#my friend threatened to cancel me on twitter over this

[joypendants]

born again: jesus edition! birthed from the jesussy!

[34saveme34]

SMG34: The Rot (a fic by yours truly)

image semi related

summary: 3 gets told to come and investigate this thing called "The Rot" in a forest, so him, 4, Meggy, Mario and Boopkins (surprisingly) set out to check it out, although things get a little odd as the Rot's influence gets to our favourite man. Sure wonder what'll happen to him!

word count: 5722

3 wasn’t happy he got roped into this. However he owed this one… he owed this one to Meggy. He hated how the closer he became to 4’s crew they only seemed to able to collect more firt on him. Although he didn't know how she could get her hands on his online activity on such forums, he thought he was better this time at covering his tracks…At least he wasn’t alone, a few others came along, like 4, Boopkins and Mario.

It was… a hike. Through the forest. Meggy had seen strange sightings and wanted to bring along others as well. This worried 3 because he really really didn’t want to break his streaming streak. He had been doing so well, having a schedule and everything and of course as soons as he got on track, someone had to come in and ruin it. This always happened so it didn’t surprise him too much but he was mad about it either way.”

However, Meggy agreed with him that he could stream this, it would be especially cool if they were to find something interesting, as if they were ghost hunters. At least something 3 can look forward to. Things that could make his streaming careers more successful always had an easier time persuading him. And he knew that, he wasn’t happy about it, but it was just a fact of life. Just like how he knew how close he grew to 4. It was hard to deny, he really cared about him. Though sometimes, scratch that, just about all the time, he made it really hard to do so. He didn’t remember a prolonged peaceful time with him. Something always has to happen, with the tension they developed over the years. But honestly, who could blame them for that?

Something that Meggy forgot to do among all things she should’ve done, was ask the others if they’re okay with the livestream. It’s really not the greatest thing to argue about on live.

��I don’t wanna have the pressure of invisible eyes on me while I don’t even know what I’m facing!” 4 whined, he looked a bit scared.

“Finally, I can add more to my smg4 fail compilation, you better not disappoint” 3 giggled, making 4 groan.

“It’s not funny, you know! Also I'm just as capable to embarrass you as well! I know what you are”

“Oh, you bastard? Are you threatening me? Right in front of my viewers?? I’ll get you cancelled on Twitter for this one!”

“Not Twitter, god no, though I bet they would like some things I have a hold of myself, like that search query you did concerning-” 4 smirked at 3, seemingly the 2 were just about to fight before Meggy pulled them apart.

“Okay, guys, that’s enough! Let’s get going”

“Oooooh” Mario pouted, putting down the popcorn he pulled out of nowhere. He loved to watch his guardians fight for such low stakes. There was something special about the ones making him dance like a clown dance for him on their own volition. 

“So what are we looking at anyways?” Boopkins asked, looking scared.

“I… can’t say. I think you have to see it yourself to believe it. Although I just like to call it the rot.”

“Th… The rot?” my guy was shaking. Boopkins, what the hell, you just got here.

“Why are you here anyways? No naptime for you?” Mario teased him. 

“Umm no… I just wanna try and get braver! So I can be there for my friends even more!”

“Aww, yea yea now let’s get going!” Meggy truly had enough with the banter. But would it be a real live stream if it started smoothly?

They started walking, with Mario and Meggy in the lead, with Boopkins not too far behind them. However 3 and 4 were at the back, not much further but they definitely weren’t as close to Boopkins as he was to Mario and Meggy.

3 turned his camera at 4 which made him frown.

“What, am I that interesting? Am I getting views for you?” 4 whined sarcastically, he didn’t feel like being on a stream right now. Especially since this expedition pulled him away from meme creation. As in his one and true love!

“Well, you might! Just do something embarrassing, that’d definitely work!”

“Like what, tell them about when we were younger I busted you in the toilets with-” 4 got slapped before he could answer. 

3 wasn’t having any of it.

“Very mature of you to bring up the past, really, classic SMG4”

“At least I didn’t like, I don’t know, try to kill people”

“Don’t you have a body count higher than zero?”

“You… can’t prove that. Besides I bet you killed more!”

“And that’s in the past, you know? Besides, being an ex villain makes me hotter, just ask my fans”

4 looked so done with 3, especially after he showed his chat filled with overflowing thirsty support for his post villain self. 3 loved the reaction, it was like warming him up from the inside. Although he would like it better if his charisma was more appreciated by his guardian partner. 

“Aaah yes, so hot twitch streamer, Super Meme Guardian 3, I could never compare” 

3 laughed and looked at his chat then frowned. This surprised 4 a bit, especially since 3 decided to face his camera ahead again, to record where they’re actually walking. 3 sighed, which held 4’s attention longer than it should have.

“What’s up?” 4 asked quietly.

“Not much… just a cringe comment I didn’t like” 3 basically brushed him off. It seemed he didn’t want to go into it so 4 left him to it. It had been hard, but 4 had been trying to pay attention to when he needed to stop. He had been getting to a point where he could tell that he shouldn’t bother 3 further. It became mildly easy as he noticed how much of an open book 3 is. Just push the correct buttons and you get him all wrapped within your grasp. Like to do your bidding and stuff. 4 considered 3 a great ally and he used him a lot as well. Although he still cared about him a lot. Sometimes he wondered if 3 realised that. He just didn’t really know how to be affectionate towards 3. Whenever he tried to be serious about it, it kind of fell apart. Wanting to be kind towards him in hard situations, like when they were stuck in the elevator, yet he was met with hostility. The whole situation reminded him of a cold, snowy day as well. He shook his head hard, he didn’t need that thought right now. 3 looked at him confused, then saw how 4 was looking in the distance, and sadness he forgot to hide still showing. 3 passed his camera to Boopkins for a bit.

“Can you hold this for me for a bit?” 3 reached to Boopkins who took the camera gently with a smile. Since he helped him out with the date with M… Mi… Micheal? What was it again? He felt a bit more tolerable. Not by much though.

“Sure thing!”

Although the camera looked a little funny in his hands, considering how the camera was like third his size.

4 paid attention to this, a bit confused at what 3 was doing. He did find Boopkins struggling to carry the camera a bit funny though.

“So” 3 pulled 4 close by his back, wrapping his arm around him, continuing in a hushed tone “What’s the gloom for? It’s super obvious and it bothers me so that’s why I’m bothering you about it”

4 chuckled.

“I’m glad you care. That’s all I needed actually” 4 showed a genuine smile to 3 which left him speechless. 4 could see he made 3 a bit flustered, maybe a bit more than just a bit…

It’s like he was buffering or something.

“Ugh” 3 pulled away “Your sweetness makes me sick, god damn it… baka”

Slowly Mario turned around, pulling out a tiny rainbow flag.

“This you?” he pointed at the 2.

3 was too shocked to react, 4 threw a loose branch at him which got into his eye. Mario started screaming in his iconic way. Meggy slapped him into a new shape.

“Shhh!!! Don't disturb the wildlife, idiot!”

Mario whined quietly, removing the tiny branch from his eye. Just as he removed it, he basically forgot it was there, as he continued frolicking.

3 finally took his camera back from Boopkins.

“Finally, my arms were starting to get tired!” Boopkins sighed with relief. 

Meggy turned to him although still walking.

“I could coach you to get stronger”

The relief quickly flew out of Boopkins, rather replaced with a pale expression.

“I hope I don’t hurt you with this, but I’d rather not if it’s okay”

“Your loss” Meggy shrugged.

As they continued, they started to find traces of the so-called Rot.

“This energy feels familiar” 3 exclaimed.

“Same here…” 4 added, as he exchanged a glance with 3. 

“That’s a good thing! Any idea what we could be dealing with then?”

“So…” 4 started “It could be a new meme. Although I… don’t remember ever seeing it before”

“The name rot does fit it though” 3 continued “You think it could do with all the memes people used to make about bogs?”

“That’s a nice thought! Or maybe one of those nature allegory memes that sometimes pop up… most of the time from Tumblr”

“Ah right, Tumblr, this could be one of their creations”

“I thought Tumblr was dead” Meggy looked behind at the 2 as they continued on, seeing more rot on the trees and in the ground. It seemed they were getting closer and closer to the core of it.

“That’s what they all think” 3 and 4 said at the same time, then laughed at how in sync they were.

“What is tumblr?” Mario asked. The others looked at him with a knowing look. He deflated, seeing no one wanted to elaborate.

While the lighthearted banter they got into was nice, 3 couldn't shake off the tension he was feeling. Probably thanks to 4. He didn't like how his mind went for the worst when it came to him. He tried to concentrate on the task on hand, the sooner it was over, the sooner he could escape.

As they continued on, 3 was starting to feel a headache get to him. It was starting to be a bit difficult holding the camera. He tried so hard to be there but it felt like slowly everything was slowing down around him. He looked ahead… then he found himself staring at 4, getting even slower, blurrier, slowly things becoming less and less comprehensive, yet he could still feel in his heart just how worried 4 was. It felt… nice. He was glad 4 cared about him. Then everything went black. At least mostly. He was stuck in a weird state, still lightly aware of his surroundings, as he could feel himself falling over, then being grabbed and held close… Held close…? What for?

He lightly managed to open his eyes and tried to perceive the world around him, although it hurt him. It was difficult, but he figured out he was stuck in 4’s arms. Not exactly somewhere he wished to be while in a state like this. He kind of imagined feeling this sick while being cared for in his bed. Thinking about it… he wouldn’t mind 4 being there then. But this is just… embarrassing… He really hoped the stream wasn’t getting any of this… He already saw that one comment referring to 4 and him in weird ways and he didn’t like that. He felt uncomfortable on 4’s behalf as well. Who knows how hard his fans would tear him apart if they knew that he and 4 need to hold hands to use their meme guardian powers. It made him think about how he would even handle having a relationship like this. Either he would have to hide this person even if he was proud of pulling a bad bitch or have them be on display but risk the parasocial freaks coming in and ruining his dating life. He wasn’t new to the parasocial rodeo at this point, he knew about the sexyman allegations. Though it’s not like he wanted a relationship right now anyways. He liked to joke about getting bitches but he really just did that because he felt humiliated at the thought that he couldn’t pull anyone. He closed his eyes, trying to close out the sight that was 4 carrying him. That’s not to say he was fully against it but he won’t admit that so soon. But as he closed the sight out, he could hear words better.

“Homo…” he could hear Mario start then if he was guessing right, he got slapped since he stopped speaking.

“Well I’m not just gonna drag him by the foot, that would be cruel” he could hear 4 retort at the homosexual allegations.

“Is he gonna be okay?” Meggy asked, concern in her voice. 3 was kind of glad he had friends that cared for him. He wished he could say that without getting embarrassed. He hoped that they knew about it at least a little bit, as much as he could hint. But not too much, their annoying asses didn't deserve to see THAT much of him.

“I think so” 4 said “But he’s definitely not streaming like this, can we turn it off?”

“Well if you insis-” Meggy started.

“Nnnn…nnooooo… ss… stream…” 3 tried to get it out, the words small and weird. But they were heard. He didn’t like ending streams so suddenly. He’d rather die on camera than suddenly end a stream.

He heard 4 chuckle.

“Look at him, even in this state, he cares about his fans”

“How nice of him” Boopkins spoke up.

“I can see said fans are feeling the same way!” Meggy chuckled “It seems a lot of people are interested in what’s up here anyways so… for 3!”

“For 3!” both 4 and Boopkins cheered. 

If 3 was fully there, he would be so embarrassed. He’d hate it. He’s starting to like this… as if he’s looking in from the outside, not subject to the actual affection of his friends yet still being the subject of it. Unbeknownst to him, he was smiling about this in 4’s arms, who noticed so. But didn’t dare comment on it. Who knows how his insane fans would treat it. Although he couldn’t just go without letting 3 know, if he could hear him.

“If you only looked this cute while conscious” 4 chuckled into 3’s ear. It sent a jolt through 3’s body, but still not enough to get him out of his state. So it was all still energy, so much, as if continuously zapping his mind. What the FUCK did 4 just say?? HIM??? CUTE??? Well, he was handsome but CUTE??? HIM??? No way, 4 didn’t know what he’s talking about. Yet the words rang in his mind, foreverly so, not leaving him. Like a forever moment. Feeling obsessed with it, even if he didn’t want to be. It made him feel so warm. Like he could feel it physically now. He heard 4 chuckle, unsure where to put it, it only made him feel weirder. It was like 4 had his fingers wrapped around him in a mental sense as well, whatever he would say, he wouldn’t be able to escape. It was… weird feeling this vulnerable.

Slowly he stirred more in 4’s arms. Still remaining as calm as he could manage, to not disturb 4 too much. He was actually kind of comfortable. Not like he’ll say that out loud. Maybe he’ll write it down in his notebook later. It had been a great source of coping for him. Writing about the things that made him feel feelings usually made them easier to digest. He looked up at 4 with half lidded eyes, he seemed so… focused. He noticed then 4 looking down, which surprised him a bit. 4 smiled, then looked to the side.

“It seems he looks a bit better now”

“That’s good! Makes me feel less bad about how we keep on going”

“We should stop for a bit though… my arms are standing to get tired… he isn’t exactly light”

“...Bitch” 3 muttered, first coherent thing he said since falling over like a log.

Everyone kind of laughed about it.

“Mario agrees!” Mario stopped and immediately whipped out his pocket spaghetti. Who knows how long that’s been there. He seemed to be happy to eat it either ways.

They all laid down for a bit, 4 laying 3 down as well then sat beside him. He really just decided to sit beside him. Maybe he really did care.

3 reached up, as best as he could as he regained his strength, reaching to 4. 4 looked at his hand a bit confused, then decided to hold it, not really understanding what 3 wanted.

“Pfft… sure whatever”

“What?” 4 asked but 3 only rolled his eyes in response.

“Guess you don’t need it then”

4 took his hand away. 3’s smile lightly faded away but not too much. He didn’t want it to be too obvious that he was disappointed about that. He wasn’t even sure how to explain that he was disappointed. He just knew that it meant a lot to him that 4 did that. He never imagined he would get so weak about him. Weak about whatever 4 directed his way.

Let it be his insults or the looks he could give him when he showed he cared. He wanted to have him whole, with all those silly little intricacies that made him who he was, even his cringe memes. Never did he care so much for someone in his life… What… What did he mean by this? Oh… OH… no… not here… not now… why couldn’t this happen at like- a more appropriate place- somewhere without 4 preferably- Well, the world is cruel to him so now he had to keep himself together in this damned situation.

He slowly sat up, not really looking at anything. He slowly breathed in, then out, slowly calming the nerves that scream about what’s boiling underneath his skin, his mind. His feelings were. Restless.

“Are you okay, 3?” Meggy turned to him, with a soft, understanding smile.

“So-so… could be better” 3 smiled back, which surprised Meggy a little.

“Do you remember what happened?”

“Not much… But…” 3 took all the strength in himself, all his emotional strength “I think the rot feeds on… frustration? I think, or anger.. I remember feeling sort of angry before… since a certain someone here can be such a piece of ass here” 3 said as he directly looked at 4.

“Did you hear what I say to you? If so, right now I’m really meaning it”

“Asshole…”

“What did you say to him?” Meggy asked, a bit suspiciously.

“That’s between us” 4 said, as he got up “We gotta keep moving anyways, I can feel how close we are”

“Yeah… let’s” 3 slowly got up, stretching his back, being held for a bit there made his back feel like a quirky little snake. The slightly loud pop from his back made Boopkins jump.

Mario looked at the 2, a big big grin that kept getting bigger.

“Hmmmmmmmmmmmm” he teased the 2, just even with his menacing Mario gaze.

3 and 4 exchanged glances.

“Home of sexual” Mario claimed, with the same big grin. 4 was ready to throw hands but 3 just got up and started walking. This shocked both but especially Meggy.

“I have no power or need to feel angry right now let’s just go, I’ll feed him bombs when we get back” 

“Feeding time?” Mario looked on with great interest, his selective hearing deciding to focus right on the word ‘feed’ “Does Mario get his spaghetti?”

“Later, red, we have a mission on our hands right now”

As Meggy spoke, 3 realised his camera was in Meggy’s hand. He quickly took it back, Meggy barely realising it was taken from her.

“What’s up, chat! I live! I could never leave a stream interrupted, all of you know I’m stronger than that so I’m here again!” he marched on, with a big smile on his face. This surprised the others, especially 4 and Meggy as they looked at each other then followed after him, with Boopkins hurrying after them with his short legs. Mario shrugged, quickly forgetting about food as he followed behind them a bit delayed.

“Oh thanks for the bits! As for your question, we’re looking into something geniusly named the rot!.... ‘Is it really named the rot?’ It wasn’t named by me, I would’ve given it a better name, like forest meme fungus parasite or something like that”

“That’s actually kind of lame” 4 said.

“I agree actually” Meggy added.

Boopkins looked too concerned to end up on either sides.

“Whatever… ‘How far is it? We’ve been here for a while’ I think we’re getting closer! As you can see the trees look much different here” he put his hand against a tree, which leaked weird residue “AAAAH EWW EWW WHAT THE HELL”

4, Meggy and Mario laugh at him.

“Stuuu-piiiid” Mario keeps laughing.

3’s eyes twitched, but he was keeping his cool.

“And I think this isn’t even the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen him do!” 4 said.

Oh 4. His sweet prince. He’s done it. Truly. 3 slowly looked at him, 4 started to look scared. 3 ran at him, camera still in his hand, getting the weird liquid on him as well.

4 looked offended to hell, heaven and purgatory, he was NOT letting this go so easily. He grabbed a bit of rot as well and threw it at 3.

Mario clapped, the clowns are dancing again. Boopkins hid behind Meggy, who didn’t look very satisfied with Mario.

But, oh, if she didn’t pay attention to him, she would have realised that the ground was moving, but she only noticed when it was already pulling 3 and 4 down, and fast at that.

“4!!! 3!!!” Meggy cried out, trying to reach into the rot to no avail. It seemed she couldn’t get into it like those 2 managed to. 

“Oh nooo” Mario genuinely got sad as he got down beside Meggy.

“What do we do now?” Boopkins went there last, although just as concerned as the other 2.

“I don’t know… the best we can do is… I think we should go back and get some tools! Maybe we can dig them out. Hopefully before the sun sets” Meggy proposed her idea, the other 2 nodded as they got up and started to run back, although not too fast to preserve stamina. They’re gonna NEED it.

3 and 4 laid there, underneath for a bit. It took a while until one woke up, which was 4. They were on top of each other, which he wasn’t too thrilled about. Though, to his horror, he couldn’t get up. He was stuck to him like this. At least it was just by their waists mainly… Who was he kidding, that’s probably the worst place to get stuck at, hands were way better, he’d rather have a week of that than this! He looked around, seeing that the place wasn’t big anyways. It was kind of dark, only illuminated by the rot’s faint blueish-green glow. What a weird way for a meme to manifest. At this point he was pretty sure it was a meme, although a powerful one. It seemed it had a strong staying power, one he hadn’t seen in a while. Another sign that it could be from Tumblr. He never liked Tumblr memes, they were always weird and hard to deal with. Since 3 was still not awake, 4 couldn’t channel the meme away either, 3 had to be at least awake for that. At least it was calm. He decided to pay attention to 3’s face. Just like before, he looked so peaceful. Although he could appreciate the energy he brought, he sometimes wished 3 could direct energy like this at him. He smiled, glad that he could get something like this to happen, although he’s still not very happy about the situation. As 4 looked around again, he noticed the lightly damaged camera, directed at them, still on. 

“Ah” was all that was left in his mouth, as he went a bit pale, knowing what they were doing was broadcasted to many people. He got on 4s, in an uncomfortable way, considering he was still stuck to 3 and reached for the camera. 

“Ummm… Hello, SMG3 viewers” 4 started awkwardly “I’d like to say thank you for all of you being here. Especially thank you for motivating us to go forward. I think I know what we will have to do with this so-called rot… But I will end stream here, it’s been a good run, thank you all for coming” 4 smiled at the camera and waved before turning the broadcast off.

That was when 3 stirred.

“Nggghh…” 3 looked up, having to blink a few times to see what the fuck is going on, kind of not believing his eyes, as he could feel his ears and face heat up.

“OI WHAT THE FUCK DUDE” 3 flipped, literally flipped, thinking they could separate but instead they fell over together, now with 3 on top, and their faces getting a bit too close from the velocity. 3 got distracted for a second. 4 took a bit before he returned the favour, as 3’s careless outburst only served to make him angrier. And so they got into a cycle of throwing each other but the bond on them still not budging. 

“Why must you be such a bitch,,” 4 whined as 3 tried his best pulling 4 off of his waist, but he only bounced back, their foreheads meeting. which made both yelp in pain.

“FUCKING CHRIST” 3 cried out.

“DUMBASS” 4 cried back at him.

3 tried to calm himself down as he looked around, seeing his camera which was turned off.

“Did… the camera break?”

“No… I” 4 realised he might not live “turned off the stream” his words were small.

3 slowly turned to him, his face the reckoning, judgement upon him, all in a pair of eyes that belong to his meme guardian partner.

“You… did… what?” 3 leaned closer to him, it would’ve been an understatement to call his vibes menacing.

“I-I” 4 trembled under 3’s gaze.

“You don’t SIMPLY end my stream”

“I said goodbye!!”

“And?”

“I thanked them for being here!!”

“...”

4 looked scared as hell, his puppy eyes coming out, begging for forgiveness. Those eyes hit 3 square in the heart.

“Shit.. whatever I guess, I’ll let you be about it”

“Oh, thank you thank you” 4 hugged him, 3 could only roll his eyes.

3 tried to get up again, and maybe stand up right if everything goes well.  And as he did, it seemed to be really hard for their faces to not be close. It was starting to frustrate both of them. Slowly, they both stood on their feet, although still stuck to each other. That’s when 4 remembered.

“Hey, wait, we can channel the rot away! You can feel its meme energy too, right?”

3 looked up, then nodded. 4 grabbed both of 3’s hands. 3 was sort of distracted by the whole thing. He didn’t like being so close so soon. He wanted to have at least a little bit of time to process his feelings. 4 noticed that, as they weren’t as efficient as they were supposed to be.

“3!! What’s with you??”

That seemed to snap 3 out of it, who looked to the side, a powerless sigh escaping his lips.

“I can’t explain”

“WHAT do you mean you can’t explain?? Let’s just get out here!! Don’t you want to get out??”

“I-... of course I do, you think I’m stupid?”

“Well, you’re looking very stupid right now, not channeling yourself!”

“Don’t you… don’t you see…? We’re just… a bit too close for my taste” 3 looked down, feeling ashamed. He didn’t want it to be true but it was, tears welling up in his eyes.

“What do you-”

“IT- IT WOULD BE SO MUCH EASIER IF YOU WEREN’T RIGHT IN MY FACE” 3 cried, tears rolling down his face “YOU think I WANT TO BE HERE?? I’D RATHER BE ETERNITIES AWAY FROM YOU RIGHT NOW” those tears just wouldn’t stop.

“THEN FUCKING CHANNEL, YOU BITCH, THEN YOU CAN GO”

“FUCK YOU”

“WHAT”

4 let go of 3’s hands, now pissed himself, both of them pissed in fact.

“BITCH” 3 added.

“WHY YOU-” 

And they started throwing hands, fighting again. Which fell to an abrupt end, as 4 held 3 against a wall of rot.

“WHY CAN’T YOU JUST CHANNEL”

“I FEEL STUPID WITH YOU”

“YOU’RE CALLING ME STUPID?” 4 leaned closer to 3, who seemed to feel more ashamed than ever, as if he said something sacred, as if he sinned.

“Ju… just sh-.. shut up already, fuck..” 3 could feel his heart twist. 3 looked at 4 slowly, cautiously sadness pouring out from his eyes. He couldn’t hide it. He felt ashamed but he knew no other way out.

“3… 3 I’m…” 4 returned to a softer gaze.

“Are you stupid? I said…” once again, 3’s heart, it couldn’t take it “I feel stupid WITH you”

“Wh… What?”

“You really are stupid…”

4 didn’t look amused.

“So you called me stupid anyways”

“YOU-” 3 clenched his fists, trying his best to hold back from screaming at 4 again “You just… don’t seem to understand. And… I don’t know if I’m… shameless enough to just tell you everything…”

4 could feel something in his heart now as well. He didn’t understand what was going on. 

“I’m… sorry”

“Oh? What did you say?”

“I said that I’m sorry…”

“Can you say it again?” 3 looked at him with a little evil grin, although still strained from the emotions he was feeling. It was obvious to 4. He gave him the stink  eye then moved one of his hands to pet 3’s head.

“Can a man not be sorry?” 4 joked, which kind of worked, although the head pat flustered 3 a bit.

“Shut the fuck up”

“Sheesh”

3 giggled, seemingly calming down a bit.

“Let’s just get this over with, 3? You did say you wanted to be gone from me” although 4 would usually hide his feelings better, he sounded more sad than he should have.

3 couldn’t help but smile.

“So you DO care, huh?”

“I- of course I do, you’re one of my bestest friends!! I wouldn’t wanna stay away from you”

“Right right…friends… “ 3 looked down, he couldn’t bring himself to be angry anymore. He was tired.

“Wait you- you don’t mean…” 4 stared at 3, who wouldn’t dare look back. Although, it was hard avoiding him when they’re stuck by the waist. 

Suddenly a lot of things started to make sense to 4. Memories flashing by him, as he looked at 3, looking back at everything. The things he would feel with him. More than just the meme energy they could channel together, there was way more there, more than he ever realised. They way he just… my god… The realisation hit him like a car crash. 

“I’m in love with you??” 4 spoke confused, 3 looked at him confused.

3 couldn’t bring himself to words, he could only look back at 4. 3 knew his heart was flying sky high though, with his face feeling god awfully warm too. After the confusion wore off, 4 smiled, kind of coming to peace with it. Skipping a few stages of grief there, huh?

“Let’s get out of here, 3” he grabbed his hands, once again, although softly. 

The 2 look at each other for quite a long moment, as they slowly channel the meme energy, yet they can’t help thinking: this is not enough. It’s kind of weird how they both leaned in at the same time, sharing a power shattering kiss that vaporized all the rot out of existence, even the thin layer that made them stuck. Although they were still stuck in the hole that the rot dug out. They looked up, finally seeing the outside world. It was a sight they didn’t think they’d miss so much. Ironically to what 3 was saying before, he didn’t seem to want to let go of 4. 4 didn’t mind that. 

“Hey” 3 spoke awkwardly “Just saying if you’d like to kiss me again, you’re totally allowed to” 

4 smiled brightly as he took on the request, melting into 3’s touch in the process. Nothing was perfect and wonderful sunshine forever rainbow though so…

“Guys, we’re- oooooooh” Meggy stopped as she noticed the 2.

“We’re here we’re- OOOOOOOOOH” Mario piped up even louder.

“What’s with the- WOAAAH” Boopkins seemed to be the most surprised. He didn’t even see it coming.

The 2 idiots finally noticed the outrage their homosexual activity made happen.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP” 3 yelled at them.

“Yeah you tell them!!” 4 cheered him on. 

The 3 other idiots, who patiently pulled them out of the hole could barely wait to ask about everything. What happened in there? Are they Homo Sex now? (A Mario original question) Most importantly: are they okay?

“None of you speak of what you saw” 3 pointed at Meggy, Mario and Boopkins. Boopkins and Meggy nodded, while Mario had different intentions. He was going into his usual devious Mario smile. 

“Mario” 3 looked at him with violent intent.

“Hee hee hee”

“Mario, he’s serious” 4 added, also ready to throw hands.

Mario took a few seconds then suddenly took off.

“MARIOOO”

“GET BACK HERE”

“MARIO MUST SHARE WORD OF THE GAY”

And so they couldn’t catch him, now everyone knew that his guardian partners were also romantic partners now. A beautiful ending <3.

---

Hope this was enjoyable! It is my first fic with this series so obviously it's not perfect. Fun fact! I wrote this in one night.

I may possibly have more ideas but nothing too concrete yet oopsie

[chalkrevelations]

There are things I say to my partner in the privacy of our living room when I’m blowing off steam that I would never in my life say to friends or other family members or bosses or work colleagues or fellow community members. I do this not because I’m two-faced but because I’m human. I get frustrated, but I’m also a grownup who realizes that my frustrations and fears in that moment are not the entirety of who I am. I have a right to express them, but I do not have the right to inflict them on the people who would be hurt by them. That’s why those conversations happen in private, in a safe space of trust, where my relationship allows me to show my partner parts of me that aren’t perfect and allows my partner to show me that I don’t have to be perfect in order to deserve to be cared about. I get support through my petty moments until I can be a better person.

This latest attack on Build is a horrifying violation of privacy and trust that leaves me feeling literally nauseated. I once again reiterate that I don’t trust third-hand amateur fan translation to be accurate and contextual, particularly given the provenance of the material, but Build himself is apparently distressed enough by at least some part of the material to make a public apology. So, that being out there, I will say: This was a private matter that should have stayed private, out of respect for everyone involved. Whatever was actually said is nobody’s business except Build’s and now, unfortunately, any named individuals who this was inflicted on and who may have been hurt by it. Which, rest assured, was the intention - to hurt not only Build with this, but also, particularly, Apo and Bible, both of whom Poi has shown her dislike of and ill-will toward in the past. I suspect some people also don’t know how abuse works, and it shows, given that what was purportedly said is a reflection of Poi’s own views back at her.

Whatever the context, I see that purity cancel culture still insists on freezing people in amber in their worst moments - without recognition of any capacity for change or growth - as long as it provides ammunition for a smug, gleeful Particicution. You’re stuck on some unkind things Build supposedly said more than a year ago? Let me tell you what I’ll remember for the rest of my life: The small, broken sound of Build’s voice just a few months ago as he tried to protect Bible and Bible’s career from a sociopath, in a telephone call that he felt he needed to secretly record as evidence of how he was being manipulated and abused.

Meanwhile, I see that swathes of KP fandom continue to be complicit in Poi’s campaign of public and dehumanizing abuse of him, which now includes not only borderline revenge porn, but separating him from his friends and isolating him. This is what abuse looks like. It’s happening in front of your eyes. Do you even care? Do you actually, legitimately care about abuse, or is it just a tool for you to use to win petty shipwars and make yourself feel righteous? Because here it is. Take a good look. This is a textbook play. And if you’re participating in reposting those screenshots of private conversations and mocking Build’s relationships and spreading vituperative language about him and acting like he deserves to have his life and career destroyed, you’re enabling an abuser. You are aiding and abetting her, as the very scenario she threatened him with - in order to maintain access to him, to keep him under control and compliant - continues to get spun out. YOU are a bully and a hypocrite and an abuser, helping to prove that the most dangerous time for an abuse victim is when they leave.

But I guess some victims do have to be perfect, huh?

.

(ETA: 7/18/23, 1520 - This post is being linked on Twitter by @cherryluminary with my permission. I'm not over there, but I increasingly feel like it's important to name what's happened, and continues to happen, to Build online as what it is - abuse. Similar to to my last post that breached containment, I'm going to ask people to remember that the behavior of Build's fans reflects on him - however fair that may or may not be - and should remain above reproach. I understand being angry - I'm angry, and at more people than I've discussed publicly, at this point. But if I find out you've been descending anywhere near the level of the ugly little sociopath in my inbox who openly admitted they want Build to kill himself, I'll block you.)

[kangshxrtie]

ch. 7 ⤍ calvin klein

you were laying in bed scrolling through twitter and posting on twitter. you had been laying there for almost three hours now when you got a facetime from kazuha.

"KAZUHA!" you greeted excitedly only showing your forehead on the camera.

"hey" unlike you kazuha was already up, dressed, and at her desk with her phone balancing on it. "did i wake you? sorry i thought you were up"

"no" you shook your head, "i need to get up now i've been on twitter the whole morning"

"i saw" she chuckled.

"oh you saw that..." you slowly set your phone down leaving it to look at the ceiling going to scream into your pillow.

kazuha just laughed in response and once you were done screaming you picked up your phone like nothing just happened, greeting her again. "so how's your morning so far?"

"it was great. woke up to some great compliments, really felt the love" she responded.

"that's great. glad i could make your morning great" you grinned sitting up in your bed.

"i would ask how yours was but i can already tell by this call"

"why are you even up so early? we had the same night last night"

"i have to edit and post some videos to my channel. you make an appearance by the way"

"oh, did you do me justice"

"you'll have to watch it and see" kazuha grinned.

"please spoil it" you begged.

"my reacting to seeing you for the first time is in there" she told you.

"wait there's a clip! why haven't i seen it?"

"sakura recorded it. it wasn't on live"

"now i'm scared" you said nervously.

"don't be it's a good reaction. i didn't know i was on camera so mine is more embarrassing than yours, trust" kazuha laughed.

"i get to see kazuha down bad" you exclaimed, "and for me, it's the best day of my life. i can die peacefully now"

"i can't wait to film this video with you" she said.

"already can't wait to see me again?" you raised your eyebrow at her.

"oh definitely i haven't stopped thinking about you since i first met you" she said sarcastically.

"i knew it, you're obsessed with me already" you joked.

"definitely" she joked back.

"i'm obsessed with you too kazuha if that makes you feel better" you said.

kazuha suddenly hid her face before saying, "glad the feelings mutual"

you looked at the time seeing it was almost 2:00 in the afternoon, "well i should probably get up now"

"yeah, and i have to finish editing this video, i'll talk to you later" kazuha waved goodbye.

"bye bye kazuha" you hung up the phone and screamed into your pillow once again after you were sure the call was over.

you took a couple of minutes to cool down before making your way out of your room into the kitchen to eat something.

"did you scream?" gaeul asked when you came into the kitchen.

"no, wasn't me" you denied.

"oh. it was really light and you have noise canceling so i assumed it was you"

"probably hyunseo. you know kids, plus her room is really far" you looked in the cabinet as you spoke.

just then hyunseo walked in.

"are you okay, i heard you scream?" gaeul asked.

"i didn't scream. it was y/n. i walked past her room when she did it" hyunseo told her.

"snitch" you mumbled under your breath.

"fine. i was on the phone with kazuha and i screamed after we talked. don't tell rei or yujin" you threatened them with a random straw you got off the counter.

hyunseo made a motion saying her lips were zipped and you nodded contentedly before pointing the straw at gaeul.

"i'm won't tell them as long as you keep me updated on what's going on with you and kazuha" gaeul said.

"nothings going on we're friends" you said.

"that scream says different" gaeul muttered.

"i'll agree though" you finally put the straw down.

"is this why rei calls you down bad?" hyunseo asked.

"don't listen to rei. she's a bad influence" you told the younger girl before making your way into the bathroom to get ready for the day. you would eat later.

ALL CHAPTERS !!! | NEXT CH !!!

i need friends to play games with

[kharmii]

I wrote this as a reply to a post, but maybe it should get added to the tags so anybody getting into the ship has a place to look up origins all in one place for context. There are too many people with 'Queen Bee Syndrome' going around pissing in people's cheerios telling them what they can and can't ship. It isn't as bad as they say, yo. It was supposed to be humorous! Anyway....

I've been seeing so much Catholic guilt on Twitter these days where people be like, "I can't believe I used to like Trainwreck! It makes me want to vomit! Why would I think it was sexy to see a guy beating up another guy!" It's either pretentious virtue signaling, or it's coming from scared young girls being brow-beaten by the threat of cancel culture into having to prove how good and perfect they are in fandom. Get over yourselves and check out my collection of vintage Trainwreckshipping posts that (facetiously) explain the context of why violence was funny.

Emmet goes to fight God but Arceus hides behind a pillar and points to Volo.

Manipulative Volo laughs about what he did but...oh no! Here comes the pissed off brother!!

Princess bride meme rough handling of Volo.

Emmet chokes Volo.

TAKE THAT YOU VILE FIEND!! (Emmet punches Volo meme)

Emmet chases Volo riding on Arceus.

Emmet chokes Volo but ends up with a knife pressing into his gut.

Volo plays a mean prank to mess with the twins.

Sexual tension with a knife part 1.

Sexual tension with a knife part 2.

Sexual tension with a knife part 3.

Volo so smug and manipulative; Emmet so crazy.

Death threat.

Emmet bloodies Volo's nose.

Where Volo is actually evil and bad ends Emmet.

Emmet coming to whoop some ass.

Giratina possessed Emmet threatens to assault Volo.

Emmet goes after Volo with a brick.

Brave soul who is still doing toxic trainwreck in modern times.

Oops (It never gets old).

Me taking the piss part 1.

Me taking the piss part 2.

If I missed any, please pm me and I'll add them (and I'll keep adding to this post as I finds 'em).

This might be an unpopular opinion, but if someone gives you a hard time for being into this ship, you could always reply along the lines of, "Fuck you, pretentious, virtue-signaling twat. I don't owe you or anybody else anything. Nobody should be judging a person's morality based on what silly thing they ship" It might not get you any friends now, but I'm holding out hope we one day get past cancel culture. Currently, we give too much power to seasoned bullies who use the current political environment as a way to get around the social stigma of anti-bullying campaigns.

[anachronistic-falsehood]

Ok before I answer any more asks, I feel like I need to get my full thoughts out there. This might be a bit long, but I have a lot to say.

First off: I am very impressionable. I always have been and I always will be. I am well aware of this. When people tell me things, I often believe them at face value. I’m trying to get better at that, which is why I tried to stay neutral this time around when everything first came out. Then I removed myself from the situation for a couple days, came back to it today, forgot to beat my hyper empathy into submission for ten minutes, and found myself almost believing him one hundred percent. I almost forgot about his first response, where he lashed out and threatened to sue people over this. I also tend not to focus on situations like this often because it’s really bad for my POCD. I am bad at this. I need to preface this post by saying that.

I don’t support Forever anymore. I can’t, not after everything that’s happened over the past few days, especially after seeing his original reaction, which was to get mad and threaten to sue and to brush it all off as just twitter drama. And he still brushed it all off as twitter drama in this most recent stream. He didn’t even acknowledge how old the alleged victim was, which means a lot of people who only knew of this through his streams don’t know that he flirted with multiple girls as young as 13. He said it was just jokes, but he did privately message at least one of these girls and meet her in real life, even if it was within a group of people. Things can happen even within a crowd.

There had to have been more things that happened behind the scenes for all of his friends to suddenly drop him. Whether it was some kind of proof that he was aware this was wrong as he did it, or if he lashed out at the other ccs for initially unfollowing him when this all came out, I don’t know. But he handled this very immaturely in his first response without even looking into the issue, and I don’t feel right supporting him anymore.

Still, and hate me for this if you want, I can’t help but sympathize with him a little bit. I know, I know, but I was a shitty person when I was a teenager, and I’m constantly paranoid that things I’ve done or said will stick with me forever or come back around to bite me in the ass. Hell, I have done and said things when I was 17 that would get me dogpiled on twitter if I was a cc. I do understand why he was upset. Knowing that he has mental health issues because of repeated twitter hate mobs does make me feel sorry for him in that regard. Just because being exposed for past actions may have been deserved this time doesn’t mean that excessive hate was deserved every single time, nor is it deserved for every cc who has fucked up in the past.

However, he was very immature with his initial response, and him pushing this off as just a twitter cancellation is enough to tell me that he does not quite see that he was in the wrong. He keeps saying that he’s matured and that he’s better now, as if that alone is supposed to absolve him of any kind of responsibility. I think he handled this wrong, and I don’t want to support him anymore.

As for q!Forever, I know he has a lot of similarities to the cc. That will be too hard to look past for a lot of people, and if you don’t want to engage in content that includes him anymore, that’s well within your rights. I still love q!Forever despite that, and I personally will still consume content that includes him, and I don’t want to write him out of the story of the smp. We can do the same thing we did for c!Dream and basically adopt him as our own oc. q!Forever can be our character now if we want him to be, and we can still acknowledge that Forever put a lot of work and thought into his character and appreciate what he did for the smp while not supporting him as a creator anymore.

And finally, I also don’t like the way that this entire situation was handled in general by the fanbase. The person who did this (as far as I’m aware) was dedicated to going after ccs for generally trivial things. If they wanted justice for this, why not bring it up before now? Why not before he joined the smp? And the victim didn’t want any part in this as far as I know, and yet people went after her demanding comments on the situation. Twitter kept celebrating the ccs dropping Forever like it was some fun party, just like people have been doing for the whole Dream situation. Twitter hasn’t handled this with any sort of tact whatsoever, and many of us here on tumblr (myself included) have been more invested in arguing and over correcting our own actions and phrasing when some biased people bring up invalid points to actually step back and take a break.

We’ve all been on the defence from each other. People on here have criticized each other’s views, invalidated other people’s experiences, and thrown insults and names at each other like this is a playground fight instead of a serious situation. The situation is over. Let’s just breathe.

[gentlebeardsbarngrill]

Hi, I have huge gratitude and admiration for your posts and updates on OFMD, I always find them so comforting and informative! Especially as I'm only on Reddit and got a Tumblr account 4 days ago to keep track of OFMD (Twitter/X is just too overwhelming for me lol). What was your take on Rhys Darby's Cameo video in regards to making you feel more hopeful/less hopeful/neither but it was still lovely? With the deafening silence from David Jenkins and worrying that the morale is dropping, it's irresistible not to start feeling a bit of doom, you know? Any response appreciated, but regardless, thank you so much for the work you're doing ❤️

Hello my dear! Welcome to tumblr, we're so glad to have you! I really should get on reddit sometime (I get notifications when certain posts get busy but I just always forget to check them). I totally get that Twitter is overwhelming, it's a tornado of information--and thank you! I'm so glad you're getting something out of the updates!

My take on the Rhys Darby cameo, ay? Well I'll be honest, I thrive on even a little bit of feedback so I was 100% pumped after that yesterday. It sounds silly but I went and cried in the shower for 20 mins because I was feeling torn between the sadness for Rhys and what he lost and was feeling and then also the beautifully kind and positive advice he was giving us.

After that-- I basically felt like someone called Gondor for aid and I was a raging pile of need for action. I actually feel more hopeful now, but I think Rhys has that affect on people. Like that man could tell me the sky was blue and I'd grin like a toddler with a lollipop and nod and feel like I could take on the day.

I do totally get that doom and gloom feeling that comes with the silence. We need that feedback from the people we're fighting for to keep morale up. That being said though--- I've noticed a trend over the past few weeks since cancellation, and that is that when we start feeling down, someone in the cast/crew starts poking their nose out. Usually its Chaos Dad (David Jenkins) but all of a sudden when things are slowing down again this week, Rhys puts himself up on Cameo, two days before the UK launch of s2? I just don't believe in coincidences in most cases, especially when we're all watching things so closely. It may make me sound like a conspiracy theorist but I do truly believe that a huge chunk of the cast and crew is watching our actions and reactions to things very carefully (Hell, Alex Sherman is over on twitter liking a bunch of fan art and porn, so at least we have our little perverted guardian angel!). They just seem to keep popping up at the exact right moments to help rally the troops for them not to be.

The difficulty with negotiations in any industry is the whole Non Disclosure Agreement that comes along with people potentially taking on new clients/funding new projects. Legitimately, there could be a contract in the works right now with a network and we already have our s3, but we just can't know about it because that would damage / threaten negotiations. It could be the other way too, but with how supportive Chaos Dad and Rhys and the rest of the crew have been just popping in and out like little bubbles of positivity, I really feel like we have still have some hope here. It's just really hard to be patient when we're all pushing so hard-- which is why breaks are so important. Anywhoooo, I've had my coffee so I'm obviously rambling at this point-- thank you so much dear for writing into me! I hope that answers your question... I am feeling overwhelmingly positive after Rhys' videos and feeling very mama bear on wanting to protect that man by doubling down on efforts, lol. So glad you're will us on tumblr friend! Always feel free to reach out :D <3<3<3 Ty!

[sunshinemarauders]

Harassment in the Marauders Fandom

These anonymous submissions come from a survey I published several weeks ago where I asked for fans in the Marauders fandom to share their experiences with me. I was overwhelmed with the results, and this is, in their own words, some of the submissions I was sent.

I was around before Rosekiller and Jegulus were popular and I loved them and got death threats for liking them?!?! I also got death threats for not reading Zars writing and I've been told countless times my writing should be deleted bc it's not like his :)

I was sent death threats for shipping rosekiller. This is mainly an issue i’ve seen on marauders twitter though, where fans can essentially try ‘cancel’ you for different opinions you have. I feel a lot more comfortable and safer on tumblr.

I had someone sending me extremely hurtful messages in private saying a couldn’t Kin Regulus black because I’m trans and that I’ll never be a real boy so I should stop trying

Yes I was in a group account a long time ago and someone made a joke about Tom Felton and we all got doxxed and threatened some more than others

harry potter tiktok in 2020 was really toxic and i also got a lot of hate for engaging with hp at all given jk rowling being a piece of shit

If we mean the broader term as the Harry Potter fandom, I got some rude messages after mentioning Hogwarts Legacy positively.

They told me I should kill my self for liking (and make art of) characters created by a transphobic bigot and other similars

i got death threats 😀

Lots of anon hate and death threats

Someone misgendered me over an opinion

People defending JKR and being transphobic

was threatened by doxing by a jily fan on tumblr in 2020 during the first jegulus week joke

They told me I should kill my self for liking (and make art of) characters created by a transphobic bigot and other similars

Another friend of mine got death threats for headcannoning Regulus to he acesexual. They were told to kill themself, etc.

[hirayaaraw]

Unbreakable Ties 7: The Waiting Game

idol!Jaehyun x OC

Genre: Childhood Friends to Lovers; slow burn; angst

Tags: @yincotton @26zcl @ahtisa02 @joepomonerof @painted-hills @ukiyoneo @ourbeautifulaffair @wintersoulwarrior @cryingforjae

Note: This is a filler chapter. Let me know if you want to join the taglist. 🫶

2020

Promises are meant to be broken. As much as they want to keep each other in arms length, it is impossible not to drift away. Jaehyun fly in and out of the country. When he stays in South Korea, it will be recording, practicing, attending a variety show, or attending a drama school. Eunhye sometimes only see him on TV or in twitter through the updates of his fansites. She also started working in a bank as a Financial Analyst. Breaking her back just to prove her worth to the higher ups.

It was a Saturday evening. Eunhye is getting dolled up to celebrate her birthday. It has been a while since the last time she celebrated it with him. The tradition faded into thin air. Jaehyun celebrates his birthday with his group and goes online to have a live with his fans. She was about to put her lipstick when someone knocked to her door.

When she opened it, Jaehyun showed with a wine and paper bags on both of his hands.

"Took you long enough to let me it." Jaehyun said then hugged her tightly before going inside. "You changed your sofa?"

"Yeah 3 months ago." Eunhye said while looking at him like she couldn't believe that Jaehyun is here. Jaehyun just smiled to cover his regrets for losing that much time.

"Do you have plans tonight?"

"Don't you have a schedule for tonight?"

They laughed together. Jaehyun shaked his head.

"Cleared my schedule tonight until tomorrow afternoon." He said while shaking the wine in front of Eunhye. Jaehyun went to the kitchen to prepare the cake. He puts the candle and lit the wick.

"Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday, Dear Eun Hye Happy birthday to you." While Jaehyun is singing, Eunhye just looked at him with tears threatening to fall. She missed him so much. She missed being with him all the time.

Now, she can't just call him ask Jaehyun to come over or go to the new trending cafe. They tried to go outside once but a sasaeng and paparazzi spotted them. The next day a blind item was published. Since then, his company asked Jaehyun not to go outside with her much to his dismay.

"Blow your candle and make a wish." Jaehyun told her when he noticed that Eunhye is staring at her. She closed her eyes and blew the candle. "What did you wish?"

Eunhye's wish is now in front of her so she just shrugged.

"World peace?" Which he laughed, but the truth is she wished to have more time with Jaehyun. Eunhye is scared that he will slip away and forget her.

"Let's cut the cake." Jaehyun is about to cut it when Eunhye screamed 'No'. "Why? Cake should be eaten."

"We don't have a cake later for you." Eunhye said that made him laugh. He nodded and proceed to putting the cake inside the refridgerator.

Despite having plans that night, Eunhye cancelled the night out with her friends. She chose to stay with Jaehyun. They cooked together whatever is in her cupboard. Jaehyun gave her a paper bag full of random items he bought from different countries he visited for work.

When the clock hits 12 AM, they used the candle and cake. Eunhye sang happily and Jaehyun was so happy to hear her voice again. He missed celebrating his birthday with her. Jaehyun blew the candle and smiled to her.

"What's your wish?"

"More of this." Jaehyun whispered while looking at the cake.

"Ha? I didn't catch that." Eunhye frowned.

"I said you are not allowed to know because the wish will not come true." He said but Eunhye squinted at him.

"I'll believe that bullshit so we can now eat the cake. Cut it now, Mr. Prada." She demanded and he followed. It will be a sight for his fans to see Jaehyun being whipped.

They drank the wine empty and tell endless stories to update each other until they fell asleep in the living room. When Eunhye woke up, Jaehyun is gone and she wonders if last night was just a dream.

She walked to her kitchen and saw an envelope. It was the same envelope Jaehyun will give to him every birthday since middle school. Eunhye opened it carefully and read the content.

Dear Eunhye,

Look how we made it! Early 20s and we are doing it well. I've been to a lot of places these past few months. I thought of bringing you there. I am sure that you will enjoy it. Someday let's travel together.

Your one and only,

Jaehyun

The next time she heard a call from Jaehyun was he informed her that he is casted as a lead actor for a romcom. Jaehyun told her that he might not be able to visit her a lot during filming. Eunhye gave her support and told him not to worry.

Just like what she always do, Eunhye waits for him to come back and take of whatever Jaehyun can give. After all, he is her bestfriend.

Present

Eunhye went home without any NCT album much to disappointment of Yeri. Kim Yerim ranted for hours about how easy it is to drop by any music store and get a copy. Eunhye told her to buy online and she will cover all the fees.

Eunhye went to her room to get her sleeping pattern back but she keep on tossing and turning even with the help of melatonin. There's sadness inside that she does not like to acknowledge. Although she went back home, it felt like there was a big void in her life.

She keep a blissfull front to his son but once he goes to school, Eunhye will succomb to this pit of emptiness. Her son, Jeno reminds her everything about him. From the smile, eyes, and their humor. Eunhye returned all the memorabilia Jaehyun gave except for their son. Contrary to Jaehyun's belief that she erased him to her life, Eunhye will be reminded of him for the rest of her life.

Seoul, South Korea

"Holy sh-- wait are you serious? like serious serious?" Mark asked him after Jaehyun asked if it is possible to visit every city of Canada in a year. "Well, I think it's possible but wow I haven't even visited half of it."

Her words linger in his mind. Jaehyun couldn't under why she said 'One of the Best Decisions of her life'. He thinks it is absurd.

"Crazy how she thinks that staying with you will destroy you." Johnny said after sipping his Americano. "Or maybe she said that after your chaotic confession."

"Very helpful, Johnny." He groaned. Jaehyun told them everything to seek advise after they comforted him they proceeded on laughing at his failed confession.

"So the plan would be you will take hiatus for a year to find Eunhye?" Mark asked him.

"Yes, that's the plan."

"It's like finding a needle in the middle of haystack." Johnny said. He is supportive in the idea of finding Eunhye but he is pessimistic at Jaehyun's plan. "Don't you have any better ways?"

"Do you have any idea, Johnny?" Jaehyun bites back.

"Get her IP address."

"You think I haven't tried? She's using VPN and I confirmed it when Eunhye said she lives in Canada. First time I checked she was in Paris so I went there---"

"Wait so that's why you were in Paris when the year she was gone?" Jaehyun nodded. "When you went to Mexico is she the reason too? And all your yearly vacation is to find her?"

Jaehyun sadly nodded. Foolish attempts to find her.

"That's the definition of world tour." Johnny said clapped slowly then Mark did too. "I don't know what to say, man. You love so deep."

"Anyway, we will have a concert in Toronto and Vancouver in 3 weeks. We can start finding Eunhye from there." Mark said in positive tone.

"Yeah. At least we now have a definite country." Jaehyun is so positive of finding her.

Almost 2 decades in the career made him brave and reckless. When Eunhye runaway, his hands were tied. No one is willing to help him or he has no way. His teammates are willing but they were all scolded and restricted by the company.

Everything is different now. Jaehyun can do whatever he wants. He has more freedom than before. All he needs is to see Eunhye and ask for her explanation. Closure. That's what he wants. If Eunhye wants him gone after he got the closure he wants, Jaehyun will move on with his life and carry his love for the rest of his life.

Tables have turned. Eunhye isn't the one who waits anymore. It is Jaehyun's turn to wait.

[taylortruther]

I didn't know you used to be an anti-Kaylor blog! This makes me think you're perfect for my question.

I used to have a mutual that was a Kaylor so while I never fully bought into the idea, I was open to it and of course, since I wasn't a Taylor fan at the time, all the info I got was GP hand-me-downs and Kaylor talk.

So the question is, what was her relationship with Calvin really like? Did people like him or not? Did she seem happy with him (til she wasn't obvs)? I've been curious about whether any songs from Rep or Folkmore might have been about him on the DL. I know the running joke is that he was too boring to write about, but I was kind of thinking that they had a mutual "nda" to not write about each other or something.

I literally know nothing so I'd appreciate an overview if you are willing and/or have time. Thanks!

tbh i think the reaction to travis is very similar. i think travis is an overall better guy than calvin, but people were mostly excited because calvin was public, to an extent about his own life; he praised her publicly; they posted a lot of photos together, hung out with each others friends and families. people were also kinda besides themselves about how they looked together because they were both tall and white and whatnot and calvin is really ~hot~ plus they also had power couple vibes.

however there was also a small subset of fans that didn't want her dating him, so they tore through his social media and laid out why he was problematic, much like they tried to do with travis. calvin had more dirty laundry, he had some racist remarks, and over time said/did some shifty things ("she cooks too" comes to mind) that pissed some of the fandom off.

calvin often looked kind of annoyed when photographed in candids with taylor, and he had a really idk sarcastic/edgy personality on socials, so i think kaylors clung to that to support the theories that he was a beard. like, he gave off vibes that he didn't want to be there, and taylor was giving off vibes (to some) that she was overcompensating. reminder that she was also deeply struggling and hiding it (or attempting to) at this time.

i don't know about NDAs, but calvin roasted her on twitter when they broke up, basically saying she controlled the media during the breakup or relationship, and she targeted people when she felt threatened. some celebs joined in, and that was part of the beginning of her eventual cancellation in 2016 (snapchat gate was only 1 or 2 months later iirc.)

he's not much of a songwriter, and taylor has said that she took a break of no recording or songwriting between 1989 and reputation.

personally, i think their relationship ended on very bad terms, and she was so glad to be out of it that she didn't have anything to write about, if that makes sense. like, her goal was escape a relationship that was probably toxic (ivy and high infielity), and then survival (the cancellation), not write songs about how good things once were.

also i think sometimes a relationship seems like such a bad idea in hindsight that it can simply become uninspiring. but that's just my personal opinion!

[roo-bastmoon]

Walking my talk... (UPDATED)

UPDATE!!

It's been brought to my attention that activism of this sort in the past has actually devolved into huge scandals and hate trains which is the total opposite of my intention. So I messaged all the accounts and instead have amended the tweet in the hopes we can do some good, without causing harm!

Instead, if you would like, we as ARMY might want to trend something like:

Please join ARMY in donating to @RAINN in support of victims of sexual assault. https://give.rainn.org/a/donate?_ga=2.237570563.248522491.1683740589-1340792183.1683740589

But if we mention Jimin or Angel Pt 1, it could be weaponized against him. I'm so sorry I didn't realize that. Thank you for helping me learn!

Okay I don’t know if it will make much difference, but I sent the following message to the large accounts I follow and admire, in the hopes to start a trend over on Twitter. I honestly don’t really know what I’m doing, but I figure every fire starts with a little spark, right? (If you can possibly help by tweeting, tagging, and donating with me over the next week or two, I’d be very grateful!)

Hello. I am a follower named Roo, writing today to run an idea by you I’m calling “Angel RAINN.”

Because Angel Pt 1’s creator, Kodak Black, has committed rape of a minor, armed robbery, drug possession, and evasion of police, many activists are calling for a boycott of the song and are threatening to cancel Jimin for being associated with him. More here.

I believe there may be a way to champion BTS’ values while at the same time supporting Jimin and the other artists on the track, who have done nothing to deserve backlash.

I propose over the next week and during the song’s release, the fandom trend the following message below to raise awareness of the issue and counteract the damage of supporting the work of someone like Kodak Black:

ARMY supports Jimin of @bts_twt and the other artists of #Angel_Pt1 for #FastX, but condemns the violent criminal actions of Kodak Black and @UniversalPics for hiring him. Please join us in donating to @RAINN in support of victims of sexual assault. https://give.rainn.org/a/donate?_ga=2.237570563.248522491.1683740589-1340792183.1683740589

What do you think of this approach? If you approve, can you help promote this idea among your friends and followers, maybe repost the message to help it trend?

We have an opportunity to ensure ARMY’s stances on feminism and sexual assault are crystal clear, while also allowing fans to feel good about supporting Jimin’s first major motion picture OST. I’m just a small account, but together, I believe Jimin stans and ARMY can make a difference. I’d really welcome your help.

If you’d rather I not contact you about things like this, I will absolutely respect that--I just figured I’d give it a shot by contacting you and other accounts I admire.

With deep respect,

Roo

I sent it to these accounts (with this number of followers):

@/USBTSARMY (743K)

@/JiminGlobal (438K)

@/OneInAnARMY (234.9K)

@/voteforpjm (64K)

@/PeachesKM13 (53K)

@/ParkJiminUSA95 (32.4K)

@/JiminFunds (25.7K)

@/btsstreamteamin (10.3K)

@/7_Miniekookie (8K)

@/minieskies(4.8K)

@/pjmstreams (2.2K)

Other large accounts I follow sometimes don’t allow for direct messages, but I tagged them in this tweet:

@/BTStranslation_ (459K)

@/btschartstudio (64.6k)

@/kmgoogiemimi (47K)

@/pjm_streaming (38K)

@/LetsBeGoodHuman (18K)

@/DI0RKM_ (15.2K)

@/KooksupportMin (4K)

Again, I'm a nobody and I'm very happy to remain a nobody, but ARMY seems to have a long history of activism and championing charitable causes, so maybe this has a chance? Can you perhaps help spread the word and/or donate?

Yours, Roo

[abbottgiftexchange]

a gift from a person who asked to stay anonymous for @thehours2002 <3

Author's note: First Off, Happy Holidays everyone, and especially to my giftee. Hope yall had a great new year! I hope you like this little ficlet :) Writing in a male pov was a fun challenge, and I hope Barbara isn’t too OOC. Hope you enjoy it! Lastly, I don’t know when this fic would take place. Maybe in the abyss of time, idk. I think it's a couple years after the current season.

Jacob doesn’t know when he first noticed precisely.  Melissa being part of the community was always kind of an open secret, one that she not so subtly threatened him to never speak about- something about privacy and it being her own business. And Ava once set a school-wide memo that if you implied she was hetero was grounds to get canceled via her Twitter followers. 

 But Barbara? Barbara? The woman who he struggled to admit to being gay in his first-year teaching? (For the record, he did sorely misjudge her on that front but still.) Like sure, she divorced her husband a year prior, but that didn’t point to Barbara Howard being into women.

So one day, when they were all sitting in the teacher's lounge complaining about the cold outside, he saw out of the corner of his eye that one of Barbara’s hands gripped Melissa’s hand under the table.  Like…the other woman would leave at any moment. He didn’t mean to stare, really, but Gregory and Janine were talking to each other, and they kinda made it obvious they didn’t want him to butt in.

“You got to be kidding me,” Melissa muttered as she peered at her phone through her glasses. The hand-holding stopped. 

“What’s wrong?” Jacob asked, his eyes glancing between the two older women. 

“I have to go out in this weather; I’ll be back in a second.” The redhead muttered, shrugging on a winter jacket. 

He noticed that Barbara scowled as Melissa left the room in a rush. 

Janine and Gregory started to argue about the optics of How Nice Snow Is, so Jacob grabbed his mug and sat down next to Barbara. 

“So…How do you feel about snow?”

“It's fine, Jacob.” He could tell she wasn’t paying attention to his questions. 

“Yeah, yeah. I don’t love it either.” They sipped their drinks in unison. 

She looked over at the window and frowned. Jacob watched as the older woman got up and peered out the window. He followed her up to the window, and they watched as Melissa talked to some…Woman. 

“Who is that?”

“I don’t know.” She did not seem happy about that. Oof.

And then Melissa kissed the other woman on the cheek. 

“I didn’t know Melissa was dating someone.” He said, squinting through the snow that was falling. “Nice she met someone, though, right?” He looked over to his window-peeking companion. 

Barbara was gripping the windowsill. 

That's when part of it clicked in Jacobs's mind, and his eyes went back and forth between Barbara and the scene playing below. It put a lot of things into perspective. Many moments that he just wrote off as them being friends in a different light.  *

From there on, he kept a watchful eye on her. Part of him wanted to reach out and tell her he knew exactly what she was going through. But then he thought about it some more. His experiences were more about falling in love with straight men, and she was in love with a taken bisexual. Not really apples to apples there. And then it also dawned on him. 

Jacob didn’t know if she knew what she was feeling. He was able to come to terms with it. He had boy bands to focus heavily on as a young kid while he ignored everything around him. He had moments to explore. Barbara Howard might never have had anything to help her with these…feelings if she even acknowledged them. 

He didn’t really mean to pry. That was the last thing he wanted to do. But it felt like his calling to help her. Guide her like she guided him in the past. He repeated that phrase in his head on his way to the Kindergarten classroom. Jacob hoped she would still be here - the school bell did just ring, but it was Friday and people liked to bolt. 

He knocked a couple times on the doorframe, and what he got in response was a muttered, “I’m busy, Melissa.” She didn’t even look up from the papers on her desk. 

“Uh, it's Jacob?” 

“Oh, Jacob. Do you need something?” She gave him a smile but then looked past him, and her eyes darted around to see if anyone else was there. Okay…weird…Anyway, how was he going to word this? Don’t be too forward-

“Are you mad at Melissa? I noticed you didn’t sit with her today.”

Okay, Too Forward., maybe even the wrong approach. 

Barbara took a deep breath and sighed. 

“Speaking for both of us, I think Melissa and I would appreciate it if you and Janine stopped trying to intervene with our personal problems.”

Confirmed. 

“So you ARE mad at her.”  Full Send it, Jacob! He moved into her classroom, looked around for a place to sit, and then decided to stand rather than stoop to sitting in a five-year-olds chair. 

She sighed again. 

“I am not mad at Melissa; I am just…not the biggest fan of her current life choices.”

“That shes dating a…woman?”

Barbara's eyes widened. “No! Oh, Heavens, no. I just feel like her girlfriend isn’t the best. She could do better.”

It's like he was transported right back to the sixth grade, where his one guy friend started dating a girl, and he couldn’t do anything than just get mad at him.

“What's wrong with her? Melissa seems happier than when she was with that other guy, uhh, the one who stocked the vending machines. Didn’t she date him like a year or two ago?” 

“I know, I know. It’s just-” Barbara put her hand over her eyes. “I just have a feeling. I just don’t like her. Simple as that.”

Jacob tried really hard not to let his mouth fall open. 

“You are not speaking to Melissa because you have a gut feeling about her girlfriend, and correct me if I’m wrong, whom you have never met?” 

She closed her eyes. Then nodded. 

“To me, it sounds like you are jealous.” Jacob shrugged. 

The older woman looked away when the word “jealous” left his lips, refusing to meet his eyes. 

“Jealousy isn’t Godly. And what would I be jealous of? Really, Jacob.” Barbara forced out a laugh.

Should he really lay this on her? Right now? He took a deep breath. You are Full Sending This, Jacob, helping to make this the Gayest School in Philadelphia. 

“I think you love her. Maybe as a friend, maybe something more.” It was only when he heard the words leave his own lips did it fully set in what he said.

He didn’t wait for her reaction. He assumed it was something scandalized. Jacob booked it out of there faster than the speed of light. There were consequences to one's actions, and then there were consequences for speaking out of line to Barbara Howard, the best Kindergarten teacher in the whole city. 

He was TOO forward.  Why does he do this to himself? *

It was Janine who broke the ice. She visited his room on their break and interrupted his grading. He was trying to not be in the same room as Barbara as much as possible, but Barbara wasn’t interacting with Melissa at all, so Melissa was apparently pissed that everyone was ignoring everyone, so Janine finally cornered him and asked what happened. 

“Jacob, why?”

“I thought I was helping?”

“You don’t share a hallway with them! Me and Gregory do! Do you know what it's like to have Melissa interrogating you on why her best friend isn’t speaking to her?” She took a deep breath. “This is- This is like ten times worse than anything I have ever done.”

“I know.” He pulled his hand over his face, dragging it down. “I messed up a ton.”

His friend came over and side-hugged him. A minute after the hug, Janine giggled.

“What?”

“I still can’t believe you told Barbara she might be gay.” “Me neither.” He moaned.  *

It all came down to their garden. 

They both simultaneously noticed that despite both of them ignoring it (in hopes to not run into each other) that it seemed to be doing quite alright in the winter months. Jacob came out one Monday morning after letting it sit for a week or two to find Barbara doing the exact same thing. It was freezing and quite dark from the clouds overhead. 

“It’s still doing okay.” He said out loud, not really directing it to her, but more in amazement. 

“It is.” Barbara paused. “I haven’t worked on it, have-” He cuts her off with a shake of his head. “Hm.”

They step down into their little garden together. They’re both quiet as move around the plants. It seemed like minutes pass with no more words uttered. Jacob looked at the tiny pea pods below him and sighed. 

“I- Barbara, I was really out of line. I shouldn’t have assumed. I feel really awful for stepping in.” Jacob kicked a pebble into a corner. He willed himself to look up at the older woman. “I hope I didn’t make things worse for you and Melissa.”

Barbara looked at him with uncertainty. She then exhaled and fiddled with her long necklace. 

“Jacob, Jacob. I was making things worse with Melissa. You just said what was happening out loud. You noticed.”

He nodded, a bit unsure where this was going. 

“I do love Melissa. I’ve known her for many years. Maybe I do feel for her in the..the ways you said.” She paused and took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I think I have to think about a lot of things going forward, especially if it's obvious to everyone. And if it's gonna affect those around me.”

“Are you saying I helped you?” He was grinning, and he knew he really shouldn’t be, but sue him!

Barbara laughed.

“I’m giving you a maybe, Jacob, a maybe.”

They resumed their gardening with only a small interruption from Gregory, when he walked by and stared at them for a bit. (Why did he do that only when they were gardening?)

“How did you know?” She asked as she watered some vegetables. 

“I fell in love with my best friend. His name was Scott. I had never felt love like it before. It surpassed the love I felt for my friends, which at the time were mainly girls.” Jacob laughed. “Well, Scott met Maddy, and he soon forgot about me and my Pokemon card collection.”

She hummed in response. 

“When you first told me I was jealous, I couldn’t believe it. Me? Really? But then I went okay, yes, I was a little mad Melissa didn’t tell me about her new girlfriend. But then it went to: ‘I was mad Melissa wasn’t spending as much time with me.’ And then I just accepted I was jealous.” Jacob took note she was fiddling with her necklaces again. “I don’t think I loved anyone as much as I love Melissa. I don’t think I ever realized that until recently.”

“Thank you, Barbara, you didn’t have to share that with me. I- I feel honored.” Jacob felt tears spring up in his eyes; maybe he was finally cementing his place into their little work family, as Janine put it. 

She gave him the ‘you are laying it on a little thick’ look, and he shut up. 

“Well! If you ever want to visit one of my queer film nights going forward, you have an invitation.”

Her eyes widen. “Uh, Thank You, Jacob. I’ll have to, uh, think about that.” 

It was then that a beam of sunlight finally broke through the clouds, and Jacob smiled as it perfectly illuminated the woman in front of him. Saint Barbara Howard, Indeed.

[splathousefiction]

Into The Wild: R/GoneWildAudio

Trigger Warning:

The following article will discuss grooming, racial bias, violence and more. Reader discretion is heavily advised.

I have spent over a month gathering witness testimony from users of r/GoneWildAudio. Quotes when given are word for word what was relayed to me from sources, all of which will be kept in total confidence. Any information that is not eye witness testimony is publicly available with a google search.

“I want you to fuck me so hard my neck snaps against the bathroom stall”.

It’s been close to seven, eight years since I got that Twitter DM.

I still remember it vividly.

Because the person that had sent it to me was supposed to be a friend.

They had interviewed me for their podcast back when I still did Magic: The Gathering content. I’d felt safe with them, knowing absolutely nothing else about them save the face they showed the public. I consented to the interview and started it with a crude joke. Even back then, the persona I played on air danced around horny concepts and potty humor. It was all an act. Anyone that actually worked directly with me or knew me could attest to that.

That’s not what this person got out of it however.

The messages started up the same week. Boring small talk at first, but it quickly escalated into them sending me nudes, salacious texts and more. All without my consent or prompting. At first, I played dumb. Being a “himbo” has gotten me out of trouble more times than I care to count. Then came the point they dragged my partner at the time into it.

So, I went off.

I threatened to post full screenshots. I threatened to tell everyone that would listen. I told them I’d talk about it on the podcast I was a part of at the time. We had a massive audience. It would kill their career overnight.

They huffed and left me alone after that. Started horrid rumors about me, the whole nine. Some people agreed with them. Random people I’d never spoken to would hop in my mentions calling me all sorts of things. I never acted on any of the things I’d say I would do. They were a prominent community figure. I was the “shock jock” of our podcasting circle.

And, as they said: “Nobody is going to believe you”.

I left the MTG community behind entirely a year or so later. Maybe two. At that point I’d seen its face, I’d seen my stalker/harasser have a fast-tracked career. I watched as one of our largest cosplayers was doxxed and people sided with her harasser. Whatever disillusionment I had about the community had been shattered into a million pieces.

It was one of the last times I consciously put effort into aligning myself with a collective online.

My stalker/harasser, the person who was the primary reason I stopped attending in-person events at all, wasn’t outed from the community until 2020. When someone finally leaked screenshots and the entire network of abuse they had orchestrated. The day it happened, friends from that era of my life reached out. They told me they were glad I was okay.

That they wish they had listened to me.

Day late and a dollar short folks, but thanks I guess.

I’m ashamed to admit it happened, even still.

I’m more ashamed that it was the second time it had occurred.

I don’t mention the above to garner pity or sympathy, but to illustrate a key fact about how communities will often overlook the worst in their midst to keep the “machine” rolling. If your harasser is a prominent part of the community, if they’ve aligned themselves with movements that are inherently “good”, they often can move with impunity. They can continue to be a wolf tearing at the flock for years to come. “Cancel Culture” isn’t real and it never has been, for if one instance of it was true I wouldn’t be writing this at all. I wouldn’t feel compelled to talk about another era of my life, the reasons I left, and why I felt compelled to write this editorial in the first place.

This isn’t a hit piece, this isn’t an expose. This isn’t even a word of warning.

All of what you’re about to read started with the simple question of why.

MTG Twitter and content production wasn’t the last time I willingly became a part of an online subculture. The real, actual last time that happened was R/GoneWildAudio on Reddit. I was there for almost two years, from 2018 to the summer of 2019 or 2020. This is brief for many who are familiar with the subreddit or contribute to it; however, my few years there both elevated my career to new heights while making me omnipresently aware of the exploitation, insecurity, harassment and real world danger that surrounds GWA. I left after one critical event, giving my piece in a community thread  in which the painfully small moderation staff was attempting to quell growing flames.

I thought that would be it.

I was confident that I could close that chapter, and move on.

Yet here I am now, after spending roughly a month talking to people, studying sub reddit traffic and more. I’m faced once again with the realization that I am not alone, nor were my negative experiences there isolated. Unlike last time, I’m not afraid. I’m motivated to act as quickly as I can to answer that question, worming its way through my gray matter.

Why GWA?

Reddit, Age Gating Content And Responsibility

Reddit is one of the largest and most popular social networks on the face of the earth, rivaling only Twitter and Facebook in respective visits per day.

In the modern era, Reddit is stylized as a place that caters to every interest regardless of how niche. Your lust for a certain anime character and weird Audacity question can have equal footing in their respective communities, with responses from actual people and auto-moderation/bots. This seems an ideal circumstance for independent creators and large corporations alike, as creating a subreddit for your whatever can instantly allow you audience reach.

Users can also operate in relative anonymity. Account creation requires only an email account, and there’s always the option to create a “throwaway” right from the user control panel. You can also surf as a guest if you see fit. Security for account creation works via passwords and two factor authentication. Beyond this however, personal and community safety is left up to dubious moderation staff and individuals.

This creates a paradox for adult communities on Reddit, as there’s no true age gating or ID checks before users join. There’s the atypical “are you 18+? This community is NSFW” that pops up, which everyone simply lies to. Legally, this is all above board. However, it also very openly lays bare the possibility for NSFW reddits to be widely available to minors-who sometimes engage with the community via content creation.

I want to stress that this isn’t unique to reddit. Just in the last few months, the NSFW twitter community has seen several prominent personalities out themselves as underage. However when comparing Twitter and Reddit, the contrast is in sheer volume. Twitter has billions of users. A NSFW subreddit if it’s popular can have anywhere from ten to a hundred to a few thousand users. The capacity for a minor to both gain the trust of the community and lie to moderation (which waffles between non-existent and “a hand wave”) on Reddit is exponentially higher. Moderators are human, and will make judgment calls accordingly.

With a disposable email and hand hewn identity, users can engage in spaces they absolutely shouldn’t, thus endangering themselves and the entire community in the process.

Such is the case with GoneWildAudio, one of the most popular erotic audio subreddits on the site. GWA features a pop up window to confirm you’re legally of age, and asks for a vocal timestamp verification for performers.

That’s it.

And this is more than other subreddits even attempt.  

As a vocal talent myself, I can’t even begin to stress how incredibly fucking easy this is to bypass. With a bit of practice an amatuer could easily pitch-shift their voice and sound far older than they are. If they were especially crafty, they could also pull it off in an audio editor. Mic quality would also come into play here-overwhelmingly, the users on GWA do not have proper or professional set ups. A shitty cell phone mic recording could make a user sound far older than they really are.

The possibility of there being content created by minors on GWA is  “above zero”, which is a non-negotiable dangerous risk for anyone involved in the adult community.  The responsibility for ensuring proper age gating and safety for the community has failed everyone at every single level. The question of who is responsible for ensuring this isn’t as sticky as it seems.

If Reddit is going to allow adult content on the site, proper age gating such as what Fansly, OnlyFans and others use is paramount. However, Reddit sitewide moderation has a horrid reputation for ensuring NSFW doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. As Reddit won’t even remove illegal content on their own site unless it breaks the news, the chances of site moderation acting are incredibly low. As such, moderation responsibilities often fall on individual sub reddits.

Which brings us to one of the largest things users will notice about GWA right off the bat: It’s moderation is next to non-existent by adult industry standards, and dangerously ineffective given a subreddit of it’s size.

This is a fairly recent issue. GWA swelled during COVID-19 lockdowns and now sits at around one million members, a point of pride for them. Membership doesn’t translate into real-world traffic on the sub however. Over a three week period, I checked online membership during peak EST hours. The average per-day was somewhere around 4.5k-5k users online, without accounting for people surfing as guests (there’s literally no easy way to track that on my end). While this is a miniscule fraction of the active user base, that’s still a few thousand people. Logic would dictate a dedicated moderation staff available at least during peak hours to ensure member safety, especially given the open (and legally dangerous) possibility of minors accessing adult content.

That’s absolutely not the case.

As of this writing, there are currently eight active moderators. You can view the current list of moderators here.

Eight moderators for thousands of possible users is, simply put, disastrously insufficient by any stretch of the imagination. This grows exponentially worse if you believe the by-line of “a million active members”. Even given the use of auto-moderation via bots, this isn’t enough people. If for no other reason than ensuring the safety of their own members, having a moderation staff of under ten people willfully endangers casual audience members and performers alike. To translate this into real-world application, a site receiving this much traffic would likely have a dual-purpose department of at least fifteen to twenty.

At eight individuals, who are both likely unpaid and likely have real-world lives/jobs to get to, the end result is a moderation staff that is heavily overworked, untimely in remedying emergency situations and difficult to approach at all. A staff of eight people to handle thousands isn’t sufficient enough to ensure a democratic and unbiased use of moderator responsibilities.

I’d know.

Over the last two months, I put out a call on twitter for audience members, moderators and performers to speak to me about their experiences with GWA. I received roughly thirty three detailed responses from across the spectrum, save for the moderation staff itself. As promised, these responses will be kept in full confidence and not quoted here. If one of my sources feels confident telling their story publicly, they’ve my support. I received written testimony, screenshots from discord servers and more. Responses came from a diverse data set as well. Many BIPOC, queer people, audience members and performers reached out.

There were common observations in every single message:

The Moderation Staff of GWA Is Inherently Biased: One common thing I heard from the performers that spoke to me is that certain community members were held to a radically different standard than the rest of the community simply due to their prominence. While this does occur in any community one might find to some degree, the GWA mod staff has a history of allowing abusive, actively predatory, racist and otherwise biggoted performers the freedom to remain. This was cited by every single BIPOC and queer respondant I spoke with. A single person saying this would be concerning, but repeated evidence has made it abundantly clear that the mods of GWA will turn a blind eye if a performer drives subreddit (or affiliated subreddit) traffic up.

The Moderation Staff Will Not Act Unless Moved By Outside Forces: The story of F_Stop_Fitzgerald was one I heard about on Twitter well before the GWA staff made a public post. F-Stop_Fitzgerald, who lived in Toronto, was a school teacher and member of GWA who created teacher-student centric content. He was caught trying to lure children and in possession of child pornography. The literal headline breaking story was well known on twitter for roughly 48 hours before the GWA staff made a post about the incident, encouraging victims to come forward and offering anonymous resources for witness testimony.

Curiously, a moderator mentioned that they were aware underage users were on the sub reddit and that “we don’t care if you broke the rules, we’re here to help”.

While I understand where they were coming from, this coincidently confirms that the mod staff is aware of the non-zero chance that minors are on the subreddit yet again and will likely not act to remove them unless it’s brought to their attention. Their attention, which is sparse, given their already overwhelming workload. While proper age gating likely wouldn’t have prevented Fitzgerald’s predatory antics, the fact that the mod staff was both aware of minors and not proactively preventing situations like this from even having the chance to occur with the absolute bare-minimum legal compliance is incidentally malicious by association.

The legal precedent for that falls not on them however, but Reddit itself, which cannot and will not risk losing it’s user base overnight ala Tumblr-style age gating and content requirements.

Fitzgerald absolutely hasn’t been the only case of predators making use of the subreddit either. Several of the people I spoke with were victims of targeted harassment, sexually predatory conduct and more. In more than one instance they went to the mod staff, who made excuses for performers because of their prominence within the community. An investigation was promised, and the performer was allowed to continue to post. In one case, it was even suggested that the victim simply “tag that performer out”.

When did people actually experience results?

When they went to twitter directly with screenshots, left to fend for themselves against the onslaught of harassment by supporters for performers who refused to see what was before their very eyes. Then and only then did the GWA Modstaff decide to act, and rarely was someone banned from the subreddit for their actions. It’s the popular belief that Fitzgerald received banning at all simply because he broke international news.

This led to the creation of several twitter accounts, such as ConfessionsGWA and others. On these pages news broke about several GWA performers who were abusing their positions within the community to get away with everything from exploitation of labor to far worse. There’s a 41 page google doc with screenshots. The catalyst for the creation of CGWA seemed to be Tom Banter, who was openly allowed back to GWA and GoneWildAudioGay after fetishizing BIPOC audience members, using sexual degredation on discord server members, and openly complaining that he had to tag his non-con audios with a “rape” tag.

To quote one of the GWA mods, “(Tom) has paid the price for his scandal so hopefully he’s reflected and learned his lesson”.

Tom continues to make audio to this day on Youtube and streams on Twitch.  He left reddit only after individuals came forward away from GWA, on twitter.

In response, GWA has scrubbed or archived any of Tom’s posts.

Never moving unless pushed from extrinsic platform sets a precedent of “the mods don’t care”, community wide.

GWA Is Inherently Focused On The Cis-Het White Male Gaze (And The Mods Still Don’t Care):

Literally every BIPOC performer and user I spoke with could cite multiple times off the top of their head that there was a push of their own to make GWA a more inclusive place. Or, at the least, a place that was safer for BIPOC performers to post without worry of a hostile, fetishizing or racist audience.

Nothing happened.

Either the mods would hand-wave away comments while promising nothing or simply not respond at all. During the height of BLM protests after the murder of George Floyd specifically, none of the respondents I spoke could recall any of the moderation staff working towards making black performers feel safer. Almost all of the respondents I spoke with cited that incident as what ultimately drove them from the platform.

This is tied in with the overwhelmingly stereotypical focus of BIPOC bodies within audio, specifically black women. Many of the sources I spoke with would remark about how overwhelmingly and aggressively sexualized they were for their race. Some respondents also pointed towards how several performers-such as KenteClothedTiger, Tombanter and others-would specifically focus on marketing themselves as an inclusive, BIPOC focused creator in order to lure in their victims.

The end result of this is a less diverse community as BIPOC people, sickened by the lack of mod action, rightfully leave. As the subreddit grows less diverse, it tends towards caucasion and cis-het focused content. Those alienated by gazing at the top posts are often told to head towards an affiliated subreddit, such as GoneWildGay and others. Which would seem an ideal solution, save that this funnels BIPOC and queer talent into an ever smaller nesting doll of potential audience reach.

It’s an insidious means of stifling BIPOC and queer voices.

So who does the responsibility for correcting any of this lie on?

Institutionally, Reddit as a platform first and foremost. Without getting into a discussion on internet privacy, release forms and proper legal compliance towards adult content, Reddit is incredibly unlikely to move. It costs less money to simply make Subreddits disappear when they break the news than to proactively ensure legal compliance with content creators and communities. What’s more, making their user base actively feel safe over simply making problems “vanish”.

Logically one would assume that the moderation staff of GWA would have a vested interest in, at the least, having an appropriate number of moderators to deal with the thousands deep user traffic (or what’s more, their “million strong” membership). Except they’ve done anything but that.

The latter here looks absolutely baffling to anyone with any understanding of how a community is run from the outside looking in. It begs the question of why a community would be run this way whatsoever, what kind of ideation would lead to leadership like this.

Which leads us to GWA’s second largest issue-it’s “amateur” marketed culture.

Free Content Isn’t Free: GWA’s Stalwart Refusal To Admit The Obvious

GoneWildAudio proudly proclaims itself as a community “for those aroused by sound”, where performers of all stripes and capability are invited to post their content. There’s an open mix of script writing, improv performances, “ramble faps” (listening to someone engage in self pleasure) and more. Recordings vary in quality from cell-phone static scratches to uploads professionally edited, scored and recorded.

Regardless of the amount of work put into these uploads, users are strictly forbidden from posting links to absolutely any services in which they might get compensated for their work. Because GWA’s culture insists that it’s “amateur” and not “professional” work.

This is alarmingly counterintuitive to creative culture period, but especially heinous as many people turned towards erotic audio and sex work during COVID 19 lockdowns, when GWA itself experienced it’s largest surge in traffic. People flooded the subreddit as they found themselves with unprecedented free time, hoping to find a community that would be a pathway towards substituting their strangled income.

Except their posts would be auto-yanked for linking to a twitter account, an additional platform for uploads and more simply for having a tip jar. As of my writing this, I was recently informed that a GWA mod convinced a new audio platform that GWA couldn’t use them despite their pro-NSFW attitude because the site itself asked for donations. A patently absurd idea that caused the site owners to reconsider featuring NSFW content at all (they still allow it as of this writing) and instead focusing on music.

The idea that anyone, amateur or not, doesn’t deserve to be compensated for their efforts, tipped or otherwise financially shown appreciation for their works is inherently exploitative to the core. Conflating successful efforts with make-believe, worthless upvotes doesn’t put food in the fridge, pay the light bill or student loans. What’s more, apathetic staff could even codify something within their own rules that would essentially hand-wave away responsibility. We are not held liable for anything beyond this subreddit page beyond harassment, et al.

Instead, “we are amateurs” is used as a shield, with exploitation of talent being rampant. Script writers get their works stolen, performed without credit and put behind paywalls (which, while strictly forbidden via GWAs rules, still happens regularly enough you could set a clock to it). Voice actors put hours of work into performing, engineering and scoring their works only for them to be vacuum-sucked onto this solitary platform (as linking to others could get the post yanked). New arrivals and hopeful content creators eager to join a community either get disillusioned and leave, or begin to view compensation as a kind of “selling out”.

This is especially rancid as GWA’s reputation casts an enormous shadow over the entire ero-audio community despite its quantifiably small reach. GWA is often where many of us begin or build our careers. I myself likely never would have met CMakesP, XytaMidnite and many of my regular clients had I not formally posted Splat Speaks there. I would be hard pressed to find a performer in erotic audio that didn’t start at GWA over youtube.

A community this small with a culture of  “you’re only a real artist if you’re starving”, lead by a staff that openly allows the continued predation of it’s user base, sounds like a fucking fever dream. It’s the kind of place that other adult performers would jump ship from. Many of us have.

Yet the specter of GWA still lingers on throughout the community by a falsely inflated reputation. Performers, platforms hopeful for the upload traffic and others take a single glance at that “million membership” mark and assume working with GWA will make or break their reputation.

GWA isn’t necessary to be an erotic vocal act, script writer or engineer. People simply use it because it’s the most convenient option by being a small, fractional part of one of the largest social media services in the world. People use it because they see the word “amateur” and assume that means them due to inexperience. Listeners use it because the tagging system is at least semi-functional.

All while the sub continues to exist only because of exploitive practices.

This is even more intolerable as GWA can’t provide safe platforms to upload content to. Soundgasm, long touted as the preferred platform for the sub (to the point it’s directly mentioned in their rules), had its content scrapped several times and uploaded without performer consent all over the web. I myself was a victim of this, as were dozens of other performers I know. It was only after this was repeatedly and loudly talked about on twitter that it was revealed how incredibly easy it was to download content directly from the service in MP3 quality. When the mod staff was approached about this, they failed to even assure their users with false security.

“These things happen”, they said.

Which is hilarious considering any other respective platform that also hosts “amateur” content often has provisions in their EULAs and rules that they’ll file DMCA claims on behalf of their users if their content gets stolen. They also often codify that the “amateurs” literally keeping the service alive (often with free content as well) inherently own the rights to their content. Even non-commercial sites like Archive of Our Own, allows “amateurs” to file complaints if their works are uploaded in a non-transformative fashion-and link to personal pages where you can be tipped. While Ao3 does allow scrapping, they’ve publicly stated they will take counter measures against it should it occur at the scale GWAs own scrape did.

Not to mention Soundgasm is a volunteer project maintained by a single person. What happens if one day they decide the hassle is no longer worth it? It hasn’t even been properly maintained in over eight years.

If GWA cannot and will not protect its own members, their content or even create a space that promotes professional growth, I find myself once again returning to the opening question of this editorial.

Why R/GoneWildAudio?

Concluding Statements, Observations And The Way Forward

The simple answer to that question is something GWAs entire reputation is built upon, but also something that can be easily templated over to a different service, a different subreddit, a different community:

Convenience.

That’s it.

People don’t use it because it’s safe. They don’t use it because the moderation is great. They don’t use it for the diverse array of BIPOC/Queer/Trans uploaded content, the inclusive community. They don’t use it in hopes of making some extra cash.

They use it because Youtube is a puritanical hell hole and they already have a reddit account. They use it because Twitter is overwhelming at billions of users and the nazis are also there. They use it because they can do so relatively anonymously, and the risk-reward calculation means they won’t get hurt. Maybe. Perhaps.

Unless they’re BIPOC or queer, in which case they’re always, always looking over their shoulder so long as they’re using the subreddit.

GWA exists because of convenience, is continued to be used because of convenience, and can be subsequently dropped if faced with competition that’s even a mild improvement, has even a slightly caring moderation staff or is creator-career friendly. It could disappear overnight should Reddit itself decide it no longer benefits the platform as a whole to have it. Even something as small as losing Soundgasm would have disastrous effects. A better tagging system could legitimately be enough to cause a shake up.

GoneWildAudio exists on a razors edge, ever a single strong wind away from being relegated to history. If that history proves good or ill is ultimately up to those framing the community through rules, policy and community action.

As of this writing, many of them have been absent for weeks.

-j

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[allsassnoclass]

🎨🔒❌ for the ask game? -💙

@igarbagecannoteven hi megs!!! thanks for stopping by! i'll answer each of these for the fic i've been working on most right now, which is a crossover for two other fandoms that i'm mostly writing to get the wiggles out, and then i'll also answer them for the 5sos wip i've worked on most recently!

‍🎨 [Palette] If your WIP was a color, which color would it be?

fic 1: oooo this is Difficult because two strong color associations with the characters themselves are red (superhero costume) and orange (sports team uniform) but the fic itself is not either of those vibes. maybe a deep navy blue! things are dark and everyone is lying to each other and assassins will eventually be involved. lots happening behind the scenes that the narrator doesn't know about. but also navy blue is a nice color and all the lies and secrets are worth it in the end.

fic 2: mmmmmmmmmmmm i think either a nice deep green or a really pale blue! it's for malum and they as a pairing are a nice rich green to me, and that color has always felt very reliable and steady, which to me is their dynamic in this fic. the pale blue comes in because it's a pretty lighthearted fic and the pale blue is like a sheer curtain that they're trying to cast over their relationship despite everyone being able to see through it. they're hiding but they're not trying that hard yknow they're too happy together for that

🔒 [Lock] Would you let your family, friends, or other people you know in real life read your WIP?

i would let my sister, but she doesn't want to so i don't have to worry about it. i would not willingly show either of these to anyone else irl lol

❌ [Cross] What would your WIP get cancelled on Twitter for?

fic 1: i'm going to be honest idk what twitter cancels people for these days. cancelled for being ooc but ooc for the fanon characterization and relatively in-character for the canon characterization, which is what i am following. but also slightly ooc from that and canon is both being strictly followed and has been put in a blender. probably cancelled because that whole situation is confusing. or canceled for having the protagonists roofie the other protagonist and breaking and entering, but if you've read the original book then you wouldn't care about that because it happens in the first book too with no consequences. maybe cancelled for including consequences????? and having a character threaten to call the cops even though acab.

fic 2: rpf :/

[swimmingclassicrockpizzawombat]

Rant about cancel culture ig:

*sigh* do I even have "permission" to enjoy the Beetlejuice musical or any of it's media at all, even it's by myself anymore?

Or am I too "horrible" of a person and unworthy to do that too?

Bc how dare I "fetishize" the actor getting hurt according to people... even though I never even did that?

"people like you are not welcome in the fandom" "we don't want scum like you here"

I suppose I'm the only person ever in this universe that has ever made a mistake then, and that already means I'm all this "horrible" things ig.

I congratulate everyone on never messing up then! Clearly I'm too flawed for that.

After all, the way cancel culture works is, you make one mistake and that's considered your "mask" falling off for a second, so that second of your entire life is finally showing everyone your "true self", your "true colors". This is who you really are, it's not the action that was bad, it's that YOU as a person are the definition of bad and evil and the scum of the earth. And whatever you did suddenly gets blown out of proportion and people are ready to jump at you.

A tiny mistake defines you as a person, and sometimes even your entire life sometimes. It's not uncommon to hear of people who got cancelled, particularly who are already part of marginalized groups or don't have platforms as big as other MORE problematic people who can't get cancelled, and had their community turn on them, to eventually go on to end their lives.

Only to be remembered for the one mistake they made and even then be hated by large masses of people, to have people saying they deserved it and scum like that don't deserve to live, being pleased with themselves bc they led someone to take their life.

(which one could argue it's ultimately the person's decision to do it in the end, but how much is it really when they are already marginalizing by society, and later turned from their communities? When they even loose their jobs over it and can't find another one? When the people who probably say that are also the ones who doxed them, threatened them and told them to kill themselves?)

Everyone enjoys a spectacle. Seeing someone go down. It makes you feel powerful. There might be a lot of problems in your life, and you might be feeling helpless over something, why can't we stop politicians from taking away our rights after all? people like JK Rowling from harrasing trans people on Twitter? But this is something you have control over! And that feels good. You have the power to go kick this other less powerful someone down even if they were already on the ground and that feels like at least you are doing something. Because it's someone everyone has as a collective decided is bad. And bad people don't deserve mercy, don't deserve forgiveness even if they apologize, bad people ARE bad. They are probably trying to manipulate you with that apology. Bad people can't apologize genuinely. Period.

NGL I didn't have getting cancelled and loosing the one community I had amongst all the shit I'm going through irl over some mistake in my cards for the start of this year.

And I think the worst part is not the harrasment itself, or even knowing you made a mistake, it's the sense of betrayal. Of people turning against you, including people you don't even know and who don't even know you deciding you are the new bad guy of the day, you deserve to be put in the same category as other cancelled people such as sexual predators and homophobes (even if you yourself have been a victim of said crimes).

People deciding you're not worthy of being treated like a person simply for the thrill of it.

Of course, when I came out of the closet all my closest friends dumped me and blocked me, and I was also bullied all throughout school for being too different (I later learnt I'm also neurodivergent!), don't get me started with my own family disowning me and always ganging up on me over the dumbest shit...

So I'm pretty familiar with the feeling, but Ig that doesn't mean it stings any less.

To paraphrase Lindsay Ellis, people tell you that you need to either grow a thicker skin (and learn to take the harrasment) or leave, and I don't have the strength anymore to do the first one so I will do the latter.

[joannechocolat]

On media storms, and transphobes, and free speech, and the establishment.

(Dated 22nd August, 2022.)

Unless you were asleep last week, you’ll have noticed I made the news. I made the news a lot. The Daily Mail (twice); the Times (twice); the Telegraph; the Observer, plus radio and any number of online and international outlets, including UnHerd, where stories go to die.

The story has taken many forms. That J.K. Rowling feels “betrayed” by my “lack of support” for her: that my views on trans rights makes me ineligible for any public role; that people are calling for my removal from the Board of the SOA; that I’m a monster because I replied to a post from a satirical Twitter account with - shock, horror - a smiley.

I haven’t talked to anyone in the Press, in spite of many journalists asking, so this “story”, was taken from Twitter, where stories evolve at such a rapid rate that by the time they make the broadsheets, no-one really knows what shape the story started out at all.

But this is what it has become. I’ve been repeatedly (and wrongly) accused of a number of things, which when you unpick them, boil down to one thing. That as Chair of the Society of Authors (the authors’ trade union), I’ve abused my position to discriminate against people who don’t agree with my support of the trans community.

Full disclosure: this isn’t new. Ever since I was elected Chair in 2019, I’ve been getting increasing amounts of abuse, pressure and demands for “debate” from people with gender-critical views. Some of them are colleagues; some women I once considered friends. Some of these women now have become single-agenda tweeters, railing night and day online about what defines a woman, and spreading misinformation and fear about the trans community. Many of these women claim to be afraid, and to have suffered cancellation for their views. Some of them feel that as Chair of the SOA, I should have taken their side in Twitter debates, signed petitions, joined hashtags to validate their beliefs.

But here’s the thing. The SOA represents everyone. It has over 12,000 members. It needs to stay neutral to represent all its members equally. And it has a strict policy of non-intervention in Twitter debates between members, even when they get nasty, because Twitter can be a nasty place, and the SOA can’t be everywhere. That’s why I tweet in my personal capacity unless I specify otherwise. 

The gender critical lobby has had real difficulty understanding this. Over the past two years, I’ve been under increasing pressure to “speak out” about individual cases (I can’t); ally myself with transphobes (I won’t) and “denounce” death threats to J.K. Rowling (which I do, but apparently not often enough.) Over the past two years I’ve received countless abusive tweets, urging me to kill myself, or resign from the SOA, or hoping that I would die of cancer, all from the gender-critical lobby.

The latest eruption began last week, with the stabbing of Salman Rushdie, a man whose life has been under threat since most of us can remember. Last Friday, an Islamist fanatic managed to get close enough to stab him, leaving him with terrible injuries. The literary world was shaken. Friends of Rushdie’s spoke out in horror. But those of us who only knew him for his books were also deeply shaken and upset. Because this wasn’t just a violent attack on an author, horrific though that may be. It was an attack on free speech, a principle all creators hold dear.

Free speech is a term that has been misused a lot recently, especially by people wanting their say, but denying it to others. In fact, free speech is like oxygen: you can’t remove it from someone else without also losing it yourself, which means that, if you believe in free speech, you can’t then go around deciding who deserves it and who doesn’t. Rushdie is a great writer. But even if the victim of the stabbing had been a minor writer, a bad writer, or a writer with problematic opinions, the same attack on free speech would have happened, threatening writers everywhere. The principle of free speech matters. And it matters to all of us.

I wrote about this a bit on Twitter, where many authors were still upset, struggling how best to respond to the horrific attack. Twitter being Twitter, there were also a number of angry Islamist accounts, crowing about the Rushdie attack and targeting anyone who expressed sympathy. Some were abusive, some even threatening. Several people I follow were sent messages on the lines of: Shut up or we’ll come for you next. I got one myself. So did J.K. Rowling. But on Twitter, size matters. What J.K. Rowling, with her 14 million followers, says is instant news. So when J.K. Rowling announced that she’d had a death threat from an Islamist account saying: You’re next, her name trended for two days, and Rushdie’s all-too-real attack was overshadowed by a Twitter threat.

Now, it isn’t up to me to decide whether the death threat was credible, or whether J.K. Rowling should be afraid. I don’t know how many threats she’s received, or how many she thinks are credible. Having had them myself, I know they can be upsetting and frightening. But a threat on Twitter is not the same as being stabbed in the eye, and I didn’t see the need to comment.

 Instead I put up a poll, asking fellow-authors if they’d ever received a death threat. I wanted to use it as a way of talking about author safety. As it happened, Chuck Wendig had been posting about his latest death threat the day before Salman Rushdie was stabbed (a weirdly specific death threat, in which his correspondent expressed the hope that Chuck would be, er - raped to death by a dolphin), and the tone of my first poll reflected the jokey nature of our interchange. In the light of the Rushdie stabbing, though, I realized that wasn’t appropriate. I deleted the poll almost at once and started again with a more neutral wording, but the folk on Twitter who watch me for any ammunition they can use had already screencapped it and passed it around. It made the papers, variously as: Harris  Mocks Rushdie or Harris Mocks Rowling, but I was doing neither.  Death threats – to anyone, including J.K. Rowling – are absolutely wrong. They’re also a crime. Crimes are for the police to sort out. Free speech, however, is a legitimate principle for a union to uphold.

But free speech isn’t always the speech that you agree with. Free speech can be confrontational. It can be unfair. It can even be upsetting. I’ve upset a lot of gender-critical people with my own use of free speech; my refusal to join their hashtags, sign their petitions, enter their debates. That doesn’t mean to say I don’t believe in theirs, or that I wouldn’t fight for their rights as fiercely as for anyone else. But that has never been enough for the people who want me gone.  

Since last week, the wave of people demanding my resignation – or just my removal – from the SOA has grown. Many of those who have joined the “debate” are not members. Many are not even authors. Nearly all are transphobes, though. Because that’s what all this is about. Not all gender critical people may be transphobes, but all transphobes are gender critical. Graham Linehan has been posting about me since 2020, calling for me to be dismissed. He doesn’t know what the SOA does. He doesn’t care. He’s just one of many prominent transphobes who believe that someone who believes in the rights of trans folk doesn’t deserve a voice of their own.

I have a trans son. He came out very recently, and I haven’t discussed it online. Last week, I discovered that some of my principal detractors had found out about this. After talking to my son, and with his permission, I went public. I love my son more than words can say, and I didn’t want anyone to think that I was ashamed of him. Kathleen Stock, among others, gloated that this was proof of my bias. She (rather chillingly) denounced me for having “undeclared trans-identified offspring,” and claimed that this was the “real” reason for my support of trans folk. Kathleen Stock finds it hard to believe that someone might uphold a principle without having a personal interest. Actually, I’ve been a supporter of trans rights for much longer than this. Like I said, I believe in supporting the rights of all marginalized groups.

So, just what are they saying now? That I’m jealous of JKR? I’m not. I love my life, and I love my son, and I wouldn’t change that for anything. That because of my pro-trans beliefs, I should be cancelled or lose my job? That would be ironic, wouldn’t it, coming from people who are claiming to have been cancelled for their gender-critical beliefs. And full disclosure; it isn’t a job. It’s an elected position, as part of a Board of twelve people. It’s voluntary, time-consuming, often thankless, and unpaid, and I do it because I care about authors’ rights. All authors’ rights; whether they’re famous of not; whether I agree with their politics or not.

But this assault isn’t going to stop. Given how many people pretend to be “fearful of speaking out”, they’re certainly doing a hell of a lot of it. I’ve had open attacks this week from a certain sector of the author community – all London-based, all cis, all white, all influential people (many of them men) with lots of friends in the right-wing media – saying that they are coming for me. One person compared it to the March of the Ents, going after Saruman. The literary establishment, is seems is desperately afraid of progress.

Here’s the thing, though. I’m stubborn. I’ve never fitted into the London literary scene, so the fact that it now feels the need to mobilize against me means very little to me. This week, I’ve had death threats, attacks in the media, and countless abusive messages. I don’t care. I’m not afraid. I was elected to this role to help protect authors’ rights. That means yours, whoever you are, and those of all other authors. If you’re a member of the SOA, then we have elections yearly. You too can stand for the Board, and be elected, and add your views to the diversity of views already expressed there. Till then, I’ll do what I’ve always done. Raise awareness of authors’ rights. 

They grow us tough in Yorkshire.