Cat over moon

!!! 

me, falling in love with every woman I see whose purpose is to eat and be pretty:

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Lin is the only other major character who looks human throughout the movie - I’m not certain she started out human, but I suspect she may have, and may have fully traded away her humanity. I do think it’s significant that she, unlike Chihiro and Haku, doesn’t reclaim her name at the end of the story.

She’s the first bathhouse worker who is kind to Chihiro, helping her get her clothes and navigate her first work assignment and sneak food. One of the core themes of Spirited Away is finding your footing in a new and terrifying place, and Lin and Haku are key allies in Chihiro’s struggle to gain the skills and self-assurance she needs in order to thrive.

Lin’s human appearance helps us and Chihiro feel more sympathetic towards her . Her familiarity with the system of favors and bribes makes her appealing as a role model who can demystify Chihiro’s new environment for her. Unlike the more inhuman occupants of the bathhouse, Lin looks like someone Chihiro could become in the future, and that’s a good thing! She’s living proof that the bathhouse is not such a monstrous and scary place. Because Lin treats the bathhouse like home, Chihiro begins to see it as a home, too.

And once Chihiro starts to think of the bathhouse as her territory, she realizes that she has agency in this place as well. She uses its rules to her own advantage to free Haku and herself.

And that is the point of Chihiro’s journey in Spirited Away: it’s a metaphor for starting over in a new place and overcoming fear of the unfamiliar. After all, the frame story is Chihiro’s family moving to a new city. At the beginning of the movie, Chihiro is despondent, unhappy to be leaving her old friends behind. By the end, after making it through the spirit world, she’s taking a much more active role in helping her parents settle into their new home.

Because Chihiro has a mentor and friend, she learns how to survive and even do well in the Bathhouse. It’s because of Lin that Chihiro is able to not accept her place within this system and instead fight back, and in the end to make things a little better for everyone.

There’s something there about community, and easing the path for those who come after you. Lin doesn’t regret her choices because they were the best choices she could make, and that’s okay. It’s not a tragedy. She got as far as she could get, and because she did, she’s there to help Chihiro get farther. 

People have said the tag is unique to Claude only and therefore there’s no way a human-made fic could have gotten wrongly flagged as AI. But how accurate and trustworthy worthy this is, really? Even IF, hypothetically, this method is proved correct 99 times out of 100, that still means “there is 1 time out of 100 times where a human-made fic is wrongly flagged as AI due to an error”. And that to me nullified the credibility of the whole doc. Like, sorry for not trusting another newly-introduced machine and for being skeptical about it.

“But how could the tag get there if the author didn’t use AI?” Besides the possibility of an error, I can already see people weaponize this method by faking screenshots of fics that are about the ships or topics that they hate to make it look like these fics have Claude tag in them, and then spreading those fake screenshots around. And the worst part is that authors cannot prove their innocence because people would just say “they got caught so now they removed the Claude tag from their fics”.

Like. I hate AI, but I hate witch hunts, accusations and harassments more.

These comments below sum it up really well.

The Tube Post has been updated for 2026! Endless thanks to @andstuffsketches for the amazing art (!!!), @rowenabean for checking this over for me (all remaining mistakes are my own), @kelpforestdwellers for extra tips, and @appleyblam for an editing pass. Thank you all!

yeah even without filtering anything — sometimes I look for stuff to read without filtering anything out — I don't think I've ever seen those super disturbing ones that some people apparently have issues with (or if I did see them, it was super rare that I don't remember seeing them at all, like... I just ignore, scroll past it and then forget about it).

so yes, you (general you) have to actively search for it. if you (still general you) don't like it and yet you still go out of your way to look for it just so that you can be upset or triggered, then that is a you problem.

The search engine calculates a score that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features.

If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you’re on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?

are explicitly stated

to be cranberries

People have said the tag is unique to Claude only and therefore there’s no way a human-made fic could have gotten wrongly flagged as AI. But how accurate and trustworthy worthy this is, really? Even IF, hypothetically, this method is proved correct 99 times out of 100, that still means “there is 1 time out of 100 times where a human-made fic is wrongly flagged as AI due to an error”. And that to me nullified the credibility of the whole doc. Like, sorry for not trusting another newly-introduced machine and for being skeptical about it.

“But how could the tag get there if the author didn’t use AI?” Besides the possibility of an error, I can already see people weaponize this method by faking screenshots of fics that are about the ships or topics that they hate to make it look like these fics have Claude tag in them, and then spreading those fake screenshots around. And the worst part is that authors cannot prove their innocence because people would just say “they got caught so now they removed the Claude tag from their fics”.

Like. I hate AI, but I hate witch hunts, accusations and harassments more.

These comments below sum it up really well.

Generally, I'd say the consistency of a writer's individual voice is one of the biggest tells that something is legitimate. If they usually use "AI writing" tells such as "it's not X, but Y", but they've done that since the beginning of time, it's pretty easy to infer that their work was scraped for AI training, and not the other way around.

I feel kind of bad for newer genuine authors coming into the scene now because: A) For the authors that have a long history of posting, you can track their individual author voice through their works over the years. We did a guess the author event in a private server a few years back, and even though we were trying to obscure our style to "hide", people who followed us could still tell it was us! Newer authors don't have a public history to "prove" (gosh I hate saying that) their legitimacy.

B) For the newer authors who are still developing their voice, I'd wager a large percentage of them started as fic readers, and when your own voice is underdeveloped, you tend to write in the style you know. That is to say, a style similar to an amalgamation of the other fics they've read...which is exactly what AI is trained on.

Anyway, I don't think there's a good answer for any of this. Which kind of makes my whole ramble here obsolete. Oh well.

If I suspect AI, I'm just gonna keep quietly closing and clicking out.

People have said the tag is unique to Claude only and therefore there’s no way a human-made fic could have gotten wrongly flagged as AI. But how accurate and trustworthy worthy this is, really? Even IF, hypothetically, this method is proved correct 99 times out of 100, that still means “there is 1 time out of 100 times where a human-made fic is wrongly flagged as AI due to an error”. And that to me nullified the credibility of the whole doc. Like, sorry for not trusting another newly-introduced machine and for being skeptical about it.

“But how could the tag get there if the author didn’t use AI?” Besides the possibility of an error, I can already see people weaponize this method by faking screenshots of fics that are about the ships or topics that they hate to make it look like these fics have Claude tag in them, and then spreading those fake screenshots around. And the worst part is that authors cannot prove their innocence because people would just say “they got caught so now they removed the Claude tag from their fics”.

Like. I hate AI, but I hate witch hunts, accusations and harassments more.

These comments below sum it up really well.

For portraiture you have the unique challenge of capturing the distinctive features while flattering them. There’s a tension of “what makes the person look like themselves?” against what they WANT people to see.

Acknowledging and respecting that, reflecting a View of the Self instead of a simple photograph, has always been an ephemeral and noble challenge of portraiture. It’s a rare skill, and while I’m not claiming to be a brilliant practitioner, here’s how I go about it. You want the person to feel SEEN - on a level and in a way that only a portrait artist could.

If someone in a novel were to spend a paragraph studying the portrait, they ought to be able to say something plot-relevant, like “the artist had faithfully captured the FAMILY RESEMBLANCE in the notable features and the PLOT POINT in the shape of her eyes… but no photograph could have captured the wistful turn of the mouth. Across a hundred years of distance, her soul was clear, speaking to Protagonist as if she were merely in another room…”

That’s the skill of portraiture, really, and it’s rarer than the ability to do good lineart (which I can’t do either; note that I’m not claiming to be GOOD.)

The immediate outstanding features of the “fan” are

Dark, hooded, distinctive eyes - she’s probably proud of them

Challenging, knowing expression

Long dark hair is a feature she’s proud of; because it’s well-cultivated

A sweet beauty of youth, but I can see what she’ll look like when she’s older

Notes on her features:

Roman nose that’s unusually short for the bridge type. Doesn’t have the space to be “hooked” but has the shape.

Natural brow with natural arch - fuzzing in to a shapely tapered form

Rounded face but with an interesting composition of flat slabby cheekbones and a high flat forehead. I’d love to look at it from other angles but she could model for a LOT of time periods and a LOT of artistic traditions.

Cool olive skin - very tricky!!! Especially with that pink lip. Frankly beyond me to depict fairly tbh… but at least I tried

Dark pigmented undereye and eyelid, which I chose to handle in the sense of “flattering eye makeup”rather than true depiction of her colouring.

Full mouth with NO CUPID’S BOW - fullness in lower lip

I’d elide the faint double chin out of gracious recognition of the angle and acknowledgement of the fact that the sitter would PROBABLY prefer it not to be noticed. I ultimately alluded to it, but elided it.

Even without the double chin, her determined yet rounded chin is another charming and forceful contradiction that lends what we call “character” to the face

💯 keep the moles

Presumably a fan of Instagram anime art is familiar with conventions and is therefore hoping for a portrait with glow brushes and SHEEN and TEXTURE and anime petals and veils barfed all over it - so I did a final version with those things - presuming it would make the “customer” happy

Obviously you can see that I’m quite humbly and realistically not an ARTIST but I thought it was interesting to contrast what skills are valued in a party trick of portraiture (breaking down and flattering features, playing a delicate game of flattery/pleasure and clear-eyed recognisability) vs a much more skilled and stylish render that is based on replicating anime aesthetics and thus - despite being better which I acknowledge! - didn’t engage so much with the goals of portraiture. Returning to the goals of portraiture - likeness, gesture, expression, picking out features, affection for the subject - is so,so good for the soul. For one thing, it reminds you of your ability to fall in love with faces…

Attempted to do an anime/manga-style portrait with the actual features of the fan (plus a little artistic licence which was definitely intentional and not a result of me not bothering to sketch). Please excuse one of the worst hands in the history of art.

Playing on hard mode here since anime really de-emphasises the nose, and the nose is the part I recognise faces by. Often European characters in anime have relatively long noses, even if they're not prominent, so that's what I've done here.