#stop trying to profiteer from this crap

[writing-for-life]

I think this article about Sandman/Flat Earth is an AI piece, or at least a very badly researched article…

Okay, I am NOT going to reblog the OP because I’m not going to directly boost engagement for this, but this “article” about the supposed parallels between The Sandman and Tales from the Flat Earth is currently floating around in the tags:

Please do NOT take this at face value. I strongly suspect someone clobbered this together with the help of AI, because most of it makes no sense whatsoever:

Half of the characters and story beats mentioned don’t even exist while important stuff is totally missing. Some of it is hilariously wrong as well: Sivesh is a boy/man, not a woman.

It’s honestly comically bad if you actually know Tales from the Flat Earth.

Since there are affiliate links at the bottom of it, it looks as if someone who has never read Tales from the Flat Earth spotted a business opportunity and quickly jumped on the bandwagon.

As someone who actually read both and thinks Matthew Boroson’s FB post is a bad faith piece that’s often factually wrong, or at least very embellished, I can only say: This is not it.

I’m currently sitting on a post to dig into what’s been said in that post and why it doesn’t really hold water if you do an actual comparison, but this is even worse than Boroson.

Tumblr makes me despair sometimes…

[paceprompting]

Need a Ride?

written for ‘snowfall’ wc: 1000 # | steddie | rated: g | cw: non archive warnings apply | tags: alternate first meeting, pre-season four, feat. steve harrington's beemer

@steddieholidaydrabbles

He was sending his van right to the dump this time. He meant it.

Stupid engine he’d had to drop all his profits on for the third time crapping out right in the middle of the road. Leaving him to hoof it back to the gas station and hope that Wayne was home from his shift to get the call.

And of course, the snow season had to start today.

Head ducked against the wind, with only his battle vest and leather jacket against the bracing cold and snowflakes that stung his cheeks and nose where it wasn’t covered by his hair. He was just glad that there were streetlights so he wasn’t veering off into nowhere in the dark.

He could barely feel his fingers in his pockets by the time he made it to the station. He was still shivering, so he wasn’t quite at the point of hypothermia, but even dialing the numbers on the pay phone was a bit of a feat in itself.

Eddie put his back to the wind as the phone rang. And rang. Eventually, it rang out.

Wayne must have picked up a double shift. Not unusual, especially this time of year. Honestly, Eddie should have guessed that in the first place and called the plant instead of the trailer.

And he didn’t have enough change for another call. Guess he shouldn’t have stopped to buy that pack of cigarettes. That he’d already opened and smoked one from before his shitty van broke down.

“Fuck,” Eddie hissed, smacking the receiver into the hook.

He could trudge back to the van and settle in for the night. But without heat, he’d be just as well off trying to walk home in the wind and snow. And he wasn’t going to be getting sympathy with how he was dressed for spare change, much less did he have anything to deal to someone who would give him the time of day.

If he didn’t figure this out quick, he was going to get arrested for loitering.

Although…

“Munson?”

He perked up despite himself, recognizing the voice. Even if it wasn’t exactly someone he was elated to have run into at a pretty low point in his day.

Standing there under cover from the wind, the snow fell gently onto Steve Harrington. Of course it did. Settled on his hair and his jacket like powdered sugar on an overly-sweet dessert.

He wasn’t getting gas, pulled over and stood with the driver’s door open. One hand braced on the door and the other on the hood of his car, Steve stared curiously at Eddie. He was actually dressed for the weather, a puffy white and pale blue-striped monstrosity with fur around the hood.

Steve glanced at the rest of the gas station, noticing that his was the only car around.

“What are you doing here?”

Eddie stayed beside the payphone, in the wind and snow, but the farthest he could be from Steve. He’d dealt to him a few times, just weed, really, and only knew Steve by reputation. Last he’d heard, Steve had just dumped his two lackeys, Tommy and Carol and had slung ice cream at the Starcourt Mall until it burst into flames.

Why Harrington could care about him, Eddie had no idea.

“Van broke down,” he answered shortly, shoving his hands in his pockets even though the leather was nearly as cold as the wind. He gave a strained smile. “Stuck here.”

“Phone busted?”

“Out of money.” Eddie cocked his head, feeling bold. “Got fifty cents?”

It’d be enough for another call to the trailer and one to Wayne’s work for safety.

Steve raised both brows, and Eddie blanched. He and Steve were practically strangers, and he’d immediately hit Steve up for money. Even if he was known as the rich kid with parties every week because his parents were never home—Eddie was so far off his radar, he might as well have been gum under his shoe.

“I could give you a ride,” Steve said instead. “Forest Hills, right?”

A ride in the Steve Harrington’s Beemer. Sleek and maroon and drool-worthy.

The girls at school that would have literally slit his throat to be in Eddie’s place.

Eddie’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head, but he managed to find words and point back at the payphone with his thumb.

“I really just need to call my uncle. He’ll come get me.”

Steve leveled a gaze at him. “And you’ll spend an hour in the snow waiting. I’m not going to leave you out here to freeze.”

Eddie sucked his teeth, staring Steve down. He hated to give Steve the point of being right, but he was starting to lose feeling in his hands and his cheeks were stinging from the wind across his face.

He sighed, wetting his bottom lip. Or tried to, since the wet from his tongue only made his face freeze more.

“Fine,” he said, ducking his head as he trudged toward the Beemer. He didn’t dare stop to double-check with Steve, wincing as he pulled his hand from his pocket to open the door and slide inside.

The inside was immediately ten times warmer, blasting from the fans and Eddie nearly moaned. Until Steve’s door slammed closed and suddenly Eddie was inside Steve Harrington’s car. With Steve Harrington.

“You good, Munson?”

He was staring, he realized only after Steve spoke. If Steve wasn’t apprehensive about letting the school freak into his car, he was sure to be when Eddie acted as though he’d been raised far from civilization.

He forced a hard swallow. “Just surprised this isn’t all some trick. My type doesn’t exactly mesh with your type.”

Steve gave this chuckle, like an inside joke only he had any idea of.

“Right,” he said softly, and Eddie definitely felt as though he was way out of the loop on a new kind of Steve Harrington.

A kind he had a single car ride to figure out.

Part Two

[novella-november]

I have no idea why this needs to be said, but you can hate generative AI, love the Public Domain, love media preservation, hate the overbearing US Copyright system, and... still believe that Copyright Laws exist in the first place for a reason, (even if, thanks to Big Corporation Monopolies, it's been twisted into its current behemoth monstrosity.)

You can hate Large Language Models and still believe in Copyright Reform over Copyright Abolishment.

You can believe in Media Preservation and still believe that Plagiarism is wrong.

You can hate the current restrictive Copyright Laws without wanting to abolish them entirely.

You can love the Public Domain and still loath predatory corporations stealing everything they can get their hands on, to literally *feed the machine.*

These things are not mutually exclusive, and if you think that

"you can't hate AI if you hate the current copyright laws"

or that

"Hating on Generative AI will only give us more restrictive copyright and IP laws, therefore you need to normalize and accept generative AI stealing all of your creations and every single thing you've ever said on the internet!"

I just genuinely don't understand how you can say this kind of crap if you've ever interacted with any creative person in your life.

I'm a wanna-be-author.

I want as many people to be able to afford my written works as possible without restrictions, and I fully plan on having free ebooks of my works available for those who can't afford to buy them.

*That does *not* mean I, in any way shape or form, would ever consent to people stealing my work and uploading it into a Large Language Model and telling it to spit out fifty unauthorized sequels that are then sold for cash profit!*

You cannot support generative AI and turn around and try to claim you're actually just defending small time artists, and *also* you think no one should have any legal protections at all protecting their work from plagiarism at all.

Supporting unethical generative AI (which is literally all of them currently), protecting artists, and *completely abolishing* copyright and intellectual property laws instead of reforming them *are* mutually exclusive concepts.

You *cannot* worship the plagiarism machine, claim to care about small artists, and then say that those same small artists should have absolutely *zero* legal protections to stop their work being plagiarized.

The only way AI could even begin to approach being ethical would be if using it to begin with wasn't a huge hazard to the enviornment, and if it was trained *exclusively * on Public Domain works that had to be checked and confirmed by multiple real human beings before it was put into the training data.

And oh, would you look at that?

Every single AI model is currently just sucking up the entire fucking goddamn internet and everything ever posted on it and everything ever downloaded from it with no way to really truly opt out of it or even just to know if your work has been fed to the machine until an entire page of text from your book pops out when it generates text from someone's writing prompt.

And no, it's not just "privileged Western authors" who are being exploited by AI.

For an updating list of global legal cases again AI tech giants, see this link here to stay up to date as cases develop:

[heyftinally]

Y'all are going to like this one.

SWIFTIES DON'T TOUCH THIS POST WITH A TEN FOOT POLE, I SWEAR TO FUCKING HELL-

So my friend sent me this article, and I'm going to tell you why I think it's complete bullshit.

1) wishing us a happy Pride month is the BARE MINIMUM. As someone with her presence in the media and social influence, she could - and should - be doing SO much more than just wishing us a happy pride four days in.

2) "the singer has been an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community" not a good one. She seems to only remember us when it's convenient or benefits her in some way. Case in point:

2018 - "When it comes to feelings and when it comes to love and searching for someone to spend your whole life with. It's all just really really delicate. You know?" Taylor then performed her song "Delicate."

2023 - It’s painful for everyone, every ally, every loved one, every person in these communities.

In the first example, the intentional song reference comes off as extremely tacky. This is people's LIVES you're talking about. People are MURDERED for who they are and who they love (or don't love). This isn't an appropriate time to pull out the "oh-so-quirky" act and be cutesy.

In the second, the fact that she can't even center queer people in their own experience is so, SO telling. I promise, however painful it is for allies, it's 1000x worse for us to LIVE it. Allies don't have to wonder "am I going to get hate crimed wearing this?" before they leave the house - we frequently do. To not acknowledge that shows me that everything she says is performative at best.

3) I wouldn't call what she does "advocacy". She mentions us every now and then when it's convenient for her, profits off of us when we fit her marketing plan, and I've yet to find where she actually apologized for the homophobia in the original version of Picture to Burn. Also, she's real good friends with Travis Kelce's dad, who is a raging transphobe (and I bet his kids are, too). You don't get to call yourself an ally if you willingly allow the people around you to be violent bigots.

4) "always" is a strong word for someone who seems to show her support situationally at best. The full quote was "The way for that to happen is for us to continue to keep pushing governments to put protections in place for members of the LGBTQ community. And I promise to always advocate for that." Yet she doesn't do that.

5) what she speaks out, I've noticed that it's nearly always in the states that primarily agree with her. We don't see a whole lot of her "inspiring ally" speeches in places like Texas or Florida. But I've seen plenty of them come out of already notoriously queer-friendly places. If you aren't willing to face the heat of the difficult places along with the comfort of the easy ones, you don't get to call yourself an ally. Allyship is not easy. Anyone remember when Lady Gaga advocated for us in Russia, under threat of arrest, and her response was "arrest me, Russia! I don't give a fuck!"? Yeah, I've never seen even half that level of true commitment from Taylor.

6) STOP. MAKING. STRAIGHT GIRL SONGS. "GAY ANTHEMS"!!!! FFS it's such a slap in the fucking face of REAL, ACTUALLY QUEER ARTISTS that y'all keep calling these piss pathetic straight girl over produced crap songs "anthems". Fucking stop it. If they aren't queer, they don't qualify to be a queer anthem or icon. Start supporting ACTUAL queer artists with ⅛ this energy, for the love of FUCK. This bullshit pisses me off. Do you need a list of queer artists? I'll make you one by hand if you promise to stop trying to label Raylor Swift's straight girl shit songs as "gay anthems".

7) rainbows and gender subversion are not exclusively nor inherently queer. If that's our bar for "gay anthems", the bar is so low Lucifer himself needs a damn Webb Telescope to just barely see it from hell.

[animeaandp]

[Emptying drafts-87 left]

(Lost the direction I wanted to go in with this)

MHA Prompt

Warning: smut, swearing, violence, angst

Dabi x pregnant civilian reader

You're Dabi’s neighbor in the crap-box apartments he lived in before joining the league. You were homeless for a while before landing a job selling your quirk's essence. It's hard to produce and sell on your own at first, but big surprise that the criminal world was happy to help. So you became a milking cow metaphorically and sort of literally; you created a product for others to sell and in return you get some of the profit. It’s just enough to get by but without any other prospects or desires that’s fine with you. Nothing wrong with a simple life.

Whenever you’d cook too much food you offered it to Dabi, or on occasion asked if he wanted to join for a movie night; just trying to make friends with your neighbor. He usually brushed you off and if he wasn’t interested then that’s okay. You stopped knocking on his door so much.

The walls are paper thin though so he knew plenty about you without having a single proper conversation. He knows you grew up in an orphanage before aging out with no one and nowhere to go. Dabi learned your favorite movies and shows, that you were actually a really good cook who learned most of it from the cooking channel, your favorite color was green and apparently everything in your apartment was some shade of the color. You loved snakes and were allergic to strawberries. Your best friend was someone named Maddie and you always spoke too damn loud on the phone with her. Telling you to shut the hell up was one of the only reasons Dabi ever spoke to you.

One day you’re confused to see him standing at your door bc you weren’t on the phone or being loud in any way. He wasn’t here for that; it was his first time realizing what you did for work and wanted what you sold. Zero intention of paying for it of course, but before he can threaten you you’re shoving a bottle into his chest and telling him it’s on the house.! It just made you so happy he finally talked to you. Dabi manages a “thanks” then goes back to his apartment.

The stuff worked like a charm and became the source of your interactions with Dabi from then on. Usually you just gave him a new bottle but on occasion he’d throw some money at you before leaving. It was his way of ‘treating you well’ and making sure to never owe you shit.

One day there’s no answer, even though he knows you’re inside; he heard the door slam shut earlier. He pounds on the door shouting at you to open up but no response. The only reasonable option is to kick down your door and interrogate you as to why you’d ever ignore him. But he walks into a mess and blood. Dabi listens but can’t hear anything, and again there’s no response when he calls your name. Flames tickle his fingers just in case as he continues further into the space. The door ahead has a huge blood splatter on it and already cracked open. Dabi pushes through, it’s a bedroom, but still doesn’t see anything, “y/n…i know you’re in here….come on don’t make me start a fire to sniff you out.” The trail continued to the bathroom, and it had to be where you were. Closed but not locked, Dabi opens it and doesn’t understand what he’s looking at. ‘Is she dead.? Was she murdered??’ You’re slumped against the side of the tub, stripped naked, covered in blood and bruises. You’re not moving. Dabi’s not sure if he can see you breathing either, what’s in front of him is such a mess.

Should…

...should he leave you?

Or hide your body? If the police found out everyone would think he did it. There were enough bottles in the corner of your bedroom to last him forever as well. He could just close the door, loot your stuff, and get back to his own life.

He could leave

He could walk away right now

Close the door and never look back

‘Just leave’

“…This bitch is gonna owe me big time.”

.

.

You wake up the next morning tucked into bed with your injuries tended to and bandaged. The television is on and an overwhelming scent of bleach makes you want to hurl. You sit up coughing and cry in pain immediately. “Lay down idiot before your stitches-WHOA! TF!? HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND?!!”

“!?!?….D-Dabi-??”

“Drop the fucking knife-you’re enough of a pain in the ass as is.!”

“Wha-AH!!?” You collapse to the floor gripping your stomach now that the adrenaline of the moment has subsided. Davi kicks the knife across the room and stands over you, “Looks like you’re back to being a helpless damsel in distress. Good. You’re a real bitch when you’re injured.” He tried to pick you up but you slap his hands away with whatever strength you have left. He snarls at you, "now what.?? What are you crying about?”

“Don’t touch me again…please.”

"??"

"..."

"…Ah, I get it…a boyfriend? Or some stray who couldn’t keep it in his pants.?” You clawed your way back towards your bed, trying not to cry anymore, “Please don’t make fun of me. Not right now.” He rolls his eyes walking towards you “You sure you don’t want help.? You look pathetic.” You ignore Dabi’s jabs while trying to pull yourself back into bed. Laying there you didn’t look much better; like a dying fish gasping for water on the sidewalk. Dabi crouches down beside you. “Feeling better puppy??” Usually you found his snarky comments funny enough to at least smile, but your eyes look right through him. “What happened; when did you find me? How? What did you do-?” “My my y/n, you’re awfully chatty when you're about to die. Maybe I shouldn’t have helped you.”

“Why then.?”

“…..I need your shit.”

“……ha, haha…”

“whatever. Don’t get up again, my sutures aren’t very professional but you should live. You might look like me, but…..that’s the part where you flatter me.”

“I’d rather bleed out.”

“Yeah, keep it up with that smart mouth then.”

Dabi opens a window to air out the bleach he used to clean up most of the blood. He’d found your medicine cabinet and gives you a handful of pills before going to lounge on your couch and watch tv.

A few hours later and Dabi’s freely going through all of your things again, taking advantage of your lack of mobility. “Remind me; why’d you try and slit my throat earlier.?.” You laid in bed staring up at the ceiling as Dabi ransacked your place there was nothing interesting to find anyways. “I thought you were him.” “The guy who did this?” “Mhm. It was just a reflex; sorry.” Dabi gives up his explorations to lay beside you You were right there wasn’t any good shit in your apartment. “Save it. I doubt it’ll be the last time. I’m still waiting for your answer; who was it?….no, no no puppy don’t start that sniveling crap again. Forget about it then. Just stop crying.” "O-Okay…"

.

.

Over the next couple of weeks, at least once a day, Dabi invited himself into your apartment to check on you. He always helped himself to whatever suited as ‘payment’ for his aid and you never bat an eye. But it’s been a month now and you weren’t feeling any better. Your body had healed well but you still felt like you’ve been hit by a truck every day. Dabi didn’t remember you being so crabby before your incident or remotely so emotional.

You were becoming a real pain in the ass but it's hard to take his insults to heart when his cheeks are stuffed with a third serving of the dinner you made him. You reassure him though, “I'll find a doctor to go see soon. Promise."

"Good."

Bad. Veryyy bad. The worst bad-nothing could be worse-the very worst very bad thing was happening and it was bad bad bad.

"You need to move. Now."

"Wha-No fucking way, I was here first; you move jackass!?"

"First you inconvenience me by getting knocked up and now you want to make me move??"

"No but just get over it!"

"I'm not listening to you and your bastard baby cry every day y/n!! MOVE.NOW.!"

"...."

"....I.."

.

.

You don't move but you don't see or speak to Dabi after that day. You barely let him hear you make a sound to prove that you were even alive. Dabi had the peace and quiet he demanded but it' too boring now. And he's hungry.

Eventually he bangs on your door and shoves a raggedy teddy bear into your chest, swearing that he wasn’t changing a damn diaper. You fiddle with the toy, still finding it perfect as is despite the damage. “I’ll call you Dabi.” Dabi growls at your little jest and pushes his way into your apartment, “just make us some dinner already I’m fucking starved.” “Of course” you steal a quick hug from him as he passed “I’ve missed you too” and he’s disgusted that he allowed such things from you.

His disgust grows as he finds himself walking with you to run errands, building furniture, and even reading a damn book on how to parent for dummies. “This is such bullshit, why do I have to read this crap to you” he tosses the book and rolls over to hug your pillow, too tired to keep looking at that boring book. You find it so cute how grumpy he gets when he’s tired. “Go home then. Get some sleep, you’ve been up with me all day.” He grumbles his usual swears at you while digging himself further into your bed, “I’m sleeping here. Deal with it.” “…happy to.”

A couple months pass by and Dabi is so full of it. You listen to him gripe on and on about how much pregnancy is ruining your body and what an ugly whale you were now, yet he can never keep his hands off your belly for more than a moment. He’s entirely fascinated by it all but every time you tease him he says something rude and snarky about what an eye sore you were. “These aren’t so bad though” “!?DABI..!!?” You flick his forehead but can’t stop giggling as he rubs his face in your cleavage. You didn’t mind it or anything about your life right now. Taking care of this freeloader made you the happiest you’d ever been.

.

.

People like you didn’t get to stay happy though. What a fool you were to forget that. You and Dabi.

.

.

Dabi woke up one morning to find a note saying you ran to the store and would be back soon. He looks out the window to see it’s raining before crumbling the note and setting it on fire with a sigh. He really hated how much of a not-completely-horrible-person you were turning him into. Sick. He snatches your umbrella and heads out to find you. “I swear if that whale catches a cold…”

His footsteps come to an abrupt stop. That last splash under his shoes wasn’t water. It was something thicker and red flowing out of the alleyway. Dabi follows the trail “son of a-“ and rushes to check for a pulse. It’s faint but just enough that you might live if he hurries.

Dabi wouldn’t be there when you woke up in the hospital but he was waiting once you got back home. He already knew what the doctors were going to tell you, that you’d be going home alone. A week later you trudge through the door but Dabi thinks he might be seeing things. Like a ghost you don’t make a sound, or blink. You don’t react to Dabi’s presence at all until he knocks your purse out of your hand and yanks you in by your neck. “Answer me when I’m talking to you brat. Tell me what you need already.” But your eyes don’t sparkle or look mischievous looking back at Dabi. You’d gone numb. So Dabi silently took care of you (to the best of his abilities) until you go from numb to grief stricken.

It was such a headache. The tears, crying and wailing over a half folded pile of baby clothes, or into Dabi’s shoulder once your crying woke him up and he needed you to settle down. He’d drag you into his arms, ignoring your shouting to piss off, and force you back into bed. Then keep you trapped in his full embrace until you exhausted yourself and passed out. Dabi complained constantly but regardless he was there with you.

Finally, Dabi walks in one day to see you packing up the last of the baby junk. He squats down beside you to start throwing in the last of it into the box. You no longer got sad or angry at him for doing such things, you knew it was his way of trying to help you move on. “It’s just…I found something that made me look forward to living…” Dabi rolls his eyes, “pleaseeee no more waterworks I JUST got here.” You chuckle and punch him in the shoulder, “You’re such a heartless asshole.” “and the only reason you’re alive.” He pushes you back and goes to place the box in storage as you plopped down on the couch. You recline comfortable and welcome Dabi slithering over on top of you. “Besides, at least now you’re not a whale anymore and, thanks to whatever fucked up god is out there, these two are still here.” You laugh tugging on his hair trying to pull his face out of your chest. “You’re too old to be acting like this!!” “Shut up and respect your elders you little rat.” He slaps your hand away but eases up; resting his head on your cleavage as his arms coiled around you. “You’re young. You have plenty of time to crap out another baby, assuming you can stay out of trouble long enough to.” You tickle his back with a fond smile, “If only I could.”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…???….what are you doing??” “Smelling you.” “Uh huh, yeah I got that. Wanna tell me why though??” Dabi drags his face over your chest and up your neck, taking deep breathes all the way to your ear and into your hair. “I’m committing you to memory.” You grip onto his shoulders when he suddenly pushes up and his knees force yours to spread under him. “W-Why???” He scoffs in your ear and whispers “you don’t really expect me to stick around to help raise my own child do you?” “What are…nghh…Dabi wait…” He continues nibbling your ear though as his hands roam to places they haven’t been before. “Wait for what. You want a baby so I’m gonna give you one” “Wh-“ “Maybe two.” ‘Two’?!!” “Mhm. Depending on how good this is.” You feel a growing heat that you weren’t afraid of being consumed by. “This is a horrible idea” you whisper lifting your hips for him “what if I do expect you to stick around?” “Why would you expect that?” “I don’t expect anything from a person like you” you hike your leg up and shiver feeling his lips drag down it “but I’d want you to.” He furrows his brows trying to control himself but this is already more patience than he’d typically exercise. “I don’t want that.” “Do it anyways.” “I don’t wanna.” “Fine. Good luck finding someone else to put up with you, or feed you.” “Hmmm, good point” Dabi’s mouth moved hungrily down your thighs, digging his fingers into both as he went, “a few more and maybe I’ll stick around til their first birthday.” “T-There’s a Christmas turkey in it for you if you stick around for their second.!” “Where’s a rat like you finding something like that” he mumbles between licks before you tense up “From wherever a villainous lowlife like you can steal one from!.Fuck…” “ha ha that’s my girl.”

All your free time is spent rolling around with Dabi, listening to him growling and grunting in your ear, reminding you how he swears to never change a single diaper or be forced to do anything. You try asking him why he’s doing this then and finally he says “You wouldn’t stop crying about wanting a damn baby so I’m giving your needy little cunt one. That’s it.! Just feeding your greedy greedy body what it wants..” and he fucked you with that need. His hands and mouth are never not on you and it’s unsurprising how his lack of shame extended into the bedroom. You think once the pregnancy test says positive it’d all stop but “no way I’m passing this up.” You’re confused and trying to slow him down as he throws you on your bed. “Pass what up? I thought you’d never touch me again now that I got what I wanted?” “No. Because now it’s my turn to get what I want.” He pushes your body into the position he likes and wastes no time. “Nine months without having to waste my time and money on condoms? Absofuckinglutely.” “Wait that’s not entirely true and you never paid for-!?“ “oh shut up, I’m breaking in my new toy.”

True to his word you’re run ragged by his infinite libido. Even after he joins some villain group he comes running to get between your thighs every chance he gets, including when he shouldn’t. One day there’s some loud banging on his door and he slaps his hand over your mouth, refusing to pause his ascent. Then the banging is on your door and you panic hearing shouting for Dabi to open up. “Not a fucking sound” he barks down at you before picking up his pace, ignoring the person’s demands that he not be late to another meeting. You do as you’re told and bare his forceful climax by biting your pillow. Your voice shakes as you try to find it “I…I’m in no condition to be handled like that..” “You’ll take whatever the fuck I give you.” He pulls the sheets over you and dips his head to kiss your cheek goodbye before getting up. You’re too exhausted to care about the arguing and shouting when he finally opens the door to let in whoever it was. You close your tired eyes and just hope Dabi finds all his clothes quickly so they all leave. Then you get a well deserved break while Dabi ran off with his buddies to go do bad guy shit. “*sigh* not a bad life for us at all..”

[radioactivepeasant]

Snippet Thursday:

Giving Sig gray hairs for fun and profit (sorry, Sig, it's for a good cause)

Going with the winner of the poll here: "Damas Commits to the Bit too hard and Sig is Going To Slap Him"

Premise: Sig went on all of two missions with the Demolition Duo and decided "dibs, my rookies now, no take-backs".

"No leads on Mar yet."

Sig slouched in the corner booth, eyeing the empty bar as he spoke quietly into his talk-box. "Been trying to work out why Jak was able to talk to that Oracle in the slums. Only thing I know for sure is that it's teaching him to control all the dark eco Praxis forced into his bloodstream."

"His bloodstream?!"*

Damas sounded appalled.

"Eco outside of the core organ is some of the worst pain a hu'men can experience shy of a gut-shot! When did that happen?"

Sig clenched his teeth hard.

"Over the last two years. Snatched the kid off the street and put him through that for two years trying to make a super-soldier while Jak fought him every step of the way."

"I wish I could say that didn't sound like a logical progression of his depravity," Damas hissed on the other end of the line. "That your recruit managed to walk away from that -- let alone resist for two years -- is impressive."

There was a thoughtful note in the king's voice. He was considering something. Now was as good a time as any to try to catch him in an agreeable mood. Sig braced himself.

"...I have a request. I know you don't want to get involved in the civil war beyond runnin' guns, but-"

"Spit it out, Sig."

Sig rubbed the skin under his prosthetic eye and groaned.

"I'm...scared for Jak, man. Every time I see him, he's weaker. Kid’s about to drop over the edge of exhaustion and he keeps trudging on because he says "they" told him to. And I'm pretty sure he's talkin' about the Underground. Now, I know it's off agenda, but- I wanna follow him back. Find out whose trying to work him to death and straighten em out."

He could barely see the shrug on the monitor as Damas answered.

"Why're you asking me? He's your kid."

Something warm fluttered in Sig’s stomach and he grinned despite himself. "Yeah. I...guess he kinda is at this point, isn't he?"

The line was quiet for a few seconds. Time enough for sounds to begin emanating from the street. Then,

"When you find Mar-"

When. Not if. As if his success wasn't even in question.

"When you bring him home, bring Jak, too. I want to meet this kid in person."

"You think I'd let him and Daxter stay here?" Sig scoffed.

Just then, the door swung open, bringing with it the ottsel's familiar voice.

"I'm tellin' you, sweetheart, it's all about the pine-pears. Slice em, grill em, put em on the steak. I guarantee even Hoverboy will love it."

Tess walked in with the boys -- Sig didn't blame them for walking together. This wasn't the nicest neighborhood even without the KG -- and she giggled.

"Daxxie, I've never even had pine-pear. How am I supposed to convince Krew to put something on the menu if we can't get any?"

Jak looked worse than before. The circles beneath his eyes were deep and purple, and he looked dehydrated. Daxter perked up from his shoulders to glance in Sig’s direction.

Crap. He loved the boys, but they weren't cleared to know about Spargus yet.

"Hey, shift's gonna be starting soon, hon. Imma have to call you back."

"I beg your pardon?!" Damas sputtered.

After a beat, in which he must've heard the other voices, he sounded calmer. "Ah. You have company. Carry on."

"Yeah yeah yeah. No, I'll remember. Don't worry about it," Sig said quickly, and a little louder than necessary. "Milk, eggs, paper towels. You need me to grab anything else when I clock out?"

Jak stopped next to his table and cocked his head with a soft frown.

"Who you talkin' to?" he asked.

With a sardonic lilt, Damas’s voice grated in his ear.

"Oh, is that my "stepson"? Yeesh, he sounds rough. Tell him to take a nap."

"Tell him yourself!"

"Sure. Watch your ears."

And before he had time to brace himself, Sig had his ears ringing as Damas raised his voice and loudly called,

"Hey kid! Be good for your old man today. Take a nap when he tells you to this time."

"What the-?" Jak squinted at the talk-box.

Sig flushed scarlet from the tip of his ears to his neck when he heard the usually stoic king burst into uncontrolled cackling.

"I'm gonna round up the kids, and then I'm gonna smack you when I get home" he whispered harshly into the line.

"You wouldn't!" Damas snickered, just before ending the call, "Think of the children!"

"I am going to get him for this," Sig muttered as Jak’s face twisted in confusion.

"Who the heck is that?"

"A menace, that's who," Sig growled. "Ignore him."

Unfortunately, Jak did not.

The more time he and Daxter spent with Sig, recovering from missions under the guise of "Wastelander training", the more comfortable he became with Sig having more or less unceremoniously adopted them. And the more comfortable with Sig he got, the more accustomed he became to encrypted calls from Spargus. The ones Sig wouldn't tell him about yet.

Damas’s terrible habit of taking a Situation and running with it came back to bite them both when a message came while Sig was running perimeter check. And Jak answered the comm.

"You...are not supposed to be on this line."

To his credit, Damas kept reasonably calm.

"Where's your dad, rookie?"

"Sig's clearing the building," Jak answered with a shrug.

"I'd go grab him, but apparently broken toes disqualify you from pest control."

"Eco would fix that quickly enough."

"That's what I said!" Jak gestured vaguely towards the door. "It's not even the worst injury I've gotten in a base!"

Daxter paused on his way past Jak to the kitchen.

"That's true," he called over, "I think catching the live scatter rounds with your bare hands still holds the title on that one, pal."

"Eh." Jak made an entirely too casual shrug.

"Now, don't tell me you were juggling ammunition," Damas said, with a bit of mild reproof under the dry tone.

"The kid tried to channel em," Jak defended himself, "Slight burns or crabby toddler with super strength? Definitely could have been worse. Sig freaked out over that one, too."

Damas’s face went blank very abruptly.

"What toddler."

The door opened, and Jak glanced over.

"Oh, hey Sig. Your "it's complicated" is on the comm."

Sig made a very amusing impression of a fish out of water. He rushed across the room and snatched the talk-box.

"You don't have clearance for my comm, cherry! You know that!"

"What?" Jak asked indignantly, even as Sig propelled him out of the room.

"It's just that stepdad guy! What's the big deal?"

Sig glared at the box. "You did this."

Damas barely noticed. "He can stay, I need to clear something up with him."

If looks could kill, Damas would have been shaking hands with his ancestors at that moment.

"Out. Go run your weapons drills." Sig waved the boys away.

"Well so much for being consistent with him," Damas needled.

Another discreetly murderous glance was aimed at the camera lens.

"Are you serious right now."

"Jak may have information about Mar's location, Sig. I'm dead serious."

Sig snapped back to look at Jak so quickly that Jak was afraid he was going to get whiplash.

Jak blinked.

"Uh...we're not talking about the dead city founder guy, are we? Because I don't know where he is, but the old lady is making me look, so I can probably get you intel later."

*"Toddler,"* Damas corrected tightly, "Green hair, wearing an amulet of Mar. Powerful but uncontrolled channeling potential. Would be about four now."

Jak relaxed. "Oh, him! Yeah, I dropped him off with Vin at the power station because the Shadow was letting him play in the street again."

The combined stares of his semi-legal guardian and the man on the tiny screen left him fidgeting uncomfortably.

"....what?"

[morlock-holmes]

What objections would you actually accept to AI?

Roughly in order of urgency, at least in my opinion:

Problem 1: Curation

The large tech monopolies have essentially abandoned curation and are raking in the dough by monetizing the process of showing you crap you don't want.

The YouTube content farm; the Steam asset flip; SEO spam; drop-shipped crap on Etsy and Amazon.

AI makes these pernicious, user hostile practices even easier.

Problem 2: Economic disruption

This has a bunch of aspects, but key to me is that *all* automation threatens people who have built a living on doing work. If previously difficult, high skill work suddenly becomes low skill, this is economically threatening to the high skill workers. Key to me is that this is true of *all* work, independent of whether the work is drudgery or deeply fulfilling. Go automate an Amazon fulfillment center and the employees will not be thanking you.

There's also just the general threat of existing relationships not accounting for AI, in terms of, like, residuals or whatever.

Problem 3: Opacity

Basically all these AI products are extremely opaque. The companies building them are not at all transparent about the source of their data, how it is used, or how their tools work. Because they view the tools as things they own whose outputs reflect on their company, they mess with the outputs in order to attempt to ensure that the outputs don't reflect badly on their company.

These processes are opaque and not communicated clearly or accurately to end users; in fact, because AI text tools hallucinate, they will happily give you *fake* error messages if you ask why they returned an error.

There's been allegations that Mid journey and Open AI don't comply with European data protection laws, as well.

There is something that does bother me, too, about the use of big data as a profit center. I don't think it's a copyright or theft issue, but it is a fact that these companies are using public data to make a lot of money while being extremely closed off about how exactly they do that. I'm not a huge fan of the closed source model for this stuff when it is so heavily dependent on public data.

Problem 4: Environmental maybe? Related to problem 3, it's just not too clear what kind of impact all this AI stuff is having in terms of power costs. Honestly it all kind of does something, so I'm not hugely concerned, but I do kind of privately think that in the not too distant future a lot of these companies will stop spending money on enormous server farms just so that internet randos can try to get Chat-GPT to write porn.

Problem 5: They kind of don't work

Text programs frequently make stuff up. Actually, a friend pointed out to me that, in pulp scifi, robots will often say something like, "There is an 80% chance the guards will spot you!"

If you point one of those AI assistants at something, and ask them what it is, a lot of times they just confidently say the wrong thing. This same friend pointed out that, under the hood, the image recognition software is working with probabilities. But I saw lots of videos of the Rabbit AI assistant thing confidently being completely wrong about what it was looking at.

Chat-GPT hallucinates. Image generators are unable to consistently produce the same character and it's actually pretty difficult and unintuitive to produce a specific image, rather than a generic one.

This may be fixed in the near future or it might not, I have no idea.

Problem 6: Kinetic sameness.

One of the subtle changes of the last century is that more and more of what we do in life is look at a screen, while either sitting or standing, and making a series of small hand gestures. The process of writing, of producing an image, of getting from place to place are converging on a single physical act. As Marshall Macluhan pointed out, driving a car is very similar to watching TV, and making a movie is now very similar, as a set of physical movements, to watching one.

There is something vaguely unsatisfying about this.

Related, perhaps only in the sense of being extremely vague, is a sense that we may soon be mediating all, or at least many, of our conversations through AI tools. Have it punch up that email when you're too tired to write clearly. There is something I find disturbing about the idea of communication being constantly edited and punched up by a series of unrelated middlemen, *especially* in the current climate, where said middlemen are large impersonal monopolies who are dedicated to opaque, user hostile practices.

Given all of the above, it is baffling and sometimes infuriating to me that the two most popular arguments against AI boil down to "Transformative works are theft and we need to restrict fair use even more!" and "It's bad to use technology to make art, technology is only for boring things!"

[jellybeanium124]

Stede excused himself from the brightly lit ballroom with two hundred chatting people and loud band to go to the bathroom. He sat on the toilet for five minutes in the brightly lit bathroom as other fundraiser guests walked in and out, doing their business and washing their hands.

All he wanted to do was go home. He didn't want to talk, he didn't want to be wearing a suit, he didn't want a fancy meal. This was unusual for Stede. He normally loved wearing a fancy suit while eating a fancy meal and talking nonstop, but he was tired and his whole head and body was buzzing. His suit felt too tight and itchy, and he swore he could feel tags rubbing against him, and his shoes hurt.

He left the stall and washed his hands and started wandering around. He shouldn't be doing this, abandoning the party to snoop around like a curious child, but he couldn't go back in there. What was he supposed to do? Go find Mary and stand behind her while she talks like a functioning adult? He didn't even know why he felt like crap.

The entire building the party was being hosted in was bright and fancy, but at least here in a random hallway with benches and candelabras on the walls and plush velvet carpeting, it's quiet.

He turned a corner and saw a man sitting on the ground, leaning against the wall where a bit of it juts out to form a small corner. He's got his knees tucked up to his chest.

"Sir, are you okay?" Stede asked, walking over to the man.

He looked surprised to see someone. "What? Yes, yeah, I'm fine. I'm with the fundraiser benefit, that's why I'm here. I just... needed a break."

"Me too."

"...You wanna sit?"

"Ok."

Stede sat down on the carpet next to the man, and stretched his legs out.

"I'm Stede," he said, holding out his hand.

"Stede??" the man echoed, shocked. "Shit, Stede Bonnet?"

"Um... yes?"

The man seemed to grow shyer, and looked away. Stede put his hand down. Then he pulled his knees up and sighed.

"You've probably read those articles, right? About Bonnet Suits? Where I'm the silly spoiled son of an evil Disney villain?"

"Yeah... might've..."

"Well, Mr. Teach was right about some things. My father is evil. There's no appealing to his humanity no matter what. He won't make any of the changes I want to make in the company. That's why everyone thinks I'm so useless. Maybe all my ideas are stupid anyways... I just have stupid ideas..."

"What are your ideas?"

"Pay every single employee who works in the factories making suits for us the equivalent of $15 an hour. Every single one. I've done the math 40 different ways, it's possible! We could pay them more, but I've got to start somewhere. My father always shuts me down and tells me I'd be throwing away hundreds of millions in profits. I've stopped trying to convince him to do something by explaining how this will help the people who make the suits that made him fucking wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, and right now I'm working the whole 'everyone loves human rights this will get us more customers and we can charge more if people think we're sustainable' angle but even that's not working. I can't take it anymore. I have a little boat. I bought it as a fiftieth birthday gift to myself. It's sitting at a pier in Rhode Island right now. No one knows about it. Not my father, not my wife... once I grow some balls I'm going there and getting on my boat and I'm not coming back."

The man blinked at him.

"Sorry... fuck... I don't know why I said all of that. Fuck, there's journalists at this thing. I'm supposed to be doing good for my father's reputation, not sitting in a hallway talking about what a piece of shit he is..."

The man swallowed. "Yeah..."

"Enough about my stupid problems, you really don't seem okay. Are you sick? Should..." Stede cut himself off and looked at the floor.

"Should...?"

Stede shook his head. "Nothing. You came out here for some peace and quiet, and I'm fucking it all up. I can go now."

"I wouldn't mind if you sat and we had peace and quiet together."

Stede smiled at him briefly, before leaning his head back against the wall and letting out a sigh.

For a few minutes, the two of them sat together in silence. It felt a little good, at least, to know that there was someone else here who couldn't stand to be at that party longer than thirty minutes. A kindred spirit, maybe. A potential friend.

"I'm Ed Teach," the man said quietly, after a few minutes had passed.

Stede's heart dropped through the floor.

He was sitting next to the man who called him an ineffectual, under-qualified, empty-headed heir to a despicable fashion fortune. And he was right.

"Oh," Stede said.

"That's it? 'Oh?' You're not going to have me thrown out? No yelling? You're not even gonna bribe me to stop talking about your dad's company and the shit he pulls?"

Stede shrugged. "Eh, we deserve worse."

"You're a lot different than I thought you'd be."

"You're a lot different too. I thought you'd be a ruthless and mean sneaky journalist."

Ed sighed. "It's hard being like that all the time... I thought you'd be a prick. A real entitled asshole."

Stede smiled gently. "At least one thing my father never gave me was his personality."

Ed nodded. "But y'know, if you're really serious about change, why don't you just fucking do it? Stop waiting for your dad's approval, go to Cambodia and Bangladesh, and pay them out of your own pocket? Running away to Rhode fuckin' Island isn't gonna help anyone."

Stede cocked his head at him curiously. "Could I do that? Go behind my father's back and just... pay them out of my own savings? Is that legal?"

"I mean, you can give people money. You can write checks. You could write me a check right now. That'd be legal."

Stede raised an eyebrow. "Writing a check for my nemesis journalist? That'd be awful suspect, even if it's legal."

"Okay okay okay not me specifically, but, like, you can do that. You can write checks. I know you're sitting on millions and millions of dollars, Bonnet."

"Okay," Stede said, standing up. "Let's go."

"Let's?"

"Yes. Let's go. Fuck em."

Ed stood up. "Now?"

Stede nodded. "Now. Let's get our passports and board the first plane we can. I'm going behind my father's back, like you suggested."

"And you want me... to come with you?"

"Of course. Presumably I'll need a journalist on my side when this shitstorm goes public," Stede said with a manic smile.

~~~

Obviously, our juvenile stunt didn't immediately solve everything. Bonnet Sr. still had access to Stede's finances, and drained his bank accounts so the millions he gave out in checks would bounce. But our stunt wasn't without its value. It immediately brought public attention to Bonnet Suits, and the fashion industry and its abuses in general. Bonnet Sr.'s now infamous meltdown during his interview for Reuters caused him to step down as CEO, leaving Stede to take over. Over the course of the following year, Stede made sweeping reforms inside the company, all according to plans he'd spent years trying to get his father to implement. Yesterday he publicly announced that he's retiring, and now here I am, retiring as well. People often compare us to Romeo and Juliet, with one reporter who shall remain nameless calling us "just as fockin stupid as those teenage twats." And perhaps we are just as stupid and headstrong as them. I did get on a plane to Bangladesh with a billionaire approximately 5 hours after meeting him (he'd never flown on a commercial flight before, he was adorably excited about trying the "airplane food" and requested a pin with wings on it like kids get). But now it's been well over a year, and I'm still stupidly in love with him, so up yours. I'm going to retire and spend the rest of my days eating fresh lobster rolls and relaxing on my husband's little boat. Journalism has no doubt taken years off my life, so I'm going to spend whatever time I have left happy.

Take it sleazy, Ed Teach

[gaykarstaagforever]

DS9 "Little Green Men" is a fun episode, even though I feel it got a little too madcap with the escape, and could have used more of Quark trying to take advantage of humons in 1947. Maybe him getting an actual sitdown with Trumon?

I get that they were really going for a "what if DS9 characters crashed a Roger Corman movie" vibe, and they do that well. These people don't act like real people from the 40s, they act like B-movie characters from the era preceding the gritty and realistic 70s. It almost feels, and nearly looks like, TOS "Tomorrow is Yesterday". That was only 9 years after "Night of the Blood Beast" in 1958. Simple and outlandish were still the order of the day. They nail that here, and it's fun.

I don't recall them really establishing Rom as an amateur engineer before this, so his sudden knack for it is a little glaring. I mean, he's not stupid, and Quark always makes him check things out and do maintenance. But I feel like it would have been more fitting to have Nog do the ship stuff, and Rom is sitting there reading the guide Bashir gave Nog, so Rom could step up and be knowledgeable about ancient Earth. Let Quark freak out and scream for Moogie after his standard-issue terrible Quark plan fails. Minor quibble.

What's funny to me is that, during that scene on DS9 between Sisko and Odo, I said aloud, "Ben should really have Odo disguise himself and go with them, to stop Quark when he inevitably pulls shenanigans." And HE DID IT. Like, for once, Ben and Odo take Quark as seriously as the giant perpetual threat he is. I was very pleased.

I also like how they're trapped on a US military base with paranoid Cold War soldiers who want to kill them, and Odo regards the entire nail-biting time travel adventure as a frustrating annoyance he has to nonchalantly sort out so that he can put Quark in the brig for smuggling. This is just a slightly more irritating duty shift to him. You really get the sense that he is a literal god-like alien who could easily sort this all out in 2 minutes. But no, he'll turn into a dog and let sympathetic humans help them, because it will preserve the timeline and get them back home slightly faster, sigh. That's a great character beat.

Love the stuff with Quark, Rom, and Nog just totally crapping on 20th century humans for being primitive idiots. Yes, that bluster immediately fades the second they get threatened. But Nog still believes it enough to try his fanciful scifi threat. And Quark STILL wants to stay behind and ruin the timeline for his own personal profit. They never lose their intrinsic Ferengi sense of superiority over these tobacco-huffing, atomic-horror-creating ancient aliens. And you can't blame them.

I was hoping for some cute post-script where we find out that that lady was named Dorothy and went on to write a screenplay for some 1960s scifi TV show that had a Federation and Ferengi. But I guess that would be a little too on-the-nose. And they already did that call-back to Bell looking suspiciously like Sisko.

Nog getting that poor oblivious woman to rub his ear was a tad much. I mean, I get that it's funny to us. But in-universe, that's basically SA. ...I think?

These nerd shows get confusing and weird sometimes, you know?

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for taking a picture of an older lady’s craft?

I know this one sounds silly but it’s been eating me up for a while now. When I (M23) was 18 I went to the local craft fair with my grandparents. At the time, my friends and I had this in-joke in our group chat where we would take pictures of goofy stuff and pretend that we had run across a specific friend, because said friend was goofy and never left the house. While we were walking around, I saw this really goofy looking bird decoration on the outside of this shop that was all decked out in Christmas stuff. So, I took a picture, and was editing my friend’s name over it when I heard someone say “excuse me” really angrily. Then this older woman walked over to me and said again, “excuse me, but that is exceptionally rude.” I was very taken aback and just kind of stared at her. She asked if I had just taken a picture of her shop, and then pointed to a small sign nestled in between loads of Christmas crap that had a camera with that kind of no smoking symbol over top of it and had the words “no photography” underneath it. Then she went on a rant about how rude it was to take a picture of something someone made, and that there are so many people who will take a picture of something someone spent time figuring out, then go home and make the same thing without ever crediting anyone, which takes away from her profits, and makes it harder to operate small shops like hers. Then she told me that she needed to see me delete the picture, so I showed her me hitting the “x” on the capture. She told me that she needed to see me go into my photos and delete it. I was pretty flustered at this point, and awkwardly tried to explain the concept of captures that are just meant to exist long enough to see them, and aren’t saved anywhere. I definitely didn’t tell her that the only reason I chose her bird was because I thought it looked goofy as hell, and settled on “I promise I don’t want to make your bird.” She was still super angry, but stopped asking about the picture and just walked back into the shop still talking about how rude it was. I shuffled back over to my grandparents, who didn’t say a word about the incident, which made me feel even worse for pissing off that elderly lady. I was used to everything and anything being fair game for a picture, and counted myself one of the good ones for trying to avoid capturing people without consent, but she did have a semi-visible sign specifically saying “no,” so AITA?

TL:DR- Older lady got mad I Snapchatted her bird for a meme when she had a “no photography” sign on her shop. AITA?

What are these acronyms?

[dearweirdme]

Hi! Random thought here... but I feel like most of us wouldn't give 2 craps about jkkrs if they weren't so confrontational towards us. I'm aware that there are also tkkrs who are the same towards them. But most adult/mature tkkrs I've met and talked with personally are all pretty level headed about this whole thing and are just vibing lol

If jkkrs could just believe what they believe and stop coming into our spaces, spouting their bs and also being super annoying tbh... I wouldn't really care what they believe. I'd think they were wrong still, but that's where it'd end. I've never once thought of purposefully searching for a jikook blog in order to send them copious amounts of hate or argumentative asks. It's so weird and comes off as super insecure.

Honest confession here: sometimes jkkrs have actually made me resent the public jikook pairing as whole. Idk if it's the shipper's cockiness when there's company content with their ship in it or what... but it's made me realize even more how much the company likes to profit off of the 2. And while I 100% believe that Jimin and Jungkook are good friends and care about each other, I hate to say I usually cringe a bit when I see content edited in such a way to push their relationship forward into the spotlight. It feels forced and unfortunately it makes me not even want to watch it sometimes. Their show was my last straw tbh.

I'm not saying every moment between these 2 is forced. But the WAY the company goes about pairing them together or using footage feels forced. I adore Jimin and I feel sad that their relationship feels tainted to me now. I can't even imagine how JK feels with all of this. I sometimes wonder if the company's interference has impacted their friendship at all. Especially since Jimin often seems more compliant in the fanservice and often initiates it, but sometimes JK looks more uncomfortable with it.

Hi anon!

Good points! You and I think very much alike.

I have no issue with Jm and Jk at all. I look at them the way I look at vmin. I have made it a point to separate Jm and Jk from jkkrs.

I’ve had many (!) jkk asks. All of them trying to convince me/us that they’re right. Even when they try to just debunk Tkk it basically almost by a comparison with Jkk. I’m actually pretty convinced that Jkk fandom has gotten this big because they had tkk to compete with. What troubles me a lot is the way they generally see Jk and Jm. Jm is mostly painted as this weak victim type, while Jk is the protector who’s world evolves around Jm. It’s pretty toxic a lot of times and makes it so easy for them to blame one of them (mostly Jk) for when something seems off. Truth is… there’s never actually something off so there’s hate thrown around for no other reason than Jkkrs being wrong. Tkkrs don’t have this imbalance between Tae and Jk as much (though I’m sure some also do).. I think our view of them as persons is much more accurate. Funny thing is though… that ever since they enlisted the amount of ‘Tae is a victim and Jk is the bad guy’ asks have kicked up… I think it’s due to lack of content and people are getting creative because of that… kinda like Jkkrs also get creative.

I understand why people don’t enjoy the prospect of Jkk content. We can actually see that it’s not all natural and on top of that we know what to expect from Jkkrs. And Jkkrs are loud! Holy shit they’re so loud about all the shit they’re wrong about! And this wouldn’t be an issue if it was something that only happened once in a while, but we know that we can probably expect BH to keep the Jkk content going. So by now just the thought of upcoming Jkk content is enough to make some of us feel annoyed (or anxious for some even). Because we know it will probably come… and that’s different for Jkkrs.. because getting Tkk focused content is way less likely than getting Jkk content.

[kingsmoot]

@ttombo

yes you explain how beautiful the process of creating things. but the character for fanfic itself is not created by fanfic writer. so why feel offended with ai. because for me both ai n ff give copyright issue in writing. i like to hear explanation not to fight

ok. i am sorry for how rude my initial reply to you was. i should have engaged with you in better faith, and i apologize for my harsh tone. let me try and explain why these things are not related.

copyright law exists to protect intellectual property so that people can make money off of a brand. mickey mouse is copyrighted to the walt disney corporation so that they can make merchandise with his face on it and sell that merchandise at a 800% markup from the cost of the slave labor and materials it took to make it. copyright law protects the ability for giant megacorporations to continue sucking money from their ips. "ip" stands for "intellectual property" and is used to refer to these huge brands, like the mcu or star wars or alien or friday the 13th, etc. i have no interest at all in protecting the ability of disney, 21st century fox, a24, or any other corporate conglomerate to make money. i just do not care if they can make another trillion dollars selling plastic crap in the shape of their ips. it doesn't matter to me.

fanfiction and fanart are transformative works. they exist in sort of a legal grey area wrt copyright infringement. technically, fanfic and fanart are only "legal" if their creators are not making money off of them. so all the fan-made merch that fandom loves (and i do NOT exclude myself from this i own a lot of fan made merch as well as official merch) like keychains and t shirts and plush dolls are all technically illegal. the artists who make these things could be sued and ordered to stop making these items. the characters they are representing on their merch are not their ip, they belong to a big legal entity that wants to exclusively make money off of tchotchkis shaped like Blorbo Du Jour.

but i would rather give my own money to a fanartist making merch of my favorite blorbo than to the corporation who owns said blorbo. that is just a personal preference and not praxis. i do not care that disney or hbo or whatever is "losing money" when i buy fanmade instead of official merch. it doesn't matter to me.

fanfiction is not made for profit. i do not write fanfic to make money. i have never received a single penny for any of my fanfiction and i never will. i write fanfiction because it is fun. because i love it. because i feel a drive to create and this is the outlet i choose to do it in. i am passionate about the craft of writing because i love it. i am passionate about the craft of fanfic because i am an ethusiastic nerd.

i do not think that not using ai to churn out algorithmic drivel is good because it means you are not feeding copyrighted material to chatbots. i do not care about what is or is not copyright protected when it is fed to chatbots. i care that creative people in fandom who feel the drive to MAKE something push through the discomfort of a learning curve. i care that creative fans teach themselves how to write in a way that they enjoy. i care that creative people push through the challenges of making art they are proud of to reap the rewards of having created art they are proud of.

i am not against using ai to write fic for any kind of copyright concern. copyright does not matter to me. creative writing as a learned skill that anyone can develop and hone DOES matter to me. choosing not to be lazy, choosing to put real concerted effort into creating art you are proud of matters to me. whether the art you create is about your OCs or about copyrighted characters, what matters to me is that YOU made it. you took part in the action of MAKING something. something that is uniquely yours because it came from your brain and you worked to bring it out from your thoughts and into the world.

i do not care about protecting copyright but i DO care very much about people engaing in the creation of art, which takes a lot of effort and is challenging, but is also very rewarding and wonderful.

i hope that this helps explain why copyright and creative integrity are totally unrelated and why i do not care about protecting ips. i am sorry again for biting your head off after your first question. thank you for coming back with a measured response to my anger, that was kind of you.

[bullet-prooflove]

Clean: Trey Cahill x Reader

Tagging: @@mariashane @kj77 @tiredmarshmellowuwu @choppedgalaxynerd @herwordslikebutterflywings @flopiboni @words-and-seeds @aiko24k @@kane-nero-6 @wabi-sabi1090 @kmc1989

Trey used to traffic drugs. His dealer used to give him ten grand to transport a few bricks of coke over the border into Arizona under the guise of delivering one of the classic cars he’d been restoring to a buyer.

It was usually a five hour trip to the stash house. He’d drop off the merchandise, take his cut and then get high in a shitty roadside motel. He’d stay there for days until he was right again to drive the five hours back to Vegas.

He doesn’t do that crap anymore, he hasn’t since Folsom got him into rehab two years ago. That’s when he got serious about restoration, started turning a profit on the garage, building a client base. He may not ask where all of his spare parts come from for the sake of plausible deniability but the heavy stuff, he’s out of it.

If he gets caught it’s not just his life he fucks up, it’s yours too. You’re already getting shit for dating a former criminal, you will never admit it to him but Folsom had filled Trey in after the scuffle with the defence attorney. That stuff, it reflects badly on you, it puts you under scrutiny.

He’s kept his nose clean since then. He’s stopped going to the bars with all the shady shit going on, lost contact with the people who could suck him back into that life, tossed his burner phones. He’s gone completely legit.

He has his head tucked under the bonnet of a 1969 Chevy Corvette when Killian turns up at the garage. There’s a problem with the starter, he’s still trying to figure it out when he hears someone clearing their throat behind him. He knows it’s Killian, even before he glances over his shoulder. He’s been trying to get a hold of him for days now, putting the word out through the people they used to have in common for Trey to get in touch because he needs the cars to move product.

“You’ve been ignoring my calls.” Killian says as Trey straightens up and turns to face him.

He’s leaning against the hood of a Stingray Trey’s been tuning up, his hands are tucked into the pockets of his black leather jacket. He looks more haggard than the last time Trey saw him. Dipping into his own supply, Trey thinks.

“That’s not my life anymore.” Trey tells him as he picks up the rag from his work bench and uses it to clean the grease from his hands. “I thought you would have got the message when I stopped buying drugs from you.”

“Hm.” Killian says as he holds up a baggie of coke between two fingers. “So I assume you don’t want this.”

This is how it starts, he remembers. A freebie, a little fun, before he knows it he’s five grand in the hole, doing ‘jobs’ to pay off his debt.

“Do you think I’m really that weak?” Trey laughs, crossing his arms over his chest trying to ignore the twitch in his fingers. “That I’m going to jump back into bed with you because you offer me a bump.”

“I think if I leave this here.” Killian says setting the baggie down on the workbench alongside Trey. “I’ll be getting a call from you in a couple of hours’ time for a little more.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it.” Trey bites back and Killian gives him that smile, the one that sets Trey’s teeth on edge.

“Once an addict…” Killian says, pushing the baggie towards him.  “…always an addict.”

It’s a few hours later that you turn up at the garage. The lights are still on despite the late hour. Part of you is worried and the other part pissed because Trey was supposed to meet you for dinner tonight at that little Chinese place you both like. You’d sat there for an hour before you realised he wasn’t coming. He hasn’t been picking up his calls or his texts.

When you step inside you find him hunched over the workbench with his head in his hands. Your hand comes to rest on his shoulder and he flinches at the sensation before he turns his head to look at you. His eyes are red rimmed, the vibrant blue shining through the frustrated tears as the muscle in his jaw clenches.

“Trey.” You say softly and he takes a sharp inhale of breath before he tilts his head towards something on the workbench.

“I need you to get rid of it.” He says, his voice pained as you follow his gaze to the baggie of coke. “If I touch it…”

He trails off because he doesn’t need to say anything else.

Two years sobriety, everything he’s worked for, it’ll be gone and he can’t go back to that place, not when he’s come so far. But the thing is he can’t seem to help himself. His mouth is dry, his fingers itch, he can feel himself giving in and he’s powerless to stop it.

You pick up the baggie and tuck it into your pocket. The relief is visible, Trey exhales for the first time in what seems like hours, the tension seems to flood out of his body as he uses the back of his hand to wipe across his eyes.

“I need to know what happened tonight.” You say quietly. “How this ended up here.”

If it were anyone else including Folsom he’d lie, say one of his customers dropped it because he wouldn’t want them to know about all the bad shit he’s done in the past. But it’s you and he’s always been honest with you and that’s not about to change today.

He tells you everything, from the product he used to move for Killian, to the nights he spent high as kite. You listen quietly, your hand holding his and he’s grateful for that because being here with you, it keeps him anchored, it reminds him that he’s more than just his addiction.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you.” He says quietly as he clasps your hand to his cheek. “Really I don’t.”

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Like My Work? - Why Not Buy Me A Coffee

[terrence-silver]

Hi 👋! Can you do “ we could’ve had something, if you weren’t so fucking evil.” with terry? Have a nice day

Differing Points of View.

(Terry Silver x Reader)

---

-"Good and evil are relative."-

He coos, just as easily as that, caressing the words as smoothly as a lover would and that was your cue to finally snap. Cut the crap. -"No, Terry, they're not relative! It doesn't work that way!"- You point at him, vigor in your arm, your voice rumbling with righteous fury. Yes, you and him, you had an argument. An argument that escalated. You never figured yourself as the type of people who would have shouting matches, or rather, you never figured yourself as the kind of person who'd shout, because Terry didn't. He simply sat in his arm chair, legs crossed, seeming completely unfettered. Like he enjoyed this, in a sense. Maybe that's what was so infuriating. How he didn't seem to take any of this seriously.

-"I don't think profiteering from environmental disasters for over forty years, abusing some kid who's no longer a kid for decades over some stupid vendetta, putting your own best friend behind bars who the vendetta was for in the first place and burning down someone's place of employment to send a message is relative! You're acting like some sort of gangster!"-

His list of transgressions --- recent ones, that is, come out, rolling off of your tongue in the form of a rant and you realize you blurted out all of that in one breath, standing in front of him practically hyperventilating. Another thing Terry appeared to like; he visibly chuckles his chin when the moniker of 'gangster' crosses the threshold of his lips. Jesus, he took that as a complement. He really took that as a complement. Couldn't even try to insult him without him viewing it as a crowning achievement. -"I mean, how could you do that?"- Your shoulders hunch forward and you almost plead then, trying to appeal to him. Reaching something within him. Some point of empathy. Regret? Remorse? Anything. But, there's nothing there. If anything, there's pride. -"Which part?"- Terry clicks his tongue, appearing profoundly amused and there you were, shouting again. He was infuriating and deliberately pushing your buttons. How well he did it too, that even as your temper flared up, you understood you were being toyed with yet you found yourself unable to stop.

-"Every part!"-

You yell, feeling a bit like an adult trying to contend with a child.

-"How can you wake up in the morning?

-"You put one leg forward. Then another."-

He leans back into his seat, talking with one hand, twirling one bejeweled finger mid-air, describing his point of view through a saying. Of course he'd use a saying. Of course. The Zen of Terry Silver. -"Enough with the proverbs! Jesus! You've got a proverb for everything!"- You shriek, smacking your hands down, talking with your whole body, finding yourself in pain due to what you were about to say, feeling that regardless how difficult it was it still had to be said. It was inevitable. Looming over you. -"You know, we could've had something. If you weren't so fucking evil."- Your voice cracks saying that and by the time you've uttered your line, you're whimpering, because by god, that hurt. You always knew confessing that to him would've hurt, but never this much. You catch Terry's face stilling. His expression growing serious. Without a single ounce of rushing, he leans forward, standing up from his armchair, looming large, walking forward, slowly. You take a step back. Part of you thinks then that calling him evil will have him coming at you with a fury all his own, but instead, Terry's calm. Quiet.

-"All that profiteering off of environmental disasters, as you called it,"-

His jawline twists, and he's smiling, looking to the side, shaking his head.

-"Companies nowadays claim to be good and green and then they still dispose of their waste somewhere in backwater Thailand where nobody can see it. It's like pushing the scum under the carpet and calling yourself an accomplished janitor. At least I was fucking honest about my policies."- He chuckles and you're standing there, mouth agape as you listen, momentarily confused. What was he talking about? This conversation wasn't going in the direction you figured it would go in. You brace yourself, searching for some kind of catch, some sort of verbal trap, a tactic, his usual line-up of mind games. But, Terry? Terry was utilizing logic and you couldn't deny it. Your fight or flight instinct kicks in. Your heart starts pounding away in your chest. God. He was going to dodge each and every argument you made chronologically and with sound reason, wasn't he? He'd leave you without a single way to debate him on any of this, won't he?

-"That punk kid?"-

Terry's eyes shoot up at you, his gaze growing cold.

You immediately knew who he was talking about.

-"Larusso has been continuously asking for a good beating for the past thirty years and once he finally gets one over the nose, he cries foul and everyone cries foul with him."- There's venom on his tongue and you hear it in the way he pronounces each and every one of his words; like he wanted to spit them out on the carpet. Let the acid of his voice leave a hole in the fabric. -"Could've justified himself as a victim when he was a snot-nosed twerp fresh in highschool --- but now? He's a grown man. He really thought nobody would hit back? How long do you think he's gonna use that little self-righteous schmuck from Jersey card until it grows old, huh?"- You gulp hard. You've nothing to say to that. Nothing at all. Deep down, you knew Terry was right in a weird sense; that Larusso was just as culpable. Just as petty and spiteful. That nowadays, if Terry was pushing, Daniel Larusso was pushing right back when he could've just as easily let it go. That there was fighting in the streets because of it. That you were standing up for someone who would've never stood up for you. You take yet another step back. You have to. You have to move your limbs in some direction or you'd collapse on the floor. Like a magnet, Terry moves with you, taking a step forward, as if on cue.

-"The whole thing with John?"-

Something clenches in your gut, you knew what was coming.

More facts you couldn't deny no matter how badly you wanted to.

-"John knew the stakes. He also knew I'm not to be trifled with. He's a grown man too. He can handle the heat in the kitchen. He's been handling it for an awfully long time. Don't be here pleading his case for him."-

Terry's mouth presses into a hard line. Eyes unblinking. You sense the edge of the sofa smack the back of your feet in movement with a thud. You had nowhere left to go. You hit a wall. -"I loved that man. I still love him. I'll love him for the rest of my life."- Terry's stare pierces through yours. There's an acute ache in your chest, bubbling, coiling and you recognize it as pity. You felt bad for him. You couldn't believe it, but you did. Your ire pipes down, cooling, dwarfing from a pulsating black hole of anger into a star. You're on the verge of apologizing and you don't like that. You don't like that one bit. Were you that much of a pushover? You collapse, plopping down on the sofa, feeling exhausted and lost, looking up at Terry, rendered speechless. -"But, you don't visit a friend knowing he has a weakness for you, uproot his life after disappearing and going no-contact for well over quarter of a century and some change, ask for a non-refundable kickstarter loan and get surprised when your friend doesn't exactly appreciate your conflicting loyalties."- Terry puts up his his index finger, speaking slowly --- very slowly --- putting special emphasis into every word, every line, every sound, until you found yourself nodding away, quietly agreeing, looking down at the floorboard. God. Well over a quarter of a century and some change. The poignancy of that smacks the wind out of your belly, even though you knew this whole story. John's and Terry's whole story. You were agreeing. You really were. He wasn't even manipulating you. Wasn't even toying with you.

He was merely telling you the truth.

And you knew. You knew it was all true.

It was you who'd be a liar if you argued him further.

Terry knew that. You knew that he knew.

-"As for Mike Barnes? His business? Give me a break!"-

At that point, Terry raises his voice laced with bitter laughter, throwing his head back, appearing part outraged, part amused. Like he didn't believe he had to defend his reasoning on this particular matter in the first place. -"You forget that in the 80's, he was awfully casual about going all mercenary for a buck."- Terry leans down, his neck bending your way, his eyes searching yours. You couldn't look at him. Not right now. You were too embarrassed. Somehow, deep down, you hoped Terry wouldn't have had valid excuses for any of his actions over the years, but he had concrete and rather purposeful basis, as frightening as that sounded, for quite literally everything he ever did and you felt like such a fool. Such an idiot. You underestimated him catastrophically. -"Roughening up some kid he never even met up for some other guy he never met either? You think someone made him do that? That his hand was forced? That he didn't hop on that plane to LA of his own free will back in the day? That he didn't come rushing to my door like it was fucking payday?"- You feel a finger sneak itself under your chin and you try to move, shiver away on instinct --- anything to ensure no eye contact happens, but you're grabbed, not unkindly, but with enough firmness to where he makes you look at him. Where he holds you by the jawline, tilting your head towards wherever he so pleased.

You blink. You blink furiously. Wanting to sink into the couch.

Disappear.

-"It's only when he didn't get his share of the cake that he got all rehabilitated."-

Terry tilts his head sideways, appearing wholly sardonic. If you ever felt sorry for the incident with the furniture store downtown, the empathy disappears someplace you can't find it and you scurry, looking for it internally, desperately trying to grab unto it like a life-raft, not wanting to agree with an arsonist precisely because it was so easy to agree with him. You feel empty. Filled up by everything Terry was saying. Sensing yourself defeated. Completely and utterly. Today, you intended to break things off with Terry Silver, if that was at all possible. All but five minutes later, you were the one who felt like you were in the wrong, having an out of body experience; your worldview shaken. -"Thing is, Barnes is always one step away from playing by gangster rules and it's only fitting he gets hit with a gangster's revenge. All the rest of them too."- Terry adds with a sense of finality, his hand sneaking up from your chin to cheek, caressing you there, looming over you like a tower. You shiver. You...wanted to break up. Leave him. You built everything up in your head. What you'd say. How you'd say it. How you'd organize yourself. How you'd pull this all off. This wasn't going as you planned.

-"So, tell me how good and evil aren't relative?"-

He asks the question you feared since he started his tangent.

You had no answer.

How could you out-philosophize Terry anyway?

You choose to hold yourself responsible. Apologize for shouting.

Getting carried away.

-"Terry, look, I ---"-

You stutter, finally speaking, mustering up the courage to do so, twiddling your fingers around in your lap awkwardly. -"I'm sorry. Okay? I really am."- You stare up at him from under your lashes, looking back down just as quickly, shocked by what you were uttering. Were you afraid of him? Yes? No? Maybe? Partially? You couldn't tell. You supposed you feared him more when he was like this. Quiet. Concise. Logical. You could handle his wrath. His volatile tendencies. His unpredictable calm, less so. Humbled, you capitulate to the wry notion that for all intents and purposes, that if Terry was a bastard, he wasn't exactly the only bastard in The Valley. You understood that the only reason he even bothered explaining himself to you with so much detail was because in his own weird, Terry way, you mattered to him. The same way he mattered to you, even though his choices weren't always easy to accept. Swallow. -"I'm not. My life is everything I did in it, and given the chance, I'd do it again."- He smiles, unapologetic, face practically beaming with genuine, unspoiled mirth. Fuck sake, as awful as that sounded, you couldn't help but admire him for that. Jesus, how he crawled under your skin. Inside of your mind. You wanted to cry, feeling judgmental towards a man who more than deserved to be judged. Instead, you mutter, barely audible, practically whispering with a small voice. -"This thing of ours."- You manage, unsure how to describe you and him. -"I want it to continue. Us. I don't want us to end."- You blink up at him desperately, needily, entirely downtrodden and aware of it, sensing his thumb brush against your lower lip, savoring his moment of triumph in the sun.

Help, you wanted to scream.

Someone help me, please. I'm begging on my knees.

I have no opinions, no will of my own, no sense of morals.

I'm his robot. Puppet on a string.

He's taken everything. Made it his own. Made me his own.

Who am I anymore?

Someone shake me and talk some sense into me.

-"We'll never end."-

Terry coos, sounding infinitely pleased with that conclusion, practically purring as he parted your frowning mouth, pushing his finger inside so you couldn't speak any further even if you wanted to, practically gagging you as he stood perfectly still, towering above you, his teeth on full display, his form casting a long, dark shadow on the wall behind him --- and believe him. You really do. You believe that you and him would never end. He'd never allow you and him to end. Even if you really wanted to. Even if you insisted upon it. Fought for it. Ran. Grew a spine. Stood your ground in spite of your love for him. Would you know how to be anything but his even if he let you go, however unlikely that might've been as an option, though? Would you know how to function in society again? Would you knew what was right? What was wrong? Could you ever be sane again? Would anyone even want you back? Someone who was agreeing with a tyrant when he carefully explained to you how everyone he's ever tyrannized deserved it and you truly sat here, thinking they did, fully self-aware of both the truth and the ridiculousness of it all? Understanding it was wrong. Understanding it was bad. Horrible. And yet still seeing his point of view? Would anyone outside of the bubble Terry's created for you ever be able to trust you ever again?

You doubted it.

You were that far gone.

You were more Terry Silver's than you were your own.

[motherstone]

WAVERIDER THOUGHTS

This will be long, and nasty. I may be yapping nonsense myself, and ngl this was all written in a fit of emotion, so it may be biased as all fuck. SPOILERS EVERYWHERE. Read further at your own choice.

Kazu, the neglectful, crappy father of his characters

Yeah, no, it’s been a long-time issue of his. Every new book has a new character. Not much of a problem if you're establishing the world - it’s a big one if you’re ending a story. See, the point of a finale isn’t to get us invested in new characters, it’s about giving a satisfying conclusion to your old. And not necessarily purely conclusive either! Some characters still have some journey to walk, but what matters is that you could read what happened to them, be at peace with how they went.

Kazu wrote the finale as if he’s writing 16 more books.

Let’s see the line-up shall we?

Trellis - has been hyped up being the true king, has been trying to get people stop believing in the false king, would not shut the fuck up about the well-being of the elves for several books.

Ending: Changed his mind last minute and gave up the throne.

Vigo - a flawed mentor. Kinda useless. Tries to be a guiding force and emotional support.

Ending: Dies in the most pointless and jarring way possible.

Aly - has exhibited great leadership qualities, is a good friend to Navin.

Ending: she wasn’t even there.

Etc etc. and that’s THREE of them so far, and it’s disastrous. Their conclusions were poor and nonsensical, the narrative portrays them as foolish and ignorant, and basically just treated their entire journey of 8 books as worthless and with little to no growth. Which is just yonkers. The main players don’t play in the final part, and the supporting casts are pretty much not supporting.

Then there’s the NEW cast.

No, sorry, I can’t stand them. They’re not appealing to me, we barely know anything about them except they’re apparently competent and we’re supposed to accept that they’re gonna be the better, newer generation of the Guardian Council? Because the story says so?

Why put new characters to play a part where your established characters can fill in perfectly? At least those established characters already have something ESTABLISHED, thus the payoff is more impactful ,especially if you fit them properly into the role. I never even gave a crap about Cielis and there needing to be a new Guardian Council, I always got the impression in book 4 that it was supposed to be the waning era of stonekeepers, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE MOTHERSTONE WAS STOLEN, THERE’S LITTLE OF IT LEFT, THERE ISN’T A NEW MOTHERSTONE IN CANON, APPARENTLY ENDED UP FORGOTTEN BY EVERYONE ELSE DESPITE BEING A POWERFUL ARTIFACT, AND STONEKEEPERS ARE TOO DANGEROUS FOR THE WORLD OF ALLEDIA. IN GENERAL.

All in all, the book feels like it’s trying to shove and rub these new guys all over my face, trying to get me to love them.

Gabilan, or just make Gulfen a democracy at this point

I'm gonna be for real though, I don't think Gabilan is the best guy for the job. Just because he was "kinda" right about stonekeepers doesn't mean he's a leader, and I don't think someone who kills people for a living, profits off of war, violates people's minds and steals their memories and ruin their lives, and arrogantly believes he has the judgment and say on who gets to keep which memories would be anyone's first choice to rule the country at its most desperate either. He’s sharp, yes, but moral? He has the moral backbone of a fucking chocolate eclair. A guy like that would not treat the people under him with the right to choose, when so many of his actions involve violating other people. If that’s THEIR next best choice after Trellis, Gulfen is fucked.

It's also kinda frustrating. Gabilan gets ONE reference to how he intends to be King, while Trellis gets references that he's the true king for several books, people desiring he make a better people out of the elves, had enemies trying to kill him to prevent him from taking the throne like the VOICE himself, only for the narrative to never even follow through it? 

The story can't seem to make up its mind either. "Stonekeepers in power are bad because they keep seeking to control others and are bad at maintaining control, so you shouldn't be King. That's why you should get an even higher, greater authority so now you're the leader of the Guardian Council!" 😩 make it make sense? 

Ronin, or how to make supervillains

Kazu has a bad understanding of how people work by how he wrote Ronin. Iffy enough that Ronin is retconned to be alive, her method on raising these stonekeepers is to be heavily scrutinized. I’ll be controversial here, but Ronin sucks as a person.

That’s NOT how you treat people, especially when they’re asking for help, even if they wronged you. That’s prioritizing your pride over what’s needed to be done.

Keeping kids in an isolated area, even with their consent, scaring off locals from their livelihood so you could have THEIR resources instead, and then scaring them into not bothering are all shitty things to do. If I didn’t have context, I’d genuinely think she’s trying to make a cult.

She didn’t create a better generation of youth, she created an ECHO CHAMBER. Their interaction with other people who isn’t them are limited and only under her monitoring, they don’t get to have the support and interaction of a wider community, they have fights, she induces them to lose control on purpose (even for training, that’s basically like having someone HAVE breakdowns so they’d “handle breakdowns better”), the young stonekeepers only interact with HER beliefs and HER teachings.

She’s arrogant as all fuck. 

The worst part is that the narrative doesn’t treat this as bad, just flawed, which is anything but 💀

To use @/gofancyninjaworld analysis, which is semi-realistic ngl, what Ronin did was plant seeds for these kids to be supervillains.

A sense of isolation

It’s bad enough that having overwhelming power alienates stonekeepers from most people, Ronin’s method of training has them explicitly stay in an area where the range of people they could interact with are greatly limited to Ronin and their fellow students. Sure, they interact with some civilians, but in an unbalanced way, purely in a savior and rescuee way, nothing else. This gives them sparse experience in the give-and-take interactions in a society, because for all they know, water only flows downwards.

A sense of superiority. It's not good to be considered 'gifted' and to be set aside from others. 

A sense of entitlement to rule.

Which Ronin further reinforced by planting into their heads that they’re the new Guardian   Council eventually, despite having little experience in leading. What happened to “rejecting a seat on the Council because she felt the responsibility at her age was too great”? And that was when she was an older teen. These guys are younger than she was offered.

Access to the means to do so.

The quarry, their stones, and their inevitable ascension to be the new Council.

So basically all she did was groom overly powerful kids with induced breakdowns, with heads too big for their bodies, with very little connection to the wider world to ground them in their thinking and humanity, basically four bombs that could and would inevitably go off. Cool. Any one of 'em could wind up becoming a totalitarian menace. Y'know how spoiled entitled billionaire bastards exists? It's almost virtually the same process.

Interacting with regular people AS regular people, not just as savior or leader is important. It grounds you. It teaches you there’s a variety of people, who won’t always be the perfect victim, who are not necessarily evil but are bad, who are not intentionally malicious but just incompetent, among other things. Application is the real teacher here - the more exposed you are to other people, the better you’d be able to handle them.

Emily, the monster, the savior, the next Buddha

Can’t make up its mind whether to condemn Emily or if she’s the next best thing since sliced fucking bread. Apparently, self-confidence is her issue, not her arrogance or survivor's guilt.

Not to mention her powers came outta nowhere. It’s like she discovers enlightenment, and that was what allowed her to properly control her powers.

Defeats the entire theme of needing other people and that not every outcome is reliant on ONE person’s actions, BY DOING EVERYTHING BY HERSELF, AGAIN!

God, I wish I could say more, but I skipped some of Emily’s parts because reading it was as tedious and agonizing as threading on cold mud. I can’t help but cringe at every dialogue.

The Voice, or how to NOT make a supervillain

…. I don’t even know what to say. Poor Ikol, a victim of the most indecisive and sloppy writing of  a villain I’ve seen, I actually feel genuinely fucking bad. I don’t even know where to begin with this dude, he’s just one whole confusing set of contradicting depictions and motivations.

Riva, or how to get a restraining order in 2 fucking seconds

If I were Trellis and told me the same words Riva said, I’d bolt as far as quickly as I possibly can away from her. That’s creepy, full stop.

I think this was kazu's way to prevent fans from shipping Emily and Trellis by a.) aging up Trellis because that’s the only explanation I could think of (even though he said a few times on twitter that he's the elf equivalent of 16) and b.) to get him together with Riva.

The way Kazu went about it is too insane for me. "Hey, I had a vision of you and me having babies and you became a great leader, let's get together" 💀 that's no basis for any healthy relationship, or any relationship at all that isn't transactional 😵. What is this?

On the other hand, he doesn't respect Riva as a character at all. A character becoming a love interest and a parent isn't a bad thing in of itself, but he wrote Riva so impactfully and charismatically in book 6 - she's one of the few rare elf characters, and a girl elf character to boot, is an established leader, was the daughter of an immigrant and knows all the hardship that comes with it, not to mention hails from a city that Cielis outcasted and abandoned because of their fear and prejudice but she compassionately takes care of the people there anyway.

There's so many interesting and compelling storylines with the foundations he made Riva with, and he focuses on getting Riva to get Trellis to get together with her 😵 she gets reduced from a character with plenty of potential to a character that exists purely to uplift another. That's just depressing. Riva and Trellis deserve better.

Who? Navin. We all forgot about fucking Navin

Actually, I’m pretty sure Kazu forgot about Navin up until the last second. The fact I forgot until he came up on the page speaks for itself on how bad the writing problem was. He plays almost no parts at all. He doesn’t even GET to be a leader properly. He was there to get punched, didn’t even GET to help Emily or anybody else.

The Ending

……………………………………………………………………………………

If Older Emily could time travel with the Void, why didn’t she just eliminate Ikol herself instead of leaving it to our current Emily? Oh, and Vigo jarringly dies and sacrifices himself in the most pointless way possible.

All in all, Kazu - world’s most terrible chef

BAN HIM FROM THE KITCHEN 🔥🔥💯💯🔊🔊🗣️😩😩 HE CAN'T COOK.

Bad? I knew it was gonna be bad at the cover alone, ut no way I could've predicted it was THIS atrocious. It’s not the medium’s fault either, you can’t claim that the medium limited what Kazu had to say - Kazu created comics for a living. He has more than a decade of experience, made dozens of pages, by now, he knows YOU CAN’T WASTE A PAGE. Every panel is important. It’s not the medium's fault for being short, it’s Kazu’s for being sloppy. 

He has an editor. He has a studio, he has a team, he has several copies of his series, he has claimed he has reread them over and over. He has no excuse to be this inconsistent and directionless. So what the fuck are they doing? Do they just sit there and draw? No quality or consistency check? 

Honestly, if he says it was executive meddling, if he was just tired of Amulet and just wanted it over, if it was because of medical reasons - I could accept all those reasons. I could forgive why the series wound up as it is, they’re all reasons I could understand. A decline in quality on purpose I’d understand because that can be fixed. A better employer, a better work schedule, better accommodations.

What I will not accept, if he genuinely believes this. Is. GOOD. WRITING. BECAUSE IT’S NOT. That’s either a lie, an in-denial belief, or just plain ol’ ignorance. That’s just pure arrogance to me. You drop this slop on my feet, 300 pages of yapped nonsense and try to convince me it’s gold? Fuck no. I deserve better, we deserve better, the kids who read your books deserve better. There’s no fixing that kind of thinking.

Am I too harsh? Yes. But I need to let all of these out. Am I kinda biased and a lil incomprehensible? Yes, but I don't care. If you enjoyed it, good for you! But it’s not for me. For closure, I’m nursing whatever shit I try to fix with a rewrite. Kazu already nuked the playground - might as well take a page from his book and do whatever I want like he did.

[litsnobconfessions]

A Year of Animation Day 48: The Secret of NIMH

Date: February 17, 2025

Day: 48

Content Watched: The Secret of NIMH

Year: 1982

Rating: G

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

Ernest and Celestine gave me some serious Secret of Nimh vibes, so it felt like a good follow-up. I loved this movie as a kid. I didn't own it, but I borrowed it from the neighbor a lot, even though it scared the crap out of me, and, if I recall, I kind of had trouble following it. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, and I'm curious as to whether it holds up, of if this is going to be another Swan Princess. 

Starting off, in reference to the animation, you can immediately tell this is a Don Bluth film because like Disney, Miyikazi, and Dreamworks, he has a style. If you've seen Fievel, you can recognize his mice anywhere. All this being said, Bluth did work at Disney for about twenty years before starting his own company, so if this feels at all Disney-esque to you, that's why. Furthermore, this LA Times article quotes Bluth is several places as wanting to create high quality films rather than focusing on profits. He also states his disappointment in many of the sequels to films that he made, which he was not involved in. The point is: the man wanted to created beautiful animated movies, and it shows.

According to the article, The Secret of Nimh is the first full-length animated feature Bluth's company put out. It's based on the novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh by Robert C. O'Brian, and I do have to wonder what the decision was behind changing the protagnist's name from Mrs. Frisby to Mrs. Brisby. But seeing as I don't have many other issues with it, the movie holds up. It is, like the Disney films I've watched, beautifully animated. The backgrounds are gorgeous and personally, I think it puts Cinderella to shame. The characters look sharper, and though this could easily be due to Cinderella's animation being three decades older, the scenes also feel busier.

I mentioned in my review of Cinderella that the movie feels a little.... empty. The characters feel a bit like they're rattling around the big house, and the party for the prince doesn't feel particularly well attended. But scenes in The Secret of Nimh feel busy. There are usually multiple characters on camera, often three or four. And the scenes with the most characters present--the meeting of the rats and the moving of Mrs. Brisby's house--are shot in ways that show how many character's are present. I don't remember how many wide shots there were here (I didn't think to look), but at the very least, the camera cuts between different groups of rats who are obviously in different places in the set, so we get a feeling of people filling the space. Cinderella didn't do this, and I don't think Sleeping Beauty did either.

I also think the busy-ness of the movie has something to do with the plot. My husband told me that Don Bluth's goal was to permanantly scar little children, and I'd say this storyline is more intense than any of the Disney films I've seen so far including Zootopia, despite the fact that it is rated G. It seems there's an action scene about every ten minutes--Mrs. Brisby and Jeremy escaping the cat, Mrs. Brisby and Auntie Shrew taking down the tractor, Mrs. Brisby running away from the guard when she goes to visit the rats in the rosebush, the flashback in which the rats and the mice escape from the lab, Mrs. Brisby drugging the cat, Mrs. Brisby trying to get out of the cage in the farmer's house, the battle between Justin and Jenner, and the attempt to stop Mrs. Brisby's house from sinking into the mud with her children inside. In contrast, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella each have... one action scene? So the plot more naturally lends itself to a lot of things happening on screen at once.

And I know said this movie was scary for me as a kid, and that I had trouble following it, but I think that may have been what I liked about it. As we saw with A Scanner Darkly, I don't have problems with complicated plotlines, and while I'm picky about which horror stories I consume, there are plenty of scary things out there that I enjoy. I have to wonder if, even as a child, the complexity of this storyline held my attention better than the simplistic boy-meets-girl plot of Cinderella. It's also possible that I liked it more because the characters really felt like characters. Sure, Jenner is just kind of greedy and a basic evil Bad Guy, but Auntie Shrew, Mrs. Brisby, Jeremy, Justin, Mr. Ages, Nicodemus, and each of the individual kids (except maybe Timmy) all seem to have their own personalities, as opposed to the stepsisters in Cinderella who are very obviously mere caricatures (for that matter, Cinderella herself and the prince don't have much to them either.)

But let's talk for a minute about why this movie is scary. Because I think a lot of that lies in the animation. For one, it's literally darker. It uses a lot of dark colors and a lot of things are happening in shadow. But I think the other key, which I also think is the most brilliant part of this film's animation, are the lighting effects. I don't mean the lighting like I talked about in Cinderella. This movie doesn't blow me away with the way scenes are lit. But it uses light to emphasize things. Nicodemus and the Great Owl both have glowing eyes. Nicodemus's book and giant looking glass also glow. And at the end, and Mrs. Brisby activates the stone, she radiates light. The general darkness of the film makes these points of light really stand out as important and honestly, I think the contrast adds to the scariness. The glowing things look out of place, and therefore should be feared. Because as scary as Dragon, the cat is? I thought both the Great Owl and Nicodemus were scarier.

Finally, I want to bring up the brief bubble animation which occurs while the Brisby kids are being tended to by Auntie Shrew, and they're doing laundry or something. It's a pretty short animation--the scene opens with the reflections of the characters in bubbles--but I noticed that Cinderella and Dumbo both had animations like this, and I found the prevelance interesting. I'm guessing it was a way for animators to do interesting things and show off their prowess, kind of like having an airbender with long hair battling multiple guys wearing capes. Also, in case you wanted to know, I looked it up. NIMH stands for National Institute of Mental Health. Just in case the movie itself wasn't enough nightmare fuel. ;)

Tommorrow, we'll begin exploring Aaron Ehasz' most recent world of elemental magic.