#implied fusehound

[roguishshrimp]

giving a character a fat ass for narrative pay-off

[seerofmike]

personally speaking, crypto age retcon + introduction of seer basically slaughtered cryptane and crypto as a character for me. like i still enjoy it/him to an extent, but my days of pumping out 10 cryptane fics a month are gone. i've seen many similar sentiments expressed from other people who had crypto/wattson ships with other people just...drop them

also, like, i've seen way less people talk about them in general because it seems like respawn prioritized pushing them as a ship instead of developing them as characters.

close friend of mine who i commission for art regularly and loved wattson/darksparks seems to have shifted gears entirely to rampart now, and thats like, buckwild to me? i would have called her the resident Wattson Lover like, a season and a half ago. now she barely mentions her at all.

there was never much cryptane to begin with since i was the one doing most of the content, but it's definitely slowed since s9. i think there's been like...10 new cryptane fics? i definitely see content for other ships--fusehound, lobalore mainly, valkloba mainly, but very little for the fandom's previous popular ships of cryptage/darksparks, and because both of those ships involve crypto or wattson i think that's why the shipping landscape feels so empty. i don't think i've seen darksparks fanart in an entire season?? which is WILD to think abt considering how huge it was.

sorry for this rambly addition to ur post lol but my friends and i have discussed in length about how the entire relationship seems to have driven away people who liked them as characters because the narrative seems to actively disrespect them as characters in order to push them together. not at all implying that smartysparks is inherently an awful ship that disrespects them as characters . its just that...canon straight up did not do a good job handling them.

i post on the lore subreddit abt them on occasion and even people not invested in the shipping scene/don't have other ships with them so no conflict of interest complain regularly about their storyline and their character work. it's just! interesting and wild to see how one(1) story arc with 3 characters involved can decimate an entire portion of a fanbase. bumbleby rwby but on a smaller scale

Is it just me or did the Crypto age reveal/Wattson + Mystik radio play during the Legacy Antigen really change the landscape of the fandom's shipping in Apex?

Since that happened, I've seen way less Crypto ships with anyone outside of Wattson and much less Darksparks overall. It seems like some more notable artists in the Apex community have barely done ship work for Apex too

[roguishshrimp]

there was a prior conversation but I wanted to share what @ac0rnman sent me that inspired this

giving a character a fat ass for narrative pay-off