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h00nerz · 1 year

Text

who’s that girl!

FOURTY / something like this

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warnings: mentions of alcohol consumption, profanity, that’s it afaik

word count: 2.9k

BY THE TIME YOU ARRIVED BACK TO YOUR APARTMENT THAT NIGHT, it was much later than you’d originally intended. Following your (very anticlimactic) breakup, Yunjin had insisted it was the perfect excuse to go out and get absolutely wasted. She’d even tried to get Sakura and Chaewon to join, but they politely declined, leaving it to be just the two of you. So, you followed Yunjin to some random club where she did indeed get wasted, while you weren’t really in the mood to drink.

All you could do was zone out while Felix’s words echoed around in your head. Was he right? Had you really been secretly harboring feelings for Beomgyu this entire time, but been too afraid to face them? After all, it was much easier to convince yourself you were falling for a stranger you met at work than to admit you were falling for your roommate.

You had thought back to the night you’d gone out drinking together, and thought Felix wasn’t interested in you. You had reminisced on the way he made you smile, and laugh, and completely forget about your relationship problems. And then, you had wondered what would have happened that night if Felix never called you. If you never made Beomgyu upset with you, if you had stayed out with him longer…

After that little hypothetical, you did end up having a drink of your own. You were nowhere near as drunk as Yunjin, just buzzed enough to ease your anxiety before it got the better of you. Eventually, you’d gotten tired of sitting at the bar and being overwhelmed by your thoughts, you began dancing with Yunjin in the giant sea of people.

Around 1 AM, Yunjin started trying to climb up on the barstools, and you knew that was the sign it was time for you to go home. So, you dragged a very clingy and very drunk Yunjin out of the club, and into an Uber to take you back to your apartment. You’d thought of just dropping her off back at her own place, but as you watched her breathe on the windows and draw phallic shapes in the precipitation, you knew she was in no state to be alone.

And that was how you ended up leading her down your hallway, attempting to keep her quiet so she wouldn’t wake any of your neighbors. She kept going on about how much she loved you, and how sorry she was none of your relationships worked out, which she seemed to think was sweet of her, but was really more like salt in the wound at that point.

Due to how late it was, you assumed your roommates would have fallen asleep already, so you shushed Yunjin as you flipped through your keys and finally unlocked the door. But when you opened it, you saw the three boys sitting around the coffee table in the living space, playing what looked to be a game of Monopoly.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought! Pay up you fucking idiot!” Beomgyu was yelling, waving some card in front of a very defeated looking Yeonjun. Soobin seemed to be a bit out of it, entranced by the swishing of the wine in the glass he held in front of himself. His gaze drifted over to you and Yunjin, though, then his eyes widened.

“Oh my god! Burglars!” He shouted, leaping up to his feet and nearly spilling his glass, but just as quickly as he’d tensed up, he relaxed again. “Oh, hi Y/N. Hi Yunjin!” He greeted them, and the other two boys finally noticed them.

“Hey, uh, how was your date?” Yeonjun asked, blinking at the two of you. Beomgyu sat quietly across from him, avoiding eye contact with you, which you were actually thankful for.

Yunjin giggled at the question, leaning on your shoulder as she began to remove her shoes. “It was so much fun. It turned out Felix and his friend Hyunjin were in love, so Y/N dumped him, and so we just went out clubbing the two of us!” She explained, singing the last part and nearly toppling over.

“Oh, I thought you guys were joking on Twitter. Sorry, Y/N.” Soobin frowned, and slowly sank back down to where he’d been sitting previously.

“Yeah, really sorry, Y/N.” Yeonjun said, and blinked at the two of you. “So, wait, Felix and that Hyunjin guy like each other? And he didn’t sweep Yunjin off her feet?” He asked, and as he said so, your friend, began to tip over onto you.

She grumbled about being tired, and you let out a soft sigh. “Nope, he did not.” You replied, doing your best to help her stand up. “She needs to get to bed, though, you can ask her all about it tomorrow.”

In that moment, you made the mistake of glancing over at Beomgyu, who coincidentally had finally decided to look at you. Your eyes met, and immediately Felix’s words began to echo incessantly in your mind.

I think you secretly like him too.

You knew he was right when your heart began to pound against your ribcage, begging for you to let it out. You knew he was right when your mouth went dry, and it felt like the only thing that could quench your thirst was a swim in his eyes. You knew he was right when the entirety of your skin was lit on fire, burning red hot just from the split moment of eye contact. You knew he was right when your limbs turned to jelly, and you were struggling to stand.

The realization hit you like a truck—or, to put it more accurately, Yunjin hit you like a truck. The jelly feeling caused your legs to give out, and suddenly you were on the floor with Yunjin on top of you. Your view was obstructed by her hair covering your face, but you could hear the boys scrambling to their feet and rushing over in a panic.

“You’re going to suffocate me!” You coughed out, raising your fingers to brush her hair out of your view. Yeonjun was the first to the scene, lifting Yunjin off of you which finally allowed you to breathe.

Before she could protest, Yeonjun was lifting Yunjin up bridal style, earning him some giggles from her. “I’ll carry her to your room.” He offered, and you were too out of breath to decline his offer. Soobin tailed after him as he carried her off towards your room, while you watched from your spot on the floor.

You laid there for a minute, trying to catch your breath and relax for a minute. But you realized someone was crouched down next to you, and felt your breathing go haywire all over again when you realized it was Beomgyu. He was watching you, waiting for you to be ready to stand, and you felt like you were going to crumble under his worried stare.

“You okay?” He finally asked in a low voice, an amused smile playing on his lips.

You nodded frantically, pushing yourself up to your feet before he could offer to help you. “I’m fine. I work with elementary kids, it takes a lot more than that to take me down.” You laughed nervously, looking anywhere except at him.

“Right.” He nodded, stretching up so he was now standing next to you. “Good to hear. It would suck if you died and we had to go roommate hunting again.” He joked, and you laughed, but you weren’t very good at hiding how awkward you were feeling.

The two of you stood in silence, an uncomfortable tension filling the space between you. A part of you felt like dashing off to your room to check on Yunjin and your two idiots for roommates, but the other part felt glued to the spot in the living room. The paralyzation beat your need to run, leaving you stuck there with Beomgyu.

“So… Bad date?” He spoke quietly, his voice cutting through the tension like a knife.

You shrugged. “Not too bad.” You mumbled, and could have just stopped there, but the little bit of alcohol still in your system pushed you to keep going. “You know, I think I’ve been wanting to break up with him for awhile, but I’ve never had a good enough reason until tonight.”

“Oh? Really?” You stared down at his feet and watched as he inched towards you, your breath catching itself in your throat. “What was wrong with him?”

You weren’t sure how things had gotten so tense so quickly, but you weren’t a fan of it. Your heartbeat was pounding in your ears, and your fingertips were tingling as you resisted the urge to do something you might regret. “Nothing was wrong with him.” You replied with a breathy laugh. “I just… There wasn’t… There wasn’t a spark.”

“Really? The Australian accent wasn’t sparky enough for you?” He asked, which you couldn’t help but giggle at. Out of instinct, you reached up and smacked his arm.

“You’re such an idiot.” You told him, shaking your head at his childish antics.

“Yeah, I know.” You couldn’t see his face, since you refused to look at him, but you could hear that familiar smile in his voice. That filled you with the overwhelming need to see said smile, so before you could stop yourself, you glanced up, finally meeting his eyes.

Just as quickly as it had appeared, his smile dropped, instead replaced by a look of panic. His brown eyes widened, and his cheeks began to redden under your gaze. He cleared his throat, and you felt a bit better knowing he was just as nervous as you now.

“Um, Y/N, you remember that night, when you thought someone was trying to break into the loft?” He asked, a question that made your heart skip a beat.

“You mean the night you tried to jump out the window?” You countered, attempting to feign ignorance.

He rolled his eyes, unable to hide the small chuckle at your comment. “I wasn’t trying to jump out the window. I was just feeling very claustrophobic and—Anyways, that’s not the point, the point is…” His eyes flickered down, where he was flexing his fingers so they were barely centimeters away from your own. “I told you, that I wouldn’t… Kiss you. Not like that.”

“Mhm?” You pressed. You knew what was going to come next, and maybe you should have made an attempt to stop it before things got out of hand, but you couldn’t bring yourself to do that. You wanted to hear him say what you already knew, you needed to hear him confirm it for you. And then you wanted him to do what he should have done that night.

“What I meant was—“

Before he even got the chance to finish the sentence, Yeonjun and Soobin were back from dropping Yunjin off. The tension almost immediately melted away as you stepped away from each other, turning to face your two roommates. You fought the urge to scream at the two of them for interrupting everything.

“Is she always a clingy drunk?” Yeonjun asked, raising his arms above his head to give them a good stretch. “Honestly, it’s kind of cute that she gets like that.”

“Yeah, very cute.” You agreed, too busy lost in your thoughts to fully comprehend what he had said. Then, you let out a long yawn. “Wow, it’s getting pretty late. I think I’m going to go to sleep.”

Soobin frowned. “You sure? We could work you into our Monopoly game if you wanted. We need help taking down Beomgyu’s capitalistic empire.”

You laughed softly as Beomgyu rolled his eyes. “That sounds fun, but I’m really tired. Another night?” You asked, offering them a weak smile.

“Fine, but we’re holding you to that.” Yeonjun told you, pointing a finger at you as he walked by. You nodded in abeyance, glancing over at Beomgyu as he followed his friends. You could tell he was just as annoyed as you by the interrupted moment, a wave of irritation radiating off of him.

Something told you that next time, he wasn’t going to let you be interrupted.

AFTER YOU BID THE THREE OF THEM GOODNIGHT, you wandered back into your bedroom to crawl into bed with Yunjin, who had thankfully been lulled into a deep sleep. You, on the other hand, were not so lucky.

No matter how hard you tried to sleep, any effort you made proved to be pointless. Your brain was running a million miles an hour, replaying the scene that just played out. Where you had been so close to getting actual confirmation of not only your feelings, but Beomgyu’s as well. How were you supposed to sleep now, with those answers being just down the hall from you?

You rolled around in your bed for what felt like an eternity, smacking your pillows in an attempt to get them comfortable, and trying to steal your blanket back from Yunjin, before finally giving up. You’d spend so much time pent up in there, and you found yourself developing an insatiable need to get up and drink some water.

With a sigh, you finally got up out of the bed. You glanced down at Yunjin, just to make sure she was still doing okay, relieved to see she was still fast asleep. You still made an effort to be quiet, though, tiptoeing across the room and opening the door as gently as you could.

You escaped into the hallway, shutting the door to the room that had started to feel more like a prison cell than a bedroom behind you. You allowed yourself to catch your breath for a moment, leaning back against your door and resting the back of your head on it. It wasn’t until you were out of there you’d realized how claustrophobic the room had felt.

Then, your worst fears came true. You watched in horror as one of the doors opposite you in the hallway opened, revealing the person you simultaneously most wanted and least wanted to see. Beomgyu stood there, looking just as surprised as you were to see you.

“Why are you still awake?” You asked him in a low voice.

He shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep. What about you?”

“I just needed some water.” You avoided your real answer, gesturing in the direction of the kitchen.

“Oh.” He nodded slowly, and though it was a bit dark in the hallway, you could still make out his eyes boring into your own. “I’ll let you do that then.” He smiled, then held out his hand as if he was letting you pass.

“Good night, Gyu.” You smiled at him, pushing yourself off the door to leave him there. And you thought that was where it would end, a quiet goodnight with questions left hanging in the air you could address later.

One thing you forgot about Beomgyu, though, was that he was impatient. And there was no way he was waiting any longer to solve the tension between you.

As you walked past, you were surprised to feel his fingers wrap and your wrist, and even more surprised when he spun you around to face him. Without any hesitation, his arm was around your waist, pulling you flush with him while his lips pressed up against your own.

You didn’t understand how you could have been so stupid before. Now that you were here, kissing Beomgyu, you couldn’t figure out how you’d never realized your attraction to him earlier. It was a good thing you finally did, though, because you were unsure how you had lasted this long without kissing him, since it felt like the greatest thing on the whole planet.

He kissed you hungrily, as though he’d been waiting his whole life just to kiss you. His hands were all over, moving from your waist to your cheeks, to your neck, and up into your hair. You had discovered a hungriness in yourself as well, though, tangling your fingers in his long, black locks to pull him closer to you.

You weren’t sure how long the two of you were like that, kissing each other like the other was water in a desert and you’d been dying of dehydration. You were overcome with this overpowering need to have him closer to you, to have him all over you. As your lips moved in sync, you desperately clung to him, never wanting to let him go.

But he let go of you, breaking the kiss between you and instead resting his forehead against your own while the two of you caught your breath. You wanted more of him, you wanted to dive back in, but you somehow gathered the strength to hold yourself back.

“I meant… I meant something like this.” He whispered to you in breaths, and you glanced up at him through your eyelashes to see him staring down at you.

The realization of what just happened hit you like a truck. In the last 24 hours, you’d broken up with your boyfriend so he could be with his best friend, said ex boyfriend made you realize your feelings for your roommate, then you made out with your roommate in the hallway while all of your friends were sleeping.

You were absolutely screwed.

authors note: hahaha 😝 that was crazy 😝 y/ngyu finally making out what???? crazy!!!!! i hope u all enjoy this chapter i was giggling sm while making it

tag list: @therealhyunjingf @jakeshands @wccycc @captivq @sansluvr @luvdokja @squishy-maimon @urfaveuserlana @soobsfairy444 @millksea @jinjccns @zaeeeee @dimplewonie @baekberrie @luvsoobs @mazeinthemoon @moon-gyus @tyungun @soobsdior @qluvrv @txtkids @asunova @woncheecks @kaeslily @prettysung @ashxxkook @invusblog @kwnshi @lunaavity @stepout-09-15 @fairyoftaehyun @nyudove @ckline35 @pokyloky @dekusgirl @marsophilia @mutlishipperfangirl @7myoi @calumsfringe @jaxavance @yoongiigolden @17szn @wonioml @jaycheoluwu @kosmoskookie @4vonly @sunooluver

#☁️.whosthatgirl #beomgyu #txt #beomgyu smau #choi beomgyu #tomorrow x together #txt smau #beomgyu imagine #beomgyu x reader #kpop smau #txt imagine #txt x reader #kpop imagine #kpop x reader

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kitsunefyuu · 2 months

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I got in an argument with two bkdk shippers AT THE SAME TIME on a thread on twitter and it was just.... DELUSINAL

Sorry if this bothers you, I just need to share this with someone else cuz I'm so shocked after that.... If you don't want to post this then don't.

I thought that I knew how they can be but having a direct confrontation made left me literally SHOCKED because I've never encountered & talked with people so onto something to the point that they misunderstand what they read with their own eyes.

They claimed that Bakugo and Izuku's character developement only happeneds when they are together wich is just SO WRONG. For Bakugo you could argue that it is like that because he learns to calm down and accept other ppl but with Izuku it is clear as hell that it's not the case. Take vigilante deku arc as an exampre, take those last chapters as an example of Izuku's developement that is not done alongside Bakugo's.

But what actually shocked me the most was the "Bakugo saw All Might's vestige so he must be inside ofa" but it didn't go in the direction you might think it went.

Instead of saying that he still has ofa embers left or something the guy who started the thread with their bkdk ramblings said that it was confirmed by Hori that Bakugo has no embers left and that the reason why he can join the vestige realm is because his "feeligs of love" broke the rules of ofa. Wdym broke the rules of ofa you ask? Well he was bringing up the panel in which it was explained Afo's plan to steal ofa by using Tomuras hatred. Yeah. That is how Bkg "broke" ofa's rules. Bc if Afo is "enhanced" by hatred, whatever this means, it has NEVER happened nor implied, then ofa's rule for new users to be passed on/someone to exist in the realm can be affected by love. This was never even implied to be able to happen. It's just bullshit. HE AIN'T COMING BACK THIS ARC LET HIM STAY PASSED OUT WHAT DO U HAVE WITH HIM AND LET IZUKU HAVE CHARACTER DEVELOPEMENT WITH TENKO

I SHOULD'VE SAID THIS TO THEM BUT I DIDN'T CUZ I COULDN'T CONTINUE WRITING TO TWO FRIKIN ANNOYING, DELULU PPL AT THE SAME TIME.

They ended up telling me that I didn't read the manga. Yeah, sure, I didn't read.

Oh and the guy that rambled about bkdk had 'proshipper' in his bio so, yeah, he was already disgusting.

And it seems that the other bkdk's also think the same delusions bc this is what I found on another unrelated post: "Soooo Izuku going to share Explosion Quirk with Kacchan. This really have sense, he losing every Quirk he have but Kacchan went to OFA alive, since Deku will not lose OFA but only OFA quirk he can share Explosion Quirk since Kacchan break OFA rules."

Frickin delusional

Sorry if I bothered you.

And this is why I just avoid talking to BkDk shippers or interacting with anyone on twitter in general. Sorry twitter users I know you need to rely on it but I draw the line at interacting with insane people. You should just block them there no reason to debate them.

On another note, Proshipper was originally meant to just say for shipping. As in leave people alone and let them ship, it other people who turned it into problematic ship. Just wanted to clear that up since it feels like Anti's have took something meant to be about being inclusive into something disgusting, and people with bad intentions ran with it. It sad.

Now back to BkDk, don't worry most of these delusional people aren't going to stay long. With how shallow and delusional their love for the series is they will eventually run out of steam once the series in. That's my hope anyway, love or hate the DFO theory but at the least the people in the fandom are actually talking about the plot and story.

While BkDk are only hyperfocused on their ship to the point of obsession. Ignoring everything that contradicts it like you can enjoy a ship and not be insane about it. I like TdDk but you don't see me trying to twist canon into something unrecognizable for it. As I know it not end game nor is romance even important.

It's a shonen manga first. Romance is not it main goal or purpose, again it's twitter. Just ignore them or block them. They aren't worth your time at ALL, your mental health will thank you for it.

#anti bkdk #Anti bakudeku #my hero academia #boku no hero academia #yoly's talks #waywardmongergoopzine

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nekoannie-chan · 3 months

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Call

Title: Call.

Fandom: Marvel, Captain America.

Ship: Sinthea Schmidt X Agent of HYDRA!Reader.

Word count: 276 words.

Rating: Teen.

Summary: Sinthea and you flirted.

Major Tags: Flirt.

Additional tags: This is my entry to @sweetspicybingo, Sweetheart Bingo Card & square 7:

"Call me.”

You can read it on Wattpad and Ao3 too.

@saiyanprincessswanie

My native language is Spanish so I wanna improve my writing skills in English if you notice any mistakes, please let me know and I will correct them.

I don’t give any kind of permission for my fics to be posted on other platforms or languages (I translate myself my work) or the use of my graphics (my dividers are included in this), I did them exclusively for my fics, please respect my work and don't steal it. There are some people here who make dividers that anyone can use, mine is not this type, please look for the other people. The only exception is the ones I gifted 'cuz now belong to someone else. If you find any of my works on a different platform and are not one of my accounts, please let me know. Reblogs and comments are always welcome.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Marvel's characters (unfortunately), except for the original characters and the story.

Add yourself to my taglist here.

My other media where I publish: Ao3, Wattpad, ffnet, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter.

If you like it, please vote, comment, and give me feedback to improve my skills and reblog.

Tags: @sinceimetyou @unnuevosoltransformalarealidad @navybrat817 @angrythingstarlight @shield-agent78 @charmed-asylum @pandaxnienke @real-fbi @smokeandnailz @white-wolf1940 @tenaciousperfectionunknown @xoxonotme @bluemusickid @leyannrae @harrysthiccthighss @marvelatthisone @caplanbuckybarnes @sapphire-rogers @lizzieolseniskinda @notyourtypicalrose @hallecarey1 @nana1000night @talia-rumlow @writingshae @alexxavicry @azulatodoryuga @daemonslittlebitch @chaoticcollectivenightmare @endlesstwanted @chemtrails-club @marigoldreamer @whiskeytangofoxtrot555 @here4thefanfics @theestorm @patzammitt @kmc1989 @somegirlfrom

One day, while Sin was supervising her operations at an elegant party, her eyes met yours as you were watching her.

You couldn't take your eyes off Sinthea; from the first training you saw her, she had something so mesmerizing to you. She noticed the attention and decided to come closer.

With a smile on her face, Sin approached you and said, "I noticed that you can't stop looking at me. Do you like what you see?"

You smiled; you knew there was a lot of competition for a place in her heart, so you were not going to let this opportunity pass you by.

Throughout the night, you and Sin wouldn't stop talking; she even started ignoring and rejecting anyone else who came near you.

“You have guts, detective. You intrigue me. If you ever want to discover the truth behind my façade, call me." Sintea leaned over and whispered in your ear, finally, as she handed you a small piece of paper.

You nodded without saying a word. The night went on, and the two of you parted as if to avoid drawing attention to yourselves.

One night, you finally dared to open the paper. You smiled. That was her number, or at least you hoped it was. You dialed quickly; you were holding your breath in anticipation of who would answer.

“You finally decided to call? What do you want, officer?" Sinthea's voice echoed playfully on the other end of the line.

“I want to know the truth behind the mask, Sin. Call me back," you hung up. "At least if it was her number, you also knew she would accept the challenge.

#sweetheart bingo #valentine's bingo #valentine's day #sinthea schmidt x reader

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wc-confessions · 1 year

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Hi, I don’t usually come to confessions blogs for like mental health reasons but I’m the author of Follow Your Heart and i was told it was being discussed on here so I wanted to come talk about it myself.

I started writing the comic when I was in highschool, so I was a child myself. (I don’t remember my exact age, just that I remember drawing concept art while hanging out in my school’s library) That’s why the original “drama” thing was there between Mouseclaw and Sootpaw. Spottedleafs Heart came out and it was so bad that it made me re-examine that part of the story. Warriors romantizes relationships with age gaps like Soot and Mouse all the time, hence why I probably didn’t think anything of it back then. (See: Dustfern, Bramblesquirrel)

Yes, there are scenes where it’s implied the characters have had sex. There is absolutely nothing explicit however, and I have some bad news for the original anon about how babies were made if they’re that upset about it, because literally every child born in the series implies the characters had sex lol. Its even implied Daisy and Spiderleg had a one night stand! (He specifically says their kits were an accident!)

I also don’t appreciate the implications of what they were saying as someone who was traumatized by actual zooporn w real animals as a young child. That kind of thing is exactly the reason I don’t post or advertise my comic on twitter or tumblr, I knew I’d get accused of that shit. Idk if the original anon is reading this but please think about what you say before you say it :/

I’m a human being and I’m not perfect. But I like to think I’m doing okay, since multiple CSA survivors have shared their stories in my comments and thanked me for making the comic (im not trying to toot my own horn, im simply stating facts- i dont want to pat my own ass or anything) and I also had a CSA survivor as a beta reader of the comic.

I don’t think Spottedleaf experienced actual sexual abuse if that’s what the other anon was implying, I just think that the story was a VERY bad example of grooming and it was what inspired me to do better.

I’m doing this specifically because if there is the BAREST fucking chance I can educate a kid and keep them out if this situation, I want to take it. I feel incredibly strongly about this topic and that’s why I wanted to do something about it. I said this in a page description, but I was provided very little education on this in school, in fact I can only concretely remember one video and I have a vague idea that there was one other thing I was shown to educate about CSA- compared to the abstinence-only sex education that was drilled in my head from like, 6th to 9th grade. I’m just a blip in the sea of warcats comics on dA, but I can at least try my best to help where I can.

I have a warning page up that talks about the subject matter which is what I’m sure you saw, but I go a little more in depth in the description of chapter 5’s cover.

I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but I genuinely deeply appreciate you not immediately trying to crucify me when that anon came to your inbox. Like I said, there’s a reason I don’t advertise on tumblr. I really really appreciate you taking a neutral stance until you knew more. Thank you, it means a lot. :) sorry for the very long ask, haha.

thank you for your response and its no problem. in these sorts of situations its always best to pretty much get your own info so i took it very seriously. im very sorry about all that and dont hesitate to lmk if youd rather not be spoken about on here i'd completely understand.

#trying my best to minimize talk about creators anyway since lately they get out of hand or people spread misinfo #atp i just think its the right thing since Most ppl cant rlly handle simple discussions #not a confession #text #asks #nitethekitten #really sorry you had to come over here :[

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sunshine-vx · 1 year

Text

Across Space, Time and Dreams (ASTaD) (Ch. 16- Part 2 of 2)

(Blankshippers DNI)

(Please refer to beginning of chapter 1 post for complete list of CWs/TWs)

(This chapter's first illustration done by @sforspoot , second illustration done by @requyem (main drawing) + @moonlightalpha666 (background), and third illustration done by @scribblesscribblings (+ their twitter) ! Thank you so much to all of them!)

(Read it on Ao3 here!)

(Reblogs are appreciated!)

Emmet was reaching Wayward Cave, which would lead him to the end part of the Coronet Highlands. While he felt excited to keep looking for Ingo, he still had that anxious feeling in the back of his heart. Eventually, the exit end of the cave came into sight, and Emmet thought he saw movement inside. Something welled up inside his chest. Emmet decided he'd call out into the cave. He put a hand up to his mouth and shouted.

"Hello! I am Emmet! I am a Subway Boss! I am looking for my twin brother, Ingo! Do you happen to know him by chance?"

Emmet half expected no one to respond. But then, the exit of the cave glowed as a torch was lit in someone's hand. Emmet's eyes widened. The person set the torch against the cave wall and stepped forward.

Emmet's eyes filled with tears and the biggest, most genuine smile he had produced in years spread across his face.

It was Ingo.

Ingo held one last torch as he reached the exit of Wayward Cave. He thought again about the rift, his origins and the items he had found. Would he really be able to find something about himself via the rifts? He wasn't even sure if he had fallen through one. But Akari, someone from his world, had. That had given him hope, and continued to do so now. With all that had been happening, Ingo was determined to get some type of answer.

Now, the exit of the cave was in sight. Ingo swore he saw some sort of movement from outside the cave, and he paused. Suddenly, he heard someone shout towards the cave from the outside.

"Hello! I am Emmet! I am looking for my twin brother, Ingo! Do you happen to know him by chance?"

Ingo's eyes widened, and something welled up in his chest. That voice.

Emmet.

Ingo quickly took the last torch and lit it, leaning it against the cave wall and stepping forward. Now he could properly see the person who called out.

Ingo was struck with a strong wave of emotion; Confusion..nostalgia..happiness...longing….

Emmet looked..like himself, except his coat was the opposite color. Ingo could barely see a smile on the man's face, and his stature was more expensive than Ingo's own. One of the gloves Ingo once had and the armband he still had were missing on this person. Small amounts of water began to prick at Ingo's eyes. He was so familiar…

A blur of white…a smile…

Someone who looked..like me…

We'd battle and discuss Pokémon, I think…

"Subway Boss...twin brother..."

"I can't remember my own home, nor my family, if I had any…"

Ingo took in a breath. He did have a family.

Emmet.

Emmet froze in place. For a moment, he couldn't move, but when he could, he put one foot in front of the other, beginning to move his legs.

One shaky step at a time, before he was in a full on dash, soon barreling into his brother's arms, gripping him with a hug that time and space could rip from his cold, dead hands. He tried to say something, but all that came from his mouth was whimpers that accompanied the stream of tears that started rolling down his face almost immediately after he spotted Ingo.

Upon stepping out from the cave, Ingo also felt himself move towards the man who looked like him, if not much slower and making much less distance.

Ingo didn't have much time to process what was happening. He felt confused, excited, happy...and sad. Ingo almost immediately returned the hug. He was crying. Tears stung at his eyes, and when he tried to blink them away, only more came. Eventually, he allowed them to.

Finally, Emmet spoke between sobs.

"Ingo..you are here! You are really here..I knew I would find you! I knew my searches would not be useless, no matter how many people told me they would be..it worked! I found you! I am sooo happy to see you! You can finally come home.."

Home.

"I can't remember my own home…"

Not only did Ingo have a family, he also really did have a home.

A home he had before Hisui.

Suddenly, Emmet pulled away, tears still streaming from his eyes.

"We have to tell Elesa! Our Pokémon, too! Yup! The Subway System has been verrry lonely without you, you have not been there to even battle! Are you alright? You look a bit sickly..you have grown a beard, too! When–"

"Wait." Ingo said suddenly.

Emmet was important. Very important. He could feel his mind grasping at it, but it couldn't quite grip it.

Emmet stopped talking and blinked.

"You look like me." Ingo said simply.

Emmet was taken aback, but nodded. "Yes. Yes of course, you do. We are brothers! A two-car train!"

A two-car train.

Yes. Ingo knew that. The moment he saw Emmet, he knew he was important.

He was his twin brother. One part of their two-car train.

Ingo was so happy to see Emmet again.

And yet, as a moment of silence wavered through the air, Ingo realized

He hardly remembered anything about Emmet.

"I'm sorry, I'm just..a bit delirious," Ingo then said, focusing, "I'm really happy to see you."

Emmet nodded "I am happy to see you, too! So verrry happy! Although, about being delirious..you look…beat..are you okay? You are acting a bit strange. We should go find someone who can fix you up."

Ingo appreciated the thought, but he was thinking of something else.

How would Emmet react if Ingo told him he didn't remember? He would be heartbroken.

But somehow, it seemed worse to keep it from him.

Ingo spoke, "I'm sure there's many things that must be done, Emmet..but there's something..very important I need to tell you. It will be unexpected, but please, just listen."

Emmet's smile dissipated a bit, but he nodded.

Ingo took in a breath.

"I…I really don't want to have to tell you this, but…when we were separated, I…"

Emmet blinked, looking at Ingo.

"I had..forgotten about you, and I still don't remember everything…"

Emmet's eyes widened.

"What…?"

Ingo winced, but continued regardless,

"Let me explain. One day I woke up in this land called Hisui that I had never been to, and I couldn't remember anything but my own name. All my time there, I knew there were things I was forgetting. Things so important. But I could never remember."

Emmet's chest was tight, and he had a horrible feeling in his stomach. He felt like he might throw up. Ingo? Forgot him?

"No. N-No, you know me! I am your twin brother! Your best friend!" Emmet blurted out.

"You're right, I do know you." Ingo responded, "From the moment I saw you, I knew you were important. Family. But I only know so little."

Tears welled up in Emmet's eyes, and he used his hands to pull on the hair on the sides of his head. He began to weep.

Emmet felt like he couldn't talk. His legs collapsed from under him and he landed on his knees, his tears coming down harder

"I knew it was something I did. You would not say such a cruel joke otherwise."

Ingo's eyes widened. He rushed to sit in front of Emmet.

"Emmet, I'm…I'm not joking…but I swear, everything will be okay–"

Emmet was hyperventilating at this point.

"How could this ever be okay…?" He whimpered.

Seeing Emmet like this broke Ingo's heart. What he felt and how he thought was endlessly complicated, but he had to try and explain it.

Ingo paused, before he seemingly instinctively hugged Emmet, holding him gently but securely. Tears stung at his eyes. He felt terrible. But he needed to stay strong.

"Emmet. I know your heart is broken. My heart is broken, too, but I want to fix both of them as much as I can, because I care about you. So please, hear what I have to say."

Emmet didn't respond, but he relaxed somewhat from his previously tense position, lowering his hands from his head.

After a moment, Ingo continued,

"In my time before today, I would do and say things for reasons I didn't know, but they gave me strength and comfort..there were rare instances where I would recall things that were from my lost past because of small aspects of things that would make something click in my head…"

Emmet wrapped his arms around Ingo. He was silent. Ingo supposed he was listening.

"A few months ago, someone appeared here…she helped me regain some knowledge of my original time and world, as she was from there, too…but again, I only know so little compared to what I could possibly remember…"

Ingo pulled away from the hug, his hands on Emmet's shoulders. Ingo looked into Emmet's eyes, which were filled with mixes of emotion.

"But I can remember, I want to remember …I had recently begun to recall tiny bits and pieces of my home, of you…and the moment I saw you, I knew you were somebody key to my life and memories."

Emmet took in a breath, stammering.

"S-So…even if you can't remember everything, you know how important the people and things from your home are…and you still care about us…?"

Ingo nodded firmly, "Of course. Even if the memories themselves have faded, much still lives on in my heart." Ingo dug into his pocket, taking out the torn glove and piece of blue fabric he had found earlier in Wayward Cave, holding them out for Emmet to take, "Even if I can't remember the memories that make it up, I can still feel the bond between us and how important you are to me. My twin brother. My best friend."

Emmet gasped, taking the piece of fabric and the glove.

"Where did you find these…?" He murmured.

"In that cave you saw me come from. It was there I remembered multiple important things; It almost seems as if the universe wanted me to find them." Ingo explained, "I had a good feeling they traced back to someone special, and now I know that's true. I knew it was true from the moment I saw you."

"Ingo…thank you so, so much.."

"You don't need to thank me for anything."

Before anything else could be said, Emmet felt something from within his coat. He gasped.

"Our Pokémon".

Ingo was confused for a moment, before it hit him, and his eyes widened.

"You said something about 'telling our Pokémon'...we were Pokémon trainers back in our..home..too, weren't we?"

Emmet nodded, but as he opened his mouth to speak, a blue beam of light shot out of a Pokéball in his coat, a Pokémon forming. It looked confused, before it turned to Ingo, and stopped.

Ingo's eyes widened

Its name escapes me, but I remember it wielded flames with mastery..

His Pokémon.

Chandelure had felt as if something was off. She didn't want to jump to conclusions, but she felt as if their trip with Emmet had come to an unexpected stop.

So she left her Pokéball to see.

And what she saw was certainly unexpected, but absolutely welcome.

It was Emmet. And Ingo.

Ingo. It was Ingo!

Ingo blinked in shock as he took in the sight before him. A Pokémon, resembling a chandelier with purple flames.

Its name escapes me…

Chandelure.

Chandelure made a noise of much excitement, tipped with a mix of other emotions. She swiftly floated towards Ingo and hugged him as tightly as she could with her strange yet welcoming appendages.

Then, a multitude of other beams of light escaped Emmet's coat, 12 other Pokémon forming in total! They were also confused for a moment, but made noises of their own unique excitement and emotions as they spotted Ingo. 6 more Pokémon surrounded Ingo, the 6 others behind him.

Ingo seemed surprised, but not bothered. Emmet had a perplexed expression, but then he smiled, shrugging. He knew he should probably give Ingo a moment to take this all in.

"They missed you a lot."

Ingo's eyes filled with tears as he returned Chandelure's embrace. Then, after a moment, he let go of her, going to give the other Pokémon a warm greeting. He listed their names in his head as he scanned them.

A creature made of gears and other items. Klinklang. A yellow and black dragon with blades on the sides of its mouth. Haxorus. A small brown and white creature with a long face but sharp claws. Excadrill. A creature composed of garbage, yet had a charming demeanor. Garbodor. A creature resembling a strong human, but not quite, carrying a red metal rod. Gurrdurr. And a creature with pincers and a large, square rock on top of it. Crustle.

These were his Pokémon, although he had equal ownership of the last one, sharing it with Emmet, a strange detail he seemed to remember off the top of his head. These 7, out of the 13 he could see. They were his. He fought the tears filling his eyes.

Ingo went over to the other 6.

Another creature made of gears and other items, identical to Ingo's own, except the gears turned the opposite way. Another Klinklang. A long, blue and yellow creature with fins and a large mouth. Eelektross. A yellow creature with 6 eyes and 6 legs, and blue and purple patterns. Galvantula. A colorful creature with feathers yet also scales, bearing wings and claws at the same time. Archeops. A small, gray creature, seemingly made of metal, with 6 legs and pincers in its mouth. Durant. And a blue creature seemingly made of rock, 3 legs hoisting it up, with smaller orange parts, and yellow carving out its eyes. Boldore.

Ingo blinked, the tears in his eyes rolling down his face. This prompted the Pokémon to move positions, Ingo's own Pokémon scattering around him and patting him, the other Pokémon chirping sounds to comfort Ingo. Ingo laughed and patted the Pokémon in return, his laughter assuring the Pokémon he appreciated their gestures.

Chandelure had returned to be positioned in front of Ingo. Her flames wavered brightly.

I remember that it wielded flames with mastery…

Ingo smiled.

But then, that smile vanished. He glanced at Emmet, who by his facial expression, Ingo was able to tell he was thinking the same thing.

"Better sooner than later. I will help." Emmet stated simply.

Emmet was stressed, but he knew it was the best way to go. Ingo was certainly stressed as well. As anxious as he still was, Ingo's words resonated with him, and he was able to feel somewhat calm, and know what he said was true. At the end of it all, he was glad Ingo told him sooner than later. He'd rather get it over with.

"We had an unexpected stop in schedule." Emmet spoke.

"The reason we had an unexpected stop is because I had to work something out with Emmet regarding something important," Ingo explained, "and it's only fair that I tell you all, as well."

The Pokémon gathered around Ingo.

"It's..not good news. It's going to be hard to take in," Ingo said, "but please trust me when I say it'll all be okay. I just need you all to listen".

"Ingo loves you all verrry much." Emmet added, "Please keep this in mind."

The Pokémon were concerned, but also confused. They had been through hardships before; what could this bad thing be?

It came to them that they underestimated what it was.

Ingo repeated what he had told Emmet to the Pokémon; That before today, he did not remember them. As expected, the Pokémon did not react well. They made noises of distress, some arguing with the absurd concept, others panicking or shutting down. Some threw fits and others went to hide. Emmet's Pokémon scattered over to him. He tried to comfort them, petting them and trying to reassure them.

Haxorus shrunk away, lowering his head. Chandelure's flames darkened just a bit. Garbodor cried, its defeated arms hanging at its side.

And with the others' grief forming in their own ways.

Ingo had expected a negative reaction, but it seemed he had overestimated his ability to take control of the situation.

"Everyone, please listen–" Ingo called out.

A few of the Pokémon looked at him, but most of them were too upset.

Ingo took in a breath and went into thought. How could he calm them down?

After a moment, something clicked in his head. It was odd, but it felt right. He reached into his cloak and took out the Celestica Flute. He put the flute to his mouth, and without any outside guidance, played a tune he had never heard in Hisui, yet it was so familiar.

Emmet smiled, holding back tears, and the Pokémon began to calm down. The noise lowered, any fits began to calm, Pokémon hiding peeked out to look. Haxorus looked up, Garbodor lifted its arms, Chandelure's flames grew just a bit brighter.

That tune was only something an Ingo that remembered would know.

It may seem silly to some, but Ingo and Emmet had grown a special attachment to that tune ever since they were boys. Their parents sometimes whistled it to them to help calm them, and the brothers learned to whistle it themselves to help themselves and each other when they needed it. As Pokémon trainers, they passed this tradition down to them– they'd whistle it to their dear Pokémon when they needed it, too.

Ingo lowered the flute and put it back in his coat. He sat down and patted the ground to his side.

"Come here and listen. I promise, everything will be okay, even if it seems like it won't be." Ingo averred.

Emmet shuffled towards Ingo a little as his Pokémon approached him as well, a soft smile on his face. He had a warm feeling. Despite claiming to have failing memory, Ingo had remembered how to calm both him and their Pokémon down; Close, calming gestures and shared, special things. There was no way it was a coincidence.

Ingo continued to explain the situation to the Pokémon, making sure to communicate well to them; how he did things for reasons he didn't know, how he knew there were things missing, how he started to remember, could and wanted to remember more, and how he wanted to mend this all.

"You all are my family, my best friends." Ingo stated, looking at the Pokémon, "I want everything to be okay again, and I'll make sure that that happens."

The Pokémon chattered among themselves, perplexed..but glad.

Ingo glanced around, looking at Emmet and the Pokémon around him.

His family.

A sad look then flashed across Ingo's eyes. Tears filled his eyes and he blinked them away, but a few rolled down his face. He glanced down for a moment.

"I'm so sorry about all of this, that I forgot you all…I still missed you before today, even if I didn't know it…I didn't mean to forget you, and I would never want to.."

Emmet and the Pokémon were taken aback. Emmet rushed over to Ingo and pulled him into a hug, surprising the older twin. The Pokémon, who had surrounded Ingo and Emmet, patted Ingo and chattered noises of comfort.

Ingo always liked the company of his loved ones. Emmet and their Pokémon remembered that for sure.

"Ingo. You have no reason to apologize. I am sorry if I made you feel bad. I am not upset with you. I never was." Emmet affirmed, "This situation is not your fault. Even though you do not remember, you are working with us, like you always have. We are grateful for that." The Pokémon made noises of agreement.

A warm feeling grew in Ingo's chest.

"No, no, you didn't make me feel bad." Ingo responded, then letting out a breathy laugh, "I am glad I could do something. Thank you, Emmet. All of you. Thank you so much."

After a moment, Ingo and Emmet let go of each other. Emmet looked at the ground for a moment, thinking, before he looked back up to Ingo and spoke.

"So you are…willing to regain your memories, like you said?"

"I have wondered about my origins for all my time here," Ingo responded, "I would want nothing else. Which reminds me; Emmet, my Pokémon friends, I have decided on something, and I have something important to ask you all."

Emmet seemed a bit perplexed, as did the Pokémon, but nodded, with the Pokémon making noises of affirmation, assuring Ingo he was in the clear to ask.

"I am willing to regain my memories." Ingo said, tears welling up in his eyes as he looked at his brother, "Will you all be willing to once again start up this two-car train," Ingo looked around at all his Pokémon, "along with special, dear passengers," Then back to Emmet, "and set out on a new track; Helping me reclaim who I once was, as I will help you, and mend this all?"

A smile spread across Emmet's face, tears forming in his eyes as well, the Pokémon showing delighted movements and making noises of happiness, "That is exactly what I want to do. You said you wanted to fix our hearts; You should not have to do that alone. I want to do that, too. I have no doubt that our Pokémon feel the same. Yup! We are a two-car train with our dear passengers, like you said, after all, and we want nothing else than to go down this new track with you."

Ingo smiled as well and stood up, reaching his hand out to Emmet, who grabbed it and stood up with Ingo, then embracing him once again. Ingo returned the gesture. The Pokémon huddled with them, Ingo and Emmet patting them softly. Neither twin, nor the Pokémon, had to say anything; The message was already clear.

Thank you for being here with me.

After a few moments, they let go.

"We have much to do." Ingo said, "It will be a long track forward."

"That is okay. It will be alright as long as we all are together; You think this, too, yes?" Emmet responded.

Ingo nodded, "Absolutely."

The Pokémon chattered in contentment. They agreed.

Chapter 16 (part 1 of 2)

Chapter 17 (part 1 of 2)

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echoesofmyfootsteps · 1 year

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Temporary Effect

A dramione drabble (cross-posted from my Twitter, inspired by a prompt from Dramione Prompts)

//Narcissa POV

“Darling, it’s just a temporary effect of forgetting just who you are.” Narcissa combed Draco’s bangs off his forehead with her fingers.

Malfoys didn’t *do* jealousy. It was plebeian and useless. So even if her baby was positively green over a good-for-nothing Mudblood and how she was unjustly favored by those blood traitors and Muggle-lovers at Hogwarts, she would remind him of his position.

“B-but, Father’s right! She’s beating me in every subject, and maybe—“

“Now.” A faint click sounded as Draco shut his mouth with haste. Narcissa’s tone brooked no further discussion. “Your father is critical because he expects you to give your utmost for a glorious future. And believe me, yours holds astounding promise.” She knew.

She’d Seen it.

Drawing her shoulders back, Narcissa looked her son straight in his tear-filled eyes. “This world is yours—by nature and by right. All the generations that built our world, refined spells and magic and toiled to accrue vast financial means, they all refine down to /you/: one of the last pure heirs of British magic. Don’t even spare that Mudblood another thought.”

She grasped at the cool satin sheets and pulled them around his shoulders, sliding them tightly under his body in a fluid motion, just as he liked. With a flick of her wand and a whoosh of magic, the lights extinguished.

“Goodnight, mon petit prince.” She kissed his forehead. Under her lips, she felt rather than saw the crinkle that remained there. He sniffled.

Soundlessly she closed the door and made her way down the hall.

Draco’s upset had unsettled her, and she knew just what to do to calm herself. Restore her certainty.

She filled her vessel, burnt some of Draco’s baby hair, set the sandalwood, yarrow, and juniper alight and inhaled the smoke.

Settled at the back of her chambers, Narcissa looked into the golden bowl of water. For hours she sat absolutely still, back straight, waiting for Draco’s future to reveal itself again.

A shimmer in the bowl—images of people.

The pressure of Lucius’s presence tugged at the edge of Narcissa’s consciousness, but she continued, so close to her goal.

“Is it still there?” said her husband at length, his deep voice barely audible.

“Yes. I can see it.”

/Congrautlations, Minister Malfoy/ read a banner.

Draco was the very picture of health and happiness. In his arms he held a small child, on whom he doted. All appearances made him out to be a devoted family man, as any worthwhile minister would be expected to be (though she didn’t like the look of how apparently long it had taken for her to get a grandbaby). Draco was whole and hale.

Narcissa smiled. “He’s happy.”

“And…?”

“And yes, he’s minister.”

“And the girl?”

Narcissa directed her attention to the other person on whom Draco doted. The /woman/ was alight with joy, beaming for the flashing cameras.

“Beautiful. Regal. Positively glowing with power.”

If Narcissa found it a little odd that most of the dignitaries were favoring the wife over Draco, or that /she/ was the one holding the symbols of investiture, she kept it herself.

“A dutiful pureblood wife.”

“Do we know her?” Lucius breathed with anticipation.

Draco, still holding the child, pressed a kiss into his wife’s hair.

Wild, like Bella’s.

“Slightly familiar? Perhaps a distant cousin from the continent?”

Lucius clapped his hands together from behind.

“Yes, a glorious future, indeed. Now if only he could get ahead of that Mudblood.”

The water in the bowl rippled, and the image was gone.

“Oh, do stop needling the boy,” Narcissa huffed. “It’s only a brief hiccup. She’s no concern of ours.”

Original drabble location:

#dramione fanfic #drabble #draco malfoy #hermione granger #my fics

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clonehub · 1 year

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I thought it was delayed because they knew Andor was gonna be big, but they had to known Mandalorian would be big too. They really couldn't have just spaced out the release dates so Bad Batch could stand a chance? I'm more upset at the treatment of animated projects in general. At least Tales of the Jedi still did well despite airing alongside Andor.

They actually didn't think andor was gonna be that big til it came out, I think! Like I remember not much promo or hype or it til a trailer and then the critics who got the eps started losing their minds. Regardless, one of the assistant editors definitely said it had to be delayed by 6 months specifically because they were attempting to fix the whitewashing. I think tbb was originally gonna air in early September or maybe August, but now it's coming out in January and that's rooooughly six months

I think they wouldn't budge the Mandalorian for anything tbh, it just brings in too much. But as for tbb, I don't want to say that its treatment is a result of a lack of respect for animation because like, visions and totj as u said seemed to do fine/better, although every episode for both of those came out all at once rather than having weekly releases (I think). This mess with the bad batch is imho the creators own faults. If uwwtbb is getting big enough for one of the executive producers to be asked, unplanned, about the controversies of racism surrounding it during an interview, then Disney/LF would probably want to bury the controversy any way they can.

I saw some folks on Twitter upset that the tbb header for the official star wars account was replaced by the one for the Mandalorian despite the latter not coming out for another two months. Again this is probably both a lack of respect for animation and generally Disney not wanting to risk drawing further attention to the movement/uwwtbb, esp not w me and the mod qrting every single official tbb tweet every time we see one 😭

To me the bigger insult to animation is having whitewashing be the center of your visual designs and therefore be the foundation of your visual storytelling.

The bad batch would have survived I think being delayed longer. Maybe would have given them more time to think over better responses to uwwtbb.

#ask

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obi-nob-kenobi · 2 years

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Fandom AU || Obikin

Original thread on twitter

Hello_There_Ben is an (in)famous ao3 writer. The king of Dead Dove for a popular fandom. Hes been friends with artist Darth_Vader for years on tumblr. After 5 years they meet in person at a convention, seeing each other for the first time. And fall in love.

Hello_There_Ben Aka Obi-Wan Kenobi is a corporate lawyer. But since he was a teenager he’s been writing fics and posting them on every site you can think of until finally settling on ao3. Though he knew his fics aren't for everyone, to his surprise he’s gifted with art!

Darth_Vader aka Anakin Skywalker is a recent engineering masters student graduate, but back in undergrad he would stress draw. One day he got curious and went into the DDDNE tag of his favorite show, and came across Hello_Ben's fic and HAD to draw for him.

aka a very self indulgent AU but also an obikin meet cute

After they began talking. A lot. Ben gave him tips on surviving College (it's been a while for me but you'll get through it) just as Vader stayed up and talked with him during Ben's divorce (I'm so sorry, seriously what can I do for you?) But they never saw each other's pictures.

That is until Anime Coruscant comes into town, just a 20 min bus ride from Obi-Wan's townhouse. Vader messages him that he has an artist table at the con and maybe they can finally meet up. Obi-Wan used to go to that con, stopped when it got too big, but bought his ticket.

And the day of the con the nerves set in. He's finally gonna meet his online friend for the first time. Is he gonna get weirded out he's older (even tho he's never hidden his age, just had 30+ in his bio)? And when he finds Vader's table he's met with the most gorgeous man.

Which only makes him EXTRA nervous. Obi-Wan is in a casual-ish cosplay of their fandom (idk maybe he writes thorki or Hannigram) and he's getting self conscious of how he looks. He also has some coffee and pastries as a snack for Vader as a "hi glad to meet you" offering.

He approaches his table just as Vader finishes a purchase with a customer. He looks at Obi-Wan with his gorgeous blue eyes and handsome smile and Obi-Wan chokes on his tongue as he just spurts out "hello there" And Vader recognizes him immediately "Ben??"

Vader reaches over for him across his table. Almost knocking over his own display in an attempt to hug him "it's so good to meet you!!" And then Vader drags him over to his side of the table, and oh Vader is taller than him. Tall and handsome and full of sunshine.

Vader sells mostly prints of his work seen all over tumblr and Instagram. He also has cute stickers and buttons related to fanfic stuff (friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, Dead Dove etc) and he's getting a good amount of sales! But now all his attention is on Obi-Wan.

"Thank you for coming, I didn't expect you so soon. How's the con? Did you get anything yet?" Vader talks excitedly, already out of breath when he finally asks "oh, I didn't even ask if Ben is okay to call you by. You can call me Ani, or Anakin." A beautiful name for him.

Obi-Wan manages to get his own name out and Anakin's smile is so bright now learning it "Obi-Wan? That's such a cool name!! Why go by Ben?" It was a nickname growing up, but also more anonymous since he's a lawyer. Don't need clients to find his ao3 and tangle it with his work.

So the con goes well, Obi-Wan stays with anakin and helps him with his table. After they eat at Denny's just to talk more and it's really like talking to an old friend. Despite their age difference and distance everything they do is comfortable. Anakin has to get To his hotel soon and pass out. He explained he actually drove 8hrs to the con the morning of set up so he's exhausted and its catching up on him. Obi-Wan walks with him to his hotel... only there's a party going on. And Anakin isn't sure where he can sleep.

He didn't know anyone else coming to the con, but he saw someone said they had room for one more to help pay and he took it, since the cost would be much less than a hotel by himself. But the host of the room had other people over. "Absolutely not, you're staying with me"

And Anakin looks at him, shocked but grateful "Are you sure? I don't want to inconvenience you." "Do you want to sleep on the floor? Come on" So taking Anakin's car they go to Obi-Wan's house. And he's already dotting on Anakin, giving him a fresh towel and--

Offering snacks but Anakin laughs saying this was more than enough and he owes Obi-Wan a lot. Obi-Wan jokingly says to join him for dinner again tomorrow night, and Anakin replies "Thai or sushi?"

"Thai"

"Its a date" and then disappears into the shower and Obi-wan is FUCKED

TBC

#obikin #aniobi #anaobi #obiani #obi-wan kenobi #anakin skywalker #obikin au #fic prompt #hazel rambles obikin #fandom au #dead dove do not eat #meet cute #literally just obi-wan and anakin meeting as fandom nerds

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golbrocklovely · 1 year

Text

i'm gonna rant about this for two seconds just bc i saw a lot of stuff about it on twitter and don't really feel like bitching about it there lol

so the teen wolf movie… i knew from the get go this was gonna end up being shit the moment dylan wasn't gonna be in it sksks

but what i've heard about this movie (bc highkey i ain't gonna watch it sorry), it somehow is worse than imagined.

i used to love teen wolf. literally watched it as it was airing. used to have a blog dedicated to it, used to do live recaps on my personal tumblr. i loved that show. but i started to not care about it around season 4/5ish. basically, they introduced too many characters and i just didn't care about a single one of them. hilariously one of the characters i despise is now loved deeply (theo) so… go figure.

but what i don't understand is… why are any of you surprised that jeff davis did what jeff davis does best and fucked up teen wolf?

like this man was notoriously hated for years in the fandom after season 3 bc everything he did to the characters sucked ass. and then topping all of that off, the queerbaiting. that man originated it (not really, but you get my point) so why are you guys surprised that he basically did all of this again just a decade or more later??

of course this movie was a cash grab and not really meant to bring back the love or respect the fans' love for this story. it was just to make money and keep the property rights going.

personally, if i was going to make a teen wolf movie, this is what i would have done:

the overall theme of the movie - letting go of the past.

assuming you could get most of the cast to come back, this is how the movie would have went: after everyone graduated high school (at least the main cast like scott, lydia, stiles, malia, that group), they all immediately left BH. maybe even make it seem like it was a supernatural reason or something, like something pushed them away from BH but they didn't know it at the time. years later, scott is starting to see visions of allison again, like how this movie alluded to it in the trailers. have the others start to see it too. maybe they even see past monsters coming back and haunting them, which makes them all go back to BH. imagine it kinda like in "it" where all the adult versions of the kids didn't remember their old home town, but once they are told about it, they are drawn back. kinda sorta like that.

they get to BH and everything seems okay-ish. hell, maybe you can even make it where it's their 10 year hs anniversary or something just so you get to see all the familiar faces. all of sudden, old monsters that they have fought and killed before come back. bring out all the old hits, maybe some new ones - idk. then, have allison appear. but she's not how she used to be.

she's now void!allison.

each of the main characters has to go on their own journey and fight their own battles - past monsters they once faced they now have to deal with again. there is a bigger monster controlling all of the older monsters (maybe it's void!allison or maybe it's someone pretending that it's her) and if these monsters aren't defeated by the red moon (or some other bs werewolf lore shit that can be made up idk) these monsters will ACTUALLY come back and start killing all the citizens of BH bc in the current period they are only half as strong as they could be. and make it bc, as deaton had mentioned oh so many years ago, BH is a beacon for the supernatural. and something buried deep in BH is drawing this Main Monster to create and resurrect all of these old monsters.

and the whole point of the movie is showing that even tho they moved away from BH and continued living, none of them ever really moved on from what happened to them. you can have malia have to face off against her mother again. lydia maybe is back in eichen house or something. as for derek and scott, they are facing bigger issues.

scott - he has to get over losing his first love, allison. especially since in this state, she is trying to constantly kill him and his pack. he never truly got over her death, and so in the end… he has to kill her. bc realistically allison wouldn't want to be fighting him or trying to kill him or any of her friends. and more she is "alive" the less like her she is being. she is becoming more and more a monster, and scott knows that that isn't something she would want. maybe even have it where the Big Monster offers him the chance to have her be actually resurrected and not just used as a puppet if he relinquishes his powers to the Big Monster.

derek - he has to face his fears and forgive himself of his family's death (along with his first love's death as well). just a lot of forgiveness on his part, especially since now he has a kid. his kid shouldn't inherent the trauma that derek has had just bc he never truly got over it. have derek face off not only against past monsters, but maybe against himself. the Big Monster might try to persuade him to die and give up his powers bc he'll at least be with his family again. maybe derek finally realizes that he isn't alone in this world bc he has family living rn. and this makes him want to keep fighting.

and this would be a great time to note that if dylan didn't want to come back like he did irl, you can blame it on him being a human and not a supernatural being. or idk, come up with a bs reason like he's overseas taking care of the kids that he and lydia clearly and definitely had bc they are meant to be together.

they are just able to defeat their past demons, and they all band together and defeat the Big Monster in some way or another. all the other side characters that have existed can be included in each of the main casts' stories in one way or another. maybe have them be each other's tether or whatever. idk, i'm not working out all the kinks bc i ain't writing this.

in the end, they all live, maybe one of them can have a moment of almost dying - but they all make it out in the end. allison is still dead tho, bc she is meant to be dead. even tho it's heartbreaking, it's a part of life that scott can now finally accept and move on from. much like the rest of the characters and their past. they are finally healed.

see… wouldn't that have been better than whatever the fuck happened in the movie lol

#part of me wants to write this but like... it ain't gonna happen lol #i don't know all the lore of teen wolf anymore and i'm not about to relearn all of it #highkey everything after void!stiles was shit let's be honest #personal #text #do i tag this as teen wolf? idk #the fanbase on here is a bit... intense lol

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lulu-nightbon · 1 year

Text

OKAY OKAY SO

im not posting this on the Baleful Melody tumblr because its so bad lmfao BUT it is the pfp

i just wanted to draw a pic of Húlíjīng Xiānzhī (Lulilial/Lulu, the self-insert) with Macaque, Wukong, and Nezha! dont mind the pic in the upper right of the image, its a meme for a different thing

for colors (aside from shirt + shorts) on Lulu, this is the original ref (drawn by a friend who im not able to contact rn due to irl issues with my stuff)

this is post season 3 (the fic follows the original plotline fairly closely), after some spoilery things occur (ill put it at the bottom of the post). these four are thesquad™ in-universe, mainly because Lulu may or may not have. almost killed them. and almost died for them. multiple times. there's other reasons of course but if you don't want spoilers i shall not

if you want to see the meme in the upper right corner (the digitalized version my lovely friend over on twitter did, as it's MUCH cleaner), lmk, this is just a doodle page for my sona and there is one more image, but i can share that one too (basic gist- i saw a sad cat meme and decided to draw them super caked up on a thursday afternoon)

please do not mind the state my sketchbook is in, and thanks for looking at this!

okay

are the non-spoiler people gone?

they are?

okay

here we go!

Lulu was originally named Cháng Zhǐ (Zhouei), and she was just a human girl. sometime post-season 3, haven't decided the EXACT circumstances of this yet (whether they're training, battling, etc), but a spark of the samadhi fire escapes Mei and sets her on fire, burning her alive (for those noticing the pronoun difference- part of her struggle in the story is figuring out she's NOT cis, and also her closeted lesbianism, but that second one is a bit more obvious). the last thing she heard was sirens as no trace was left of her... supposedly. she reincarnated into a demon family (before you get on my ass about time continuity- nezha, in his original legend, was gestated for like 42 months a normal pregnancy is 9, came out as a ball of flesh, and then popped out of said ball at like... age 12. princess iron fan didn't want red son to grow past like 8 in his original mythology he's quite obviously older in lmk, im just trying to prove a point here, and wukong was literally born full-grown from a rock. fast aging isn't unbelievable for a demon), who named them Húlíjīng Xiānzhī. they found the group, and became a large antagonist for that portion of the story due to being mad with revenge, but they also have severe amnesia. however, their soul is still there, and wukong can see them crying out when using his golden eyes of truth on Húlíjīng Xiānzhī. eventually, they do restore their memory and at some point after that is when that image would've taken place. they first met macaque (as mk had to relay the message that wukong said she couldn't watch them train when she was still Cháng Zhǐ), who gave her a place to stay when she was Cháng Zhǐ (she does start out homeless, and was an orphaned child), then wukong either a little before or when going to try to rescue Wukong from Spider Queen (who then smashed the side of her head into the ground while she was simping, severely injuring her. macaque shadowed her away to flower fruit mountain, where he knew they'd both be safe while he took care of her again), and lastly Nezha during the Lady Bone Demon incident (she willingly became a host for lbd, as she wanted to trade herself for macaque, and just ended up upsetting the latter while being used). i will HAPPILY spoil more if you ask, im really excited about this fic!!!!!!!!! ^^

#baleful melody #lmk sun wukong #monkey king #liu er mihou #sun wukong #lmk macaque #six eared macaque #nezha #lmk nezha #Húlíjīng Xiānzhī

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ltleflrt · 1 year

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Helllo 🙂

Alright so the whole ao3 tos violation drama is ongoing on twitter and since your name is somehow what these people are using to legitimise their arguments, I’ll super appreciate it if you could clear up a couple of things for me.

Do you also believe the person they’re calling out is behind this? There doesn’t seem to be much proof about it except for the “everyone knows” and the google doc and some unknown insider. I’ll basically take your word as proof because I trust you.

And second, were any of your fics ever in trouble with ao3 because of this thing? It’s very hard for me to accept ao3 deletes fics because someone in the comments mentions getting a physical copy. The whole spin these people have put on this is just *shakes hands*

Thank you and I’m sorry the trolls try to stop you from making physical copies of your work. Their “well someone’s making profit” sucks!!!

I'm going to preface this with a reminder that I'm not active on Twitter, so I do not know everything that's going on there.

Do I believe the person they're calling out is behind it? Well, I believe she started it. Or at the very least was extremely vocal about her opposition to printed fics in a forum where she whipped up people who respect her opinion into having the same opinions.

I don't have proof. It has been several years since I was targeted, and I did not save receipts. I'm bad enough about doing that with things I buy in the store, so I certainly don't keep track of shit like that for fandom drama. Everyone who attacked me was on anon, and at the time I was naive enough to think it was okay to share my links publicly, so I have no idea who decided to impersonate CW/WB and report me for copyright. (I seriously doubt it was actually someone at CW/WB doing the reporting.) Someone came to me privately at the time and explained that she saw the drama go down in this person's FB group and showed me some screenshots. Here's the first anon message I got about it, and as you can see that was 5 years ago. If you check the comments you can see that someone mentions thinking they knew who it was.

I have also seen a recent screenshot where someone posted pictures of printed fics that they purchased on FB, and she responded negatively to it and said that she didn't think that the author getting zero profit was good enough since Lulu makes a profit. That's basically the same thing she and her groupies were talking about 5 years ago when they were bitching about me, so the tune has not changed in all this time. And during the conversation that followed they were patting themselves on the back for just printing their favorite fics on their home printers instead. That's what set me off on this rant. That screenshot was shared in a private discord server, and I don't intend to make it public. There are people in that FB group who don't share that person's views, and they'd like to remain anonymous.

So back to the original question. Do I think she's behind it? Yes. I've seen her name on things. And I've also seen how she has a little group of super-fans who take her opinions to heart without actually thinking about it very hard.

After the anons jumped all over me several years ago and reported my Lulu account, I just created a new account and moved on with my life after that, and am more careful about letting people buy prints than I was in the beginning. (I also stopped doing free giveaway drawings, because I didn't want to risk an unknown hater getting a free copy. Fuck them.) I didn't call anyone out, and just kept things to myself. However, when another author friend of mine had a similar experience a few years later, we compared notes and found that it was the same person whipping up outrage. My friend happens to be active in the FB group, where I am not, so she sees more of the drama there. Based on the fact that she told me the name, and I was like "oooh that person", I'm inclined to believe my friend about what she witnessed.

Any time I see another author deciding to make their prints available, I make sure to warn them about keeping their info secure, and that's the extent to which I generally get involved. Unless someone asks me about it privately, then I'll name names.

On to your second question. I have not been reported for anything on AO3 (yet, *crosses fingers*, cuz the trolls try really really really hard to punish those they disagree with). I don't think I've mentioned my printed fics in any comments. I had it in my profile for a while, with all in caps ZERO PROFIT to cover my bases, but eventually took it out to be better safe than sorry.

I'm speculating, but I suspect the AO3 reporting might have gained traction because one author got sick of having their Lulu account get stealth reported (because the trolls will pretend to be your friend and will pay actual dollars to access the links in order to report them), so they made their own website. They order the books in bulk, and then take orders through their direct website. Due to this, it's nearly impossible for them to avoid some kind of profit, due to being unable to accurately determine how much everything is going to cost to the penny, so they round up a little to make sure everything is covered. It's possible (again, SPECULATION), AO3 went ah that's the Forbidden Profit, and slammed the ban-hammer down.

Another author eventually rewrote one of their fics as an original and is selling it. I don't know if their AO3 got reported too, but that might be a potential connection to profit as well. I do know that when I first started getting angry anons 5 years ago, a few of them didn't like the idea of filing off the serial numbers of an AU and selling it as original fiction either. So it wouldn't surprise me if the Reporting Trolls still conflate Fic For Profit and Fic Rewritten As Original For Profit and went on an AO3 reporting spree for that author too, even though the situation is slightly different.

I don't work for AO3, I don't know what they're specifically looking for. But I do believe they'll delete a fic if they find something against their TOS. But I also think they're not going through it with a fine tooth comb until Reporting Trolls do it for them and find the teensiest scraps of evidence to supply them.

My take on all of that is that I hate everyone who disagrees with zero-profit fic prints, and I hope they all develop a nasty, incurable toe fungus. And until I see that one person who I believe is the ringleader of the anti campaign go "y'know what I changed my mind, here's my fic printed on Lulu too!" I'm going to think she's sus based on the screenshots I've seen and the conversations I've had with people in her FB group.

Also, why do you need proof? What's your stake in all of this? Are you planning on printing your fics and want to avoid drama? If yes, just keep it off FB. If no, then why does it matter? Continue reading that person's fic if you enjoy it, and ignore the drama. Don't report your fellow fans for zero-profit fic prints.

Anyway, I hope this answers your questions. Feel free to come off anon and message me privately about it, and I'll be a little less vague. I still don't have any proof if you want it, but I'm happy to talk about it with people.

Edit: the "you" in the proof paragraph isn't necessarily You, Nonny. I'm sorry, my brain got pissy at hypothetical requests for proof and I got carried away lol...

#ltleramblings #anonymous #reply #printed fics #fandom drama #fandom wank

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zynart · 1 year

Text

whispering to the ghost in the machine, asking it to paint me a pretty picture

i know we're all probably annoyed by and exhausted of AI art discourse by now, which is understandable, because there's a lot of people there who have dug in deep without having much of an idea of how any of it all works. i can say that it is genuinely very annoying how some people in tech with no artistic sensibilities who don't know enough to know how little they know but bring a lot of unearned confidence to the table anyway. i can say that they are very annoying on twitter and often have no real taste. but i want us, just for a moment, to go back to even just... about a year ago, and what you knew of AI art at the time. there's been communities using AI art for a couple of years now, circles on twitter where some of it started as hobbyists and even meme pages which posted the computer's amusing responses based on its wonky contextless interpretation of prompts. that was when art generating AI tools weren't all that good and we could all be amused not just by being able to visualize funny scenarios or interesting aesthetics, but of catching a glimpse of how this alien computer with a rudimentary grasp of text and a mechanically gifted child's understanding of composition actually 'thought'. and that was fascinating as much as it was funny

remember that? but then AI art tools advanced so quickly that our relationship with it as something that occasionally came across the tl changed. back then it was still mostly hobbyists, people who also found watching a machine think and paint to be interesting, and people who did mostly have a certain artistic curiosity to be playing around with this weird and novel tool. but then all of a sudden tech people discovered it and then all we saw was people who made their livings off of hype and marketing and linkedin platitudes and razzle dazzle for venture capital, and the kind of people who followed those people and imagined themselves as one day being like them, the kind of people who saw this as just another bodyhack to get around an inability to draw things. and then the kind of people in their orbit, who like drawing high fantasy and video game elves with huge boobs

and all of it somehow felt like a symptom of a wider anti-intellectual and anti-sophistication monoculture, like disney strongarming cinemas into starving out original IP and well-made middlebrow blockbusters while nerds insist that dominating mainstream pop culture isn't enough and that they be feted for their taste, god forbid martin scorsese criticize the newest thor movie. and it's like marvel for the cinephiles and rupi kaur for the poets and YA for the writers, seeing the art most in public consciousness and receiving the most attention and coverage — even if it's not exactly rave reviews, it's still all the oxygen in the room — is just godawful, and there are so many artists more deserving

(i mean, it's almost a cliche at this point that people in tech will see a domain that has a lot of thought and study behind it and think the difficult questions within the domain are just somehow things nobody had thought of before, instead of things people who devoted their lives to the area and are no less smart than any of you had engaged with and not been able to find an easy solution to. any of us working in the humanities know what i'm talking about here, so i get the frustration of how all this comes with associations to a tech dude approach that everything is optimizable through a process for efficiency and that the deep body of work, thought, critique, and practice that it takes to develop taste and intuition and domain knowledge can somehow be bypassed if only the people working on it had just thought of this shortcut, which they just were too dumb to have considered before —)

wait, i'll give a little context about myself first, because i know that at least a good fraction of my readers are approaching this with skepticism, assuming that someone taking AI art seriously must be some kind of artless stem person. and i mean, i'm not gonna pretend that my art is good, but i can say art is something i think deeply about and have much interest in, that i follow closely and read criticism and theory, something that i don't take lightly. that i don't think just anyone can do well, that i think takes not just talent but thought. more written art than visual in my own art, but an endless all-consuming fascination with weird new mediums and the kinds of themes you might expect from someone whose blog homepage is black and neon color schemes with consolas body text with a list of projects made over quarantine that includes 1) several essays about internet culture, 2) a virtual date night generator so you could be long-distance and still travel to cities, events, art shows, concerts, beach bonfires, fireworks shows... 3) travel-blogging in lockdown with hq walking tours on youtube, high-dose thc for immersion, audio calls as friends to walk with and the screenshot button as my camera, 4) a digital apartment space on gather, made specifically for parties where you can stay in rooms but chat to people if you go up to them, 5) a text-based game with some poems and a hacky premise about an AI recording your brain, and 6) a magical realism short story about a climate post-apocalypse

but thing is. alright, let's return to the hobbyists, and how fast AI art was developing. and very soon watching with much amusement the machine try to understand you and draw you a little painting all proudly without realizing it made no sense at all turns into learning how to whisper to the machine and getting some intuition of it and figuring out exactly how to set up the machine to produce some very specific image from your mind. i've followed AI art circles and there are artists using technology as tools in their process who have a lot of insightful points that have clearly thought deeply and respectfully about it who have plenty to say

but discourse has never really gone for insight, so what gets traction is often dumb statements from tech randos who don't know the first thing about what makes good art good art or how to recognize artistic value, or arguments from people who don't know anything about how AI works or even what the technology is and think that they make collages from actual phrases or actual chunks of pixels across the internet. lots of made-up bullshit like the collage memes* pictured earlier where the creator made a collage themselves as an example of how AI art works, or viral posts of disinformation which takes output from faceapp-style AI tools which produce output from a given photo side by side with the original as proof of a search-and-collage mechanism

(this is the collage meme in question. the collage image given as an example of AI art is something this creator made, not an AI art product, because that's now how it works)

which isn't how it works at all. but i think i should explain how it actually does work before we go ahead.

there's an old joke now about AI or machine learning basically being just a glorified logistic regression or matrix multiplication and the thing is, it's more true than it's not. AI being basically like a billion equations that learns which output of a cluster of pixels is most accurately represented by which equation to look like whatever thing the keyword is, and learns the equations to combine those equations to most accurately give out whatever bunch of keywords and grammar the prompt is. math that says an equation where you input this. not collaging anything or even having access to any of the original art (you can find a more thorough explanation by an AI artist here)

and just to reiterate that. because a lot of people seem to have no idea how it works and seem to think it's kind of a web crawler, or a 'spider' in old school terms, that basically does a search of a big library of images and pastes them together in a mashup (sometimes in amusing ways, like recently when there was a movement to flood artstation with anti-AI images with big red slashes on them, out of an impression that AI is literally searching artstation and collaging recent pieces fitting the keywords which would make this sabotage all the art machines, and people in the AI art community posted images they'd generated to also have big red slashes with joking captions about the anti-AI slashes working and ruining all the tools. if you saw either side of this little hubbub but didn't know what exactly was going on, now you've got some backstory)

the thing is, i think ultimately this approach of trying to confuse people about what AI art does obscures what ultimately makes human stories or art unique. which is having interiority and a mental model, the lack of which gives you an uncanny valley. the whole thing imo obscures what actually makes human created stories or art unique and interesting, which is that interiority and a consistent mental model. the lack of which means AI art can have a real uncanny valley effect even when it achieves a lot of technical precision

the training-and-regressions process that created AI art generators is why it can know roughly how big a hand is supposed to be in scale to whatever else is being drawn, and it can know fingers are a bunch of bars of light and dark color next to each other, so it can output a bunch of alternating bars fit inside a certain sized area by taking the equations for those things, but it doesnt have any mental model about how a hand should look or why a hand would be a certain way or even really what a hand is, just a ton of regression results. same for how people constantly say the white squiggles that look like signatures proves that its collaging paintings which have signatures on them when its never an actual signature of a person, its just that the equations to most accurately represent a painting often notice that paintings have little squiggles where a signature would be and so include a little squiggle in the equations

and once again a human with interiority would know that having a random squiggle in the corner of a painting actually makes no sense bc it serves no actual purpose, but the AI doesnt know what signatures were or why they're there. because it has no interiority, no conscious experience, no sense of self or its place in the world in relation to other things, no mental model of how things go together and why.

The point is the doing of them, rather than the accomplishments There is no actor but the action, there is no experiencer but the experience An artist’s expression, is his soul made apparent. His schooling as well as his `cool’ being exhibited. Behind every motion the music of his soul is made visible. Otherwise his motion is empty. The Tao of Jet Kunedo – Bruce Lee

i feel like with any new tool or medium, the way you make good art is by exploring its actual unique capabilities. so a lot of the best AI art have an "under the skin" (as in the movie) type of vibe and a sense of alienness or eldritch aspects, a sense of making art using a medium where its inner workings is inherently unknowable unlike how artists like filmmakers or photographers or painters can learn the actual characteristics of their tools, like how different film stocks produce different aspects or which kind of lighting setups create a certain effect or which type of lens or setting to use or which kinds of paint are reflective vs matte or hold their color best or whatever. and that aspect as a mirror of current technology and AI itself as it advances beyond our actual understanding of it or its effects

as opposed to the uninspired trash posted by a lot of unimaginative silicon valley tech bros or big tiddy anime girl lovers or gamers or like, sahil bloom. because people who dont actually know about or think about or understand art doesnt get the whole concept of mediums and their capabilities, or understand the evolution of art or its role in broader society. all like just a futuristic version of how retvrn accounts who drool over like tacky ass marble greek pillars around a pool in a miami drug dealer's mansion or see some random english cottage that was cookie-cutter even when it was built are all people who have an absolute loathing of abstract art or modernist architecture or surrealism or anything like that because their only conception of art is "does it look superficially nice (according to my super basic sensibilities)" and dont have the imagination or curiosity or brain cells to understand any more than that, in that they dont really have any sense of the place of new technological tools in art to make anything good. so its just hack shit like mediocrity

(okay, maybe i'm being a jerk here. there are absolutely people who i think deserve much scorn — for something related, see my post on 'book lovers' and how much of book twitter or booktok seem to actively hate books and be proud of hating classics or literature or the hard work of actually appreciating literature — but there's definitely people in there who are probably pretty nice and are just excited about being able to make something that they find pretty, which they couldn't before. that's kinda sweet, maybe. and they didn't really intend their posts to contribute to an overall milieu of a groan-worthy moment in art. maybe they were just posting it themselves the same way i post stuff like "haha look at this cool rock i saw on the way to work today". it's not really their fault that they don't have particularly refined taste or a clearly defined idea of artistic sensibilities and preferences, because we all have limited time in our lives and allocate that time according to what interests us, and maybe someone who likes a pretty painting by the computer just spends their time on other things closer to their interests than me reading books and art shit. i may complain about it but i don't want to be a jerk about this, and i'll try reserve my ire to people with an actual platform posting their garbage instead of everyday randoms)

but returning to things that are specific to the medium, and the element of using a black box as your oils and canvas and clay and camera. even something like prompt engineering isnt just telling the computer what you want, its trying to figure out the inner workings of the tool by going into it blind. almost like if you had zero knowledge of what a camera was or what was inside it and had to try dismantle it and reverse-engineer what this contraption or this gadget was or what the lens being this place does or how film works and why it gives pictures but similar cylinders or similar salts dont. why the film has to be film specifically and not something of the same shape or similar substances if you're unaware of the chemistry of photosensitive silver salts, why the lens has to be an exact way and not just any round flat see-through glass if you're unaware of the concept of how lenses bend light or the laws of refraction. or why a photo taken in a certain angle or certain lighting exposure might look bad vs what you need to take a good picture, or why you want to use a certain kind of lens for portraits or for landscapes, or why something darker colored photographs poorly, or why the moon can look amazing to the eye but look terrible in a camera when certain other things look the same both to the eye and in a camera, and so on

something different from other mediums/tools is that making the art itself is an exploratory process, that in many ways its physically impossible for any human to ever learn the inner workings of the equipment beyond just a very broad sense because we cant actually ever learn like a billion components no matter how much you try, and there can never be an encyclopedia or a body of work that gives you full expertise in it so each individual artist's entire body of work is their entire body of knowledge and each person's is completely unique, that the same inputs may not give you the same outputs so its impossible to mechanistically predict which means that being able to precisely recreate something is impossible the way you can in theory precisely create a painting or photograph as it exists in your original intention — not always for something like photography because you have action shots and stuff, but we're talking about the actual physical realities of what's possible in the medium so being able to exactly replicate a still life of a rock or a portrait is possible with sufficient mastery — which means that the creation process will always require a sense of just intangible Vibes

i described my blog earlier, but i want to return to themes that interest me. i love themes of alienation and loneliness, finding hope in despair, technology as a force that might free us in the small scales but subsumes us on the grand ones. i'm fascinated by questions of whether subjective experiences that still feed inputs into our brains is any more or less "real" because the process that created the stimuli is different: how meaningfully different is it that i experienced paris, not just photographs or tourist traps but walking through narrow streets and listening to street musicians, through a screen and headphones and sometimes but not always facilitative substance use? would someone a hundred years ago given the same tools not view it as having explored paris through some magical form of spiritual transportation or astral projection? would they consider themselves as having been to paris, while i cheapen my own experience by insisting it didn't really matter because spending hours walking through those streets wasn't material enough? will this way of thinking feel as strange to someone in the near-future to whom the line between the 'real' and the digital world is much less present or relevant?

and i think the line between the technological eldritch of the internet, the art of people as mediated through the technological medium, and the material world is already blurred for me — or it almost is, but some part of me won't let it and will discredit some as less real than others, and some part of me will dispute why i think that way because by any metric that matters they are equally important, like why do i view internet friends i haven't met yet as "less real" than friends i've met in person even if we were much less close and shared much less, and even if 95% of my communication with my real-life friends is still on the same chats and texts and apps as my online friends, so why

and so on —

see, the genuinely spooky and interesting thing about current AI tools on the more abstract and higher level of things, that what so much of the research with GPT and so on is trying to do is probe at the nature of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. the hard problem of consciousness, whether consciousness or sentience or qualia is something that will form itself once any entity has sufficient intelligence, or once you have a network of neurons that's big enough, because there's an assumption that human consciousness itself is an emergent phenomenon from the right environment of intelligence.

AI art tools are far too specialized to actually give insight on this, the way that they might be trying to figure out with GPT and deepmind and stuff. AI art tools are what i said earlier, glorified matrix multiplications and a gajillion regressions that learnt patterns associated with patterns. but developments in AI are linked to each other, just by the nature of how these get made, and developments in more generalized AI will be used to develop finer and finer new generations of AI art models

i do think the rapid rate of progress, the pioneering, the developing familiarity with an unknown entity that's constantly itself changing and growing, the constant calibration and recalibration of intuition, it's all part of being into AI art at this point. or at least of being seriously into it, like a lot of the original AI artists i described before. and i think that is fascinating

anyway. all this reminds me of something from one of my favorite books. i'm not going to name it here to not spoil it, but the narrator and key characters are a type of entity created by humans and seen by human as not having souls in the same sense that humans do, because humans can't create souls, of course. but being able to know this for sure is a big question, and what humans decide on as the way to tell if these figures have souls is through their art. the idea that art would reveal the soul, that you need a soul to be able to make real art:

"She told Roy that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul." ... "You said it was because your art would reveal what you were like. What you were like inside. That's what you said, wasn't it? Well, you weren't far wrong about that. We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all. That was why we collected your art. We selected the best of it and put on special exhibitions. In the late seventies, at the height of our influence, we were organising large events all around the country. […] 'There, look!' we could say. 'Look at this art! How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?' Oh yes, there was a lot of support for our movement back then, the tide was with us.""

and as a companion text, i'll quote david chalmers from the seminal paper "the hard problem of consciousness":

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect ... there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state.

We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. The usual explanatory methods of cognitive science and neuroscience do not suffice. These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say. These are simply the wrong sort of methods: nothing that they give to us can yield an explanation. To account for conscious experience, we need an extra ingredient in the explanation. This makes for a challenge to those who are serious about the hard problem of consciousness: What is your extra ingredient, and why should that account for conscious experience?

At the end of the day, the same criticism applies to any purely physical account of consciousness. For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory. The facts about experience cannot be an automatic consequence of any physical account, as it is conceptually coherent that any given process could exist without experience. Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical.

The moral of all this is that you can't explain conscious experience on the cheap. The tempting induction from [applications of biological science to physical processes of living beings] fails in the case of consciousness, which is not a problem about physical structures and functions. Given that reductive explanation fails, nonreductive explanation is the natural choice. In physics, it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental. Fundamental entities are not explained in terms of anything simpler. Instead, one takes them as basic, and gives a theory of how they relate to everything else in the world. I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.

We know no set of physical properties can constitute experience, for familiar reasons. But perhaps some quite alien property might do the job ... a "hidden dimension" of space which enables the existence of consciousness. I suspect that such a property has to be hidden, as an empirically adequate theory can always be cast in terms of structure and dynamics that are compatible with the absence of experience. It seems that the new dimension will either (a) be epiphenomenal to the other dimensions (or at least to the projections of those dimensions that we have access to), or (b) related to them as a "realizing" property, carrying the structure in one of these dimensions and making it real. The latter would be compatible with the idea of turning the hard problem "upside down", on which physical reality is itself somehow derivative on underlying experiences ... on which the fundamental (proto)experiences are part of the causal order.

Some of the most intriguing pieces speculate about the shape of a fundamental theory of consciousness. Many of these proposals invoke some form of panpsychism ... making a case against the existence of fundamental laws that connect consciousness to mere complexity, to aspects of functioning, or to biological properties ... and makes a strong case for an integrated view of nature, on which consciousness is not a mere tacked-on extra. Given that the physical domain is a closed causal network, the next choice is that between views which put experience outside this network, with physical laws that make experience epiphenomenal, or put experience inside this network by having the intrinsic properties of matter be proto-experiential. The latter offers the most attractive and integrated view, if the "combination problem" can be solved.

truth is though, i'm a skeptic about whether we'll ever be able to create consciousness. it's something i genuinely doubt, but i think the possibility is legitimately interesting. if art examines the world as it is and as it could be, and our hopes and anxieties, and the cultural moment and counter-moment and zeitgeist and reaction, then i think that in a world where we're all billions of us nodes in a permanently connected system, ourselves probing the very nature of consciousness by trying to create brains in the mainframe, those are themes worth exploring with art. and the tools that are deeply intertwined with these questions by their nature, tools where the creation process itself is engaging with those themes, have their unique place in letting us

i know that the superabundance pandora's box of AI art tools does mean that any given artwork is much less likely to survive the ages the way that defining artworks of previous moments in time have come down to us, but maybe we just haven't had that first Great artwork in the genre yet, who knows? and even if we don't, does that matter — does the ephemeral nature of art as reflecting the ephemeral nature of everything on the internet and in the internet age, everything both superabundant and super-rare, permanent and nonexistent, trillions of pieces of content most of which all fade within moments, fleeting interactions, distance passions, broken urls, myspace, geocities, forums lost to servers going offline, every single line from years of conversation archived in every chat window but rarely re-read, blocked friends, deleted account friends, the coming point where more facebook profiles belong to the dead than to the living, twitter main characters of the day, gorgeous art that we look at for 3 seconds before keeping on scrolling, streaming services that disappear their own libraries. does that mean that the moments when we see art that touches us matter, and the way they touched us and how they made us feel, all that matters even if we may not remember it later

here's one AI painting i really liked. it's probably not a good representation of the current state of AI art with prompt specifications and stuff because it's from quite a while back, from the days i mentioned at the start of this essay when AI art tech wasn't as good as it is now and all AI generations had a certain bizarre feel to them. but still, this is art i think about often and which clearly had some effect on me

@ images_ai on twitter

i do find what AI art reveals about how the machine ‘thinks’ to be interesting too, sometimes:

@ ai_curio on twitter

AI art tools, as the specific subset of AI we're talking about here, has no real connection to adjacent research that aims to find an artificial general intelligence and investigate the possibility of emergent consciousness in massive digital brains, with large language models like gpt/chatgpt. but i think it's inevitable that developments in generalized AI will inevitably feed into each new generation of AI art tools. language models to to help it interpret prompts more accurately, to parse context better, to understand connotations, or higher-level discoveries about intelligence and the inner workings of the mind to learn things like to develop distinctive style, maybe… who knows. i don't

"An artist’s expression, is his soul made apparent. Behind every motion the music of his soul is made visible."

"Your art would reveal what you were like. What you were like inside. That’s what you said, wasn’t it? Well, you weren’t far wrong about that. We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all."

if art is expression and communication, something that reveals the soul. something intangible, indescribable, intuitive. an artist attuned enough can take meaning from the work

(i'm not attuned, but i once spent three hours staring at a rothko painting and i could've sworn i felt soul in it, and i can't explain why. i couldn't put it in words. but i don't think the power of art is all some kind of placebo effect, just because i can't put it in words)

you can tell from the earlier quoted paper on consciousness that i genuinely have no idea where AI research probing into the workings of generalized intelligence and the nature of consciousness and qualia as emergent phenomena will go and what it will find. i've admitted to being a skeptic. but i do think that the long constant watch for those first flickerings of consciousness if, whether justified or not, one of the grand themes of at least the 2020s if not a longer period in history that we'll only be able to contextualize after the fact but that we're definitely living through right now. and maybe even before we can understand or recognize it ourselves, the inner workings of the machine will begin to reveal themselves deep down, layers down. but i do think that maybe even before we can understand or recognize it ourselves, those first rumblings...

art speaks to the soul, right? art is the soul of the artist made apparent? the artist that's mastered the tool so that it creates an image as intended, so that what is communicated by that art is what the artist intended it to communicate. and that's what separates the AI artist from the casual, right? the artist learns how to create their vision, the casual has an idea of what they want and is surprised by the result. creation vs commission. and that's what's worth taking seriously, the endeavor. building a relationship with the machine until you know what to say and how to say it for you to use the microchips as a chisel, equations as film

whispering to the ghost in the machine, coaxing it, understanding its quirks and lapses, learning just what to say so that it'll create what you want it to create. seeing how that changes, what you have to do differently as it grows. knowing that the machine is growing. gazing into the screen and finding the shape of what you tried to conjure, and if there are any other shapes or shadows of shapes, outlines or swells, that slowly begin to reveal itself, almost imperceptibly at first except by intuition. some sense of interiority. something distinct, that you know is distinct because you've worked out how to create your own expression, so if you see something else in there. something that reveals the blurry, lumbering shape of what could be the soul or the spirit, something that an artist might be able to pick up on before a programmer. any moment now. look closer

———

if you liked this, feel free to check out my other 'essays’ on internet/pop culture stuff on my homepage. here’s a selection:

· “book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it’s weird (or, defending classic novels)

· there are things we owe to each other

· i trained a neural net on 10,000 irony-poisoned tweets and it just gave me cringe?

· what makes someone good, bad, cancelled, or redeemed? i don’t know either!

· please tell me if you have a definitive answer on what makes someone a bad person

· ok, fine, my social justice politics feel a bit like religion sometimes and that’s ok

· after the deluge (short story) (dispatch from an island state post climate apocalypse)

#ai art #ai art generator #dalleart #midjourney #ai #artificial intelligence #ai artist #ai artists #ai art discourse #stable diffusion #stablediffusion #art #dall-e

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