#binary exploitation

[themorningnewsinformer]

OpenAI’s o3 Model Helps Researcher Discover Critical Zero-Day Linux SMB Vulnerability

Introduction In a breakthrough for AI-assisted cybersecurity, researcher Sean Heelan successfully uncovered a critical zero-day vulnerability in the Linux kernel’s Server Message Block (SMB) stack using OpenAI’s advanced o3 AI model. This previously unknown security flaw, now tracked as CVE-2025-37899, involves a use-after-free bug in the Linux SMB ‘logoff’ command handler and poses serious…

[critical-skeptic]

The Illusion of Complexity: Binary Exploitation in Engagement-Driven Algorithms

Abstract:

This paper examines how modern engagement algorithms employed by major tech platforms (e.g., Google, Meta, TikTok, and formerly Twitter/X) exploit predictable human cognitive patterns through simplified binary interactions. The prevailing perception that these systems rely on sophisticated personalization models is challenged; instead, it is proposed that such algorithms rely on statistical generalizations, perceptual manipulation, and engineered emotional reactions to maintain continuous user engagement. The illusion of depth is a byproduct of probabilistic brute force, not advanced understanding.

1. Introduction

Contemporary discourse often attributes high levels of sophistication and intelligence to the recommendation and engagement algorithms employed by dominant tech companies. Users report instances of eerie accuracy or emotionally resonant suggestions, fueling the belief that these systems understand them deeply. However, closer inspection reveals a more efficient and cynical design principle: engagement maximization through binary funneling.

2. Binary Funneling and Predictive Exploitation

At the core of these algorithms lies a reductive model: categorize user reactions as either positive (approval, enjoyment, validation) or negative (disgust, anger, outrage). This binary schema simplifies personalization into a feedback loop in which any user response serves to reinforce algorithmic certainty. There is no need for genuine nuance or contextual understanding; rather, content is optimized to provoke any reaction that sustains user attention.

Once a user engages with content —whether through liking, commenting, pausing, or rage-watching— the system deploys a cluster of categorically similar material. This recurrence fosters two dominant psychological outcomes:

If the user enjoys the content, they may perceive the algorithm as insightful or “smart,” attributing agency or personalization where none exists.

If the user dislikes the content, they may continue engaging in a doomscroll or outrage spiral, reinforcing the same cycle through negative affect.

In both scenarios, engagement is preserved; thus, profit is ensured.

3. The Illusion of Uniqueness

A critical mechanism in this system is the exploitation of the human tendency to overestimate personal uniqueness. Drawing on techniques long employed by illusionists, scammers, and cold readers, platforms capitalize on common patterns of thought and behavior that are statistically widespread but perceived as rare by individuals.

Examples include:

Posing prompts or content cues that seem personalized but are statistically predictable (e.g., "think of a number between 1 and 50 with two odd digits” → most select 37).

Triggering cognitive biases such as the availability heuristic and frequency illusion, which make repeated or familiar concepts appear newly significant.

This creates a reinforcing illusion: the user feels “understood” because the system has merely guessed correctly within a narrow set of likely options. The emotional resonance of the result further conceals the crude probabilistic engine behind it.

4. Emotional Engagement as Systemic Currency

The underlying goal is not understanding, but reaction. These systems optimize for time-on-platform, not user well-being or cognitive autonomy. Anger, sadness, tribal validation, fear, and parasocial attachment are all equally useful inputs. Through this lens, the algorithm is less an intelligent system and more an industrialized Skinner box: an operant conditioning engine powered by data extraction.

By removing the need for interpretive complexity and relying instead on scalable, binary psychological manipulation, companies minimize operational costs while maximizing monetizable engagement.

5. Black-Box Mythology and Cognitive Deference

Compounding this problem is the opacity of these systems. The “black-box” nature of proprietary algorithms fosters a mythos of sophistication. Users, unaware of the relatively simple statistical methods in use, ascribe higher-order reasoning or consciousness to systems that function through brute-force pattern amplification.

This deference becomes part of the trap: once convinced the algorithm “knows them,” users are less likely to question its manipulations and more likely to conform to its outputs, completing the feedback circuit.

6. Conclusion

The supposed sophistication of engagement algorithms is a carefully sustained illusion. By funneling user behavior into binary categories and exploiting universally predictable psychological responses, platforms maintain the appearance of intelligent personalization while operating through reductive, low-cost mechanisms. Human cognition —biased toward pattern recognition and overestimation of self-uniqueness— completes the illusion without external effort. The result is a scalable system of emotional manipulation that masquerades as individualized insight.

In essence, the algorithm does not understand the user; it understands that the user wants to be understood, and it weaponizes that desire for profit.

[lycorisicecream]

Consequences, new Robloxian OC of mine

Timelapse because CSP lets you do those, heavy flash warning

The two images below the timelapse are what I used as references for her, the one with the claws is from Forsaken (cool game that had a short public play test available, the play test period is over now though)

[vaultsixtynine]

why have i never thought of this. a matrix seven/j*hnny au would fuck pretty hard

[wormthe]

[ image description: a screenshot of tags from the original post by tumblr user read-marx-and-lenin. the tags have been edited for clarity, and read as follows:

There is a reason why the maxim begins "from each according to their ability" after all. Like, this isn't some kind of "working hard makes you a better person" kind of thing. This is a "people depend on each other to survive and to thrive" kind of thing. When people understand that and act accordingly without having to be told, that is when the state withers away. Until then, there has to be mechanisms in place to make sure people aren't just abandoning each other out of selfishness.

/ end ID ]

"the corrolary of this is that abled people have an obligation to perform the labor to provide that care and resources."

So you think disabled people existing exploit abled people? Or what? Because I can't really tell what you're on about.

not at all, quite the opposite in fact.

there's a certain ideological faction on here- the antiwork crowd- who fully support the first part (that disabled people who can't work deserve resources and care) but are unwilling to follow it to its second part (that abled people should be obligated/incentivized to perform labor to provide this resources and care).

due to my extreme distaste for antiwork ideology and it's short-sighted first-order thinking, I feel a need to remind people of that corrolary as a tactic to ward against antiwork ideology taking root.

for every positive right we have or should have (to housing, education, healthcare, etc) there's exists a matching collective responsibility to provide that positive right. if we want to effectively provide those rights (and we should), we need to accept those responsibilities.

[bemusedlybespectacled]

proposing what I'm going to call Gaylor's Razor, which is: never explain normal shit as being part of a secret message that can only be decoded by over-analysis.

"These Taylor Swift lyrics are actually coded messages saying that she's a lesbian and is forced to stay in the closet! Any lyrics that are clearly about being attracted to a man are just to throw us off the scent!" Sometimes people, like Taylor Swift, are straight and write about being straight, because they are straight.

"The fourth series of Sherlock was deliberately bad because it was actually a coded message to us fans that there is a secret fourth episode that will make Johnlock canon and will actually be good!" Sometimes writers (even experienced writers who are normally good at their jobs) will write something that's not good, because no one is perfect. They're not going to waste everyone's time and money and energy creating something terrible on purpose as part of a grand master plan.

"Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the Canadian Olympic ice dancers, are secretly married (with kids)! Their public relationships with people who are not each other and them repeatedly saying 'we dated as kids and now we're just friends' are just to hide the truth! Which they need to hide for some reason! Their relationship is obvious just from their physical chemistry when competing! JUST LOOK AT THIS TWO SECOND CLIP OF HIM BLINKING AT HER!" It seems counterproductive to put all that thought into hiding a relationship that doesn't need to be hidden but then also telegraph that same relationship in front of millions of people through planned choreography.

"But BB, what about times that people really are speaking in code or hiding something due to outside influences?"

If it requires huge leaps in logic, like adding all the letters in a sentence together and dividing by seventeen and that number matches the binary sequence for the color yellow so YELLOW MUST BE SIGNIFICANT, it's not a secret code.

If it requires focusing on teeny tiny details but discards huge ones, like analyzing someone's micro-expressions but handwaving away what the person is actually saying out loud with their mouth, or focusing on one specific line instead of the entire scene or song or whatever, it's not a secret code.

If both supporting and contradictory evidence are used to come to the same conclusion (ex: when Taylor says something that I interpret as gay, that means she's gay, and when she says something that I interpret as straight, that still means she's gay and just hiding it), it's not a secret code.

Trying to apply fandom meta analysis techniques to real life is a really good way of fall into conspiratorial thinking that can be easily exploited. You can totally try to predict what's going to happen in a story or choose to interpret a scene in a specific way; you can't do that in real life with real people. That way lies the kind of nonsense that leads to shit like "this image of pizza on a children's toy is actually subliminal messaging by The Cabal™ that proves that Pizzagate is real."

[sha-brytols]

someone: do you think anders is a good person

the part of my brain that engages in genuine critical media analysis: i think it's disingenuous to label him through the lens of a binary good/evil paradigm because what makes him such an interesting and engaging character is his status inbetween a human with complex emotions and desires and flaws that will never fully align with each other, and the singleminded focus and purpose of a supernatural entity that is literally justice incarnate and has no capacity for nuance and whose very nature is fundamentally incompatible with humanity but the two of them are so deeply connected that they make up a single identity that's constantly at odds with itself and this struggle causes him to act in ways that aren't always clean and often land him and those around him in impossible positions. i think he was morally justified in doing what he did to the chantry but i also believe he understood the magnitude of what he was doing which is why i inherently disagree with the notion that characters like varric or sebastian were wrong in their reactions because that's the very nature of violent revolution—people get caught in the crossfire and are harmed despite their innocence and regardless of the righteousness of the action at large. if someone killed your mom to protect a hundred orphans you probably wouldn't come out of the experience full of love and admiration for the person who killed your mother because regardless of the outcome they still fucking killed your mother. anders destroyed people's homes and lives and there's a conversation to be had about how he gaslit and exploited hawke, his own potential lover, into being an unwitting accomplice even though we know through meta knowledge that he was perfectly capable of doing it on his own and very likely only wanted hawke's involvement because he needed a powerful figure to become the rallying symbol for his cause. the reality is his very nature would have never allowed him to choose hawke and his friends over his goal because to do so would have been fundamentally selfish and antithetical to his newfound identity as one who champions the needs of the many at the expense of the individual. it's a beautifully tragic story about the lengths a person would have to go to in order to enact any sort of meaningful change while constrained in a system that benefits from their powerlessness, and how that process cannot exist without suffering and pain on both the individual and collective level. i also feel like if anders was written by a person with a degree of compassion and awareness for not only the character they were writing but just what living as a vulnerable and targeted minority is like then the narrative and message would have been vastly different than what ended up on screen because, ultimately, the game wants you to look at the stark injustice of a child being ripped away from their family to spend a life locked away in cold isolation where they're at constant risk of exploitation, abuse, death, and even a complete removal of their personhood, and think that there's room for compromise. it's a narrative that perpetuates the myth that passivity and tolerance in the face of oppression is more virtuous than burdening the masses with the discomfort of seeing their own culpability in sustaining it. a better game would have challenged varric and sebastian while also affirming their anger instead of just the latter. a better game would have explored hawke's reaction in a deeper manner that examined their relationship with the system, their own internal biases, and how anders affected their worldview.

the part of my brain that was on tumblr in 2014 and is still extremely petty and spiteful: he should have blown up the conclave while he was at it

[kaiasky]

nice! I was a bit surprised when you mentioned that the cheats you were looking at were a separate proc that acted as a proxy for the network packets, but also had an in-game GUI

So @kaiasky you asked for me to write something if I figure out more about how video game hacks work, and I did some more research.

At its most basic, if bytes are written on your machine, you can modify them. So if you have a binary on your machine, you can easily decompile it to assembly, modify the assembly, recompile it, and run it.

Except, wait, that sucks.

You have to know assembly well, which is miserable

It's really easy to brick a program that you do this to because of offsets

A lot of programs have checksums and other failsafes to detect direct modification

So that's not going to work very well.

Instead, you can ride along in the process that's executing the binary and execute your code there. For windows machines, it seems like the easiest way is DLL injection.

Now we get to use C instead of assembly (thank god) and we have a lot more flexibility. We don't want to touch the underlying binary because of (2) and (3), but since we're in the same address space as the program, we can write to the addresses that the program accesses. If we discover the location of a variable, we can overwrite its value with whatever we want.

We can abuse this further by messing with function pointers - if we can overwrite a value containing the location of another function within the binary, we can point it to our code instead, achieving arbitrary code execution. Yay! I think there are some countermeasures to this that cheat developers have to watch out for, but this is just a broad overview anyway.

Okay, great, but how do we figure out what to modify? We could read the entire binary in assembly, but I think I'd rather kill myself. Instead we have to use some tool to spy on the program. I remember using CheatEngine when I was little to cheat in flash games, and it turns out it still works pretty well - if you can repeatedly modify a value, you can use a tool to find its memory address (usually).

You can even trace back a pointer chain (ie, an attribute contained within a player object contained within a game object, but usually with many more layers) to its root and find a way to do location discovery entirely automatically, though this seems a little tricky sometimes.

Anyway. This is a very broad overview that raises as many questions as it answers for me, but I'm going to try playing around with some tools and seeing if I can get anywhere.

[rainsinheaven-if]

PLAY THE DEMO

Last updated: March 7, 2025 - and includes the prologue + chapter 1 with 14K words (without code)

Warnings: Blood and injuries, sexism, profanity, temporary character death, child neglect, parental physical and emotional abuse, optional sexual content, and more. Suitable for ages 16+. List will be updated in the future.

This game is in early development and a work in progress. There may be future changes to location names, plot etc.

You’ve never felt loved by your family before.

Born a twin but feeling more like a shadow, you’ve watched your younger brother, Nolan, receive all the love and praise you were denied. But no matter how unkind you are to him, Nolan’s loyalty and kindness towards you remains unwavering. It’s as if there’s a bond pulling you back everytime you think of leaving it all behind.

Now a mysterious illness has swept through Valorian Kingdom’s royal court, leaving many nobles, including the king at death’s door. The Oracle’s prophecy offers a single hope: the Crown Prince must gather five lost souls to join him in a dangerous journey towards Coven’s Swamp, an ominous and foreboding area hidden deep within the mystical forest.

You are chosen to be one of those five.

As you venture deep into the forest, the journey will push you to the limits of courage and loyalty, forcing you to question everything you believe about family and love. This might not just be a journey to save the day, but a journey towards self-discovery for you and everyone in your group. So when the journey ends, will there be anything left of the person who first stepped into the darkness? 

Customize your MC! Change your appearance and control your personality. MC starts out as female, but there will be transition options.

Grow a relationship with your twin! Choose to either continue being unkind to your twin brother or getting to know him instead. Your MC's relationship with him may affect some major events.

Develop relationships! There are six romanceable characters - 3 male, 2 gender selectable, and 1 non-binary. Or you can avoid romance and keep it all platonic.

Learn and improve your skills! With the option to choose to focus on offensive or defensive magic, you can learn and improve your skills to become better at what you do.

Find yourself! Journey through the mystical forest to not only find a cure, but to self-discovery. There are plenty of secrets to learn about that may or may not change the way you think and feel.

More to be added…

Below are the six romanceable characters in this story. You can choose to flirt with everyone, but at one point, you'll have to decide on one. Also keep in mind that there are other important characters as well that are not listed here.

Ver/Vera Forrest | Gender Selectable | 21

Playful and energetic with golden-retriever-like energy, V is always ready for adventure. They never fail to be there for you when you need someone to rant to, or a shoulder to lean on. Their cleverness and sneakiness keeps them out of most trouble due to the way they were raised. And it’s exactly how they are raised that has made them hide their burden under their positive enthusiasm.

You are best friends, so why don’t you know any of their secrets? 

Oliver Astoran | he/him | 21

With a cold demeanor, Oliver holds a strong desire to protect the people he cares about, especially those whose kindness is exploited. Your unkind treatment towards your brother causes him to despise you. You are always able to press on the right buttons to rile each other up. He shows a strong sense of determination that marks his mental and physical strength. But perhaps there’s something more to the reason behind his behavior than what the eye sees.

Will you ever be able to see him in a different light, or will it just be fighting, fighting and more fighting?

Ethos Van Winston | he/him | 22

Burdened by the responsibility of being heir to the throne, Ethos is reserved, guarded, and serious. As a child, he was once carefree and one of your closest friends. But after an incident that left unspoken, lingering tension between you two, he now elicits a melancholic presence. His warm side is hidden away somewhere, and you wonder if there was more than just the incident that made him change.

You weren’t the reason he changed… right?

Theodore Eaves | he/him | 24

From a young age, Theodore’s life has been defined by duty and training. He’s mature for his age and has a tendency to act like an older brother to you and the group. He’s well disciplined and stoic, rarely having time to express vulnerability. His focus on duty has left him oblivious to romantic interest, despite his admired reputation due to his looks and status. His obliviousness goes further though, for reasons that he himself hasn’t fully discovered and understood.

Will you ever get to see a vulnerable side of him, instead of just that brotherly figure?

Mattie | they/them | 19

Curious as ever, Mattie often gets themselves into trouble. But with their charming personality and resourcefulness, they’re able to get themselves out of trouble. They are playful, enjoying the work of teasing others and instigating drama to get chaotic, and hopefully flustered, reactions. Their skills and knowledge about the forest have proven him to be a good asset, but there is more to them than what meets the eye.

For someone who is so bright and playful, they can’t surely have anything to hide, right?

Yaran/Yara | Gender Selectable | 22

Nobody is sure they know who Y is. They seem ambitious, cunning, and deceiving; doing risky things to achieve their own goals at the cost of someone else’s pain. They are unpredictable, popping in and out of your group - sometimes being a guide, but other times hindering progress. Despite their ambiguity, they are charismatic and mysterious enough to leave your group intrigued. All there is to do now is truly learn who they are and what they have hidden inside.

Who is Y and can you trust them with anything, especially your life?

ROs Profiles | Discord

music inspiration

This is my first attempt at creating an interactive fiction game and using Twine Sugarcube. Please be patient and kind <3

Shares are appreciated :)

[sharkbitten-sailor]

HI HI HI HI I LOVE YOUR ISEKAI'D READER IDEA!! Since they have the intention to change a survivor's/killer's canon lore, what would they do if they have admin commands? Like c00lgui but better, or with more limitations (up to you!) I'm curious with 007n7's reaction since he's a former exploiter, OH and maybe reader doing it mid-round to confuse the killer!! *mischievous laughter*

HIIII! i'm so happy you love my au already anon!! tysm it truly means a lot to me <33

if the reader does have admin commands, i'd rather see it as a glitch, since they technically aren’t supposed to be there in the first place,,,,, more like an anomaly. that said, if they do have access to commands, they probably have no clue how to use them properly,,,,, like, imagine them just staring at the screen like "why the freak is there binary code here" however, they will learn how to use it eventually (barely since it's hard af)

past 007n7’s reaction to the reader would be curiosity. he’d check his c00lgui for their pfp, only to find nothing. that’s when his interest spikes! from there, he’d begin testing them, poking at their presence and messing with them for whatever reasons suit him in the moment. i think there’s also a small chance he’d guide the reader into exploiting things. though ofc he’d never take responsibility. instead, he’d just sit back, watching the chaos unfold, and shrug: "oops not me they did it." (somewhat like frenemies dynamic i guess??) besides, he might think that someone as new as you having such powers is a bit of a waste.

and reader using their glitch/admin commands mid-round? zamn, imagine killers staring at them while they just go "wait a minute let me check the commands." as mentioned, they don’t really know how to use it properly, so sometimes they disappear, sometimes they just... turn into a 2d model... and whatever other chaos unfolds! more ideas are up to you xpp

(apologies if i mischaracterized past 007n7 anon 〒▽〒) hope these are the answers you're looking for :D

[featherquillpen]

We already knew for months that Murderbot would be played by a white, cis male actor in the TV adaptation. But seeing the first look of him as Murderbot in the new Trump era of neo-segregationism and trans eliminationism has me angrier about it than ever.

There should be no stories about us without us, especially not in a time when the US government is trying to force us all out of public life.

Murderbot is an allegory about dehumanization, slavery, and corporate exploitation. It should not be a story where a Preservation team played by people of color fights to free a white man from corporate slavery. I always, always read it as a story about the Preservation team seeing themselves in an exploited subject like Murderbot and doing their best to free it from the oppressive hierarchy of the Corp Rim. In other words, I pictured Murderbot as a story about POC rescuing another POC.

And before anyone says it, because I'm extremely tired of this take: this post is not about whether Murderbot should look androgynous or not. I don't care. Murderbot should be played by a non-binary actor, period, whatever their gender presentation. A masc-presenting NB actor would be totally fine.

[nonbinarynow]

How would you describe antibinarism?

To me, antibinarism is to be against the current gender binary in a manner that recognises the colonialist, bourgeois roots of the system.

Binarism is the Western imposed gender binary is a tool of colonialism, neo and classical. As a black person with direct African heritage, it broke my heart to find out how the West steamrolled the nuances of gender experience in my native culture, and imposed a very strict sex and gender binary. It divided them, it alienated them from their own culture and set them into rigid worker identities. Binarism shows why binary gendered POC are held to unrealistic standards that they will never reach because they are not going to fit into the patriarchal, white, bourgeois cishet binary. It shows how the binary was used to dehumanise us though that effect. It explains why queer people have always been genderqueer by nature of their sexualities. It explains why the nuclear family model was developed in that particular manner economically (domestic labour mother, market labour father and 2.5 children) and why it is upheld as a finality (to produce workers at an effective rate; to manage and engage with private ownership). Binarism is down to capitalism and it's effects on society, culture and mentality.

So for me as an antibinarist, I am specifically anticapitalist because of this. They are inseparable. I feel that anti-binarism is to be against the sociocultural mindset of the gender binary and the reasoning why it exists (capitalism, exploitation and private property.)

[kc5rings]

I love how even in their funny failgirl streamer animation side series Arknights takes a second to look directly at the camera and go

“American exceptionalism is a lie crafted by CEO’s, built on the backs of an exploited working class and is knowingly poisoning our one and only home planet.”

Now watch this owl rap in binary!

[triptychgardener]

thank you for early june by the way and and also for being one of the like. three people total other than me who believe in transfem eridan

Look I do fully believe that the worst people among us can, with personal effort, attain goodness and greatness (becoming a transgender woman).

In all honesty I think taking transfem Eridan seriously is, I don't know, sort of important? In the face of March Eridan.

Lots of good ink has been spilled about the transfeminine femboy dichotomy and I don't think I have the ability to replicate the nuances of such things. But like, historically, there has been a category of person, assigned male at birth but feminine presenting to some degree or another, who exists not really as their own person, but instead as an idealized joke/sex object in the minds of men and other people who sexually exploit them. This figure, in the cisheteropatriarchal is a completely apolitical one. You can have sex with them and it doesn't count as gay. They don't have political demands, like "asking to be called women." They are a titillating deviation with no ability to harm the status quo. In today's terms, they are commonly given the dubious title of "femboy" or "trap", but if we look elsewhere, (I will be apologetically butchering the writings of transfeminist Thalia Bhatt) we can see this pattern of third-gendering in places across the world, with women like the feminiello in Naples, hijra in Inda, as well as others. A type of person assigned male at birth, presenting female, who has a particular gendered role in a binary-gendered society, that of being a usually disposable sexual object, occasionally given some light ceremonial or religious airbrushing to disguise the fact that such people are not a part of "normal", life. They are without an internal perspective, denied opportunities to live a life outside of a typically male sexual perspective.

But trans women? If someone is a trans woman, they usually have political demands, a desire for bodily autonomy, and the desire to actually be treated and referred to as women. And when a "femboy" turns out to have been a trans woman all along, well. Just look at how much everyone was talking about the streamer F1nnster when she was just doing a funny crossdressing bit for a person who paid her to do it, how many posts about "cis+ genderfuck crazy gender" versus when she actually came out as trans. This phenomenon works backwards too, with plenty of transfem sex workers having to tag their sex work as femboy to gain traction. There's a clear distinction here if you care to look.

I think Eridan dying in the story where she did was a good thing for the story (same with the rest of the Murderstuck deaths.) In a world with 5000 "fantasy racist learns to become lest racist" plots, having the fascist no one takes seriously Actually Follow Through and do the horrible things his ideology clearly incentivizes him to do is refreshing (also Hussie correctly predicting that the Harry Potter themed character would, in fact, be a fascist). But if one is to continue on, and have Eridan choose to deradicalize herself, then I think making her become a woman as she gets older is one of the only ways forward.

So. That's a lot of fucking words of transfeminism, and why the fuck am I applying to to Eridan Ampora, known dead fascist 13-year old fish from a webcomic? I'll admit it's a tad frivolous, but March Eridan, the fandom concept, flourished in that fun period of the 2010s where everyone was asking if traps were gay (got to hear that said by one of my high school friends, and I was out as a woman at the time.) Not to say it ever really went away, but, like, the whole joke (not putting this on Paige Turner, the original creator of March Eridan, this is just how the fandom ran with it) was just "hey look at this boy in a skimpy miniskirt and tube top and pigtails! Isn't this funny/a good excuse to draw a child barely in his teens in a sexy way?" Not like the fandom really needed an excuse, but I think, to a point, transfem Eridan is kind of the only way to go from there. Turn him into an actual woman. Put aside all the jokes, and make her transfemininity something you have to take seriously, something she has thoughts and feelings about!

[forsaken-headcanons]

wait let’s do a few fun ones

Happy pride!

A few identity hcs:

Guest1337:

He/Him but he honestly does not mind they them. he'd probably not even care about she her. "I'm probably genderqueer but i'm in the army and in hell so idc abt that rn"

"cis" man (see above)

bisexual icon

highkey think he'd be ambiamorous(being open to both monoamorous and polyamorous relationships with little to no preference for either.)

Daisy idk i think she'd be pretty chill with like them having multiple partners :) let me live my life.

007n7: He/Him he had a short He/She period where he tried it out in his hacking days tho. sometimes misses it. (god can we get these fathers to like open up)i think he’d fuck with it it’s pre retirement but i think ppl would dehumanize exploiters a lot so he’d start to associate them with taht more :(

again, single father so he doesn't really have time to think abt it rn but i think he'd be a nonbinary man (Non-binary man or nonbinary boy refers to someone who identifies both as a man and as non-binary. ) (look it up if y wanan learn more it's pretty cool$ $$)

he's a gay man. idk what to say

he is 100% objectym as well like. he doesn't realize it but yeah. maybe to code but hear me out on him being super attached to the dock in the lobby. idk if that counts but like hear me out it's one of the few places he feels at peace. i'm so insane

might send in more separately zbut yay!

also i am masssiv MASSIVE multishoper btw . i hope ships like a pirate. its fun!!

hod bless the image of guest and 007n7 sitting togeher in comfortable silence on the dock, 7n7 leaning against guest as they peacefully watch the water drift on by.. yeszz

-birdcage anon!

also diversity win! birdcage anon is a genderfluid arospec lesbian who uses any pronouns at all ! happy pride

Happy pride! Military Intelligence (Guest/007n7) is one of my favorite 007 ships. This makes me happy.

[lightningant]

Okay I mentioned the Marauders fandom sounds like a fate worse than death tier repulsive but some clearer thoughts on it

There is this smug superiority and elitism about them where they're like "we're the QUEER fandom, fuck JKR", but it's all bound up in aesthetics. Because there is this discomfort in actually reckoning with queer lived experiences, being queer is treated as set dressing here. It is entirely unsurprising to me that trans creators were being harassed within the fandom this last March because yes, that's what you get when you don't acknowledge bigotry at all beyond wangst storylines about teen rebellion against stinky mean adults, isn't that crazy

Like idk, I don't particularly mind tiny femboy Sirius, there's nothing wrong with it, it's kind of cool and challenging actually, but a fandom based purely on aesthetics does not really care to consider the level of transphobia and homophobia Sirius would experience by making that choice, and while Sirius is absolved of all that in the fandom's parsing of this aesthetic because he is not framed with the narrative of a trans woman, Regulus trans headcanon does feature him grappling with oppression. And YET the oppressive nature of white supremacy and misogyny and conservative politics which would pressure Regulus magically does not extend to homosexuality, because everyone is just super gay. AND YET women's rights and arranged marriages are a popular topic, a structural inequality which would of course create homophobia, which would of course create transphobia towards a GNC Sirius, but just...doesn't.

And in fact, for all the trans headcanons I see, rarely do they put forth trans women, when that is the demographic JKR came after. Rarely is GNC Sirius testing the waters on transition (except into being non-binary, naturally). Rarely is Peter's emasculation a symptom of gender insecurity which could be exploited by notorious queer-coded genderfluid diva Lord Voldemort (which would, by the way, make the way he reinforces Wormtail's masculinity while also emasculating him in the books SIZZLING with truly grotesque contempt). Rarely is James' aggressive showboating and adherence to masculine norms her digging her heels in about her fears about exhibiting femininity. Severus Snape. There is just not a lot of space made for transfemininity at all here! Kind of makes me feel really bad and weird when so many choices in the fandom are acting like their consumption is political praxis, that their queer headcanons are a challenge to JKR's beliefs, yet these aren't allowed any space! "Fuck JKR but tgirls give me the heeby jeebies too" ass fandom.

Like normally I'd just go "yeah this is a normal amount of men-centered fandom behaviour, and an environment popular with trans men will bias towards trans male headcanons, duh". It's SPECIFICALLY the smugness and squirming around discussing systematic oppression that makes it weird

Additional funny: trans people who were harassed all made sure to point out the "Fuck JKR" in bio people were also going on Harry Potter tours and buying up all the merch like come on. Come ONNNN