So, I Wrote A Dadow Fic. I'm A Sucker For Found Family, And Dadow Is Underrated.

I'm reading a simplified version of Journey to the West (Chinese mythology that created the Monkey King) and I'm having so much fun with it. Chinese isn't my first language, so the version I'm using tries its best to keep the vocab to a 1200 word limit. The goal being to help people improve their reading. And it's totally working, but the real intriguing part is the story.

The story is just so engaging and funny, and the characters, as flawed as they are, are really endearing. Like, it's clear why this thing became Chinese mythology in the first place.

But because it's written in an easier way to read, my brain puts into a "kind of made for kids" category, and having that mindset makes the things I'm reading all the crazier and more hilarious.

Like, of all the things I expected to read in my second language, this was not one of them. 😂

I don’t have children so take this with a grain of salt but I hate when you can tell people like the concept of their children more than their well-being. Parents like the concept of an all-beige nursery that’s photogenic more than they care about the development of their kid’s brain. They like the concept of a cutely dressed kid in designer clothes more than they care about their comfort and personal desires. They like the concept of a child who never eats poorly more than they care about the happiness that can come from a child eating some candy now and then. People need to stop treating their kids like little dolls

Speaking of AI in fandoms, I'd love to bring AI Fanfiction to the discussion. Because that's been eye opening. (I'm also too stupid at art to really understand how much work goes into one image.) It's serious theft, it's a robot puking back up what it's seen before and you can feel it in the writing it makes. It claims in the narration that the characters are feeling things and learning when that isn't what's happening. Nothing real is going on. And you can feel it in Every. Single. Sentence. It's honestly horrible, and I've been against it since its creation. But recently I noticed something absolutely insane and disheartening.

I'm a senior in highschool (17, going on 18), and all of the new sophomores are using AI. All of them. These 15 year olds are openly talking about their use of AI fanfic and AI fanart. And listening to them rattle on and on about how cool it is to have a way to bring these things to life via AI made me realize something. These kids aren't trying to be thieves. It's not that they lack morals, or are lazy. They haven't thought about the full implications of it, sure, but there's an underlying issue here.

They're using AI because they don't think they can make anything worthwhile themselves. And that makes my blood boil.

Something about AI is making these kids think that the only way to enjoy fan content the way they picture it in their head is to have something more "qualified" to do it. AI is telling these kids that they suck at art. That they suck at writing. And that there's nothing they can do about it. And they're just young enough to accept that.

And y'know what? They probably do suck. But that's a good thing! The best thing about fandom is the way it uses people's passion for their favorite things and turns it into skill.

We all sucked at what we do when we were younger. I sucked at grammar when I started writing. My concepts were killer but my execution was just abysmal. But my love for the original content fueled me to keep going. To keep trying and I'd say that now my writing is pretty darn good. I see such talented people draw wonderful things because fandom made them practice. Fandom constantly brings out the best in people. We're really good at these things now. We don't need a dumb robot to do it worse.

But fandom has changed. Now there's an easy way to create something without becoming a creator. These insecure kids are entering fandoms with that concept in mind. And when they see that they suck, they hit that ever present roadblock of worrying you won't get better. But now they have an out. While we all had to figure out how to get over said roadblock, they just pressed the skip button, because it was there. They skipped the most important thing you could possibly learn in life, because some a-hole made a skip button.

It's like they're sequence breaking life, missed a power up, and feel like the only way to succeed is to keep using the cheat code that got them stuck in the first place.

These poor kids, man. AI isn't just the death of creativity, it's the death of ambition, and self-esteem. These kids aren't the problem, they're the victims. Victims of this toxic mindset that AI put into their heads.

I'm starting to see AI art in fanart tags and even when they are tagged as AI art, people in the reblogs tagged it as fanart.

Let me just say this once. I don't believe AI art is fanart. The way things are, it's theft. It doesn't count. The effort that fan artists put into their works cannot be equated in value with whatever an AI generates. The works with hours of applied skill and originality and love put into them are the works I want to praise on this blog.

So that being said, if I ever reblog "fanart" that is ai generated, please send me a message or an ask and let me know so I can delete it off my blog.

I don't know why I feel the need to share this, maybe it's because it's been on my mind and it's 2:41 am and it's currently the "time is sludge... Again" part of the insomniac experience, but I want to talk about this. (This talks about my experience with happy stimming under the cut)

It was several years ago when I saw this comic of someone's happy stimming. She, like, waves her arms around and builds up this lovely yellow hue, and it's sparkly and then she expels all of it as at once and- it's truly a wonderful comic. I don't know where it is now. But it really captures the right feeling. And it was so cool... But I was kind of... I feel bad using strong words like "mortified" but that's the best way to say it.

Because Stimming was one of the many, MANY things I have in common with our lovely autistic community. And we're entering a world where people are starting to be able to be who we are and act how we feel, and I knew from the moment I saw it, that something was wrong. I didn't have a happy stim.

Most people who stim are forced to stop because humans are so bad at appreciating the abnormal, and that never happened to me. I'm lucky! But I didn't have a happy stim. And I knew I was supposed to. I immediately knew that. Knew it about me, me as a person. I knew it. There was a hole in me that was taken and I didn't know why! And it was terrifying.

And I kept thinking, And and I kept digging.

I knew about physical stims. With your hands and your feet and your hair. Most of my stims were those. I'd bounce my leg under a table, I tap the pads of my fingers together with my thumb if I was a specific kind of anxious, I move the bones in my wrists back to where they're supposed to be to try and fix things instinctually.

All of those were to get less anxious though. And my mother was always so open to things like that. So willing to learn about every diagnosis and piece of information that needed researching.

I knew about vocal stims. While most people were forced to stop for more crummy society reasons, that wasn't the case for me. I just... Didn't have any? I enjoy talking, I enjoy singing but they weren't... That comic. They didn't have the yellow feel-good-ness. They didn't have The thing.

I like swinging on swingsets. The momentum is nice. I think that counts as a stim but I usually did it to help, wouldn't-cha know it, anxiety. Help me sleep at night. It wasn't the thing.

In my house, you didn't listen to songs on repeat. My mother would lose it. You didn't loop songs in the car, it'd drive her batty. She'd probably have a panic attack. So I never thought of it as a thing? It didn't occur to me. When I got my own pair of headphones, I wouldn't drive her crazy by listening to anything on loop, I could go forever if I wanted. But I didn't. It wasn't a thing and I was apprehensive about it, that's not a thing we do. Don't to it. Even when my mind got loud about playing things on loop, I tried not to let it overcome me. That's not a thing. People don't do that. And I'd long since settled with the dismal answer of never knowing what the stim was. I hadn't even thought of checking because sounds like asmr hurt like sandpaper on my brain.

But recently, I don't know, something changed? I reeeally needed to hear this song again. So I went to the instrumental. And it was great there. I went to the vocal only, it was just the goodest sound. I went to covers and back and eventually I just let it play. I really let it smoosh into my head and memorized the instruments and felt them. It was like following a groove in a table by tracing your finger across it. It was just. The thing. I actually lost sleep because I was enjoying myself so much. I was so happy!

I talked with my mother about it. "I dunno, I really really wanted to hear that song over and over? it has a BAGPIPE in the second verse! Who wouldn't want to hear that!?"

"yeah, I could never do that. I guess my misophonia is too strong for that."

It was so eye opening. Misophonia. It was her misophonia, she'd never used that word before. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. Listening to this song on loop isn't bad, it's just a me thing.

And that's when I realized that I'd found the thing. I'd finally found my happy stim. I've decided to not cry about it, but this was such wonderful news. It's needlessly specific, and I don't know why my kid mind had labed "no looping" as Gospel? I mean there's a button for it and everything. But it's my thing.

I may never have some visible stim that people will see but I have my thing and I'm so beyond society possibly judging me.

I am on ADD meds, have overstimulation issues, anxiety, truly frightening physical disabilities I fight all beneath the surface. And I play the songs that have the thing about them on loop for five hours at a time. And I think I love me for it.

Whoever you are, you're you. You're more you than anyone else. That is something beautiful. You like Fanfic, go for it! You like art? Go for it! You like flapping your hands? Go for it! You like judging Disney for its questionable decisions as of late? Try not to kill them too much. They only mostly deserve it.

Being you is a gift that you should cherish, and reward yourself by being you. Not someone else.

For those that read this whole thing, the song in question is I've Had Enough of You from Billie Bust Up, a video game musical that's currently in development. Listen to all the stuff that's out so far, every song I've heard knocks it out of the park. Listen to it on loop if you want! I think we've established that listening to songs on loop does not, in fact, summon Satan.

Happy Stimming! (why does that sound like a holiday now?)

Only Iblis ones. Hence the lack of obnoxious purple Lazer Llizards.

Happy belated B-day, Sonic 06

You're my favorite travesty, and the fact that this abomination of a video game happened barely six months after I was born is honestly kind of hilarious to me. I always know exactly how old my favorite Sonic game is.

I know I called you an abomination, 06, and that's cuz you are, but you might be one of my favorite games of all time, ironically and unironically. It being a buggy mess is hilarious, Project 06 being awesome is the best, and honestly if you're willing to sift through all the garbage writing execution, you can find some real treasures. Shadow's written so well that I think that's where all the budget went, Silver is a character so charming he survived to reach other, significantly better games, Crisis City is honestly such a cool and distinct concept for a fictional space, I mean, I wouldn't be writing Psychic and Empathetic if I didn't think so.

(I say "writing" as if it isn't just brainstorming I keep forgetting to put in my notes app, and flesh out into chapters that I then never remember to upload cuz my brain would rather write an entire fic and then post it instead of the usual fanfic, post chapter when it's done thing...)

Anyway, ily '06 you freak of video game nature!

Sonic 06 fanfic I was referring to btw, it's still happening, I promise! Dadow will return!

I definitely had a serious struggle switching from Wattpad, where people seemed to constantly care about your fic and you a lot to ao3 where everything about it was better and bigger and more professional...

But no one seemed to care.

Even if they did care, it didn't feel like it because I was never given any feedback. And if I'm going to be perfectly honest, the crisis of not knowing whether the hundreds of hours I've spent on something actually positively affected people is hitting me all over again. And it feels a lot like the isolation of quarantine leaking into my escape circles. Except this time, I sunk hours and hours and my whole heart into trying to reach out and enjoy things with others only for the response to be silence.

No one reblogs on tumblr anymore.

No one leaves comments on Ao3 anymore.

Seriously people the lack of fandom interaction these days makes me genuinely depressed, it never used to be like this, makes me wonder what's the point of coming online to do anything anymore.

Reblog a post so other people can see it.

Leave a comment so the author doesn't feel like giving up.

Fandom cannot live on Likes or Kudos alone.

I have no idea how to tag this or anything but

The other day me and my mom were telling my sister she needs to eat more and I asked

"what's the food version of 'hydrate don't diedrate'?

After a beat my 40 year old mother responded with

"Eat it don't yeet it"

I have taught her well.

So…sonadow generations am I right

It is extremely important for people to understand how their chosen media works. There are tons and tons and TONS of people who slave away for what are seemingly simple projects. Dozens of animators for just one pilot, tons of people with headaches all in the writers' room trying to figure out how to tackle continuity issues, a plethora of geniuses debugging for hours, several sleep deprived musicians determined to find the exact wrong pitch that would make the scene come together.

If you want to try and wrap your head around this, go listen to the Gravity Falls behind the scenes podcast. Even if you're not a huge fan of the show, watch one episode, and then Alex Hirsch's explanations for the scenes in it. I listened to it because I was curious about the writing, and I fell down a rabbit hole much deeper than I thought. I could make a bingo card of all the times he talked about someone else bringing it home and making his dreams come true.

"I was worried about this scene, but producer ____ figured it out."

"If it weren't for the music ____ composed this sequence would've dragged"

"if it weren't for my friend ___ telling me to rewrite that scene, this episode wouldn't exist"

"if it weren't for these brilliant storyboards by ___"

"if it weren't for ____'s costume designs"

"if it weren't for my friend being masochistically willing to stay up all night with me, this show would suck"

I have a huge amount of respect for every piece of inspired media that was worked on by actual humans, because there's more work put in than you could possibly imagine. It's unfair to blame any success or failure in a franchise on one person. Everyone deserves credit for the good and bad they did for something, and with something with as much heart and soul as Sonic, there's clearly much more good being done.

Help me out here: Why is there so much Ian Flynn hate going around lately? I thought everyone loved that he was contributing to the games. Now suddenly they aren't. I guess that's par for the course for this series but I don't get it. He isn't perfect but I like what he's done. Am I a weirdo?

Ian Flynn has always had a lot of fans, but any creator putting their work out there is going to have detractors as well. That's just the nature of being an artist. To some extent, it's no big deal. He's not a perfect writer. Nobody is! I consider myself a fan of his work, but I've criticized plenty of individual writing decisions from him on here.

But Ian doesn't just have critics. He has his own obsessive hatedom. And the specific nature of Ian's hatedom is... interesting.

A decade ago, Ian was only the guy writing for Archie Sonic, meaning any debates over his work were quarantined within that tiny niche of the larger Sonic fandom. Only people who kept up with the comics month to month had any real reason to have an opinion on the guy, which means we're talking about merely thousands of fans as opposed to millions.

Within that group, he had some haters. You had the people who were mad about story changes made during his run, particularly things like ancillary characters getting killed off (although over the years we've learned that most of those were editorial mandates from Mike Pellerito). You had the people mad that Ian didn't push their favorite ship, with feuding SonAmy and Sonally fans claiming that he was CLEARLY biased towards one or the other. You had the people who just really, really liked one of the previous writers way more - usually Penders, as hard as that may be to believe today. That sort of thing. Pretty normal comic fandom type stuff. Again, it comes with the territory.

Unfortunately, many of those haters only got worse over time, morphing into reactionaries who constantly try to incite Comicsgate type culture war bullshit.

There are people still mad at Ian for making Sally bi and pairing her with Nicole instead of Sonic in the later Archie comics. There have been elaborate MS Paint red string conspiracy boards explaining how people like Ian and Jon Gray have apparently been destroying the franchise from the inside for years by Making Sonic Woke. (Jon gets dragged into this because people are still mad about him drawing The Slap 20 years later. Yes, really!!) There was an unhinged change.org petition trying to get Ian fired, specifically from people who were mad that the Freedom Fighters aren't in the IDW comics. There was even a very sad little fan campaign from these people trying to get Sega to move the Sonic comic license away from IDW and over to Udon, because they thought Udon would bring Sally and Bunnie back and also make them sexy again. There's a lot of this.

(Unfortunately, Penders has also exacerbated this by gossiping about Ian on Twitter and giving these fans ammo, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)

The thing is, for years, people who only played the games or watched the cartoons had no reason to pay attention to any of this. Now, though, Ian isn't just writing for some weird spinoff comics that only the super nerds read. Now he's writing comics that are canon to the games, and ALSO some of the games themselves, and ALSO consulting on other tie-in media like Sonic Prime, and ALSO writing the official Sonic encyclopedia, and ALSO serving as part of the new Sonic Lore Team at Sega. And on top of all this, he's got an increasingly popular podcast where he fields questions about his work on all of these things, which serves as one of the fandom's main windows into creative decisions being made behind the scenes.

As a fan of Ian's work, it's been really cool to see him rise in prominence. But the dark side of this is that his obsessive haters from the Archie days now have WAY more of a potential audience of their own. Now, every Sonic fan has to have an opinion on Ian. What this frequently means is that you'll have the Comicsgate types taking things Ian writes or says out of context, attempting to get more of the general fandom to yell at the guy.

Unfortunately, there are a wide variety of Sonic fans who take the bait:

You've got hardcore fans who disliked basically any recent piece of Sonic media and are looking for someone to blame.

You've got the people who are concerned about the sanctity of Sonic's canon, who shoot the messenger any time Ian mentions a new retcon from Sonic Team on the podcast - or any time he even mentions the THOUGHT of changing anything about the canon, as we saw recently with the Sol Dimension nonsense.

You've got people who romanticize some sort of mythical artistic vision that Sega of Japan supposedly has (or had) for the franchise. To many of these fans, American contributors like Ian just don't "get" the heart of the series and are trying to turn Sonic into something different. (This "heart of the series" tends to be some mix of Japanese instruction manual lore, the cinematics from Sonic CD, the OVA, and/or the games written by Shiro Maekawa, depending on what Sonic media the fan in question grew up with.)

You've got fans of specific characters or ships who pin the blame for how their faves are depicted entirely on Ian - most vocally fans of Shadow, even though the root problem is that Sonic Team hasn't known what to do with Shadow since 2006. At best this stops at regular old criticism, but at its worst this devolves into claims that Ian has an agenda against certain characters.

You've got fans annoyed by a perceived over-emphasis on comic-original characters in the IDW comics, ignoring the obvious facts that these characters exist because the game cast is so tightly controlled by Sega, and also, you know, that people just like the IDW characters and want more stories about them.

You've got a LOT of discourse over IDW's Sonic being a hero who tries to give his enemies second chances, as if half of Sonic's closest friends aren't already former villains and rivals. Honestly this is very transparently just reheated Steven Universe discourse lmao

You'll also see people who just think they could do Ian's job better. They can't believe that THIS GUY is the American fan working on all these Sonic projects, when clearly THEY understand the characters and lore and themes SO much better than this charlatan.

All it takes is for someone in one of these categories to be unhappy about some recent piece of Sonic media, and for them to come across an out of context quote or comic panel that rubs them the wrong way, and suddenly the leftist Zoomer Sonic fans will join the latest dogpile on Ian alongside the reactionary Comicsgate types who are mad at him for Making Sonic Woke.

In general, when fandoms get upset, they tend to want a scapegoat. A person or two to point a finger at and go "THAT's who ruined the thing I love!" This tends to be based less on reality and more on which contributors are the most visible online. You'll sometimes see teenage and adult fans of children's cartoons single out a storyboarder who's particularly vocal on Twitter, blame them for every story decision they don't like, and harass them off the platform out of a sense of retribution for their favorite ship or whatever. Failing that, fans might choose to blame every nitpick, down to individual lines of dialogue and frames of animation, on a showrunner, just because that's the name they associate with the show. And unfortunately, when it comes to Sonic, Ian is now arguably the most prolific and outspoken contributor on the English speaking internet, and therefore a common scapegoat.

Some of the things I've seen Ian blamed for are truly wild. A lot of people have claimed for YEARS that he's just lying about the existence of creative guidelines and restrictions from Sega - or, as fans call them, The Mandates - even though they're just an inherent aspect of working on a licensed property. Others claim that The Mandates are real, but somehow Ian's fault. A vocal minority of fans have convinced themselves that Ian is the sole reason the Freedom Fighters don't exist in the IDW comics, even though Ian says he's been pushing to bring them back since day one.

Sometimes you'll see people say he ruined shit he didn't even work on. A few weeks ago on Twitter I saw someone claim that Ian had written a rejected script for Sonic Forces in which Tails died. I could not find a source for this for the life of me. As far as I can tell, the rumor seems to have been born from an alleged leaked script for Forces with margin notes from Aaron Webber that criticized the way Tails was written, and also an old tweet where Aaron joked that Tails would die in an upcoming episode of Sonic Mania Adventures. These merged into "Aaron Webber criticized a draft of the Forces script in which Tails died." How'd Ian get dragged into this? Who fucking knows!

It's all just a big game of telephone. All it takes is some asshole to make something up about Ian on Twitter or YouTube or a DeviantArt journal or some forum, and at least a couple people will believe it, and then it gets repeated as fact. Again, this used to be contained by the niche nature of the Archie Sonic fandom, but now there are WAY more people who are receptive to this shit.

It's just sad to me that Ian tries to be so open and honest about his work, to try to explain the rationale for certain things, to keep fans looped in on the direction the franchise is headed, and this just gives the Flynnspiracy types more quotes to take out of context and try to paint him as the devil. If it sounds like I'm being overly defensive and dismissing his critics, man... some of the things I've seen people say directly to him are just unbelievable. People will send paragraphs-long angry screeds in to his podcast that completely tear him apart, and he has to sit there and be like "Well, that's your opinion, and you're entitled to it." People literally pay for special guest interview episodes where they just rapid fire complaints about his writing at him directly to his face. I don't know how he does it. I would snap.

All of this over Sonic the fucking Hedgehog of all things.

I don't know how to wrap this up. Engaging with fandoms online is very tiring, which is why I tend not to do it. Things like this are too common. I guess, just... remember that making art collaboratively is a complicated thing. The people involved are generally trying their best given the circumstances, but they're only human. They make mistakes. But please treat them like humans. Criticism and dogpiling are not the same thing.