#me: write about actual blaseball players

[ditto-not-on-discord]

in less than 60 days, It will have been a year since blaseball was suddenly canceled.

TRUST ME, THE OTHER TAGS WILL MAKE SENSE IN A LITTLE WHILE.

Blaseball, in its 2.867 Years of existence, was many things. but the easiest way to describe it is "Good". It had a very incredible fanbase that still kind of mourns the game to this day. the devs had a panel at GDC in 2022. It was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Game Writing in 2021 and also the "Best Video Game" at The Hugo Awards in 2021. It won the Nuovo Award at the independent games festival in 2021. people could observe the games happening, gamble fake money, and also affect how the story and the characters would develop at certain points. It was a great game, that sadly was canceled because the cost that was needed to run the game was too high for the team at the game band to support, at least according to wikipedia. It being dead is also a major part in proving that there is no justice in the universe because of it not being here, yet SILENT HILL ASCENSION SOMEHOW HASN'T KICKED THE BUCKET YET.

Now for all Silent Hill fans who have blocked that game out of their memory, and for everyone who has no idea what Silent Hill Ascension IS, here is a refresher:

"Released" on October 31st, 2023 (which was already a bad day for me, but I am NOT getting into that), Silent Hill Ascension is an interactive thing (listen its not a tv show, and it isnt a video game. the developers say that its "the best of both", but lets be honest its more of the WORST of both) that is canon to the silent hill franchise.

people can observe the games happening, gamble fake money, and also affect how the story and the characters would develop at certain points. Yes, I know this sounds EXACTLY the same as what I described blaseball as, but thats because I purposefully oversimplified both games a bit. Silent Hill Ascencion has bland writing (so bland people even thought it was AI), all the mechanical depth of a bad mobile game, and all the horrible microtransactions (loot boxes, a season pass, and something else I will get into later) as well. Blaseball, as previously mentioned, was nominated for several story writing awards, had enough mechanical depth that some fans created a SCIENTIFIC COLLECTIVE TO ANALYZE IT, and at the time it died, NEVER had any micro transactions or a fee to enter.

Remember how both games use fake money? In Blaseball, those who were in the 1% of money havers had all their coins distributed to the other players. In Silent Hill Ascension, you can literally just buy so many "Influence Points" that you can manipulate the entire fucking story, and you can hoard them for as long as you fucking want. Also, Something else I want to mention: Literally nobody talks about Silent Hill Ascension because its so bad. hell, and those that do talk about it DON'T have anything good to say. very few people play it, and there are a shit ton of bots that the devs added so it feels like more people are actually watching. Silent Hill Ascension has reached lower lows than blaseball ever did, and is less than half a year old. So why the hell is it still alive, when a game that did its entire stick better is fucking dead. THE ONLY REASON I CAN THINK OF FOR IT BEING ALIVE IS BECAUSE ITS SUPPORTED BY FUCKING KONAMI.

There is no justice in the world.

[leonstamatis]

hello leon stamatis (my favorite stamatis)! i do not know anything about the state of blaseball right now, i think it was a randomly generated baseball-like a while back? my understanding was that most of the content was fan generated to begin with, being what it was and all that. is it too late to get into it? if not, i would love to hear some starter recs

what a coincidence, he is also my favorite stamatis! and blaseball is one of my favorite things. this, however, is a complicated question, so i'm gonna go ahead and apologize for what will surely be a much longer answer than you anticipated by asking this. sorry!

we're gonna start from the beginning. what is blaseball?

well, you're right. it's a randomly-generated baseball simulator. that's the general idea of it. there were 20-24 teams (sometimes more, depending on what else was happening), and they played games against each other. while it initially started as a basic baseball game -- with some absurd names and very simple mechanics -- it later evolved to include more complex mechanics, including player death, modifications to the stadiums, and other statuses that could impact and change gameplay at random (or under specific and nonsensical conditions).

blaseball started in late 2020 and had a sort of on/off cycle. during an on cycle, there would be games every hour on the hour for 99 hours over a week. then there would be a post-season to determine a champion, and the season would end. these on cycles were often divided into eras, and had larger plots and storylines forming connective tissue through the elections and special events.

during an off cycle, also known as a siesta, the devs would take some time to patch bugs, develop new features, and plan for the future. some of these siestas were a week or two; some were several months or over a year.

the unfortunate news here is that blaseball just recently... ended. the games won't be happening anymore, the site isn't active, and there's no new content coming down the pipe. the devs said it wasn't sustainable to keep doing it -- a thing that makes a lot of sense, because one thing blaseball certainly could be was overwhelming and time-consuming. and that's coming from me, as a fan who didn't have to actually do any of the coding or community maintenance.

however. onto the second part of your question. can you still get into blaseball even now that it's over?

[takes a deep breath.] YES. please do, in fact!

it's fair to say most of the content was fan-generated, i think, depending on what you define as "content." the games and the website were fairly minimalist; they gave us major events, but the characters were just names and a few lines of stats, so it's not like you're missing out on key character moments or quotes or anything with blaseball being done. all the identifying characteristics, the personality and appearance and emotional response? that's fans, baby!

this is one of the things that's cool about blaseball. i've heard it said that writing for the fandom is more in line with original fiction because so much of it is created by and dependent on the individual, as opposed to a centralized canon. which means a lot of the time, there's more effort in a fic to introduce you to someone -- something fanfic doesn't typically do! and because so much was happening in blaseball all the time, people do make an effort to explain events and canon occurrences either in author notes or in the story itself.

(unless, that is, it's a major event everyone was largely aware of. these were few and far between, but they were such a big deal that they make up a lot of the fic content. if you have questions about any of those events, i would recommend the blaseball wiki, where election results, modifications to specific players, and other significant canon events are recorded. there's lore there, too, but i can pretty much guarantee that whatever lore is there won't match up directly with any of the fic you read; blb authors tend to take the wiki and widely-accepted fanon lore more as a suggestion than as a rule.)

the long and the short of it is, you can absolutely still get involved. there are just under 3,000 fics, last time i checked, so it's not big enough that you'll be drowning. my honest recommendation is to pick a team based on who you vibe with -- the blaseball wiki has team overview pages, too -- and then see who is writing for that team. there are collections for a lot of them, and they'll focus on a specific set of characters most of the time depending on who had the most significance on the roster.

(my actual recommendation is to start with the earlier fics. the discipline era -- the first eleven seasons -- was a very tightly told story without a lot of bells and whistles. players had a normal season in season one, and then in season two everyone started dying, and then in season seven the fans messed with the mechanics and did a necromancy and the necromanced player started murdering people until we all banded together to defeat the god that was giving them the ability to do that. that's pretty easy to follow, especially compared to later eras when the entire point was adding as many new mechanics as possible or testing out new features. it got confusing, even for people keeping a close eye on all of it.)

if you find something that confuses you, that's okay! it might take some effort/research to understand these storylines, but the wiki is pretty good at explaining mechanics and events. just look up whatever is getting you and it should make some more sense. or you can use Before, an archival tool that lets you watch old games and fandom events in real time. (and if it still doesn't make sense... well. that's blaseball, baby! you kind of get used to rolling with nonsense, honestly.)

okay. that's all very long-winded, because of course it is. sorry, again. but... recommendations!

i think, often, that blaseball fic would be aided by the inclusion of a sort of "Weeb Ass Shit" scale. some of it is going to be very embedded in the nonsense of blaseball and hard to get through, especially if you're new to the team, specific player, or even blaseball in general.

hen fourteenfifteen and i had some friends who had never engaged with blaseball read a few fics of ours a couple months back as an experiment, and it shocked me to learn that the concept of an incineration -- a player being set on fire and killed by a "rogue" umpire, one of the earliest and most basic mechanics in the game -- was unfamiliar and a stopping point for the readers, because they'd never heard about that happening. and certainly not in such a nonchalant way. these kinds of terms are everywhere in blaseball fic, but if you can find the ones that focus more on a character than a game or a modification, then you've got a starting point and you can build out from there.

that being said, there's always going to be blaseball, so there are definitely still going to be moments where you end up scratching your head. it is simply impossible not to. if you're cool with that, here's a brief collection of some blaseball fics i would say have a lower blaseball-ass shit rating:

when winter turns to spring by waveridden, a love story between two co-captains from around season seven to season eight. (also, it's one of my favorite ships and it's my team. go flowers.) honestly, hayden does an excellent job of explaining everything in very simple and understandable ways. so if you want to just poke around on their page, you'll have an excellent time. there's a whole run of things from mid-2021 that is literally just character studies written for other people, and they're all great.

the things we take off for each other by bloodsweatspit is less about blaseball itself and more about one of the teams, the canada moist talkers. it looks at a handful of the key dynamics and is, in my opinion, one of the best fics for providing insight into a team and the people on it -- especially in so few words.

speaking of the moist talkers. it's hard to recommend just one of cyndakip's fics, but they all tend to exist in a similar timeline and universe and there's a lot of continuity that makes it easy to follow once you've gotten started. if you're looking for some very well-done, very lengthy character work, cynda does great things.

there's this fun trend that hit during the first lengthy break in blaseball colloquially known as the 12x100, or twelve scenes of 100 words. the idea is to give a series of short scenes that highlight a character or storyline without committing to a whole lengthy thing. i'd recommend checking out the 12x100 tag and clicking through a few to see what characters you like. (more specifically, babytriumphant's chicago, in brief series is a bunch of them specifically focused on the chicago firefighters team, and they're all lovely!)

another flowers fic. i'm not sorry. oxicleanmoron's it's my own damn fault is more recent, and set in the late expansion era. but it's not about blaseball. it's about a road trip. so you're in good hands if you want some fun character dynamics and minimal blaseball.

lift your head (and look out the window) by baliset is a nice little window into the baltimore crabs. marn also is one who does a really good job of explaining things from the beginning, so there are a few fics of hers i would recommend. but start with this one, and then maybe check out your sinking ship (is big enough for two) if you want to meet some more of her beloved little guys.

another sort of love story without the focus on game mechanics: you're at the party (you're not invited) by impernia. this one i include in part because i think it leans into some of the stranger aspects of blaseball lore without getting into the game itself; a lot of characters are strange or unusual in some way, and this fic conveys that beautifully.

take the bullet by waltztangocache is a great example of something you'll find a lot in this fandom, which is... character death stories! if there's one thing blaseball gave us a lot of fodder for, it's people dying and people grieving. if that's your thing, wonderful! you've found your people! hen does a great job showing the ripple effects that i would say are common in fanon lore -- esp on the firefighters -- regarding incinerations. i love this fic. it pains me.

i have written a lot of blaseball fic in my time, but i tend to think i fall pretty high on the blaseball-ass shit scale. there are others like me. however, if you do not mind me shilling for just a moment, i would recommend to you inside your blinding light. it's not about blaseball, as much. it's about a carpenter and a tree, and they fall in love. welcome to blaseball lore! it's fun here.

i... hope you were not overwhelmed by all of this. thank you for asking about this, and for being willing to dig deeper into this fandom and what it has to offer! i'm barely scratching the surface here, but all of the authors i've listed have plenty of fics worth reading, and there are tons of authors i love who i didn't have a specific pull from for this list but who i would nevertheless recommend once you're a little more familiar with how this fandom writes.

blaseball is over, but the fic's still around. and it's pretty fucking good fic, i'd say. <3

[fogwitchoftheevermore]

i'm going on a VERY fun rabbit hole with this life series/hermitcraft/empires blaseball au thing, so have the next installment, the hermit blaseball au! this one is a lot easier to understand if you don't know anything about blaseball, because this is Much more "i've just put them into the plot of blaseball, they're just hanging out in there". my empires blaseball au can be found here, and the third life blaseball au will be linked here one i finish writing that up.

also, a few of my choices for teams i am not... particularly confident about (namely xisuma, bdubs, hypno, and tango) so if you have a better suggestion for them please pitch it.

Grian: Batter for the LA Unlimited Tacos

Scar: Batter for the Miami Dale

Mumbo: Batter for the New York Millennials, Siphon

Cleo: Pitcher for the Kansas City Breath Mints

Ren: Batter and team captain for the San Fransisco Lovers, Charm

Bdubs: Batter for the Hawai’i Fridays

Impulse: Batter for the Hellmouth Sunbeams

Pearl: Pitcher for the Houston Spies, Precognition

Gem: Pitcher for the Kansas City Breath Mints

Xisuma: Pitcher for the Philly Pies

Evil X: Pitcher for the Hades Tigers

Wels: Batter for the San Fransisco Lovers

Hels: Batter for the Baltimore Crabs

Hypno: Batter for the Mexico City Wild Wings

XB: Batter for the Atlantis Georgias

Beef: Pitcher for the Dallas Steaks

Keralis: Batter for the Core Mechanics

Joe: Pitcher for the Kansas City Breath Mints, later batter for the Seattle Garages

TFC: Coach of the Ohio Worms

Doc: Pitcher for the Core Mechanics

Jevin: Batter for the Charleston Shoe Thieves, Flinch, later rerolled into Reverberating

False: Pitcher for the Tokyo Lift

Stress: Batter for the Tokyo Lift

Iskall: Batter for the Breckenridge Jazz Hands

Tango: Pitcher for the Chicago Firefighters, Fire Eater

Cub: Batter for the Charleston Shoe Thieves, got Flinch from fighting god and got it rerolled into Debt

Etho: Pitcher for the Canada Moist Talkers

Zedaph: Pitcher for the Yellowstone Magic

Wormman: Pitcher for the Ohio Worms

This AU is, even more so than the Empires part of this AU, just me shoving the Hermits into the Blaseball universe and letting it happen.

The only people who are even sort of replacing an actual Blaseball player are Cleo, Joe, and Gem.

Cleo is our Jaylen. She pitches for the Kansas City Breath Mints, and is the best pitcher in the league, and when the Forbidden Book opens, she dies. Her intended replacement is False Symmetry II, aka Empires!False, but when the Forbidden Book is opened in the Empires, Hermitcraft, and Life Series universes all at once, everything gets a little muddled, and everyone comes out of it a little muddled. The biggest change is that Cleo is instead replaced by Gemini Tay, the newly generated player from the Empires world who was meant to replace Xornoth. 

When she is resurrected at the end of season 6, Joe goes into the Shadows in exchange. Within a few seasons, he is able to leave the Shadows and bats for the Breath Mints for about a season, afterwards he is transferred to the Seattle Garages, where he stays. I am not putting him back in the Shadows because it makes me kind of sad.

Cub and Jevin are both players for the Thieves, so they get cursed as a result of the boss fight against the Shelled One. We will resolve that later. Hels, despite being on the Crabs, does not get cursed, because he doesn’t join the Crabs until after they return from ascension.

Other than that, the Hermits are just sort of Existing in the world of Blaseball. Evil X and Hels are both created in similar ways to Evil Twin and Bontgomery Mullock, which is to say, Blessings break and accidentally clone a guy, so we just slightly edit one of their names and keep going. Don’t worry about it. 

At one point during Expansion, while the Reroll Will is still in effect, fans of the Thieves attempt to reroll the Flinch modifier that Cub got as a side effect of fighting god and losing that one time. It gets rerolled into Debt, in a similar vein to what happened to Silvaire Roadhouse, but because he’s on the Thieves, he actually gets to kill people. Good for him. Jevin’s Flinch modifier also gets rerolled, but he gets Reverberating. Good for him, but in a different direction.

[once-vel]

i know absolutely nothing about blaseball but you have no idea how desperately i want to know everything about blaseball

[ID: An ask from @/celestinecerasus, reading: "all i know about blaseball is it's like evil 17776 (not about football) (not about satellites) (evil things happen)". /End ID]

(context, for anyone confused)

hehe... excellent... the short answer is it was an absurdist horror baseball simulator which ran near constantly during the onseason. i cannot summon a coherent explanation of it for the life of me so i'll put some assorted fun facts under the cut. i also tried to explain what my last post involving my ocs meant down at the bottom !

if you want an actual decent explanation of what it actually was, i recommend this post here. it is not mine! but it is good

umpires can go rogue and incinerate players, but only during solar eclipses

names are completely randomly generated based on a pool of names. so while there were characters with very normal names there were also characters named like... jaylen hotdogfingers. boyfriend monreal. freemium seraph. you get the point

there were an assortment of fun weather games could be played in, such as birds, peanuts, solar eclipse, feedback, salmon, sun 2, and three separate coffee weathers. this is not all of them i just cannot be bothered to pull up a list

said weathers had unique effects. my personal favorite is salmon weather which made everyone time travel

none of the players had a shred of canon lore so a lot of the fun was coming together as a community to make shit up for them. a whole lot of this has been recorded on the wiki if that interests you!

there WAS a story going on, separated into two eras, discipline and expansion. i cant tell you much about discipline because i wasnt there but expansion featured a god named The Boss buying the league and destroying it in pursuit of making it marketable. it ended with everyone killing her. as she was represented by a png of a coin, when we killed her, all of the ingame currency was completely removed from the website. after that the league was slowly destroyed by a black hole (games continued during this)

one time los angeles got split into infinite separate versions of los angeles. i am not sure how it worked because this concerned a team that was not mine. they called these the infinite los angeli

during. i think it was that same event? every player on the los angeles team got renamed to wyatt mason. there was a whole thing trying to get everyones names changed back. several players names were never fully corrected. this was named the wyatt masoning

then there was the time multiple teams across the leaves got their own little clones of wyatt mason. there wereee 14 i think? this was named the second wyatt masoning. i personally like the seventh mason a lot

there was one time a team got reduced to one(1) active batter and the game continued like normal. that one active batter was just. in several places at once. ze hit a triple at one point. all by hirself

necromancy was a thing. oh necromancy was very much so a thing. the first time we necromancied someone she came back with a debt to fill and killed many people

then you had the time someone necromancied themself with zero consequences. they got incinerated but they had a modification (attribute) that gave them a chance to change teams at the end of every season and fucking apparently dying didn't turn this off? so they just walked out of the hall of flame (the afterlife) and onto a random team. they proceeded to die again that season (i believe), and then they walked out of hall again

there was lore about the Before Times. in these Before Times, a guy was given a modification called firewalker that was essentially Super Debt. he left a team? whole team became unstable. he got many players killed. there's a song about this!

speaking of music! a lot of fans came together to write blaseball themed music. if music about this game interests you, check out the garages (the band)! they have a LOT of music. some songs i recommend are bones to ohio, fight gods, ur too slow, free space, mike townsend (knows what he's gotta do), and dead ringer. i also like your favorite one to break a lot. zakri song.

ok thats enough fun facts for now this is a c.ob blog not a blaseball blog. BUT i will now explain what my post from earlier means!!

kelzil is an alternate. getting alt'd in the actual sim essentially just means your stats get rerolled, but a very common interpretation of getting alt'd is outright getting swapped out for an alternate universe version of yourself. this is the interpretation i like! getting alt'd early specifically means they've had time to get used to it, so they're mostly just hanging out.

zakri's deal is like... i already explained the incineration thing in the post so i don't think i need to say more on that. flickering means he's more succeptible to the effect of feedback weather, which is two players on opposing teams getting swapped mid-game. this usually results in getting moved around from team to team a lot. he then gets shadowed, which pretty much just means he's taken out of active play. i don't have a solid interpretation of what the shadows Are so i don't have much to say on that.

THEN he gets elsewhere'd, which entails getting swept [vague gestures] elsewhere by flooding. this also takes you out of active play but this time it's for a random amount of time - a player might be gone for a day, a player might be gone for multiple seasons. zakri is gone for multiple seasons. i personally think of elsewhere as very foggy and very wet and very lonely, especially when you're there for a while. zakri will not be having a very good time !

now, for unnamed kiv. so the rising stars are a team that were introduced at the end of expansion. long story short, there was a big special game between two teams made specifically for the game - the good team (the rising stars) and the evil team (the vault legends). the vault legends were, specifically, the boss' team. we didn't really get to pick who got put on what team, players were drafted through a specific process. if you got too popular you got put on the legends and if you were popular but not too popular you got put on the stars, iirc. so because i imagine unnamed kiv to be a generally good player, they get forced onto the stars. after this is when the sun exploded and the league was destroyed by a black hole btw. so like. unnamed kiv is having a great time i'm sure

[daekie]

so...... ⚾ Blaseball, huh?

see the thing with putting all my work in a one-last-hurrah message in the fanwork channel is that i don't have enough characters left to talk about almost anything else. so INSTEAD here's a masterpost of my work i guess!

and it's all of the eyes on the way it's going

There was something... there was something they were supposed to say. Something they were meant to carry through the rift. Some information Wyatt Mason wanted to hold close to their chest, because it could change everything, if they just - but there’s nothing there except the same crackling static that would make them jump, if they felt alive enough for that. Wyatt Mason III was pulled through the Rift. Wyatt Mason III Localized into the Georgias' lineup.

2938 words, 1 chapter. Written before I actually had any real feelings or opinions on that wet little guy (said with immense fondness) & the first real piece of writing I did for Blaseball. I think I've gotten a lot better since this, but it's not bad, and I'm still pretty proud of the workskin I made for it.

for you, home is a cemetery

The light shining overhead casts everything in dangerous gold, and the players standing in perfect rank and file are no better and no safer: the Aequitas Representatives, here to take the challenge proposed by the Seattle Garages, here to remind a pesky little team what their place is and how foolish it is to fight a god. 6x200 snapshots of those terrible, brittle years, smothered and kept and preserved under a god's thumb for her purposes and her purposes alone.

1200 words (6x200), 1 chapter. AO3 says it's 1201 but it's lying I think. The Wyatts Mason, in a world where the Coin arranged their Localization and corporate drone teenagers scare the living shit out of me; inspired by @zayphora's original Aequitas AU.

you'll lead all your friends like lemmings to a slaughter

Season 14, Day 86. Wy█tt M██on III Ech█ed █yatt Mas██ ███ — ECHO Wyatt Mason III STATIC ECHO Wyatt Mason VIII STATIC

3387 words, 1 chapter. The aftermath of and it's all of the eyes on the way it's going. Wyatt Mason III Three hasn't even picked an actual name yet besides 'not Wyatt', and they've only been alive for fourteen days, but they know they're not walking off that field at the end of this game. Written after I'd been playing them on Twitter for some time, so it's a lot more consistent with a lot of things!

i'm no ghost, no fool

The first thing David Gray needs you to know is that their name is not David Gray. (is this worth crying for? is stepping up to bat worth dying for?)

2852 words, 1 chapter. Dialogue-only. In a Short Circuits world, Atlantis Georgias shadows player David Gray has some things they need to get off their chest, and a Fan's the only person who can hear them say it (literally). Good thing they can spot a Fan at a hundred paces.

a short list of stars that died this year (or: i’m screaming every requiem i know at the suns)

i’m screaming every requiem i know at the suns & someone is singing a mourning song. Nagomi Nava reflects, after the end of the world.

6967 words, 2 chapters. Written as part of the Sunbeams' 2022 Solstice exchange for orionexperiment#0951. Nagomi Nava experiences the Semi-Centennial, makes an odd friend in Tillman Henderson while she's at it, and makes her way through Season 24 and the end of the universe. This thing fucking rocks honestly, I don't even think it reads too well but I'm incredibly proud of it still.

radio station 19.14

11666 words spread across two fics. Written for the Tokyo Lift Fic Exchange. Jessica Telephone Voicemail and Wyatt Mason (Season 14 birth) Jasmine Mason have a midnight talk about not being that person you took your name and face from, and what it means to be you, and the team that loved a girl they barely even got to know. Fics can be read in any order. Includes:

the only way i know how to say sorry is "better luck next time"

One day, in the static she hears every time she picks up a phone, she hears a voice. The voice doesn’t sound like Jessica Telephone. If it did, she’d put the phone down immediately; deals like the kind Jessica made can’t really be taken back, but that was a determined girl, and she’d make a determined haunt, too. But it doesn’t sound like her voice, or her own, or otherwise. It sounds like a teenage girl. Jessica Telephone isn’t the only girl here who might as well be someone else's ghost.

5533 words, 1 chapter. I tagged this with Minor Parasocial Relationships / alt jess is weird about jessica. its parasocial its antagonistic its envious its Really Something / JESSICA ISNT EVEN HERE GIRL. WHAT ARE YOU HUNG UP ON and I stand by that. This is Jessica Voicemail's side of the conversation!

my theologies strewn out in the dark

At least she herself was able to say that’s not me, that’s my name, that’s not me, I want to be something else. She doesn’t think Jessica has said that, or maybe even thought it to herself; who wouldn’t want to be Jessica Telephone? From the outside, wouldn’t it be a gift, to live a life so rich? (Wouldn’t it be a gift, to be a splinter of a god who saw everything but never saw it coming? It always looks better from the outside.) Jessica Telephone isn’t the only girl here who might as well be someone else’s ghost: or, what that looks like from another camera angle: or, hey, who decides what the real Ship of Theseus is, anyway?

6133 words, 1 chapter. Jasmine's side of the conversation. Eldest daughter syndrome applies even if you're a weird sound ghost and Jas has got it bad. When she can't do anything, why would she ever let herself do anything less than as much as possible?

spinning on this infinite road

a collection of fics written for the game band's blasetober 2022 prompts, all written as 12x100s.

8675ish words, 6 chapters. Covers prompts THE BOOK, CERTIFIED BLASEBALL MOMENT, BIRDS, PEANUTS, A BLESSING, A CURSE, and PARKER.

oh, it's time for another vendetta

This is a body he hasn’t known since before the PODS. This is a body he had no say in leaving behind. This is a body that is his and is not his. York doesn’t know he’s crying until he feels the heat on his face. or: york silk backslides on his mental health recovery, because who ever put 'being eight years old again' in their twelve-step plan?

1628 words, 1 chapter. Set in Sonder's Salmon & Snake AU, where post-S24 the League resets back to S1 but with randomized rosters, and the only players who remember the original timeline are Hall Stars and Legends.

I've also done some ficlets from ask memes -- York Silk's protagonist halo & the vault's heel population, and Trip Mason & Jaybot and accepting the fact things won't get better. And I roleplay(ed) Wyatt Mason III & Siobhan Chark on Twitter!

Non-fanfic stuff I've made includes the following (it's 99% community-billboard stuff):

Everything on this I can back up except putting the Wyatts and Wyatt Prime on separate levels.

(at some point i WILL make a final version of this; this one doesn't include s24 + short circuits i think. but. yknow. it is what it is.)

mock takeovers for fan-entities the Archivist (the first two) & the Catalyst (the third one)

propaganda for early expansion era -- i think this is s13-s14?

late expansion era propaganda. the second one isn't even a good edit but i still think it's funny.

propaganda for short circuits. we could've been the atlantis peanuts.... i wanted it so bad

& some coronation era propaganda. very happy with that first knight ump one.

...and then i also did some playlists (raw meat, static echo)...

and during coronation, i drew my design for mckinney vaughan...

...and i did a moodboard for MaX (Wyatt Mason X)...

oh yeah and I also did text post memes. first set, second set, third set, georgias set.

it's been a good run, yall! onwards to whatever comes next. (& ofc i'll still be blaseballing -- i'll probably be playing around in this setting forever and ever.)

[salthien]

hiiii leandra beech for the lore asks??

LEANDRA BEECH MY BELOVED TIGERBEAMS BABY. i genuinely don't lore blaseball players on my own much but when i say leandra was so real to me Immediately it's so true. I originally didn't want to lean so far into the Discipline connections because I worried over having too many attachments to old Eras, but then she got Frasier Shmurmgle'd and I went 'fuck it, I will get as self indulgent as I want because the chances of anyone else loring her are Very Low'. special shoutout to Cedar @riseinviolence for taking the Leandra-Discipline baton and sprinting with it, I owe quite a bit of this to him too

this got long. i need to overexplain everything.

content warning for child death (not permanent, but is relevant to mention)

Leandra Beech, trans woman (she/her), Moab resident since birth, of hispanic descent - family is primarily Mexican-american & has been in Moab for a couple generations at least. Normal human, at least until:

the ILB returns when she's 3, and thus the Hellmouth opens when she's 4. i'm not sure how much of this is common Hades-Hellmouth lore and how much of it is specific to Cedar's version of it (I think a lot of it is Cedar's. can you tell I'm obsessed with their Hades), but in the upheaval part of the Hellmouth opened into the underworld itself. She dies - in a way - but Hades being at least partly an afterlife, saves her, mends her and what it can't mend it transforms into the body of a lion. The actual circumstances of her change are entirely Cedar's idea, including this that killed me dead when I read it:

She lives, despite everything, by virtue, too, of the strange dark hands of someone in a denim jacket, a face she doesn’t know yet. “Come on up, little manticore,” he says to her, in a tongue that sounds strange to her ear. “You are not yet due down there.”

Inevitably becomes a fan of Blaseball; it's hard to avoid in Moab. Has a lot of childhood-hero-worship for both the Beams and the Tigers. When she can, goes to games at the Overlook or, rarer, at Sixth Circle (not as many as she'd have liked to) and the games she can't, she watches on TV or listens to on the radio. The hero-worship dims to a healthy respect, but her interest in the game remains a lifelong thing

Takes an interest in photography in her teens, continues it into adulthood; she does Blaseball photography (and sports in general, too, once Blaseball is gone) but also nature & wildlife as well.

Writes a blog, almost entirely for herself; this used to be half-strategy, half-anecdotal accounts of her time following the game, but eventually turned into life anecdotes in general once Blaseball was out of the picture after S24.

Is in her fifties/sixties (I forget the specifics of the timeline/how long it's been ingame since beta Season 1), but ages slower because of the circumstances of her survival. Appears in her early thirties.

Personality-wise - pragmatic, even-tempered, forthright, self-assured but not overconfident. Not very emotive or particularly talkative - this can lead to being misunderstood as cold or standoffish, but likes people and cares very deeply for everyone around her. Not secretive or reclusive, but not looking to be a mentor or leader either. Very observant, quick to notice and remember details, with an excellent memory for people in particular

Joined up while attending a Hades-Hellmouth game with full understanding and acceptance of the fact that she would eventually die. Maybe didn't expect it to be so soon, but at least she chose her place on the team with full knowledge of what awaited her; the tiger stripes were almost an immediate change upon taking the field, fading in and clearly visible by the end of that first game

She was incinerated because she put herself between an umpire and Elip :) something something Captain Dean only original Tiger left & she made that choice for the health and survival of the team above all else.

I have more thoughts about her rship to the rest of the living Tigers and the dead Tigers in the Hall after her incineration but this is already massive as it is. player whose whole life was shaped by the game and willingly embraced it and it got her twenty-three whole days of play. augh

[fourteenfifteen]

for the blaseball fic rec asks: 8, 10, 14, 21?

ty hayden my beloved !!

8. my favorite fic from the expansion era

hard to pick a number one fave but all my friends are sitting in their graves by rory flavortext completely knocked my socks off the first time i read it. i love how it plays around with formatting and i love the actually idea of it i think it’s sooooo cool

10. a fic about my team

so many options nobody is doing it like the firefighters ❤️ i love robbie babytriumphant’s whole 12x100 series but esp what do you do which is about gita sparrow and which is totally breathtaking. one that packs a crazy punch into such a short piece it’s really great

14. my favorite fic about elsewhere

there’s no weather at all by snips mantisqueer is one that has extremely stuck w me since xe wrote it!! i love the neerie ideas in this fic and i love the spooky memory loss stuff it’s very cool and good

21. a fic about a little-known player

i adore blink marquis’s fic abt conrad twelve, rest my spirit if i can. it is so good. and like it feels like cheating since i love conrad in general but that isn’t even the thing i just think the writing in this fic is excellent and that it plays w surreal stuff in a super cool interesting way. good ass fic

[spiritunwilling]

Three moments in the lives of the Band of Exiles. (Except they play blaseball.)

Some author's notes:

This crossover has been my worst idea yet. I'm very happy with how this turned out tho.

Danie is the name I've decided to give Vassa's successor. I'm pretty sure Ada is the only character in this who is fully not in acotar

As a disclaimer. I wrote this on my phone and did not proofread.

I started this with a "haha what if these kidz paralleled real actual blaseball events" so that's why Jurian's part is Like That. But things went off the rails pretty quickly and I didn't have the heart to do a rewrite.

I wrote a very bad very not thought out very short post of what the history of the world in this au is probably like? You don't have to read it.

They pull him out of the Trench that election. (Which one, exactly? Someone must've told him, but everything in Jurian's head runs together like ruined ink.) Everything is too loud and too bright after years spent in the water. Jurian slowly adjusts his eyes to the newfound light, squinting through his eyelashes and trying to make out his teammate's face.

He'd hoped, in a retrospective way, that the hand that'd pulled him out of the waves had belonged to Miryam. Or Drakon. Any one of the faces that'd flashed across his mind before everything had been heat and flame and dust. As is usual with Jurian (and as is usual with blaseball), he is not so lucky. The person staring at him now is a fresh face, pale in every sense of word. Very definitely fae.

Jurian shuts his eyes again, then carefully opens his right one as wide as he can. He repeats the process with his left eye. Then his right again. The boat and it's occupants fade in and out like a camera lens. Beyond the windows, nothing but ocean stretches in every direction. Jurian grimaces, thinking of the salt still clinging to his skin, and tears his gaze away.

The sky is a sheet of grey, the blanket of clouds scattering light so evenly across that it's almost impossible to tell where the sun actually is. The moment is gone as quick as it comes: even through one eye and a foggy window, Jurian can see the shift. It's another one of those inconceivable things, but the sky goes wrong. Then Jurian blinks, and it's all just clouds. Nobody else seems to have noticed it.

A memory frees itself from the roiling tangle, the sight of umpires changing before his eyes. That same feeling of wrongness, right before he'd burned up. Oh, shit. Jurian scrambles for his wrist, his neck, wherever he can feel his pulse. He takes a breath, feeling the blood racing inside his limbs.

There's something beating inside his chest, something that thumps against his fingertips when Jurian presses them to the base of his skull. There's something in there making noise. He's just not so sure that it's a heart.

-

The first time Lucien feedbacks, it's a relief. General consensus in the league is that, although not an incineration, being torn from your team- your friends -has gotta hurt. Except his brothers were never much of either, so when Lucien feels the static running up his arms, all that he feels is hope.

One second he's here, the next he's across the field in an opposite dugout, twisting at the hem of a green and yellow shirt sleeve. Spring. That's who they were playing. A smaller team without anything particularly eye-catching. Tamlin, their captain, is Lucien's friend and a talented batter, but that's not enough to carry them to the playoffs. Which is fine. Lucien's not playing to win.

"Okay, okay, everyone calm down! Take a moment, I'll do a head count and then we can figure it out from there."

One of the players (Andras, Lucien remembers) raises his voice above the others. Hydrangeas bloom all over Andras' body, violet petals partially obscuring the number 10 on his uniform.

A dryad next to Lucien stands up, hauling him up as well with terrifying ease. "It's Jes! She's gone!"

Lucien tries his nicest smile. "Uh. Hi."

Andras grins back, holding out a hand. Lucien takes it. "Lucien Vanserra, right? Welcome to the Spring Canines."

There's a commotion out on the field as Tamlin gets tagged out. He heads immediately for the dugout, even ignoring Eris' sneer.

"Did something happen?"

"Jes got feedbacked." The dryad, whose iron grip is still around the back of Lucien's shirt, gives him a little shake. "We got this."

Tamlin laughs, hopping over the railing in a single fluid motion. "I think you can let go of him now, Ada. We still have a few games with the Cornucopias, that's probably enough time to put together a sending away for Jes."

Andras chimes in, "figure out what to send over, too, until she has time to come back to pack up during siesta."

"Yeah, yeah that." Tamlin pauses, turning towards Lucien. "Lucien, what do you want to do?"

Lucien almost answers that he's been ready to get out of Autumn for years, that there's a box containing all the things he wants to take with him tucked under his desk. "I can handle the stuff on my end. Don't worry about it."

Tamlin nods. "Let us know if you need anything."

Once, at a postseason party in the Dawn Court, Lucien had found himself capitalizing on the free alcohol with Tamlin, complaining to each other about their shitty families. He wonders what Tamlin thought when they'd all died. If he'd have preferred to feedback away instead. (Maybe not. Tamlin is tied to Spring in a way Lucien cannot fathom for himself.)

They're both out of it now. That thought lifts his heart up as he sinks down onto the bench, tentatively exchanging words with his new teammates. Through the feedback weather, rays of regular sunlight shine into the dugout. A seed takes root.

-

To their credit, at least the blessing had been an accident, a wimdy from way out of left field. Vassa doesn't know how she'd feel if people had been making a collective effort to turn her into.. this. Some fucking stat boost or another, at the small cost of never running the bases with human legs again. Supposedly flaming birds make better batters. ("Never" is an awfully strong assumption in blaseball. Never is for incinerated players, people sent to the shadows with no plans of reemergence. A permanent modification might be an never, but Vassa has no intention of staying like this. It's just going to be a shitty couple of seasons in the meantime.)

Their division had all gathered in their joint castle to watch the election results, like they always did. Vassa, tucked on a couch between Danie and Briallyn, had felt the change and jumped up moments before she burst into flames. At first she'd thought she was being incinerated, but then the flames kept burning. By the time the screaming had stopped- both hers and her friends -there were feathers where her arms had been.

At least she has the nights, Vassa thinks. She's wrapped in Danie's arms now, trying to commit to memory the feeling of being held. As a firebird she's literally untouchable, unless anyone would like to suffer severe burns in the process. Now she leans her head into Danie's chest and spares a glance at the clock.

"Danie. Dan. I think I have to go." Vassa stands, reaching for her jacket.

"Go where?" Danie's voice is spacey in the way it gets when their mind is elsewhere.

"Meeting. With the other division captains. I think it's about the recent blaseball events." Between Feyre's siphons, Jurian's resurrection, and the half a million other things that'd occurred last season, there would be a lot to discuss. "Come with me?"

"Of course." They grin. "Why would I pass up a chance to see Demetra rub that shutout in your face again?"

Vassa rolls her eyes. "Let her. Not like they'll get to do that again."

Danie takes her hand in theirs when they step out under the night sky. It's warm and solid and real, their fingers pressed into the grooves of her knuckles. There are worse ways to be, Vassa decides. And they're going to get rid of the blessing, then Vassa will hug every one of her team members under a clear blue sky. In the meantime, she has this.

[waveridden]

Fandom blorbo thing with blaseball. Bonus points if you fill the entire thing with Lift players

oh that's an excellent challenge i will take you up on that. anyone who wants my all-blaseball answers is welcome to ask for them but i'm starting with lift only

blorbo (favorite): yusef fenestrate by FAR. she is just in my brain

scrunkly (my baby/the cutest): i feel like lift don't have a lot of cute guys but teddy honeywell is a bear so i'll just say teddy honeywell

scrimblo bimblo (underrated fave): [kicking my giant outline for a grollis zephyr s24 fic under the bed] let me get back to you on that--

glup shitto (obscure fave): i actually dearly love freemium seraph. idk if it counts as obscure bc it was an original player but i feel like nobody talks about it. i'll talk about it. if that doesn't count then it's the irm of cicero gubbins who lives in the back of my head but isn't cohesive enough to write about yet. her name is cici she's a british-japanese college student who won a raffle and her prize was she's in the bloodsport now

poor little meow meow (problematic/pathetic fave): aly leaf <3 buzz if you see this it's your fault (this is a good thing)

horse plinko (guy i'd like to torture): i feel like i have to say val specifically because i Have written about him going through so much shit. sorry about the plinko, buddy.

eeby deeby (guy i'd send to superhell): okay fine i'll come in hot on this one. i don't care for quitter. i know they're already in superhell but that is my answer anyways

[lenasai]

🛒✨👀?

🛒 What are some common themes you incorporate into your fics? Themes, feels, scenes, imagery, etc.

sad blorbos get hugs 😌

blaseball is a horror game, and bad things happen to players all the time, so i like to write stories where they get to be sad about that but also they're supported by friends/teammates/etc.

also hoo boy i sure do latch onto characters that are either preoccupied with the past or the future huh

also also if i had a nickel for every time i wrote a long fic that took place in the vault in which two or more players were sad about something and talked about their feelings, i would have two nickels. which is not a lot of nickels but very funny it happened twice.

✨ Give you and your writing a compliment. Go on now. You know you deserve it. 😉

actually you know what, i do! i like my short poetry series a lot, it's fun to go back and read those like "cool, i wrote those!"

👀 Tell me about an up and coming wip please!

surprise(?) it's more blorboposting

okay so someone pointed out during the longest thursday anniversary event that max was up to bat when nines and lev exploded and that one statement lodged itself into my brain and made me absolutely fucking feral

so the whole premise is "what's everyone else doing at the moment someone's getting exploded and what's happening during the rest of those games" and i'm like 5000 words in lmao

did you know ivy pitched four games on days where their siblings got got? did you know they were doing pretty well on day 99 and then gave up four points in one inning after quitter and vi exploded? i think out of everyone, they probably had the worst time, not only by virtue of being one of the survivors but also just...which days they were pitching

other than that i also signed up for the lift fic exchange so...i have some ideas for characters i offered. that's all i can say. it depends on whatever my assigned person wants to read :)

although whether it's for the fic exchange or not i probably will explore [REDACTED] because it's a fun irm

[polyboros]

ohio worms time >:) this is a rundown of the first irm for all (checks hand) thirteen players i’m writing irms for. ves sundae already has two concepts, so both of those will be outlined here. the rest is between me and god (not conceptualized yet)

lenny crumb - ohio state reformatory. normal guy who leads the ghost/paranormal tours at the reformatory & summoned a ghost in the cathedral off hours to play blaseball for nyr. said ghost doesn’t remember jack or shit about nyrself besides being rude and how to play blaseball so ne steals lenny’s pronouns and the first half of nyr name

vessalius sundae v1 - cleveland play house. middle-aged performer who unofficially retired from the stage to become the artistic director for the play house. lived in sarasota fl for some time in the early parts of her career, but moved back to ohio when she was about 30 to be closer to home. joining blaseball was an accident but she’s having fun in the spotlight again

vessalius sundae v2 - dietsch brothers. works at the ice cream counter and the chocolate counter interchangeably. cognitohazard who looks like other blaseball cognitohazards’ original form. has gotten the employee of the month title exactly once

patchwork southwick - lake erie frozen lighthouse. there’s a couple of these but i’d like to imagine in the blaseball universe at least one is just... perpetually frozen, because for the fucking life of me none of the websites i looked at told me if the one i liked WAS always frozen. it is now. lighthouse keeper who either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that their lighthouse is Like This. has a cat. the cat is a ghost. this also goes unaddressed.

xandra pancakes - world’s largest horseshoe crab. realass roadside attraction btw i want to go see it. xandra emerged from the shadows the same election that luis came to the worms, so there’s a “we stole this fake crab from baltimore” kind of vibe going on. crab heist. xandra “carcinized” from the experience and now hosts drag shows at the giant horseshoe crab statue

scratch deleuze - elmore tombstone derby. dlerby, if you will. avid participant in the motorized casket race, and has recently incorporated design elements referencing the dead ohio worms as some kind of memorial. she’s also responsible for dragging the entirety of the worms to turn the stadium into a haunted house attraction every october

cantus hojo - toledo botanical gardens. artist who works with glass & creates sculptures to be seasonally displayed across the gardens. occasionally helps out with the gardens, but has largely lost time for that since joining blaseball; very loudly misses it. some of her creations can be found across the worms’ stadium.

muse scantron - neonworks of cincinnati / american sign museum. makes custom neon signs & helps to repair older ones; since coming back to blaseball from the black hole, they’ve had a pretty long backlog they’re still working through. however, they’ve still managed to find the time to decorate the stadium and their teammates’ livelihoods or homes with custom neon signs on request. they’re reportedly “pretty happy” they got sent to the shadows, as it gives them more time to work on the job they actually enjoy doing

susananana portmanteau - moonville tunnel. train conductor ghost with an accompanying ghost train that picks up “residents” from all parts of ohio who want to try moving on. rumoured to originally be an amalgam of railway workers who died around moonville tunnel, but xe’s never said as much, so it’s anyone’s guess. keeps directing the train to go into lake erie, and frequently tries to aim it directly into the ocean closest to any given away game. xe’s fine. the consistent attack on lake erie means xe has a rivalry with patchwork southwick.

millipede aqualuft - ohio uni in athens. humans vs zombies admin who was participating in a game on the go and was in the wrong place at the very, very wrong time. just some college student. trying to recruit their teammates & other blaseball teams into trying out a leaguewide game on the field (it’d be fun i promise i prommy cmon)

kit ratoon - bill’s donuts. joined the worms’ shadows for a steady supplement to his income so he could pay off student debt, and never really expected to be dragged into active play in the middle of the worst season ever while making a donut delivery to the worms. they do make very good donuts, though.

scoobert toast - columbus park of roses. goes by toast. was visiting the stadium to discuss planting a garden outside the museum with the director there when pudge nakamoto died and they got the call to play. has spent the better part of their life tending to roses, but picked up the basics of blaseball just in time to receive the credit to the team modification. they’ve mostly spent their time since joining trying to grow roses around the stadium and thinking steadfastly about anything except the end of the world, because that’s entirely too out of their paygrade as a gardener. occasionally cut roses they touch turn to gold.

katy cornbread - jungle jim’s international market. employee at a decidedly more omegamart-esque blaseball version of jungle jim’s who joined the ohio worms shadows in season 19 in hopes that she could get the hell out of retail at the weird multiuniverse store with plastic sharks all over the place. got her wish in season 22 but got the subtractor mod in the s22 elections, and worried through the end of the world about being kicked off the team for unrun crimes and having to go back to jungle jim’s

ephraim ladd - i-80 rest stops. heyy look a guy who already has irm i only have to write one for him. formerly a statue that appeared at every rest stop on i-80 in ohio, identical each time besides extremely passable subtle differences, ladd now plays blaseball and all of his movements are telegraphed to the rest stop statues. unsurprisingly this has not made all of the rest stops being identical any less creepy

[leonstamatis]

reasons to vote for jacob/moses/layna in the @blaseballshipbracket :

(listen. I can’t make you do anything. i almost didn’t submit them at all because they won’t make it all the way and it will lowkey devastate me when they lose. i’m not even offering rewards, because i want to save those for the more contentious battles later on. but, yknow, just for kicks, let’s make a case.)

my second-ever blaseball fic was about these three. it was the first ship that i thought of all on my own, and i was very nervous about putting them all out there.

since then, i’ve written 21k across four fics detailing their relationship through pretty much all of blaseball, up til gamma.

they quite literally have everything? i’m not even joking. moses was involved in the masoning before they came to the flowers. layna was on the beams when they fell into the hellmouth. jacob is a good enough player (or was before gamma rerolls) that he would almost certainly have been vaulted or at least gotten ego a couple times if not for the flowers’ insane lineup.

(moses and layna have sucked outrageously for most of their blaseball careers. that’s not related, it’s just infinitely funny to me.)

that’s not even all.

layna was sent over to the garages during an absolutely absurd three way swap in s12. later, while she was there, she also got alternated.

moses was a receiver, was temporary alternated, had an allergic reaction, watched quitter and wyatt mason vi die (while they were echoing elsewhere, actually! it pains me), and then, instead of staticking out, moses themself died! a regular incineration, at random!

jacob was mostly fine during all of this. he doesn’t experience much. that’s what makes him special. but he’s on the magic now! he fell to their shadows. i’ve given him a wizard hat, in my head.

layna was involved in the first major swap of the expansion era, and one of the biggest ones from discipline, too. moses was the first death on the flowers since cali. (it had been a little over ten seasons.) somehow, in picking three largely unconnected names off a roster to write about, i pulled some players who would have a lot of outside significance. (i did not know this at the time; it was season seven.)

there’s even a dramatic breakup at the end. i made a playlist about it. (there are annotations, too! password’s jacoblayna.)

and like look, i’m detailing all of this because I think the gameplay comes first in storytelling. i can talk about moses as a victim of the game and layna as a victim of the game and jacob as an extremely anxious, but largely untouched, guy, watching both of his loved ones experience tragedy over and over beyond any of their control.

but yknow, I think the fic actually explains their dynamic better than i can in a (relatively) brief post giving an overview. so i’m focusing on what happened to them canonically, and in the spirit of irm, allowing your brain to fill in the gaps of what that’s like for people who love each other.

point is, this may not be the layna you know or the moses you know, or even the jacob you know! but they’re good. and if you are undecided (or have perhaps been persuaded), you should vote for ‘em. because they’re good.

[queen-eevee]

⭐ bc I'm obsessed with ur writing I will take any and all rambling 👀👀

!!! JO 😭 Ily this is so sweet, all right I'm just going to do a bunch of quick rambles about albatross because it's still on the brain:

1. Famous' whole "lucky" vs. "unlucky" shtick was actually inspired by Tam's fic distance to measure out, specifically the song that title came from: Where the Lines Overlap! Blink and I were talking one day and ze said ze had chosen that song because of the "no one is as lucky as we are" refrain. The idea of Famous and Lottie being "lucky" really haunted me because like, in a way they are, right? I could go off about Lottie another time but for Famous: they're the last OG tiger standing, they've survived feedback and numerous solar eclipses, they haven't been alternated or blooddrained or shelled—who's as lucky as they are? Except then I started thinking about it and I was like "actually, this is one of the unluckiest bastards I've ever met" and now there's a fic about it :D

2. Even though it started as a scare tactic, I do think making the masks becomes a bit of a ritualistic thing for Famous at some point. They went from making basic masks in the dead player's team colors (like Juan's) to using what they know about these players to influence their designs—like including the iris flowers on Mickey's or using a player's favorite color instead of their teams' (I didn't include it in the fic but Chorby Soul's favorite color is listed on the wiki as chartreuse, so their mask is chartreuse instead of Mills pink/blue). I have a very distinct image in my head of Famous' workshop at the end of Season 24 being just littered with masks from floor to ceiling, the faces of every single incinerated player in all sizes and colors and designs completely engulfing the full length of the room.

Art kids, man, I tell you.

3. Famous' backstory kind of came out of nowhere tbh. It stemmed off of my "lucky" thoughts because I was thinking about how interesting it would be if the whole "lucky" descriptor was actually something Famous used as a more metaphorical mask to prevent anyone from knowing how much damn work they poured into getting to where they are today—into getting recruited for blaseball. The fic originally started with the line "Famous has it easy" and that eventually changed to fit with the fic's theme more, but I think that idea is a part of Famous' persona too. This backstory for Famous isn't one I'll always use, but I loovveee characters that are constantly playing a role in order to hide a vulnerable part of themself. Famous talk about your feelings challenge <3

[charaznablescanontoyota]

okay so i know you havent even published video star yet but uhhhh prerelease directors commentary on the in universe diegetic social media framing if youre feeling it

oh hell yeah i will absolutely talk about this

so r/blaseballsightings was a joke from the crabitat ages ago when we were talking about how funny it would be for people of baltimore to post really banal things on social media like 'brock forbes cut me off on i-83' or 'i saw pedro davids crying in the shark room at the aquarium today' or whatever. @catboydeicide was actually writing a fic entirely through blaseballsightings posts a while ago that i think about All The Time and i knew i wanted [the first fic in video star au] to have little interstitials to signal pov changes like elephant joke had so my first instinct was absolutely reddit threads also due to like. shaq being a streamer and i've joked before about them having their own string of subreddits where people make weird assumptions about their personal life

so there are twitter threads and other subreddits in there too!! blaseballrumors is one and i'll probably eventually get into the shaqattaqconspiracies crowd lmao. a major Thing that gets said right off the bat is that shaq is not actually a huge user of social media themself because despite everything they are very private about their personal life. so a fun thing that some of the interstitials do is like. a fan will frame an event that happened from their perspective and then you'll immediately see it very differently from shaq's pov. it's also really fun to balance fan comments between like 'this is a normal blaseball fan interacting with the game in a sports fan-y way' and 'this is a fan who treats their favorite players like celebrities' and 'this person is just a fan of shaq as a streamer and couldn't care less about splorts'.

parasocial relationships i think about em. also i do have internal lore about which reddit users in the fic are blaseball players posting under sockpuppet accounts but i'll never tell

[callmearcturus]

genuinely curious, because this is a new trend I've noticed with a rising fandom: what do you think of fandoms where the creators do occasionally incorporate fanwork or openly agree or disagree with headcanons? i'm mainly referencing the dreamsmp fandom's.... unique way of creation and interacting with canon and fancanon- you of course don't have to publish this ask now that i've namedropped, but i was just?? wondering basically, after reading ur thots on HS

i have no idea what dreamsmp is so i think you’re safe

I feel like everyone who wants to ~incorporate fanworks~ needs to look at how Blaseball works and follow that. Blaseball is very very bare bones. All the team culture and player bios and artwork of the game comes from fans. The fans also run that shit, and have group brainstorming sessions about what these extra elements should be. I think this creates a trap of One True Fanon shit, where one interpretation gets treated as ‘correct’ but otherwise the system works well enough.

What never and does not ever work is when specific pieces of fanwork/fanon are elevated to canon.

(rest under cut, bc this got long and not everyone wants to hear the post-mortem on HS)

Now there’s two branches of this. One is “the fans noticed something that was already there in the text, so the creators canonized it,” like if a character acts a lil bi, fans notice, and the creators go “yes, and” to that. That’s reacting to what’s already there.

But there’s how HS does it. Detective Pony is technically HS canon now because it’s mentioned in the text now as if it happened. Or the June Egbert thing, which.... oof. To me, I think it’s fascinating to compare and contrast Roxy being trans and the June Egbert thing.

On one hand, Roxy was overwhelmingly headcanoned as a trans woman. Hell, they were my favorite to write that way. The Cursed Podcast had basically an entire fucking episode about Roxy being a trans woman. And then HS goes “actually Roxy is a trans dude, Dirk is transphobic, and Roxy is weirdly, uncomfortably compared to Dave all the time.”

This is.... not great. In a piece of work that is trying (and failing) to be in conversation with fandom (in part bc it was written by people who weren’t involved in the modern fandom (and one who fucking hated fandom)) it comes across as incredibly tone deaf. I am literally nervous about referring to Roxy as ‘she’ even though My Roxy is a trans woman, she always was, and the Epilogues want to play in my sandbox without following my fucking rules.

People have absolutely been harassed for continuing to headcanon Roxy this way. This is the fault of the HS crew for wading into the pool and not following the rules. You can’t just have a “headcanon” when you are posting to Fucking Home Stuck Dot Com with your “““““Fanfic”““““. You literally cannot do that. You have too much social capital in the situation. Anything that Hussie “headcanons” is canon. That’s just it. If he puts it into text, that’s canon baybee!!!! So that team pretending like they are Just Like Us is horseshit.

Then, on the other hand. June Egbert is elevated to canon.... which is.... sigh.

It’s Hussie incorporating queer representation he didn’t actually do for the woke points. There it is. It’s getting the accolades with none of the work. Its disappointing and annoying and on some level feels like fan work, done by people for actual queer rep, is swallowed by a guy that, uh. Does not have the woke points tbh! Who’s handling of trans ness in HS is pretty terrible actually!

I feel like HS is like a perfect encapsulation of all the worst ways to handle fandom and its content and the idea of including it. Every instance of them doing so is busted.

In my opinion, content creators should never pick and choose headcanons to elevate to canon. They should not put down any headcanons, they should not publicly endorse any. It means that there is a One True Headcanon, and if you follow it, you’re a good person, and everyone else? Is going to be harassed and bullied and attacked.

HS did this multiple times! That fucking team kept doing it! They kept throwing logs on that fire, and then acting shocked with the fandom turned even more dramatically toxic. Hey, Kate, when you say “Vriska is trans, was always trans” and that anyone who doesn’t like her is now suddenly transphobic, you fucked up! You have created a new venue for people to be harassed! You did that! Knowingly, openly, with fucking glee! Because now if anyone dislikes your fave, you know the type of push back they will get! Asshole!

In fact, how is it different, when you knowingly separate your text into “Canon” and “THE POST-CANON” (gag) and only include the big character revelation in the latter that most people are not going to interact with, how is that different than Dumbledore Was Gay Actually?

Andrew Hussie didn’t tell that story, they retconned it. And whenever there is pushback, that team just goes “TCH WELL it’s not ACTUALLY canon. We’re writing fanfic, just like you 8) 8) 8)”

sigh. do you know.... what its like to want better rep, and to be handed it, but it’s been injected with poison, and it’s not there for the rep at all, it’s there to score points on the people you hate? like......

LIKE I AM SITTING HERE AND I’M JSUT ANGRY ABOUT IT. at how all this post-canon shit was done to make The Discourse that much worse. how the people who did this just had zero respect for the fandom, despite many of them coming from it. (AND GOLLY DO YOU THINK THAT WAS PART OF THE PROBLEM)

My point is this: Hussie (and his enablers) has a lot of shit to say about fandom, and all of it is outdated, uninsightful, and often openly detrimental to the fandom. There is a fucking reason that the Epilogues were posted on Home Stuck Dot Com with a mock up of the AO3 header..... but not actually on the AO3.

Hussie wants, more than anything, to interact with fandom with its rules, because transformative works are fun! But he can’t. He has too much social capital in the fandom. He cannot just write a fanfic, because anything he writes is canon. That’s the nature of his relationship to the work.

And frankly, Hussie doesn’t want to abdicate that power. He wants to play with the sandbox but still be the king. He still wants to be important. Otherwise, if he were genuinely interested in that kind of participation, he would have posted the Epilogues on the AO3 under a psued. But then he would be just another fan, and we all know how Hussie feels about the fans.

[captainbuzzard]

for the character meme: cudi and/or aly

starting with aly leaf since she's my all-time favorite player, hoo boy apologies because this is going to be a bit long

favorite thing about them: literally everything. she's perfect. she's a transfem mexican american environmental activist who's kinda nerdy, really likes bowser, and is at her core a genuinely kind person! all in all she was just a normal well-adjusted individual, up until the wyatt masoning turned her into a cognitohazard tangle of vines at least. she's been through so much and she's seen/participated in a lot of the most iconic blaseball events, and she ended up dealing with a bunch of the consequences of those more or less on her own. she's not naturally an angry person but there's a lot of frustration and resentment in how the lift traded her away after she shelled some tacos when just a few seasons prior they gave quitter the literal 'trust' will for doing the same. it stung that the team that claims to prize self-improvement had given up on her when at a time that she needed help most, and that was fresh in her mind when the next team she was on was literally waiting for the day she would roam away so they could improve. so many teams had become better because of her absence, she would not roam and let the thieves be yet another one. just. sorry for the paragraph but everything about her arc is so compelling to me. i have written text walls about her arc before, and i will write text walls again.

least favorite thing about them: not enough people care about her!! character-wise, she had a nasty tendency to bottle things up which led to her reaching her breaking point without anyone noticing until it was too late, and she holds a grudge like few people can.

favorite line: "alejandro leaf is the main character of blaseball." aly's just one of the most sentient blaseball players, some notable moments include: her shelling 2.5 former teammates in a single game where she was losing horribly, dying (the first not-unstable pitcher incin since s3) to deprive the thieves of parties because they were waiting for her to roam, holding the record for the most seasons without a natural roam, never haunting during her 2 seasons in the hall, roaming out of the hall to the talkers to pick up an evolution during their 9-pitcher season, and immediately roaming to the fridays to die again.

brOTP: i have a real soft spot for aly and yusef's friendship. i just think they get along well. at some point i started a comic about them meeting up in the horizon but put it down and haven't picked it back up yet.

OTP: i don't actually have a present-day pairing i like for her? i do think she dated baldwin breadwinner in s1-3 but that fell apart after the wyatt masoning, and she dated zack sanders for a while before the snackrifice but it ended (on good terms) during the grand siesta. i don’t thing she’s been in the right mental state for dating for a while now though.

nOTP: for their sakes i hope jt and aly are never on the same team again, last time they were on the lift together they both ended up bringing out the worst in each other and shelling ppl for the first time.

random headcanon: sometimes i think about her looking up to her older cousins who lived nearby when she grew up. one of them definitely was the reason she realized she was trans. on a different note, i think a lot of her youth ended up getting somewhat overwritten by the wyatt masoning so there would just be these moments where she almost remembers something that never technically happened.

unpopular opinion: she got reverted to her pre-plant form after dying for the first time. i still love plant aly, but most important blaseball events in her life have all been tied to physical transformations and a quasi-reset just makes a lot of sense for how i personally see this part of her story. someone once compared her first death to how some seeds need fire to germinate and i just think about that sometimes.

favorite picture of them: after all this time i still love her wiki header image, the day x TLOPPS card Kay did is one of my favorites from that deck, and i went wild when i saw this tarot card by birbteef.