[Image ID: A drawing of a selfie taken by Sam Manson with Damian Wayne. They are both dressed up in formal attire, Damian in a black/dark grey suit with a red tie, and Sam in a purple topped off the shoulder dress with black straps. She is wearing a variety of jewelry, a necklace with a bat pendant, a black choker with a star of david in a circle pendant and cartoonish spider shaped earrings. Her hair is reminiscent in her half-up hairstyle, but with two ponytails rather than one. The background is a dark wall, a white collumn and white tile flooring. There is a window in the back, with green curtains, and outside the window is a cityscape of Gotham at night. There is a watermark of the artist’s username in the top left corner @pathetichoney. End ID.]
i am back on my bullshit this time with a v special new way that i’m drawing bc i got a new phone that i am paying out the wazoo for, however i can draw on it so my art has gotten significantly better. though of course i had to test myself and do both 1. a full background 2. a character who wears lipstick which i always struggle with unless their mouth is in a particular position and 3. a character that i have never ever tried to draw.
so like. rip me lol.
anyways i am back on my bullshit bc this is fanart of fanfic!!!! i always feel exactly in my element when i do this, it’s just always so good??? and fun?? and when i first read this fic, i mean oh god i just fell for it so hard. i ended up rereading it again like barely 48 hours after i’d finished reading it the first time lol
the fic in question is a damian and danny are twins au! it’s called Leap Before You Think by TourettesDog and i just-- the characterisations are just so well done it all feels incredibly natural especially with the merging of the two different universes into one cohesively and seamlessly it’s wonderful. there are a few faults with this pic i think, however i am still incredibly proud of it. as a bonus, here’s a better view of the window scene because i’m still really proud of that one:
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when people bring up the racism, homophobia, transphobia, romanticization of domestic abuse / rape / pedophilia / incest, literal actual written porn of literal actual real life flesh and blood children, et cetera et cetera on archive of our own, one of the ao3 stannies’ main defenses is “you can just filter out the tags if you don’t want to see that!” when that defense has no fucking legs to stand on.
ao3 is not an archive, it is barely even a website: a rant <3 (very long)
ignoring the fact that it’s a problem that all of that is permitted on the site in the first place (i guess child porn and racism are fine, and the people who allow it on their platform are fine, as long as i, personally, do not see it), that defense literally means nothing. it’s assuming that every little thing on ao3 is tagged properly and it absolutely is not, and if you think it is you are dumber than rocks. i mean for fuck’s sake, just touching on archive warnings and not tags, “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is literally a valid option for fic authors to use when it should fucking not be.
if someone is a freak who thinks that pedo shit is hot, they might not tag it as “rape” (archive warnings OR tags). i’ve literally seen underage father/son rape porn with no trigger warning tags but “child abuse if you squint”. IF YOU SQUINT. if someone thinks that domestic abuse is actually cool and sexy when attractive people do it, they might not tag it as “abuse”. if someone is a freak who likes incest, but bends over backwards to justify it by only shipping adopted family members, then they tell themselves that they don’t view it as incest, and might not tag it as “incest”. if someone is a racist, a homophobe, a transphobe, et cetera and they wrote bigotry into their fic (or else wrote a deliberate troll fic to trigger people on purpose), do you really think they’re going to tag it as racism / homophobia / transphobia / et cetera? and some people get kicks out of writing purposefully triggering content and either leaving it untagged or mistagging it so that people will read it unsuspectingly.
even for just general content tags, it’s a mess. people just forget to tag things all the time. people deliberately won’t tag the endgame ship of their fic because “it’s a spoiler heehee”. people use the romantic or sexual “x / y” tag instead of the platonic or otherwise “x & y” tag, sometimes by mistake sometimes on purpose. it’s a joked about issue how people will tag characters or ships that appear in their fic for two sentences.
there’s no standardization of tags, which is a pretty obvious problem. what first comes to mind is the “dead dove: do not eat” tag which should just not be a tag at all because it just has no meaning. depending on the individual fic writer using it, it could mean anything from “literally the most sickening and depraved thing you’ve ever read in your life” to “horror w/ gore”. but it applies to other vague tags too - different fic writers will have different ideas of what the tag means.
in addition to that, what is and isn’t made a filterable tag, what tags are made synonymous, et cetera, is entirely up to the whims of the site staff. as an example, if you’re trying to look for fanfiction of a singular animated disney movie, the infinite crossovers with other disney movies will not actually be counted as crossovers (which they are) because they’re classified as the “disney theatrical animated universe” (which isn’t a fucking thing), so you can’t filter them out the “exclude crossovers” way. if you try to filter out the fandom tag “disney theatrical animated universe”, it’ll show up with zero fics because that tag is synonymous with every disney animated film (regardless of if the fic author actually used the tag “disney theatrical animated universe” or not), thus also filtering out the one you actually wanted to find.
and do not get me fucking started on the “all media types tags”, which also just shouldn’t be a thing because it makes it fucking impossible to find the specific fics you’re looking for. some people use it in place of tagging a specific canon / adaptation when their fic very clearly draws from one specific canon / adaptation, and you can’t filter it out because it’s synonymous with every fandom tag under its umbrella.
as an example of the issues of both the “all media types” tag and mistagging in general: as a fan of the witcher books, it used to be a fucking ordeal to find fanfiction specifically for the books (post netflix show release). some show fans would, for whatever reason, tag their fics with the book fandom tag in addition to (or even in place of!!) the show fandom tag when their fics were unquestionably show-specific, meaning i could not simply search only in the book fandom tag. i could not simply filter out the show tag, because some show fans would, for whatever reason, tag as fucking “all media types”, when their fics were unquestionably show-specific. and alas, i could not filter out “all media types” and the show tag, so that i see only those fics which have been deliberately and exclusively tagged as the book, not only because as mentioned some show fans would tag their show fics with only the book tag, but also because the fucking all media types tag filters out the book tag as well, leaving me with zero fucking fics REGARDLESS of if the author actually used the “all media types” tag. now, thankfully, i’ve thankfully seen this issue in this specific fandom lessen, but it still occurs in other fandoms and i guarantee that it didn’t lessen in the witcher fandom because of any fixing of the site on the part of ao3 staff.
another common defense of ao3 freaks is that it’s an “archive”, and therefore can’t get rid of anything anyone posts, and disregarding the fact that that is not how archives fucking work, they don’t just allow anything and also ao3 DOES get rid of fics... when they say that they don’t like proshippers, apparently, archives have... you know... archivists. they have someone or a team of someones making sure that everything in the archive is *properly fucking categorized*. they have someone or multiple someones making sure that everything they recieve (1) belongs there and (2) is properly labeled and organized. same for libraries. meaning that if ao3 really were an archive and not a sub par fanfiction website, they’d have something like that in place. something as simple as a report button for fics with a review team that will see if something’s been mis- or untagged. they’d have some kind of standardization of tags (especially the warning / trigger tags) and have proper tagging enforced in some way. and then they could also do something like stop being spineless racists, queerphobes, and pedos have the barest minimum of content guidelines saying that you can’t post fucking hate speech.
if something is mistagged or untagged, the most you can do is leave a comment politely asking that the author fix the issue, and then hope and pray that they do that. and if that person thinks [insert form of abuse] is hot, or if they’re just straight up a bigot that wrote bigotry into their fics to be bigoted, or they’re a troll that gets kick out of deliberately traumatizing people by tricking them into reading their mis/untagged fics, they might not! AND if you see a major tagging issue on an orphaned work, or a work that has an inactive author / hasn’t been updated in forever, good fucking luck getting even a negative response.
you can’t permanently block tags (i mean even tumblr.hell has that), meaning that if you would like to search for fic without coming across something troubling, triggering, or just something you don’t like, you have to either (1) do a work around by having a bookmarked link for every fandom you’re in or every character you like with all of your tags already blocked, (2) download browser extensions that do the work for ao3 because they can’t be bothered themselves, or (3) input every individual tag every time you search ao3 and don’t forget that all of those options only fucking work at all when everything is tagged properly, and we’ve already established its not. you also can’t actually block people (you can only prevent them from commenting) meaning that if there’s a specific person you’d like to stay away from your fics or a specific fic author that you don’t like and would like to stop seeing their fics clogging up the tag, you’re out of luck (though for the latter you could insert “-[username]” into the “search within results” box, but then uh oh we’re right back around to having to input that every time or have a bookmark)
their archive warning system is shit. first of all it’s functionally useless because, as mentioned, “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is an option. what’s the fucking point of special required archive warnings if you’re going to allow people to opt out anyway. second of all, aside from “chose not to use warnings” and “no warnings apply”, the only warnings are “major character death”, “graphic depictions of violence”, “rape/non-con”, and “underage”. disregarding the fact that they shouldn’t be allowing porn of underage characters in the first place (but i’m talking to a brick wall on that issue) and that “non-con” (and “dub-con”) as terminology needs to die, it’s just fucking rape lets not use weasel words... this is a paltry list of possible warnings. there’s no official warnings for depictions of: domestic abuse, animal abuse, depictions of racism / homophobia / transphobia / et cetera, suicide, self harm, et cetera et cetera. and we return to the issue of standardization of tags. in your required archive warnings at very least, there should be a standardization of what these mean, but ao3′s own faq is just like “ehh... you decide. we’ll leave it up to you”. what qualifies as graphic depictions of violence? two people may write the same level of violence, but qualify “graphic” differently, and make different decisions regarding their warnings. and we also return to the issue of: if a freak doesn’t see something that is clearly rape as rape, they might not tag it as such.
this website gets a disgustingly large amount of money every year that it doesn’t fucking do anything with. it’s been over a decade and they’re still in fucking beta. features that would actually be useful, like an actual block system, don’t exist. they technically have a report system for abuse and harassment and such, but apparently what they qualify as abuse and harassment is fickle. ao3 defenders seem to be very proud of the legal work they do for fandom / fanfic authors, but they set aside a very small amount of the money they get every year for legal advocacy, and they actually use even less of that, because it’s not the early 2000s “anne rice hates fanfiction” era anymore - you aren’t going to get fucking sued for writing fanfiction in the first place. based on their own self-reported yearly cost of upkeep, they literally already have enough money to run the site as they are now for the next twenty years.
once again: ao3 is not an archive. it is not a library. it is barely a even a website.
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I wanna see the cat
Show us how you draw a cat>:]
I decided to draw more heheh :>
I like drawing cats like either beans or pool noodles [:<
I also really like drawing rats in the cartoony way inspired off of a book about Irish history that my sister has-
Sheep are just fun and floofy :3
And SEA SLUGS!!! Fortunately my favourite ones, the sea bunny (left) and sea sheep (right) are pretty simplistic but so adorable!!
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mike—who wants to be needed more than anything & feels he has nothing to offer the ones he loves—telling will—who thinks the world of him & wants nothing more than to be by his side always—that even with all of their lifelong friends there, the past year has been weird, because hawkins isn't the same without him. because he, his life, and everything he's ever known aren't the same, they aren't right anymore without will there, too.
will, who has always been there & whose love has always held it all together for him. will, whose unwavering belief in him gives him a sense of purpose. will, who sees him as he is and allows himself to be seen, too. will, who holds his heart in his steady hands, urges him to shed his stoic armor, and gives him the space to be a real human being whose thoughts and feelings always matter.
will, will, will. the boy he'd do anything for and that he's never stopped caring for, even and especially when it hurt. the boy who said yes and whom befriending is the best thing he's ever done. the boy he can't lose without losing himself, too.
mike always pulls will free from any extradimensional monster's grip and makes him feel braver and better for being different. will reminds mike of who he really is at heart, to him and to all, and lights up all the cold and dark corners of his world. they're each other's anchor: the person they trust to lead them back to themselves when they've wandered astray, and the only ones that know each other well enough to be able to.
they've been this since the first day of kindergarten. it's always been them, and it really and truly is giving: "wasn't that the definition of home? not where you are from, but where you are wanted."
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How would a thunderclan cat go about caring for leeches? I imagine it would be harder for them than Shadowclan cats since I imagine things aren’t quite as like.. damp in thunderclan. I love leeches pls give me the husbandry lore 🥺
I'm taken aback at how many people want the leech lore, I did not expect this much love for Spotty's girls. But, ok!
For one, they are medicinal leeches. Hirudo medicinalis. This species is actually threatened in England, specifically because it's so rare for livestock to drink from lakes these days. So these wild leech specimens are actually found in ShadowClan territory, and they heavily rely on Clan cats!
They also do prey on the occasional boar, fox, or badger that wades through the mud. ShadowClan loves leeches, they think they are useful as medicine AND as snacks, leading to a symbiotic relationship.
(sadly this means that the expansion of the highway and the loss of the Clan cats massively disrupted the leech population. There are probably conservationists who discover too late that there were medical leeches surviving in this area and despair over how they could have saved the White Hart woods.)
Anyway, keeping leeches is easiest for ShadowClan of course, but ThunderClan can do it with some effort. Spotty has a two-part terracotta bowl (a dish and a lid) which helps keep them cool, even in summer, and she stores them in the darkest part of her den. At the bottom of this bowl is mud, wet leaves, swampy substrate.
It's not hard to feed them with worms or insects, but they have so many elders with joint pain that there's enough food to go around. Spotty also really doesn't mind just letting them nibble her arm; leech bites aren't painful or anything.
The hardest part is getting pond water when she needs to clean the bowl. You want water that's full of good bacteria that can support fish, not just any old ditchwater.
Before Yellowfang's exile, she would ask for ShadowClan pond water and usually be granted permission with an escort. Brokenstar didn't see a need to make a hard embargo with ThunderClan when he was so focused on eradicating WindClan first.
Yellowfang has a lot more knowledge about caring for leeches though. Because she can't access pondwater, she ran some experiments with the lesser-leeches (the ones that weren't Spotty's beloved 3), and found she can clean the bowl slowly using river water, but doing it all at once could shock the leeches.
But, it's not very hard. Harder than keeping mealworms, but leeches are an easy animal to keep. They're also really cute, like fat worms, with nice patterns.
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