#i mean there are a metric ton of characters but like

[wordstome]

how c.ai works and why it's unethical

Okay, since the AI discourse is happening again, I want to make this very clear, because a few weeks ago I had to explain to a (well meaning) person in the community how AI works. I'm going to be addressing people who are maybe younger or aren't familiar with the latest type of "AI", not people who purposely devalue the work of creatives and/or are shills.

The name "Artificial Intelligence" is a bit misleading when it comes to things like AI chatbots. When you think of AI, you think of a robot, and you might think that by making a chatbot you're simply programming a robot to talk about something you want them to talk about, and it's similar to an rp partner. But with current technology, that's not how AI works. For a breakdown on how AI is programmed, CGP grey made a great video about this several years ago (he updated the title and thumbnail recently)

I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend you watch this because CGP Grey is good at explaining, but the tl;dr for this post is this: bots are made with a metric shit-ton of data. In C.AI's case, the data is writing. Stolen writing, usually scraped fanfiction.

How do we know chatbots are stealing from fanfiction writers? It knows what omegaverse is [SOURCE] (it's a Wired article, put it in incognito mode if it won't let you read it), and when a Reddit user asked a chatbot to write a story about "Steve", it automatically wrote about characters named "Bucky" and "Tony" [SOURCE].

I also said this in the tags of a previous reblog, but when you're talking to C.AI bots, it's also taking your writing and using it in its algorithm: which seems fine until you realize 1. They're using your work uncredited 2. It's not staying private, they're using your work to make their service better, a service they're trying to make money off of.

"But Bucca," you might say. "Human writers work like that too. We read books and other fanfictions and that's how we come up with material for roleplay or fanfiction."

Well, what's the difference between plagiarism and original writing? The answer is that plagiarism is taking what someone else has made and simply editing it or mixing it up to look original. You didn't do any thinking yourself. C.AI doesn't "think" because it's not a brain, it takes all the fanfiction it was taught on, mixes it up with whatever topic you've given it, and generates a response like in old-timey mysteries where somebody cuts a bunch of letters out of magazines and pastes them together to write a letter.

(And might I remind you, people can't monetize their fanfiction the way C.AI is trying to monetize itself. Authors are very lax about fanfiction nowadays: we've come a long way since the Anne Rice days of terror. But this issue is cropping back up again with BookTok complaining that they can't pay someone else for bound copies of fanfiction. Don't do that either.)

Bottom line, here are the problems with using things like C.AI:

It is using material it doesn't have permission to use and doesn't credit anybody. Not only is it ethically wrong, but AI is already beginning to contend with copyright issues.

C.AI sucks at its job anyway. It's not good at basic story structure like building tension, and can't even remember things you've told it. I've also seen many instances of bots saying triggering or disgusting things that deeply upset the user. You don't get that with properly trigger tagged fanworks.

Your work and your time put into the app can be taken away from you at any moment and used to make money for someone else. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people who use AI panic about accidentally deleting a bot that they spent hours conversing with. Your time and effort is so much more stable and well-preserved if you wrote a fanfiction or roleplayed with someone and saved the chatlogs. The company that owns and runs C.AI can not only use whatever you've written as they see fit, they can take your shit away on a whim, either on purpose or by accident due to the nature of the Internet.

DON'T USE C.AI, OR AT THE VERY BARE MINIMUM DO NOT DO THE AI'S WORK FOR IT BY STEALING OTHER PEOPLES' WORK TO PUT INTO IT. Writing fanfiction is a communal labor of love. We share it with each other for free for the love of the original work and ideas we share. Not only can AI not replicate this, but it shouldn't.

(also, this goes without saying, but this entire post also applies to ai art)

[talenlee]

Life With Generative Tools

In 2023, back when my posts were still being shared to Twitter because the API wasn’t paid-only, I wrote an article about the potential ramifications of generative art media going forward. My concern in the immediate was that the tools weren’t going to go away, but also the potential harm to artists was as much about general economic precarity and not people using fanart to make their D&D characters. I further added to this with a consideration of how I wanted to avoid using generative art in my game development because I didn’t want what people would say about it. That is, a social pressure about the art is what keeps me from using it, not a personal philosophical disposition. I’m an artist who already works with collage and constraints, this feels like a handy way to have something I can play with.

Well, it’s been a year and change and a sort of AI Art Apocalypse has happened, and if you’re not aware of it, it’s because you’re someone who avoids all of the pools that have been so thoroughly pissed in that they are now just piss. If you’re at all related to any part of the internet where people share a bunch of images – which is to say a lot of social media – then you’re already dealing with the place crawling with generative images. Whether it’s a fanart booru, or big sites like facebook and twitter, or god help you deviantart, there is a pretty clear sign that anywhere that opened the door to generative art became a space overwhelmingly for generative art.

I teach about this subject now and I have had some time with it in a situation away from the internet, and I’d like to give you some insights into what this stuff is for, what it does, why you shouldn’t use it, and ways it can be useful.

Content Warning: I’m going to be talking about these tools as tools that exist and leaving the philosophical/ethical arguments about ‘art theft’ and their genesis aside. I’m not including any examples. No shrimp jesus jumpscare.

You might notice I’m saying ‘generative art’ and not ‘AI art.’ Part of this is because I don’t want to buy into the idea that these tools are ‘artificial intelligence.’ Ironically, ‘AI art’ now has less of an implication of being ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and is much more of an implication of ‘it’s ugly shiny art of shrimp jesus with badly spelled signs.’

I want to focus for this conversation on generative graphical tools, and I want to do that because I don’t have much experience with the other types. The textual generators offer me something I don’t really need? I already make a ton of words of dubious quality. Those are actually the things that concern me because their natural aesthetic is authoritive and comprehensive and that’s why it’s a problem that they’re being used to present any old nonsense that may just be straight up wrong. I don’t use those tools and I avoid the platforms that use them so I’m not familiar with them.

Things Generative Art Is Good For

I already use art I don’t own, a lot, for playing. Every day for the past three years I’ve shared a custom Magic: The Gathering playing card, a game I don’t own the rights to, using a card face I don’t own the rights to, and artwork from an artist on Artstation whose artwork I did not pay for or even ask for. This is generally seen as a totally reasonable and acceptable form of playful, transformative media generation and I at no point pretend I have any rights to the material. If I take a picture of someone famous and put a speech bubble over their mouth saying ‘I drink farts,’ if I, as tumblr says, play with jpgs like dolls, that is by no means being done with rights and permission.

Which means we’re already aware that there’s a way of playing with images that both violates copyright but is generally okay to do.

The metric I use for this is if the thing you’re using generative art for doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter. If you’re not going to try and claim money, if you’re not going to put it on a marketplace, if you aren’t going to try and claim ownership and profit off generative material, I think you’re probably fine. I mean probably, if you’re using it to say, generate revenge porn of a classmate that’s an asshole move, but the thing is that’s a bad thing regardless of the tool you’re using. If you’re using it to bulk flood a space, like how Deviantart is full of accounts with tens of thousands of pictures made in a week, then that’s an asshole move because, again, it’s an asshole move regardless of the tool.

If you’re a roleplayer and you want a picture of your Dragonborn dude with glasses and a mohawk? That’s fine, you’re using it to give your imagination a pump, you’re using it to help your friends visualise what matters to you about your stuff. That’s fine! It’s not like you’re not making artistic choices when you do this, cycling through choices and seeing the one that works best for you. That’s not an action deprived of artistic choice!

There are also some things that are being labelled as ‘AI’ which seem to be more like something else to me. Particularly, there are software packages that resize images now, which are often calling it ‘AI upscaling,’ which it may be using some variety of these Midjourney style models to work, but which serves a purpose similar to sequences of resizes and selective blurs. There are also tools that can do things like remove people from the background of images, which is… good? It should be good and easy to get people out of pictures they didn’t consent to be in.

Things Generative Art Is Bad For

Did you know you don’t own copyright on generated art? This is pretty well established. If you generated the image, it’s not yours, because you didn’t make it. It was made by an algorithm, and algorithms aren’t people. This isn’t a complicated issue, this just means that straight up, any art you make at work that’s meant to be used for work, shouldn’t be used because people can just straight up use it. Logo design, branding, all that stuff is just immediately open for bootlegging or worse, impersonation.

Now you might think that’s a bit of a strange thing to bring up but remember, I’m dealing with students a lot. Students who want to position themselves as future prompt engineers or social media managers need to understand full well that whatever they make with these tools are not things that will have an enduring useful application. Maybe you can use it for a meme you post on an account, but it’s not something you can build branding off, because you don’t own it. Everyone owns it.

From that we get a secondary problem, because if you didn’t own it, its only use is what people say or think when they look at it, and thing is, people are already sick and tired of the aesthetics of generated art. You’re going to get people who don’t care glossing over it, and people who do care hating it. Generative art as a way of presenting your business or foregrounding your ‘vibes’ are going to think that your work is, primarily, ‘more AI art’ and not about what it’s trying to communicate. When the internet is already full of Slop, if you use these tools to represent your work, you are going to be turning your own work and media presence into slop.

What’s more, you need to be good at seeing mistakes if you’re using these tools. If you put some art out there that’s got an extra thumb or someone’s not holding a sword right, people will notice. That means you need to start developing the toolset above for fine-tuning and redrawing sections of artwork. Now, that’s not a bad thing! That’s a skill you can develop! But it means that the primary draw of these tools is going to be something that you then have to do your own original work over the top of.

The biggest reason though I recommend students not treat this work like it’s a simple tool for universal application is that it devalues you as a worker. If you’re trying to get hired for a job at a company and you can show them a bunch of generative art you’ve made to convince them that you’re available, all you are really telling them is that you can be replaced by a small script that someone else can make. Your prompts are not unique enough, your use of the tool not refined enough that you can’t just be replaced by anyone else who gets paid less. You are trying to sell yourself as a product to employers, and generative art replaces what you bring with what everyone brings.

They make you lazy! People include typos in the generative media because they’re not even looking at them or caring about what they say! And that brings me to the next point that there are just things these tools don’t do a good job doing, and that’s stuff I want to address next in…

Things That Are Interesting

Because the tools of generative art create a very impressive-seeming artistic output, they are doing it in a way that people want to accept. They want to accept them and that means accepting the problems, or finding a way to be okay with those problems. People who don’t care that much about typos and weird fingers and so on, because you know, it gets me a lot of what I want, but it doesn’t get me everything, and I don’t know how to get the everything.

If you generate an image and want to move something in it a little bit, your best way to do that is to edit the image directly. Telling the software to do that, again, but change this bit, this much, is in fact really hard because it doesn’t know what those parts are. It doesn’t have an idea of where they are, it’s all running on an alien understanding of nightmare horror imagery.

What that means is that people start to negotiate with themselves about what they want, getting to ‘good enough’ and learning how to negotiate with the software. My experiments with these tools led to me making a spreadsheet so I could isolate the terms I use that cause problems, and sometimes those results are very, very funny. In this, the tool teaches you how to use it (which most tools do), but the teaching results in a use that is wildly inappropriate to what the tool promises it’s for.

One of my earliest experiments was to take four passages from One Stone that described a character and just put that text straight into midjourney to see what it generated based on that plain text description. Turns out? Nothing like what I wanted. But when I treated it like say, I was searching for a set of tags on a booru system like danbooru or safebooru… then it was pretty good at that. Which is what brings me to the next stage of things, which is like…

These things were trained on porn sites right?

Like, you can take some very specific tags from some of the larger boorus and type them into these prompt sites and get a very reasonable representation of what it is you asked for, even if that term is a part of an idiolect, a term that’s specific to that one person in one space that’s become a repeated form of tag. Just type in an artist name and see if it can replicate their style and then check to see what kind of art that artist makes a lot of. This is why you can get a thing that can give you police batons and mirrored sunglasses just fine but if you ask for ‘police uniform’ you get some truly Tom of Finland kind of bulging stuff.

Conclusion

Nobody who dislikes generative art is wrong. I think there are definitely uses of it that are flat out bad, and I think it’s totally okay and even good to say so. Make fun of people who are using it, mock the shrimp jesuses, make it very clear you’re aware of what’s going on and why. There’s nothing wrong with that.

I do think that these tools are useful as toys, and I think that examining the art that they produce, and the art that the community around them are exalting and venerating tells us stuff. Of course, what they tell us is that there are a lot of people out there who really want porn, and there are just as many people who want the legitimisation of impressive seeming images that they don’t care about what those images are doing or what they’re for.

Now part of this defensiveness is also the risk of me being bitten. If I buy stock art that isn’t correctly disclosed as being generative art, then I might make and sell something using generative art and now I look like an asshole for not being properly good at detecting and hating ‘AI art,’ and when I’ve say, made a game using generative art that then is integrated into things like worldbuilding and the card faces, then it gets a lot harder to tear it out at the roots and render myself properly morally clean. I’m sure a bunch of the stock art I used before 2020 was made algorithmically, just pumped out slop that was reprocessing other formula or technical objects to fill up a free stock art site like Freepik.

Which is full of generative art now.

You won’t hurt yourself by understanding these things, and people who are using them for fun or to learn or explore are by no means doing something morally ill. There are every good reason to keep these things separated from anything that involves presenting yourself seriously, or using them to make money, though. If nothing else, people will look at you and go ‘oh, you’re one of those shrimp jesus assholes.’

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[emblemxeno]

What bothers me when people talk about Engage's low selling as being due to the "story and characters being bad"... sure, if you think that sure, but how is someone who never even played the game in the first place supposed to know that ? In order to know if the game has a good or bad story, you kinda need to play it first. My point is that, regardless of Engage's overall quality, if someone looked at the cover and didn't felt compelled to buy it, it very likely has nothing to do with the story and characters, because the game needs to at least have someone see the cover and feel intrigued enough by the game to buy it to count as a sale

Engage also... didn't sell bad?

The last metric we got, iirc, is it selling 1.6 million just two months after it released. That already put it as the fourth best selling title in the entire series.

It most likely has sold more copies since, and is still popular!

And also, it used to be common knowledge that just because a Fire Emblem game doesn't have conducive mechanics or tons of character interactions at all times, it didn't automatically mean the story was bad or the characters were terribly written.

Some of the best received stories in the series are games with restricted supports or no supports at all.

So, at that point, I can only think they were put off by Engage's premise at the jump, which is fair, but it's also good to be honest about it. Its structure isn't that different from the other games, especially the Macguffin centered ones.

[bloopitynoot]

What I read This Week: 06/29/2025

I am a librarian, and unrelated to stereotypes about my profession, I do read a metric shit-ton in a week. Most of it is fanfiction but hey, I thought maybe it's time I share my reads?

This is what I read this week:

1. Heaven Official's Blessing by MXTX Chapter 140

Summary: Born the crown prince of a prosperous kingdom, Xie Lian was renowned for his beauty, strength, and purity. His years of dedication and noble deeds allowed him to ascend to godhood. But those who rise, can also fall…and fall he does, cast from the Heavens again and again and banished to the mortal realm.

Eight hundred years after his mortal life, Xie Lian has ascended to godhood for the third time. Now only a lowly scrap collector, he is dispatched to wander the earthly realm to take on tasks appointed by the heavens to pay back debts and maintain his divinity. Aided by old friends and foes alike, and graced with the company of a mysterious young man with whom he feels an instant connection, Xie Lian must confront the horrors of his past in order to dispel the curse of his present.

This was the last chapter of the series!

you can read my chapter reactions for the full series in my Bloopitynoot reads TGCF tag

What a stunning journey <3

2. Tether by Annerb (255, 268)

Summary:

Wei Wuxian grits his teeth, knowing he has no other choice. Not if it means Lan Zhan’s life. Besides, the Cloud Recesses has the best library and a long history of dealing with curses. It’s the most logical choice, even if he’d like to punch logic in the face right now.

“Wei Ying?” Lan Zhan asks.

He gives him a grim smile. “Looks like you’re finally getting your wish, Lan Zhan.”

Lan Zhan stares back at him, expression blank.

“I’m coming to Gusu with you.”

Or: Lan Wangji gets hit with a curse that requires Wei Wuxian to stay in close proximity at all times. Everything only gets more complicated from there.

My god, you will need tissues if you read this. The amount of tears I cried should be illegal.

Happy ending! I promise! But so much miscommunication and struggle that it takes a toll (loved all of it)

The lans come around- Lan Qiren secretly loves Wei Wuxian- fight me.

100/10 would read again.

3. The Shen Switch by Wemmye (52, 611)

Summary:

Shen Jiu would rather revoke his title as peak lord than spend a week alone with Liu Qingge. After being tasked to a week long mission with the man, he was convinced that the gods personally wanted to see him suffer. But perhaps they were smiling down upon him after all, as the night before he is sent to leave, a rouge cultivator that could very well be his twin bumps into him on the street.

Maybe he wouldn't have to go on this mission after all, if he could pretend to be this 'Shen Yuan' character for a week in exchange. And all Shen Yuan had to do was ignore how extremely handsome the Bai Zhan peak lord was...

This was such a fun fic to read after the emotional damage the previous one did to me.

all fluff- barely a hint of angst unless you count the most briefest of lies by omission.

I love a good liushen and this is why! They're so cute!

Unique au in which Shen Yuan is a rogue cultivator not a transmigrator.

4. transmuter by WithLoweredVoices (113, 318)

Summary:

Wei Ying gave up necromancy years ago. He should be done with hauntings, but here in his café, here in this quiet city at the edge of the world, there stands a ghost dressed in mourning white with eyes like warm honey at the bottom of the pot.

(The one where it's a café AU - only it's not.)

part 1/2 of the Magical Realism MDZS series though they are not the same universe? I don't think part 2 is a continuation or anything the summary looks very different.

Holy shit this was so damn good. The modern with magic au vibes was delicious. The way this author describes magic was so so so good

I cried so much reading this! I'm annoyed with myself that I kept avoiding it (fearing it was a heavy fic). Yes it was emotionally taxing, but damn was it incredible.

Ugh even the politics of this world was written so well!

5. Two Wife Plots in a Winter Trench Coat by NeonGhostCat (25, 134)

Summary:

In fairness, they were left unattended.

But, really — how were Shang Qinghua and Shen Qingqiu supposed to know that goofing off and singing an old love song (poorly) was going to lead to triggering an incredibly minor Wife Plot, ah??? They just wanted to let down their hair a little and revisit an old meme for a laugh while no one was looking! Now they were up to their necks in snow, freezing their asses off.

Of course, the whole point of being Wife Plotted is for the love interest to get closer. Thankfully Mobei-jun and Liu Qingge are very capable men up to tackling the very hazardous job of being love interests to oblivious transmigrators. (If only someone would clue in the transmigrators to that.)

I love cumplane disaster friends so damn much. The meme turned wife plot was [chefs kiss].

Liu Qingge is a smooth mf in this, my god.

So fun! So fluffy! very cute!

6. Til Death Do Us Part by Thyone14 (73, 999)

Summary:

Lan Zhan is finally happy with his husband and son, but things go wrong again. Seemingly the only solution they have is to go back in time, as absurd as it sounds.

But something goes wrong and they don't end up where they planned.

The summary is very bare but omg I promise this is such a good fic! It is locked so make sure you login to read it though.

It is a little angsty at the beginning - this is a time travel fic so it is expected. Though it very quickly turns into Wei Wuxian and his giant support system quickly

So many Wangxian kids!

Happy happy but still a little open ending

7. Echoes Of The Abyss by PitchWolf (39, 384)

Summary:

Before Shen Yuan could blink. He heard the rip of the fabric of space before a hand shoved him backwards and he fell into a portal.

Shen Yuan found himself lying on his back, feeling winded and disoriented. Everything had happened so fast that he was struggling to catch his breath. Was it a panic attack? He couldn't remember the last time he had one. As he looked up, his heart sank. He recognized the place he was in with just one glance. The air quality was poor and he knew exactly where he was.

The Endless Abyss

Yes yes, Demon Shen Yuan! Even better- slow demon transformation for shen yuan

If I was Shen Yuan I would have dumped his ass (Binghe) but good for them for working through things in this fic

A solid read about growth, change, and forgiveness.

8. You’ll Be the Paper, I’ll Be the Ink by Claino (56, 893)

Summary:

“I used to want to be a writer. Putting words on a page was never my forte, but I was always really good at drawing pictures. So I became a tattoo artist and now I tell stories through my artwork. Your scars have their own story, Lan Zhan. I’m just here to help you tell it.”

Or

Wei Wuxian works at a tattoo shop with his brother and their apprentice Wen Ning. Being the owner of the shop allows him to take on a more specialized clientele. Specifically, clientele that want their stories told in a more unique way; Scar cover up. When Lan Zhan enters his shop, Wei Wuxian is in for one of the most complicated pieces of his career. However, he’s never been one to step away from a challenge. Especially when that challenge is as gorgeous as Lan Zhan.

Tattoo au! so beautiful :'3 WWX offers a scar cover up service and - ugh my heart

the opposite of slow burn between wangxian. WWX tries- not very hard- to keep it professional. He does it though!

They were both gone the second they locked eyes tbh and I love it for them.

9. The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish (Chapter 1)

Summary:

When Li Yu falls asleep reading a webnovel about a ruthless, mute tyrant falling in love with a dainty male concubine, he doesn’t expect to wake up inside the world of the novel—especially not as a fish!

Li Yu soon finds himself adopted as Prince Jing’s pet carp, tasked by a less-than-helpful Magic System with preventing the prince from becoming a cruel tyrant. If he can accomplish this mission, Li Yu will regain his human form. Yet how can he succeed from inside a fish bowl?!

I just started chapter 1 today; already loving the vibes. Poor Li Yu!

you can follow along on the Bloopitynoot reads DTBPF tag

NO SPOILERS PLS.

Let's go fish lovers

That's what I read this week!

I am still working through the million SVSSS and MDZS bookmarks I did a while back BUT now I have the added bonus of everyone's TGCF fic recs too! I am hoping to start some TGCF next week, though I do get a little shy starting a new fandom's fics- we shall see what happens and where the vibe takes me,

As usual I will gladly accept any recs you have happily and gratefully- though it may take me some time to get to them; MDZS (wangxian - but also most other pairings) or SVSSS (shen yuan et al pairings - or others tbh I am not picky!) or even TGCF (fuck it- any pairings except hualian must be together).

If you want a personalized fic list I am offering lists for Wangxian (some other MDZS pairings) and bingqiu, liushen, bingliushen (and some other SVSSS pairings) -just send me a dm with your theme and criteria! If I have fics that I have read that fit the vibe, I will happily rec a list <3

Until next week!

[thebroccolination]

A 4AM REFLECTION ON GL VS. BL

My enjoyment of a GL series is directly connected to how women are socialized in reality and then portrayed in media.

I have a very limited number of cis men in my life due to the prevalence of cis men who strike me as either outright dangerous or else red-pilled into idealizing the kind of society in which straight cis men are catered and capitulated to even to the detriment of everyone else. I grew up around some very intelligent straight cis men who would explain in very reasonable voices why anything else would be silly. I know a broad spectrum of what to look for, so it’s been relatively easy for me to avoid men like that in adulthood.

I’m bored and obliquely revolted by traditionally masculine male characters unless the narrative presents me with a nuanced portrayal of how the emotional rigidity and detachment of male-dominated societies affect cis men and their relationships with people of other genders. (“Mad Men” does this for me in spades.)

That’s why SOTUS works so well. In the series’ narrative, the hazing system is presented as a flawed way of enabling closer bonds between older and younger students who wouldn’t otherwise have a reason to talk to each other due to cultural hierarchies structured by age. (Arthit’s actor Krist—who was a hazer himself—has said that, since the abolishment of the SOTUS system, his juniors have told him that they mostly stick to their own age groups in school. So he said that while he understands the reasons it was abolished, his own experiences and closeness to his seniors complicates his feelings about losing the system entirely.) In SOTUS and SOTUS S, every head hazer we see is a man trying to make his era a little better than those of his predecessors. Arthit is improving on Tum, and Kongphob is improving on Arthit.

Outside the hazing, Kongphob and Arthit’s relationship is a slowburn between 1) a shy, sweet boy literally nicknamed “Warmth” (Oon) who’s masquerading as a brusque authority figure and 2) an assertive, confident boy whose relentless determination to see and care for Arthit eventually results in a mutually devoted, long-term relationship.

[This man helped that man study economics in the evenings after his full-time engineering job—that’s the purest love there is.]

But SOTUS only works for me if it’s about two boys. A heterosexual series in which Kongphob is a girl and Arthit is a boy would just be another heavily promoted ideal that a woman should be a man’s peace—the sweet lie behind a metric ton of violence against women throughout history. Instead, Kongphob is a boy who uses attributes commonly considered masculine (assertiveness, confidence, leadership) to protect and care for another boy.

And Arthit, who’s shown in flashbacks to initially be quite gentle in his first year, goes through a full arc throughout all three iterations of the story struggling with what kind of man he thinks he needs to be to avoid societal judgment and the potential ostracization of the man he loves.

Even down to the academics, engineering was deliberately chosen as their faculty to subvert stereotypes of “masculine” majors and play with audience expectations. SOTUS works because it presented a tender queer love story in the contexts of aggressively masculine settings: an engineering student and his hazer who goes on to work in STEM. That’s why it was the BL series that set the standard and changed everything.

(Every one of my posts could be a Trojan horse to SOTUS.)

All of the BL couples I love most challenge toxic masculinity. From soft-spoken Thame who relentlessly talks through all of his issues and Po who refuses to take advantage of him, to “don’t you dare disrespect my boyfriend with crass innuendo” Win and “I would rather give you up than be another person who uses your kindness” Team, to loyal-beyond-all-reasonable-expectations Pisaeng and “I’ll change time itself if it means making you happy” Kawi—they all challenge some standard set by society that makes the world demonstrably worse for everyone.

So that’s why I like BL.

GL, though.

That’s where things get complex.

Where BL is a genre that deconstructs the Other, GL is my backyard. The vast majority of my wider and inner circle are female-presenting queer folk, so I’m automatically going to side-eye anything that hits me as inauthentic or male-gazey.

I spend my life surrounded by the complexity and immensity of women’s interiority and potential, so I viscerally despise societal and cultural limitations set on them as well as misrepresentation done to them. Basically, I’m immediately bored by any GL that gives me Kind Girl Falls in Love with Other Kind Girl and Everyone Is Kind Because Girls Are Kind.

Those aren’t the sapphic relationships I know and love.

First of all, we’re not all kind.

Second, where’s the grit?

Most of the queer women I’ve ever met have been made nuanced by the hostility of the world. Even when they aren’t well-read or politically active, they’re still savvy in some way because they’ve learned from experience to be on guard against potential threats from multiple angles. A lot of queer women are extremely funny as a coping or defense mechanism, too.

Queer women are so much more interesting and complicated than many of the characters I’ve seen in GL (so far).

That’s why I love Anin from “The Loyal Pin” so much. She’s a royal whose privilege gives her a leg up in society and the perceived freedom to have whatever she wants in any form she chooses. The narrative does eventually give her what she wants (happy endings are a requirement in romance this isn’t a spoiler) but it makes her work for it, and she has her worldview challenged multiple times beforehand.

Also, she’s funny.

Let women in GL be goddamn funny.

A lot of queer men have my issue with GL when they watch BL—not seeing their lived experiences onscreen. The lack of femme men, the underrepresentation of trans men, the application of heterosexual roles onto their dynamics, etc. I think we’re all innately harder on stories that present anything we have direct knowledge of, and I think these conversations are important to have so we understand what these stories need more of in the future.

Unfortunately, GL series that subvert societal norms for women are harder to get from an industry largely controlled by conservative men who want girls to be ladies and women to be quiet. But it’s not impossible. SOTUS wasn’t expected to do anything or go anywhere when it aired. The impact it had was an enormous shock. Tha thought it was weird until it made him money.

I think the GL series we have are improving dramatically as we get more of them and the audience for GL becomes a more and more reliable platform for future financial success. I think influential industry supporters like Saint are driving the change I want to see, and I already know of several GL series airing this year that seem intent on providing a lot of what I’ve been missing in others.

I’m looking forward to the day when my top ten list is an equal split between BL and GL, and when I can finally write the BL/GL crossover fic to surpass MUSE. \o/

[jdclee]

Shauna is a Villain Protagonist, And Always Has Been

So the thing about Shauna...

The Yellowjackets fandom (or at least r/yellowjackets) seems to have collectively lost their shit over Shauna's misdeeds last episode. People saying they rooted for her before but can't now, that this is bad writing because no one's likeable any more, etc., etc.

But here's the thing: this isn't anything new. Shauna Shipman has always been on a villain arc. She's a character motivated by selfishness and rage that at times turns violent. The lady masturbated on her teenage daughter's bed to photos of said daughter's underaged boyfriend. She killed a rabbit and fed it to her unknowing family after a reporter implied she was a boring loser housewife. She had unprotected sex with her best friend's boyfriend behind her back.

And that's all just the first episode.

I could make a long list of Shauna's "sins." I could cancel Shauna, so to speak. She's, um, super problematic to say the least. But the point I want to make isn't that you shouldn't like Shauna--it's that maybe you should like Shauna for the right reasons.

The right reason being that she's villainous and always has been. That's why she's a good character.

She is narcissistic and cruel. She hurts the people who love her, whether it's poor old Snackie, that loveable dolt Jeff, or her own daughter. She thinks the world owes her and is furious that no one else sees it. Oh and she's also killed a few people. (Or maybe not. #CouchBenTruthers).

She's also smart but stifled. She's, frankly, hilarious. She has some soft spots for Bruce the Goat, and who doesn't? She's experienced a metric fuck ton of trauma out there in Creepy Acre Woods that would mess anyone up. She's never learned to take her broken wings and fly.

And all that makes her interesting. It just doesn't excuse her actions.

In the Teen Timeline, we're watching her villain origin story. In the adult timeline...okay, I'm not entirely sure where that's heading, but probably something tragic ala another famously misunderstood villain protagonist, Mr. White.

Male characters get to go really dark. They get to be sympathetic villains. No one says the writers ruined Breaking Bad because Walt did some mean things, or that the Sopranos sucks now because Tony killed (too many to name). Shauna's cruelty isn't Yellowjackets jumping the shark. It's like, the entire point of her character arc.

Shauna is basically if Breaking Bad and The Sopranos decided to make Skylar White and Carmela Soprano, the housewives of the show, just as complicated and dark as their infamous husbands.

I for one, can't wait to see what the little psycho does next.

[decepti-thots]

☕ i vaguely remember a meta post of yours mentioning that point one percenters were a useless concept and that it also messes up megs' narrative, i'd love to read the full version of that take!

You are remembering this post, which covers the basic reasons I feel like IDW Megatron specifically does not work as a point one percenter!

More broadly, I have two big problems with the concept existing in a general sense. The first one is that it's simply ill-defined in a way where it simultaneously is not clear what it even means and yet that ambiguity is not taken advantage of for storytelling purposes the way that, say, the nebulous idea of what an outlier is gets used. Outliers don't have a clear definition, in the story- but the basic concept of 'some of these robots can do weird superpower shit outside the norm, and they are recognised as being a kind of weird group everyone sort of side-eyes suspiciously' is easy to understand as a reader and by keeping it vague, it can be used to explain quite a wide variety of character abilities without running into too much nitpicky 'hey, but that ability doesn't really match what we know about outliers, so...' stuff. It's also presented pretty value neutrally a lot of the time; Skywarp and Thundercracker aren't like, Special Chosen Ones because they can do a couple weird tricks other characters can't, they're just sort of anomalies with a couple useful abilities up their metaphorical sleeves, yknow.

Compare that to a 'point one percenter'. What is the one-sentence elevator pitch for this concept? That their sparks are... stronger, somehow. (Higher energy? More resilient? Harder to snuff out?) Okay, and what does that mean for the characters, what does that do? Well. Maybe it's why Megatron is Just That Strong, apparently. MTMTE also says this, not being an outlier, is why Minimus can wear external armour without issue- but also it's not like every point one percenter can necessarily do this, so I guess it's different depending on the mech? Or maybe they can all do it and just don't. Who Knows. I guess it's why Overlord survived becoming a phase sixer- but it's not what makes him Just That Strong. But also I guess Megatron could beat him in hand to hand combat at some point. Magnus can't though, and he's ostensibly a point one percenter? Basically, there's never really even that very broad line drawn around what the hell it means or why anyone cares someone has an extra-radioactive green spark.

And I think the point there is that like... most of the fandom just assumes Minimus' ability is being an outlier, right? And for a good reason: a ton of the stuff point one percenters can potentially do is better explained by them simply being outliers! And there we hav a problem. Having these two unrelated groups of mechs that are nebulously Different And Special to explain certain things they can do that other characters can't is just confusing when really, one would realistically do, and the reason I think it's the point one percent concept that ought to go and not the outlier concept is that the latter just raises a lot less questions.

Questions like, you know, hey, why the entire hell does this comic need an objectively measurable way to tell if someone's soul is somehow just inherently kind of "superior by" some metric. That's such a bizarre fucking thing to introduce into a narrative trying to do what MTMTE is doing; if the forged/cold construct divide brings a lot of baggage into MTMTE's themes, the point one percent stuff is just a total albatross around its neck, IMO. All point one percenters have forged souls (even Megatron, that being the twist of EC), and point one percenters are all these big important genuinely Just Plain Better characters like Megatron and Optimus and so on where the reader is clearly supposed to have this feeling of like, 'oh of course those guys are the special ones'.

If there was some attempt to explore how like, being a point one percenter just meant you could lift real good or whatever and wasn't actually meaningful in any other way but became unfairly treated as a sign of greater "superiority" nonetheless, I might see a clearer goal to the concept being introduced; you could maybe do something with "this thing that is actually very small and arbitrary is fluffed up by the powers that be as way more than it actually is". But like... all the named point one percenters we ever see outside a couple cons Megatron made bigshots in the army are genuinely these people who outside just being physically very strong, are on a narrative level understood to be the sorts of characters one might call 'destined for inherent greatness', or something. Right? There's no random nobody never-did-anything-special Lost Light background character who turns out to be a point one percenter who's just Some Guy, or anything. They're all iconic named high command type characters with Epic Fates and shit, lmao.

(Minimus could have been that character, even as a protagonist, because of the conceit of his arc in MTMTE- but they really never manage it with him either, tbh. And again, it really feels like that was much more in line with the outlier concept, and fits better there anyway.)

There's just a lot of 'have your cake and eat it too' with this whole barely-touched plotline in MTMTE, for basically no payoff that couldn't be achieved another way. Where Roberts falters with character writing is IMO when he's writing characters he is kind of precious about due to being a longterm, hardcore fan with nostalgia- you see a lot of that sentimentality at points when he's writing these characters from his childhood like Optimus or Megatron. A sort of elevation of these characters due to their metatextual status as iconic and narratively important that other characters (including, notably, Rodimus) benefit from not being subject to. And the point one percenter idea is, ultimately, a way to try and make that an objective fact in universe, it feels to me. Some of these characters just are better in a special, vague, you-know-why way. But like. MTMTE is a story that wants to talk about how presenting certain kinds of people as Just Better is wrong and cruel, too- and that tension doesn't wind up being used for anything productive. So if there's one single piece of worldbuilding I would fully remove wholesale from the comic, it would probably be this one. More than just being largely narratively irrelevant, it's also genuinely something of a problem for the comic's attempted themes.

[olderthannetfic]

Throwing my hat into the ring on the F/F issue because why not? There are a lot of reasons why, on a macro-level, F/F is less common on ao3 and in 'fanficdom' as a whole, though it really can vary by fandom, a *lot*, as I know firsthand.

Beyond anything else though, I suppose what I really, really want, is an F/F equivalent to James/Regulus or Theodore Nott/Harry Potter - I use HP examples mainly because I'm familiar with them more, but I've seen the phenomenon in other fandoms - where there's this just... intense upswelling of interest for a slash-ship between two seemingly utterly random guys, one or both whom might be exceedingly minor or entirely posthumous.

Like, while the rhetoric when people bitch about 'Any Two Guys'/Fandom Ghost/Migratory Slash Fandom, and similar complaints (i.e. about the seemingly inexplicable popularity of a non-canon slash ship versus the canon one) has a metric tons of problems in terms of how a lot of people talk about it, I want more F/F ships that have that same vibe to become weirdly juggernaughty in their fandom, explicitly becoming super popular despite one or both characters being virtually nonexistent in the main text of the source material.

That's all I really want. I mean, no, that's not all, but just once, just once, I want to watch, in real time, an entire fandom go 'wait what?' about some absolutely batshit non-canon F/F crackship that somehow becomes huge.

But F/F shippers just don't seem to bring that same energy to the table as M/M shippers. Hell, *I* don't really bring that same kind of energy to the table. I can't bring myself to do that sort of shipping, generally, though I have with one ship.

So where the hell does that energy even *come* from? Is it just the sheer size of M/M and the long history of it on ao3? The bigger a thing is, fanficdom-wise, the faster it tends to grow and all, but still.

Why do F/F shippers tend to glom more onto the canon or 'nearly canon' stuff to the (relative) exclusion of what looks like - to outside observers - throwing random guys at each other and seeing who sticks to each other? (Yes, I know that's not really what happens, but that wouldn't be what would happen for this hypothetical F/F either, but it would sure look like it from the outside)

--

The closest is the hilarious rise of Creamsicle art and cosplay, though that wasn't that huge in the end.

I think m/m fandom is particularly used to everything being subtext and repurposing various intended-as-platonic dynamics. There can be less of a focus on direct representation at times.

Those ships are just mega rare though. We talk about them all out of proportion to their actual frequency. Het shippers have a wealth of canon ships and shipteased options, but they occasionally go in for wacky crossover ships. Get a big enough group and some of this will show up.

[blake-me-up-inside]

Here we are with Ice Queendom Episode 4.

“There’s too many directions here? Which one to folloooooow… This reminds me of Weiss.” Oh Ruby…

I’ve seen this outfit for Ruby around but it’s pretty nice regardless. In general, I like seeing characters get put in outfits that are far outside their usual attire.

Getting into the city and Weiss’s trauma SURELY doesn’t stem from her father, right? Lol.

There’s not a ton of meat to chew on in this episode, but dream takes on already established characters and concepts are always fun. We have:

Weiss not understanding Crescent Rose is hilarious to me for some reason.

Klein has seven bodies for each personality.

Jean, Nora, and even Ren are “sillies” and just say “nya.” And a faceless Cardin with them, though that’s deserving. I assume those are the rest of Team CRDL, but the colors don't match. I guess Weiss never pad them too much attention, anyway.

Drunk mom silhouette, who is a shadow of her former self.

Bat Whitley is a snitch.

Winter being Weiss’s “bible” and general metric for justice shows just how… not her own person Weiss really is.

Who is the dog? Sad Klein or something?

Also, something I want to call out is Ruby’s wanted poster lists her as a skilled huntress meaning, that at this point, Weiss DOES recognize Ruby’s skill, even if subconsciously.

The overall pacing of this episode was weird, but I’m hoping for a real bonkers fight next episode.

[atayxart]

Ano Keargreaves

First Appearance: Death Be to Me at age 11

DOB: 8th February

Age: 11 - 19 - 23

Height: 4ft 8 - 4ft 11 (142cm - 151cm)

Pronouns: She/Her/Hers

Sexuality: Demisexual

Personality Type: ENFP

Curious

Perceptive

Enthusiastic

Good-Natured

Optimist

People pleasing

Unfocused

Disorganised

Ability: Hydrokinesis

She can manipulate and control water through psychic means but only existing bodies of water. (She can't create water out of nowhere - She's essentially a water bender from ATLA)

She could use the water within her body as a resource but that's a recipe for disaster.

One of the main drawbacks of her ability is dehydration which can cause her to faint.

Her ability awakening happened when she was a little kid and wasn't nearly as dangerous as some others in the world. I'm thinking it was probably something like making the bathwater make shapes as a toddler. She inherited her ability from her father who raised her until she was 10 so she had somebody to teach her.

Mental Health Issues: General Anxiety

Scars/Injuries: Large scar on left forearm from breaking it

Likes: Cute things, Decca-de, chocolate, sweets, water, cuddly toys

Fears: She has Acrophobia (Fear of Heights), she worries for Decca-de and him losing control of his ability. She doesn't want him to die because he's her best friend.

Kill Count: 50+ (Majority were indirect while using her ability. She's never killed anybody on purpose that I know of)

Originally inspired/Influenced by either personality or design wise:

She was inspired by cuteness lol. No, because literally I was like I want an adorable character and came up with her. Originally, she had a shit ton more hair clips too!

I wanted a sunshine character to balance the cast within the story. But don't get it twisted she can be very serious if the situation asks for it.

Voice: Light, bubbly, sweet

Characters: Rikku (Final Fantasy), Toga (Mha)

Songs:

Pure Love (Mother Mother)

Getaway (Mother Mother)

the perfect pair (beabadoobee)

ちゅ、多様性 – Chu, Tayousei (ano) (It's a coincidence I swear)

bomber minmi (Serani Poji)

スマイリーを探して - where is smiley? (Serani Poji)

ラ��ァーズ – Lovers (Seven oops)

Lost Kitten (Metric)

Wanted for: £4.5 Billion

Reasoning: Insane ability, daughter of Silas Keargreaves, apart of the Lietronite gang

Extra Info:

She has a twin called Maly

She has undiagnosed ADHD

She says she's 5ft when she's actually 4ft 11

She was born with her cyan blue hair

Her eyes are naturally golden

Her favourite colour is yellow

She will yap to anyone that'll listen

Her love language is physical touch and quality time

Decca-de and Ano grew up together in the underground because their parents were members of the notorious Lietronite Gang. Any character that has two black lines across their nose signifies that they were born into the gang. Fully joined members have another black line under their eyes. Ano got her line at 7. (Btw the marks aren't tattoos, they come from another ability user in the gang who can create permanent marks on anything with a flick of their wrist. It didn't hurt. The lines are a signifier and usually feared by the general public.)

Decca-de calls her Shortstuff. She calls him Mr Lanky.

Since she’s first introduced as a child and then ages up to an adult I have to make the distinction between her child self and adult self clear as crystal even if she still retains her bubbly personality because I don’t want people infantilising her because she’s a short lady.

She’s always gonna be cute but that doesn’t mean she acts like a child when she’s an adult. Plus she will kick your ass if you call her a kid when she's fully grown.

[torturing-characters-101]

So. I understand the body produces the enzyme, lactase, to help break down milk sugars. I also understand that people who are lactose intolerant don't produce/produce enough of this enzyme to comfortably consume many milk products. What I don't know is if there's a limit on how much lactose an average person with average lactose tolerance can intake in, say, an hour. Like the whole milk chugging challenge from the 90's? I distinctly remember reading that the reason people couldn't consume the entire gallon was because of the lactose, not the volume. Yet I can't find anything like that posted anywhere now.

Am I remembering this incorrectly? I mean, can my average character produce enough lactase to eat a metric ton of ice cream in one sitting? I imagine they would have some amount of gastric distress from reflux alone... but what about lactase?

(I realize this question is all kinds of jumbled. I hope you understand what I'm asking. 😭)

So first I would say it is unlikely that throwing up after doing the milk challenge had anything to do with lactase.

Lactase is expressed in the small intestine, not the stomach, which means that the main effect of consuming lactose with inadequate lactase would be gas and diarrhea, not vomiting. The vomiting was because of the volume and fat/protein content of the milk, not the lactose.

About 70% of adults do not produce enough lactase to consume normal dairy comfortably. HOWEVER, we have another way of consuming delicious lactose- bacteria in our colon.

Colonic gut bacteria can also break down lactose. While the amount of lactase we produce remains consistent no matter what, the amounts of these lactose-consuming bacteria change with the amount of lactose we consistently eat. This means we can functionally "train" for lactose consumption by eating progressively more of it over time.

If your character had "trained" for this lactose-consuming feat, and ate slowly enough that their stomach never over-filled, then sure, they could eat as much ice cream as they wanted without ill effect.

[princess-of-the-corner]

Honestly Adrien "I will not stand by my cancelled wife/friend" Agreste having "Gives in to peer pressure" generally trying to avoid making waves as a character flaw is actually a fascinating spin on the character.

I also thin it aligns well with canon cos even ignoring the later seasons, he put a metric ton of distance between himself and Chloe after one day at school.

This was before he was even all that aware of her behavior and seemed more rooted in the overall class dynamics and wanting to avoid potential tensions with these new people.

He didn't 100% cut her off of course, but he did seemingly keep her at arms length from that moment onward and its not like they seemed to hang out much if at all outside of class. So its not as though he could argue it was about letting him experience new people while still chilling with Chloe elsewhere.

It feels like an almost calculated, or at the very least cold decision.

You know I'm not sure 'peer pressure' is the right word here because.

It's not like Marinette did anything different this time in telling Adrien what happened. It's just that their relationship has shifted so now Marinette is His Girlfriend™ and therefore he must stand by her 100%

Like before incidendts with Chloé..... while there may have been some overall pressure because class dynamics, it's not enough to really break things. He's more interested in making other friends which means getting invited to things Chloé isn't.

Adrien's attempts to get Chloé to stop via threatening the friendship were after she does something bigger, not just because of class dramas or even the more petty bullying (not that petty bullying should slide but there's a spectrum)

And it's not like he was afraid of going against the group when it came to Chloé other times. Like Malediktator when everyone's celebrating her leaving, he rejects the party. And when questioned he has no issue telling them that Chloé is his friend and it feels cruel to celebrate someone feeling so upset that they want to leave the country to get away.

But the dynamic shifted and now Marinette is the most important person to him because they're dating which means he has to go balls to the wall against whoever dares to cause her even the slightest harm.

And it's not just Chloé that gets this because he straight up tried murdering Kim. If anything cutting off Chloé was a mercy because of the past friendship because he could've just gone and Cataclysmed her too.

[dino--draws]

TL-5956 Survival Headcanons

Involving: Some bending of the rules to make it more likely for these guys to have survived for 12+ years and counting, the likelihood I misread at least one part of how this all works so please don’t kill me, various overthinking shenanigans, me being a lil mean to characters, and my unabashed mental illness

and a sizable amount of text under the read more (not even kidding it’s like 1,500+ words LMAO)

THE PARADOX

Exclusively red monochromacy. This is not a visual filter sort of effect, everything has turned red. This actually isn’t a head canon it’s something Harry told me and it fucks me up. Actually a lot of this specific section is shit from the article itself that I’m emphasizing for fun.

The sky has become pitch black, and the horizon is rimmed by red like a macabre sunset. There is no difference between night and day. The sun will never rise here again.

Site-43 remains the single most stable area in the wake of the K-Class Paradox, and is considered the last bastion of human civilization. The rest of the world is left a nonsensical, contradictory wasteland due to spatial and temporal damages. Any entity you find roaming those reddened wastes are no longer what they once were. Do not engage, for those who wander are lost.

Randomized increases and decreases in the number of perceivable temporal dimensions results in visual distortion of surroundings. Added extrasensory perceptions may increase this disorientation in survivors. It takes a lot of getting used to, that constant bombardment.

Due to condensation of vaporous substances, there has been a sharp global temperature increase. Everything is humid.

Site-43 Condition

The following parts of the Site are lost/heavily damaged: 

Euclid and Keter Class Wings of the Security and Containment Sections [Detonated, First Sublevel is functionally abandoned due to instability]

Applied Occultism [Second Sublevel, damaged by detonation and other breach occurances]

Archives and Revisions Section [Burned]

All underwater site facilities and utilities. [Completely destroyed] 

With each instance of the breach, all areas that were previously destroyed become reverted to their 2002 states, then re-destroyed. This results in these locations being able to be scrapped and harvested for functionally renewable supplies after each amelioration of the breach. These salvaged supplies only vanish with the causal loop’s reset if they are left within their original area. 

Due to the heavy damage done to the First Sublevel of the site, the Second Sublevel is left similarly unstable structurally and partially collapsed. Both Sublevels are abandoned sans annual gathering of supplies. 

The Third Sublevel of the Site remains the most structurally stable and safest part of Site-43, the surviving personnel remain here. 

The Inner-Sectional Subway System is no longer in operation due to sustained damages during the breach, but its tunnels are still utilized for transportation to different areas of the Site by foot. 

Site’s power remains in operation, requires vigorous upkeep.

Food/Water

Meal, Ready-to-Eat (MRE) rations were the primary food source for several years as research was directed towards the creation of a renewable food supply. They have a metric fuck ton of rations to work with, but it's always smart to look for alternatives Just In Case, y'know?

Due to the fact that everything is red, and there is a notable lack of a sun, growing traditional plants is out of the equation because I don’t think we’re photosynthesizing in these conditions. However, what they can grow and cultivate is things such as mushrooms and algaes! Utilizing waste from the site as fertilizer, gathering soil, and perhaps a bit of GE to make sure they’re not eating anything toxic and getting the right vitamins — they can grow food. It’ll take work, but can be done with enough care. Keeping out mold will be a nightmare but god love 'em they're trying.

A handful of stray storage closets and part of the Hiring and Regulation Section have been converted into spaces for food growing

There is probably a whole bunch of shit they could science their way through when it comes to synthesizing food that isnt just mushroom farming tbh. Like turning petroleum and CO2 into food

Bottled water stores ran out swiftly. Water is primarily gathered through the usage of moisture traps (see: increased humidity). Due to SCP-001-A the harvesting of these traps are risky endeavors, and require a pre-setup of dilution equipment to ensure a lack of reflectivity. This harvested liquid is then abated to reduce risk of anomalous effects, and stored/distributed to personnel. Prior to his death in 2023, Dougall Deering would accompany those harvesting to ensure 001-A’s pacification. 

Any and all site wastewater is subjected to purification processes to acquire as much drinkable water as possible. Nothing goes to waste.  

Lake Huron itself and any groundwater adjacent to the site is unreachable and unusable due to SCP-001-B and SCP-001-C. 

There’s probably a vending machine or two that’s caught up in the 2002 causal loop reset that they can loot each year. They can have some treats, as a treat. 

For all I know this is one of those weird space-time situations where no one actually needs to eat or drink but sshhhhh it's fun to think about

Supplies

After each causal loop, the areas of the Site that are restored and re-destroyed are functionally “refreshed”. Though still heavily damaged and destroyed, these areas can be looted each year for materials -- copper wiring, plating, materials to repair other parts of the site, possible acquisition of rations and water.

Clothing from transmogrified personnel annually slain in the Archives and Revision and Applied Occultism can sometimes be recovered for use in repairing existing clothing, or as medical bandaging. 

Sections and faculties of the Site that go unused in the wake of the Paradox have been stripped; materials moved elsewhere for post-breach repairs and general maintenance of vital site functions.

Excursions outside of the Site are risky and dangerous -- though as successful containments of the breach have occurred, stability around Site-43 has begun to increase and grow safer. Nearby areas are occasionally scouted for any usable materials that remain, or were brought about by spatial/temporal distortions. 

The building of the REISNO Cannon was a nightmare to build in spite of its small size -- due to the amount of brute-forcing they had to do with its construction. When PHMD build the PXE alone, it took far more supplies to build.

Medical Care

To aid individuals wounded by SCP-001-A, able bodied personnel are encouraged to donate blood. 

These guys are working overtime due to the inherent dangers of the Paradox, doing the best they can to ration out their supplies and create what they can to help others.

Some members of personnel need to undergo treatment for sialorrhea, as the excessive production of saliva can put them at risk of both SCP-001-A and dehydration.

Medical personnel worked with the Memetics and Countermemetics Section to create Solution 001-A.

SCP-001-A

All reflective surfaces have either been destroyed, scuffed and scratched so that they are no longer reflective, or treated with Solution 001-A.

Application of Solution 001-A results in a clouding of the eyes and an impairment of vision. In light of added perceptions due to SCP-001, this is considered a blessing in disguise. 

Any personnel who had glasses has either had them destroyed, or took out the lenses from the frames.

Individuals wounded by -A are often given two options — needing to rigorously clean their wounds and be given bi-monthly blood transfusion to counteract the inability of the wound to heal and the risk of infection; or undergo amputation to completely rid themselves of the injury. For individuals whose injuries are not localized to their limbs, amputation cannot be done and the wounds simply must be taken care of. Seeing personnel with always bloody bandages, amputated limbs and prosthesis are not uncommon sights.

Bandages for -A wounds must be prior soaked in Solution 001-A, and wrapped tight, as to avoid the risk of the blood’s reflection. This is preferably done by medical staff, who have recordkeeping of all individuals wounded by -A.

SCP-001-B

Keepers of 001-B cannot communicate and over time grow conceptually vague, but the cycling of -B occurs while individuals are still recognizable. The Memetics and Countermemetics Section is in charge of the recordkeeping of Keepers.

Keepers can still interact with others and show their presence through physical touch and facial expressions. 

I don’t know if they are capable of writing, but it’d be cool if they devised a non-verbal and non-words series of drawn symbols and gestures for Keepers to utilize as a way to quasi-get around the anomaly. However “cannot communicate” could extend to “writing and sign language”

SCP-001-C

Lake Huron is to be avoided at all costs. Any individual attempting an excursion outside of Site-43 (typically for the gathering of biological materials from dead trees/foliage/etc) is not to approach due to the risk of the water rising again.

SCP-001-D

Respiration from the anomaly sometimes results in structural damage to the Site, or tremors, which requires repair.

The Survivors

The Site’s original population has been cleaved -- both by the initial breach’s heavy losses, and subsequent accidents. Only a little over 100 people remain come the 2030s, and Site-43 functions on a stretched-thin skeleton crew. 

Agent Radcliffe -- A bit torn up here and there from encounters with spectral and temporal entities, but is mostly okay. 

Agent Gwilhem -- Has a bad shoulder due a shrapnel injury. She has taken charge of the remaining members of MTFs Alpha-43, Beta-43 and Delta-43.

Technician Markey -- One of many individuals issuing repairs and maintenance to Site-43, he has sustained various small injuries to his hands due to his work. Lost a finger when it was crushed in a collapsing pipe. 

Dr. Wirth -- Has become pockmarked by various burn scars across his face and hands over the breaches. He received deep wounds across his stomach from SCP-001-A in 2027. Will never forgive himself. 

Chief Mukami -- Has taken major charge within the Site, primary maintainer of reports and processing of incidents. She has a few sparse injuries from an instance in which the bulkhead jammed during one of the loops, and she was injured by shrapnel. 

Technician Ambrogi -- Another individual who aids in site repairs, he would lose his leg in the aftermath of the initial breach due to structural damage caused by the detonation of the Keter and Euclid Wings, resulting in a small collapse of a hallway. Now utilizes a ramshackle leg prosthesis. 

Dr. Del Olmo -- Has sustained two injuries from SCP-001-A, a clawmark to the upper thigh, and one to the shoulder. Initially had turned down the offer of amputation due to their locations, but would have his leg amputated after severe infection years later. 

Dr. Deering -- Unscathed until the day he died. While everyone around him was hurt and bleeding and dying, he was always fine. It’s unclear if this is out of luck, or punishment. He thinks the latter. 

PHMD -- Injured by SCP-001-A shortly upon retrieval, receiving claw marks to the face and lower arm. Turned down amputation of the arm, claiming he needed both hands for his work. Wounds had become severely infected by the time he went missing due to neglect. 

Dr. Ngo --  Had a tendency to throw herself into danger to help others, was never wounded by SCP-001-A, but was a bit scuffed up due to other small scale accidents. Was practically the backbone of the Site for some people, as the only remaining psychologist, a lodestar of hope against this nightmare. Her death is still mourned. 

Dr. Reynders -- Mostly unscathed, aside from a few injuries -- notably one to her cheek from a temporal entity. Has gone missing.

Chronological reversions seem to have odd effects on those still alive. The running theory is that SCP-001 has severely slowed their aging to preserve their lives.

The See You In Hell PTF members are all friend-adjacent in my heart of hearts. Breach containment solidarity. Maybe a bit rough against the edges but we gotta tough it out together. All we’ve got is each other now, yknow?

jesus christ ok I think that's it I think that's all the thoughts in my brain if anyone actually reads this whole thing i heart you forever ok? i fffffucking love TL-5956-X 'n how fucked up it is I hope we get to see it again at sometime. regardless i will be thinking about it forever

[bloopitynoot]

What I Read This Week: 03/30/2025

I am a librarian, and unrelated to stereotypes about my profession, I do read a metric shit-ton in a week. Most of it is fanfiction but hey, I thought maybe it's time I share my reads?

This is what I read this week:

1 All the ways in which I know you by HanaSheralHaminail (48, 961)

Summary: It takes Luo Binghe a year to fix Shizun's meridians and enter the Holy Mausoleum. There, he watches with trepidation as the Ancestral Hall works its miracle, and Shen Qingqiu is brought back to life. Surely he will wake soon, right? Any time now...

Or, the System is keeping Shen Qingqiu's soul in stasis, trapped inside the dreamscape. Luo Binghe chases after him, and learns the truth of him.

This was way sweeter than I anticipated. I thought it was going to be super angsty when I started it; it was so sweet.

The boys work through miscommunications and grow closer together

super fluffy ending :'3

2. Heaven Official's Blessing by MXTX Chapter 74-78

Summary: Born the crown prince of a prosperous kingdom, Xie Lian was renowned for his beauty, strength, and purity. His years of dedication and noble deeds allowed him to ascend to godhood. But those who rise, can also fall…and fall he does, cast from the Heavens again and again and banished to the mortal realm.

Eight hundred years after his mortal life, Xie Lian has ascended to godhood for the third time. Now only a lowly scrap collector, he is dispatched to wander the earthly realm to take on tasks appointed by the heavens to pay back debts and maintain his divinity. Aided by old friends and foes alike, and graced with the company of a mysterious young man with whom he feels an instant connection, Xie Lian must confront the horrors of his past in order to dispel the curse of his present.

I'm 1/3 into book 5! I'm reading about a chapter a day and live blogging the experience. you can follow along on the Bloopitynoot reads TGCF tag

NO SPOILERS PLS.

I am so soft for Hualian

3 i shine only with the light you gave me by corduroyserpent (89, 400)

Summary:

“In my defense,” Tianlang-jun says as he elegantly lowers himself to sit cross-legged on the floor of the Holy Mausoleum, “I’ve never brought anyone back from the dead before. As far as complications go, this is relatively manageable. Wouldn’t you agree?” The question is directed towards a young child swimming in black robes far too elaborate and spacious for his minuscule size. The child simply blinks his big, dark eyes in response. It’s a familiar mannerism, and one that has only gotten cuter amidst accidental age regression.

Tianlang-jun brings Zhuzhi-lang back to life. It doesn't quite go as planned.

This read was absolutely stunning. Like it impacted my soul, I cried real tears and not for angst but for character development.

If you like stories of emotional growth, family found (in a way) and not, and kid fics this is so perfect.

The emotional side of tianlang-jun had me in a choke hold.

so so so so so good!!!

4 This Means War by Roslyn_Frisson (3,205)

Summary: Lan Qiren demonstrates a knack for talismans, at Wei Wuxian's expense.

This fic was absolutely adorable LOL

Lan Qiren and Wei Wuxian being sneaky and mischievous in the name of research

I love lan qiren and I love when him and Wei Wuxian get to bond- my heart. 10/10 cuteness

5 Heart Like Mine by nekojita (42, 747)

Summary: With Wen Ruohan is interested in Wei Wuxian due to his talent with talismans, Gusu Lan and Yunmeng Jiang agree to an arranged marriage between Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian to prevent Qishan Wen from growing more powerful (while there is still a threat of war looming). Things get off to the usual rocky start, with Lan Wangji and much of Gusu Lan (except for the younger Lans) looking down on Wei Wuxian.

This disapproval eventually leads to a situation where Wei Wuxian is framed for a crime by Su Mishan and friends and is punished by the discipline whip and seclusion in the Cold Pond Cave. A cave that holds more than one secret that will impact Cloud Recesses and the Jianghu's future.

I felt so many emotions reading this omg (it was excellent)

Features incredibly badass women and the lan realizing they fucked up

Lan Qiren will never recover (or admit that he worries).

So so good! The ending was abrupt, but I would read the hell out of a sequel.

6 Tiger, Tiger by acernor (23, 127)

Summary: Liu Qingge finds himself unwillingly charmed by Shen Qingqiu's new pet tiger while Luo Binghe is mysteriously off peak. The two are, of course, completely unrelated.

This was recommended to me by a couple of people and SO SOFT.

Terrible communication for the most part, but the three of them got there in the end

I love a little shifter character and tiger binghe was both literally and figuratively the softest baby.

Last chapter is smut!

7 I will be chasing a starlight by feyburner, sundiscus (71,477)

Summary: “You know what?” Wei Ying said. “I think we should be friends.”

“Vulcans do not have friends,” said Lan Zhan. He was staring very determinedly at the screen in front of him.

Wei Ying frowned at him. “That can’t be right.”

This has to be one of my favourite reads of the week!

The way this fic had me CRYING. It was beautifully written, a masterclass in character study, stunning and emotional

such a good good ending :'3 really so good (mind the tags tho)

8 We Are Not Wise by Boomchick, Suzoomie (52, 243)

Summary: When Shen Qingqiu drew Shen Yuan’s soul sword, it felt like being burned from the inside out. The fire wasn’t cruel, but it was still fire—hot and destructive, searing the softest pieces of him.

When Binghe’s fingers touch the hilt, he is ready for pain.

Transmigrated into a version of Proud Immortal Demon Way where cultivators manifest their own souls into spiritual weapons, Shen Yuan finds himself sort of kind of…accidentally blackmailing Shen Qingqiu into taking him on as a disciple before Luo Binghe joins the sect.

That should give Shen Yuan plenty of opportunities to make sure nothing goes wrong for his favorite protagonist, right? RIGHT!?

A story of twists, turns, hope, despair, and soul swords. Written for the Bingqiu Reverse Minibang 2023, illustrated and conceptualized by the incredible Suzu!

I know I said the last fic might be the highlight of the week, but this one is also up there

This was incredibly beautiful in a pain way (happy ending I promise!). It's the visual manifestation of a soul that really added an extra piece to this hurt pie

Shen Jiu learns and grows and it is beautiful.

uuugh, so good. If the summary is interesting to you, it is worth the read!

9 In the Eye of the Storm by Cassiie (30, 619)

Summary: Just as Wei Ying clears his throat to speak, A-Yuan looks up to him and tugs his robes. “Will Rich-gege come and play with me?” Lan Wangji feels a pang in his heart, wishing for nothing more than to stay with the two of them.

Wei Ying snorts at the nickname and gently takes A-Yuan’s hand clutching his robes. “No A-Yuan, Hanguang-jun is important and has duties that he needs to take care of.”

Once again, Lan Wangji speaks without thinking. “No duties. Xiongzhang gave me a week to complete the night hunt, I took one day.” He almost winces at the lie. It was true he had finished early, only by one day. But if there's a chance he can stay…

Wei Ying’s answering smile is softer than his usual grin, and it tugs at something in Lan Wangji’s heart.

“Well then, A-Yuan, let's show Hanguang-jun to our home.”

- - - - -

Lan Wangji has a looser tongue, Jin Guangyao takes bigger risks. Maybe things will go differently?

Full disclosure this is part one of a series and ends on a cliffhanger

This was a solid break from my very emotional reads this week. It was relatively light angst until the last second

I am so curious as to where this series goes!

10 Hanguang-Jun and His Beloved Pet Rabbit by 96qutie (In progress fic, read chapter 35 this week)

Summary: A gentle touch stroked his back, and Wei Ying stiffened in surprise. He looked up to find pale-gold eyes staring down at him intensely.

He gulped.

“Are you hurt?” The young cultivator asked in a soft voice, as if he expected an answer— even though he was already prodding Wei Ying’s ears and legs to see for himself. When he didn’t find evidence of injury he seemed to relax. “Are you frightened?”

If Wei Ying were human, he would have blushed and tried to crack a joke to hide it. As a rabbit, he could only kick his feet like a shy toddler.

“Wangji? I heard a commotion. Is everything alright?”

With the swiftness of a child being caught up past their bedtime, Wei Ying was shoved inside a billowing sleeve.

“Mn.”

—

This is a ‘The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish’ AU for Wangxian. That series captured my heart, so then this happened. For those who don’t know that story; you don’t have to read it to read this. I don’t follow the plot at all, and I even changed the premise a bit. It’s only loosely inspired by it.

Also just to be clear: Wei Ying is not a rabbit 100% of the time.

This is a good read in general, it is an in progress fic!

This fic has a unique take on WY resurrection/life/abilities? and I really love that about it

This chapter shit hits the fan :(((( WY our beloved is in danger.

11 A Matter of Honor by Walkerbaby (96, 851)

Summary: Wei Wuxian is found outside of the Cloud Recesses after curfew, beaten, bloodied and abused. The law says that the alpha responsible must take him as a bride.

Lan Wangji has no intention of letting Wei Wuxian be married off to a violent, dishonorable criminal. So, to protect Wei Wuxian he confesses to the crime instead.

Can an act of mercy lead to a marriage of deep and lasting love? Or have the two brightest cultivators of their age doomed themselves to a lifetime of misery instead?

I am only going to post the first fic but I actually read the entire 11 part series.

It was incredibly written but this, for me, towed the line of what I am comfortable reading. Part one starts SO rough, but it does get better for Wangxian. The other parts progress into a terrible direction. There will be a second part- I just really hope Xichen has a better ending because it doesn't look good at all. :(

Mind the tags, but if you are okay with the subject matter it really is a good read.

That's what I read this week!

I tend to read my fics in the order I mark them, and by chance it ended up being such an emotionally heavy reading week. I am hoping that this week brings some levity!

If you have any favourite MDZS or SVSSS crack/light/humourous fics- I would LOVE to read some funny/absurd/bizarre/tropey/fluff fics!

In addition, if you want a personalized fic list I am offering lists for Wangxian (some other MDZS pairings) and bingqiu (and some other SVSSS pairings) -just send me a dm with your theme and criteria!

till next week!

[lennonyoung]

Oooo yes I would like your rpf takes on them as well!

btw I agree with your takes on the boys and also I don’t know if this is an unpopular opinion but imo I think Will is only feeling bad about the fallout with Leno (and not talking to the rest of BC boys) because it’s the off season and he no longer has the NHL distraction but once the season starts again he’ll go back to ignoring them/ not interacting and posting about them again :/

I don't think that's an unpopular take at all so much as one that hasn't been wildly discussed - I haven't really thought of it that way myself, but it makes sense. I could totally see that happening. The minute he goes back, he'll probably stop interacting (at least in a visible way) and then who knows what'll go on behind the scenes. It's kinda sad, honestly. RPF takes below!!!

Alright so since this is RPF it's obviously all just my preference lol but some common misconceptions/portrayals I've seen around (again my own opinion nothing against the specific creators who portray them this way, the F in RPF does mean "fiction"!): Leno: his main use in RPF is literally almost always to drive something forward between Mack and Will, and he's always on the losing end there because at the end of the day he's a side character in WillMack fic. Which is fine! But he's always portrayed very no-nonsense, usually quips at Will something about wanting him back, etc., comes in all tough-guy, and almost always had a relationship with Will beforehand that Will is eager to leave behind but Leno isn't, and in the long run just grieving the loss of Will. That's one way to read Leno, but it's a very limited portrayal of his complexities, although that's probably on purpose.

Gabe: poor Gabe is barely in fic! We should have more Gabe fics! But when he is he's usually still hung up over Will. And that's that. He's kinda always the goofy person if he is there - Will and Leno are almost always written as having been together, and it's like oh Gabe had to witness it but he didn't get to experience it. So while Leno is always the loser Gabe is portrayed as like double the loser. Will: oh RPF Will. Oh RPF Will. Where even to start. There's a lot of takes on him. My big one is that whenever he's written as not caring about his BC friends/just tossing them away for Mack He can have complex emotional feelings/want to be with Mack, but he should be more introspective when it comes to other things. And if you don't want to write that, then just make him evil. Evil Will is fun!!!

James: he's yet to show up in RPF a ton, although with the draft on the horizon I'm assuming that'll change especially when we see what team he ends up on, but mainly I've been seeing James as someone that Leno decided to use to try to get over Will but is unsuccessful at it, and thus James doesn't exist as really anything but as replacement Will. And the thing is, as mentioned in the other ask, James and Leno obviously played together/know each other, but James definitely didn't interact with Leno as meaningfully as other guys (Gabe, Teddy Stiga, Cole Eiserman) that him suddenly being Leno's choice to get over Will makes no sense other than he was the replacement linemate and he has the thin, lean build that Will did. Leno's only other RPF pairing that makes sense in regards to BC (to me, at least) is Gabe because of the friendship, but I suppose if we use those as metrics then Will Vote should be too because he's been there the whole dang time (I would actually ascend to higher plains if someone wrote something with Will Vote as the pairing could you IMAGINE but that'll never happen he's undrafted people mock him for being short and not as attractive as the other three and he's basically the Gabe role but not Gabe so).

And finally - although you didn't ask for it... Catholic Guilt: so one of the most entertaining things that has happened with WillMack gaining popularity and then Leno as well is people looking at BC's team, realizing it is a Catholic college, and then immediately using Catholicism as a plot device for Will ala Rick Celebrini for Mack to keep them apart for a while. Obviously Will and Leno and honestly most of the other BC guys are probably Catholic (I'm pretty sure Gabe is, the Hagenses are, Drew Fortescue, Will Vote, Fowler, I know Aram Minnetian is Armenian Orthodox which while not Catholic has some similar practices although you're not here to talk the Great Schism with me lol, all the Irish guys like Powell and Joyce, etc. probably are I know that's an assumption that Irish people are Catholic but it's an assumption for a reason point is you don't HAVE to be Catholic to attend a Catholic college but most of them are because it's easier from a cultural/religious standpoint)*, so Catholic Guilt is an easy thing to write into a fic as a plot device to keep two people apart. And I totally get that. HOWEVER...the Catholic Church is a complex institution that doesn't always do things right, and historically their issues with LGBTQ have been not great, so it's used in fic to provide someone like Will with emotional complexity that he must work through to end up with Mack, or whatever is going on. BUT. People don't seem to understand the Catholic Church and like exactly how complex it is, and then they only make Will and Leno suffer. I'd just like to see a little more research about Catholicism proper before it gets turned into a plot device. If Will talks in interviews about how meeting his sister for church every Sunday was a highlight of his freshman year at BC (and he did do that btw) then his struggle with religion should feel a little more real, especially if he's gonna throw aside his literally faith for a man. This is something actual Catholics deal with because of not being truly accepted into the church, and some handle it well, others don't, and that should all be taken into consideration. But I also know it's a plot device in RPF and not actually real, so I get why it's kinda thrown in. It's just so interesting to me.**

*this reminds me of an article Jimmy Vesey wrote way back when he got drafted about how he knew being smart in high school/getting good grades was going to get him the attention of more rigorously academic sports schools like Harvard, which is ultimately where he attended, and not schools that prioritized just sports but less academic rigor, like the bigger states schools. So while Catholic colleges don't just recruit Catholics, they obviously do tend to lean towards Catholic players/kids playing in Catholic leagues for similar reasons. **I was also raised Catholic/attended Catholic schools my whole life and then have researched a lot on the church to make things that didn't make sense to me growing up make sense. No matter how one feels about religion, it's so easy to misunderstand it, especially if it's not one's religion, and I can tell when Catholic Guilt in fic is there because someone's actually Catholic vs. it was an easy plot device to find. So! Not judging anyone using it, just saying that lack of understanding of religion causes problems in the world in general, and that can extend to fic. So! OKAY DONE!

[bonestrouslingbones]

explodes gently. hi guys here are the links to literally every single one of my character playlists in order from biggest to smallest:

FLUFF:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLng5VuaCiW9d-PqJZz6hXe2CSQRV7XDDN

180 songs (8+ hours)

main genres are alt rock, punk, & nu metal i think???

vibes are 90% edgy teenager bullshit, a metric fuck ton of Mindless Self Indulgence and FIDLAR, so basically a whole lot of "everything in the world sucks forever" mixed in with "drugs are awesome also they are ruining my entire fucking life"

EBONY:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLng5VuaCiW9e-GA2Qc1TDuSwHMj_J-rnc

136 songs (5+ hours)

i. genuinely do not know how to describe all the genres in here. more pop than my other playlists. lotta indie and rock as well. pop punk. vocaloid covers. theater kid shit. man idk spin a wheel it is literally just everything

vibes are identity crises, obsession with control, secrets, needing desperately to be loved & accepted by everyone around you, and deep, crushing regret

RUSS:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLng5VuaCiW9chLMsGxSldatujCljC0YqX

95 songs (5hrs 41m)

mostly indie/alt rock, teeny bit of different flavors of pop, plus generally just that one specific genre of songs that are always on the Quirked Up Character Guy playlists

vibes are mostly existential crises, struggling to recover from Stuff and Things, being alive despite all odds, a sprinkling of eating disorders here and there, and also being a whore. metric fuck ton of Mother Mother so there's obviously a lil layer of melancholy over everything

EDGE:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLng5VuaCiW9eiAvkrAE_XlWvAnPITXjlC

94 songs (5hr 41m)

LOTS of rock and nu metal. healthy sprinkling of indie here and there

vibes are I'm Gonna Beat The Shit Out Of You, being a terrible horrible person who doesn't deserve anyone or anything good in life, and also needing to kiss ur crush on the mouth Real Bad

STRETCH:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLng5VuaCiW9cE-1yJw_TZxdSx__WcqUVg&si=jrtQO1YW3cnsiz33

53 songs (2hrs 56m)

almost entirely indie. there are a couple different types of indie but like. it's indie.

vibes are nostalgia, repression, homesickness, family, etc. metric fuck ton of Daisy the Great which unfortunately means pretty much nothing to like Most people

SLUDGE:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLng5VuaCiW9cgw5DSlEMtsEnLHHoLcm6E&si=vcwKZwWa_qqbRivI

50 songs (2hrs 53m)

main genres are theater kid shit mixed in with alt rock and Quirked Up Character Guy. plus whatever it is video game fan songs fit into

vibes are death, disney villain bullshit, and Being God

KARMA:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLng5VuaCiW9cRYmmBXHKDD4PZV6Qc2BN0&si=tr5hWls7To-_5Qqg

47 songs (2hrs 54m)

main genres are whatever the fuck you call Will Wood, alt rock, & nu metal

vibes are dying, being dead, and going crazayyyy

AND THE SHIPS oh holy shit this font is genuinely illegible

EDGEPUFF:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLng5VuaCiW9eVeoauU2n1_wxihNIHuqS2

58 songs (3hrs 26m)

genres are indie rock/pop plus alt rock

i'm not gonna describe their vibes you fucking know what they are

CINNAMON BARK:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLng5VuaCiW9fhZDBp-lrPLfLK5EzN4rtO

48 songs (2hr 39m)

genres are alt rock, nu metal, and simon curtis

vibes are (romantically) Can You Fucking Die Already What Is Your Problem and This Is The Absolute Worst Decision Either Of Us Could Possibly Be Making Right Now. Let's Make Out About It