The Dabi Urge Stan To Write A Fic In Which Dabi Heals (bc I’ll Never Let The Phoenix Quirk Theory Die)

me when i have to write about science

(i’m the one who decided to make shouto a science nerd)

rody making it into the first top 20 of the worldwide best hero poll is so funny to me

all we have is a non-canon (?) movie and some scraps here and there but this fandom loves him so much to let him be forgotten

(he’s 17th in the japan top 20 so i guess the japaneses are the one voting for him. than you guys. he deserves it)

Professional boxer!Sukuna in his late 30s or early 40s who stubbornly refuses to retire even though he's been warned by everyone that it's time to hang up his gloves.

It wasn't until he suffered a fatal injury during a big match was when he realised that he was finished. He retired and that was the end of the King of Curses' reign on the boxing world.

Retired boxer!Sukuna who realizes that outside of his career, he never had anything going for him. He spend most of his days in his penthouse or hitting the gym. He didn't know what to do with his life anymore.

Retired boxer!Sukuna who, out of boredom, one day decides to step inside a little cafe that had opened across the road from his building. And that's when he stumbles across you. His ex-girlfriend. The last time he saw you was when he broke up with you years ago. Turns out this cafe belonged to you.

(Bullet points from here on out cuz laziness haha...)

The first meeting between you two was tense. Both of you didn't know what to say to each other. Just some stiff "hey" "how have you been" and "you seem well".

Sukuna noticed how much you've grown though. The years have been really kind to you.

You could tell Sukuna's retirement got the best of him. He seemed more quiet... tired and looked utterly lost. You decide to offer him a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

It takes a while but slowly both of you start talking to each other again. Sukuna finds talking to you helps the gapping hole left after his retirement. He visits you more often.

Both of you catch up. You had a full time job before but decided that you wanted to open your own business. Hence, this cafe. You took the risk and now you will never go back. Running your own cafe has been the best decision you've ever made in your life.

Sukuna finds himself smiling as you talked so passionately. Your radiance and positivity motivates him to find something for himself.

He also feels himself drawn to you too. He felt a pang of longing whenever you smiled at him or greeted him. He was starting to realise that he had been an absolute idiot to take you for granted.

He does eventually find something to do. He becomes a boxing instructor at the gym he frequents. Sure he doesn't need the job since he had all the money in the world but he finds teaching young people who are passionate about the sport very fulfilling.

He also makes time for you now. Something he he had failed to do when you two were dating.

Sometimes he helps you out at the cafe, lifting any heavy boxes or stacking supplies or anything else you need.

And you start to notice how much he's changed too. The old Sukuna would think helping you out would be a waste of time. But here he was, standing behind the counter taking orders. Although his signature scowl and grumpy nature was still there.

After a while, you two decide to give a second chance to dating.

And both of you are rusty as hell to the dating scene. You had been too busy with establishing your business and he with his boxing career.

"It's okay. We'll figure it out together." And eventually you both do :)

i'm finally publishing my fanfic!

two weeks ago, i published a one shot entitled a lesson never learned (only violence) and mentioned i would probably turn this into a multi chapter fic

well, i'm doing it!

it's titled can you melt a frozen heart? (or will you let it burn down?) and the first chapter is already available on ao3 :) (link below)

a lesson never learned works as its prologue since it takes place 7 years before. that's why i'm keeping the two works separated

so, if you like villain shouto, touya being a good sibling (or at least trying), league of villains as family, endeavor facing consequences, tododeku and dabihawks, feel free to give it a try!

if you read it, thank you so much! this means a lot to me 🩷

cat-core

I want him

the bois in question

just started decorating my apartment and i love how at first it looks kinda cute with pink dishes, candles, flower pillows

kinda giving pinterest vibes yk?

and then you turn around and you see my dabihawks figures and my league of villains poster

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

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See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

maybe it's just a translation issue but why are quirk names so stupid? 😭

"explosion", "frog", "acid", "erasure", "blue flame", "meatballs"????

i'm sorry but they're so silly

and there's no way at least 10 people don't have the same quirk name

dare i say that neito monoma would have been a great protagonist?

i feel like the fandom either hate or love monoma, and i'm not ashamed to say i love him. he's probably one of my favorite characters amongst the students

so allow me to yap about how i feel a monoma-centric rewriting of mha would go

it would have the same start as the canon focused on izuku. monoma learns early in life that quirks have a huge impact on the way people see you but he decides to become a hero anyway.

the story would focus on monoma accepting he cannot become a hero like All Might (or the most popular ones in general), that he has to use his own tricks despite how unheroics they may seem. it would put an emphasis on monoma's inferiority complex. he literally describes himself as a 'background character' (or something like that). then you'd also have the whole dynamic of neito having a quirk considered weak/useless/villainous and having to prove his worth to both himself and his classmates (that would be interesting if he was fighting against Todoroki or Bakugou).

Shinsou would be an important part of the story too because i love him and i wish we'd seen more of their dynamic.

and don't even get me started on monoma making fun of 1A. I feel like this could make an interesting point on unhealthy coping mecanisms. like, you just need vlad king (who would be the parental figure™ of the story) telling monoma that putting other down won't help him in the long run, that he needs to focus on himself and that popularity doesn't matter in high school (it sounds like shit but trust me it has potential). and then bam (pun intended) you get a parallelism with bakugou who's also working on himself.

as the story goes, monoma learns to trust his classmates and work with them. he accepts he needs others to succeed (yk the whole power of friendship team) and is proud to be alongside his classmates and friends during fights.

monoma canonically struggles with his grades, which could be an important theme related to his self-worth issues (like, he's the only one who failed the midterms so he feels bad bc he feels like he doesn't deserve his place in the hero course)

and last but not least, you could even draw a parallel between him and afo: afo steals quirks, and so does monoma. the only diference being that monoma is doing this to help people and works with others.

anyways, i love him 🩷