Anthony from Sweeney Todd, Marius from Les Miserables, and Albert from The Count of Monte Cristo are different characters in the same font, and that font is Brush Script (derogatory).
Gentle reminder that very little fandom labor is automated, because I think people forget that a lot.
That blog with a tagging system you love? A person curates those tags by hand.
That rec blog with a great organization scheme and pretty graphics? Someone designed and implemented that organization scheme and made those graphics.
That network that posts a cool variety of stuff? People track down all that variety and queue it by hand, and other people made all the individual pieces.
That post with umpteen links to helpful resources, and information about them? Someone gathered those links, researched the sources, wrote up the information about them.
That graphic about fandom statistics? Someone compiled those statistics, analyzed them, organized them, figured out a useful way to convey the information to others, and made the post.
That event that you think looks neat? Someone wrote the rules, created the blogs and Discords, designed the graphics, did their best to promo the event so it'd succeed.
None of this was done automatically. None of it just appears whole out of the internet ether.
I think everyone realizes that fic writing and fanart creation are work, and at least some folks have got it through their heads that gif creation and graphics and moodboards take effort, and meta is usually respected for the effort that goes into it, at least as far as I've seen, but I feel like a lot of people don't really get how much labor goes into curation, too.
If people are creating resources, curating content, organizing the creations of others, gathering information, and doing other fandom activities that aren't necessarily the direct action of creation, they're doing a lot of fandom labor, and it's often largely unrecognized.
Celebrate fan work!
To folks doing this kind of labor: I see you, and I thank you. You are the backbones of our fandoms and I love you.
I swear to god after like a week people will still be reading but nobody leaves comments anymore and I just want to make it absolutely clear that I would be excited and elated to get a comment on these fics one hundred years after I post them.
A FIC IS NEVER TOO OLD TO LEAVE A NICE COMMENT ON. GO FORTH AND COMMENT!
i love the…. almost horror aspects of this album. all the references to ghosts and death…. and sonically, the unexpected shrieking in WAOLOM and the banging and screaming during “old habits die screaming” and even the way the tension subtly builds across the sixteen tracks and by the end you’re so stressed and shaken it’s like! losing your sense of self and feeling like you’ve become a monster is horror. and i’m sooooo glad she leaned into it
being aromantic is like. hey btw you're going to live a life that is the culmination of most of society's worst nightmares. sorry lol ✌️ but then you turn around and take a really good hard look at it and it turns out that living in that nightmare is fucking awesome and you get to wake up every day and take that fear that other people have and laugh and hold it close until it's a great joy for you instead. and being happy is a radical act that you define instead of someone else. and you're sexy as fuck that's just a fact of life i don't make the rules on that one
I'm sick as a dog, but at least it gave me the time to stay home and finish this update! This special though is definitely going to be lasting through into the new year, but I figure I would rather take the time to see it to completion rather than try to stuff it into some arbitrary date. It was so fun finally getting to do Casey Sr and Raph though. I wanted to give these two some time to shine since we see so little of them in Replica.
MOTHEROOD/CASEY TED TALK TIME UNDER THE CUT
I will admit... I've never been a big fan of the dumpster baby scenario for Casey Jr. It's not a bad scenario at all! Plenty of amazing stories have used it and it certainly embraces the "found family" theme of TMNT. It just always seemed a little unrealistic given the harsh state of the world (or at least as unrealistic as you can get in a story about brain aliens and mutant turtles haha). It's certainly an easier and simpler setup (removes the dad out of the picture for sure) but I wonder sometimes if this choice of origin story gets picked a lot simply because it's difficult to envision Cassandra going through pregnancy and typical motherhood willingly. However, if that's the core reason, I feel as if that does her character a great disservice!
After re-watching a few episodes with her, it's shocking the amount of depth of character Cassandra has (even compared to some in the main cast). I love her because while she's a passionate woman who makes mistakes, she's also extremely introspective and sensitive (something we see a great deal in the Brownie episode).
While I have never been a mother myself, a good number of my closest friends have been. Some of whom I could have NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS seen becoming mothers. Yet those people end up becoming some of the most amazing moms I've ever seen. Being a mom changes you, both physically and mentally in a way that I think gets glossed over in general storytelling. While I can't necessarily show that change much in Replica, I can at least give a nod to the fact that Cassandra, for all her flaws, is an amazing woman who I think would be an awesome mom! Thank you as always for your support!
Wolfie and Four friendship appreciation doodles! They're shared secrets besties! I hope Four's distrust of the shadow crystal doesn't drive anything between them. Wild found his way into this compilation with a force. It seems I can't draw Wolfie and not include him too!
Cause like, Rick simplifies her clothes in a way a man would, and you can tell.
Cause in EVERY book, from The Lightning Thief to Chalice, she’s in the goddamn CHB shirt. With like some shorts or cargo pants. Nothing more, nothing less.
He’s made improvements over the years, giving her some other clothes. But he’ll always come back to old faithful.
Like, he most definitely did it on accident, but he made her so Adam Sandler and I love it
and at the end of the day, people will still hate women.
because beyonce is a terrible songwriter who has a good body and nothing more and she's really nothing compared to olivia rodrigo, that stuck-up bitch who steals other people's music, but taylor swift is an old, bitter nothing who clearly hates other girls. and sabrina carpenter deserves to die because she followed her heart, not her brain, and that's exactly why zendaya will never be good enough for tom holland. don't forget about kylie jenner, who's stealing precious timothee's innocence away and dating her is like committing arthouse cinema suicide, or how we said the same thing about miley cyrus and her disgusting profanity, think of the children, poor liam hemsworth, trapped in a marriage with such a horrible woman. lana del rey was hot until she was big and she made trailerpark sexy until her ass got a little too fat. and ariana grande, talentless homewrecker, and selena gomez, jealous and unreasonable, and hailey bieber, even more boring than the blood drying on the knives you are so quick to pull. sophie turner is a bad mom and megan thee stallion deserved whatever was coming to her.
and amidst all of this, we still don't know these women. we cannot fathom the pain of having a public divorce, one where people choose sides and hurl insults at you until the battery on their phone dies. we don't watch them chase after sweet-cheeked children in tucked-away backyards or play board games with their best friends while their chests heave in laughter. we don't know their marriages and we don't know their solitudes. we don't watch them unravel themselves, time and time again, preparing for the battle that we have made of their lives. they can never make a mistake. they can never cry. they can never be who they believe themselves to be.
and we take all of this and we go to work, we ride the bus, we go grocery shopping, we walk in dappled sunlight, and we let ourselves shrivel. i compare myself to every body i see and i comfort in the fact that i can still encircle my wrists with my fingers. food turns to dust in my mouth when i think about the fact that taylor swift thinks she's fat and people still hate sabrina carpenter for sticking by joshua bassett's side when he almost died, for God's sake, and now the people on my twitter feed are saying GUTS is the worst album they've ever heard. i liked it, the tiny voice in my head cries out. she wrote songs that made me feel noticed. they're calling the song i relate to the most a total skip.
so i close the app. i try not to think about the endless profiles screaming about how much they hate a nineteen/thirty-two/thirty-eight/twenty-three/twenty-six/forty-two year old. i try not to think about how much they would hate me, if they knew anything at all.