Little-soldi3rs - Lucy

Just childe

thinking about how when you punch a mirror so that it cracks and fractures into multiple shards reflecting your own visage back at you, you're really just ironically surrounding yourself with more of the self you loathe in your quest to attain self-destruction. the grotesque reproductive quality of gouging pieces from yourself in order to lessen the burden of existence, and in the process only proliferating more individual aspects of You, shedding them as you go. much to consider.

Hello

I'm lucy, sometimes I write or draw!

Fanfiction Authors: HEADS UP

(Non-authors, please RB to signal boost to your author friends!)

An astute reader informed me this morning that one of my fics (Children of the Future Age) had been pirated and was being sold as a novel on Amazon:

(And they weren't even creative with their cover design. If you're going to pirate something that I spent a full year of my life writing, at least give me a pretty screenshot to brag about later. Seriously.)

I promptly filed a DMCA complaint to have it removed, but I checked out the company that put it up -- Plush Books -- and it looks like A LOT of their books are pirated fic. They are by no means the only ones doing this, either -- the fact that """publishers""" can download stories from AO3 in ebook format and then reupload them to Amazon in just a few clicks makes fic piracy a common problem. There are a whole host of reasons why letting this continue is bad -- including actual legal risk to fanfiction archives -- but basically:

IF YOU ARE A FANFIC AUTHOR WITH LONG AND/OR POPULAR WORKS, PLEASE CHECK AMAZON TO SEE IF YOUR STORIES HAVE BEEN PIRATED.

You can search for your fics by title, or by text from the description (which is often just copied wholesale from AO3 as well). If you find that someone has stolen your work and is selling it as their own, you can lodge a DMCA complaint (Amazon.com/USA site; other countries have different systems). If you haven't done this before, it's easy! Here's a tutorial:

HOW TO FILE A COPYRIGHT COMPLAINT FOR STOLEN WORK ON AMAZON.COM:

First, go to this form. You'll need to be signed into your Amazon account.

Select the radio buttons/dropdown options (shown below) to indicate that you are the legal Rights Owner, you have a copyright concern, and it is about a pirated product.

Enter the name of your story in the Name of Brand field.

In the Link to the Copyrighted Work box, enter a link to the story on AO3 or whatever site your work is posted on.

In the Additional Information box, explain that you are the author of the work and it is being sold without your permission. That's all you really need. If you want, you can include additional information that might be helpful in establishing the validity of your claim, but you don't have to go into great detail. You can simply write something like this:

I am the author of this work, which is being sold by [publisher] without my permission. I originally published this story in [date/year] on [name of site], and have provided a link to the original above. On request, I can provide documentation proving that I am the owner of the account that originally posted this story.

In the ASIN/ISBN-10 field, copy and paste the ID number from the pirated copy's URL. You'll find this ten-digit number in the Amazon URL after the word "product," as in the screenshot below. (If the URL extends beyond this number, you can ignore everything from the question mark on.) Once this number has been added, Amazon will pull the product information automatically and add it to the complaint form, so you can check the listing title and make sure it's correct.

Finally, add your contact information to the relevant fields, check the "I have read and accept the statements" box, and then click Submit. You should receive an email confirmation that Amazon has received the form.

Please share this information with your writer friends, keep an eye out for/report pirated works, and help us keep fanfiction free and legally protected!

NOTE: All of the above also applies to Amazon products featuring stolen artwork, etc., so fan artists should check too!

she's the fire he's the smoke

Arcane au where everything is the same except Silco has to lick his eyeball like a lizard bc he literally doesn’t have an eyelid

rhea has two solutions to any given problem: thoughts and prayers, or tactical nuclear strike. and she seems to pick the one she deploys at complete random lmao

"I don't wanna live" was what I should've said

Will I ever find peace?

-Otome Kaibou

asking sincerely. do you see a romance between jayce and viktor? do you think they ended up being something romantic at the end?

With apologies I am going to only half talk about the thing you are asking me, since I have something else on my mind and you happened to hit the button that makes me vomit it into words.

Coming at this from an aromantic perspective, I obviously don't experience the state of absurd obsessive delusion that you bizarre romantic freaks fetishize so feverishly*, but I am often annoyed by the idea that friendship and romance are either opposites or mutually exclusive. From my perspective, the boundary between the two is at best thin, and more realistically not actually a boundary at all except by cultural construction.

*i am taking an excessively hostile, crass tone for my own amusement i do not mean this seriously please be normal at me, weird allo freaks

I won't get into my full feelings about the end of Arcane, but it seems perfectly plain to me that the script, the imagery and the animation presents Jayce and Viktor as two halves of a whole, not opposing forces but alike to yin and yang: opposites which each contain the other. And at the climax of the show, the greatest peril to life and peace in the narrative is resolved by these two men literally joining their bodies and souls together, and going into eternity holding one another for comfort and strength. They are quite literally soulmates, quite literally the most important people in one another's lives.

I don't think that that kind of intimate emotional connection between men must necessarily be either romantic or sexual - I am aromantic, and plenty of ace people exist, and there is nothing in our natures excluding us from intense connections of love with other people of any gender.

I also think it is willfully ignorant (and genuinely homophobic) to act as though these deep connections are mutually exclusive with sex and romance. As though if Viktor and Jayce fucked nasty and made out sloppy style, suddenly their intimacy is less pure or valid, or tainted somehow.

"If these two men who are emotionally close to one another also fuck or get romantically involved, then friendship is dead, murdered on the floor by a dick-shaped knife; vile sexuality corrupts and debases the true, pure and virtuous love of ✨friendship✨" <- This shit is homophobic at a baseline, queerphobic in general, and frankly as an aromantic man I find it pretty fucking insulting as well.

What, are my friendships with other men just inherently more pure and divine, more meaningful and true than a gay man's can ever be, because I will never suffer the vile temptation of adding romance to my affection? Is that how I should think of myself? And is an aroace man more pure than me still, the only source of TRUE male friendship that a man can ever experience, free from the pustulant corruption of sexuality and romantic desire?

You get this pathetic defensiveness (especially from men, but other genders aren't immune) wherein sex and sexuality and romance between men is perceived as a threat to men's right and ability to experience deep connection to each other. But the emotional castration of men comes not from people imagining sex and romance as a component of our relationships - it comes from people who insist that our emotional lives must be ruled by strict binaries. Sex and romance, OR ELSE friendship. Deep romantic connection OR ELSE deep platonic connection. Pick one and do not dare to imagine both, nor act as though the boundary between them is something that we built by cultural fiat, and which can be dismantled just the same.

And yes, yes, yes, I know there are cultural forces literally illuminati-style conspiring to systemically erase the entire existence of explicitly romantic, sexual male love from media, and I know that homophobic puritanism is on the rise and there are material concerns and a real necessity for explicit representation in fiction, yes I know. Everything is more complicated than a tumblr post can cover, I am not trying to Solve Rainbow Capitalism™ over here, I am trying to express frustration as an aromantic man that this stupid fucking binary keeps getting culturally reinforced by both my enemies and my well-meaning allies, when I think the binary is what's fucking killing us in the first place.

So anyway. My position is that Viktor and Jayce can be entirely aromantic no-homo friends, and they can fuck nasty in the throes of mutual need and obsession, and I refuse to entertain the idea that there is an irresolvable contradiction between those things. Each of those can contain the other, or become the other given time and circumstance.

What the imagery, storytelling and script of Arcane makes clear is that Viktor and Jayce love each other more than life itself. To say that that love must be shoved into the box of either "platonic" or "romantic" is to miss out on almost everything that is beautiful about love. It can be both and neither! It can be a secret third, ninth or fifteenth thing that they haven't invented a tag for on Ao3 yet.

They are giving each other whatever the spiritual mind-ghost equivalent of sloppy backshots are on the ethereal plain forever, they are the most romantic lovers in the cosmos, and they are also the most chaste and platonic life-partner friends you have ever seen, effortlessly intimate and unashamedly tender. They are men who love one another, in every way that love matters.

You can pick whichever interpretation brings you joy, and resonates with what your heart needs, the text of the show is eminently and explicity open to it, and anyone who says otherwise either failed to pay attention, or refused to pay attention on purpose.

Finally finished this Aventurine Riso!!! I kind of want to make this a series lmao