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We are pleased to present the talented writers of MATSURI: An Ignoct Zine!

For excerpts, ao3 and social media links, visit the CONTRIBUTORS PAGE.

My original post was crafted in a moment of rage, very sloppy and one of my links didn’t copy right that one time, and a lot of stuff has happened, so I figure I owe you guys a tidy one, since I spent basically my entire day watching the public response to this like an angry trainwreck.

On December 6th all Patreon Creators received an e-mail informing us that in order to help us “keep more” of our income, specifically 95%, fees would be imposed on our Patrons, to the tune of 35 cents plus 2.9% per pledge. (Originally, Creators ate all of Patreon’s fees themselves.)

It sounds like a very small fee, but it adds up quickly when someone is supporting multiple creators. That’s tacking on an extra 37 cents to every $1 pledge… so say someone was pledging $1 each to 20 creators, you’re now paying $27.01 instead of $20. Here is a much more in-depth analysis of exactly how fucked the fee scale gets. The new system discourages making small pledges, which were the backbone of many successful Patreons– a ton of $1 pledges was super secure because losing one wasn’t a big deal. It also makes pay-per-post patreons totally unfeasible, because the extra charges are tacked on to every single post you charge for.

In addition, the new fee scale is awkward and confusing. People don’t like seeing a flat number and then getting charged extra fees on top of it, no matter how small they are. It’s already difficult to gather pledges, and this move makes patronage a much harder sell. The tiers on my page now show an inaccurate price.

(P.S. Creators who also support other Patreons are going to get double-charged in the new system, since they aren’t going to be allowed to use Patreon income for pledges anymore.)

Naturally, the announcement caused an uproar, and angry creators and patrons took to twitter and Patreon’s help desk to plead with Patreon not to make the change. Patreon responded dismissively, assuring us that we were “being listened to”, while making “sorry you feel that way” non-apologies. They also claimed that this had been “researching and consulting” with users. As of the writing of this post, I’ve seen zero evidence that they surveyed anyone.

On the 7th, everything got worse. The e-mail to Patrons dropped. Patreon made the first tweet on their main twitter page about the new fees, and the response was (predictably) a massive tornado of hatred and anger.

Creators started seeing a lot of dropped pledges with the announcement of the new fees. I can’t possibly link every single post I saw about this, but here’s a search link for “patreon lost” on twitter, where MANY creators are posting about how many patrons they’ve lost. Obviously this search won’t contain everything, just people that have used that specific phrase, but it does give a picture of how nasty this has already gotten.

The assumption that most of us made was that Patreon was trying to raise its profit margin by double-dipping on fees, and disguise it as some sort of favor to us. There was also some very reasonable speculation that this had to do more with their investors. People who are much better at math than me also proved that the graphs and numbers they were showing us were manipulative horseshit.

All in all? Not a great look for Patreon, who has always made themselves out to be in favor of the little guy and the struggling creative.

Finally, after hours and hours of angry feedback, Patreon tried one more time to defend their bad idea. They tweeted an update to the blog post, explaining that they want to implement a different kind of subscription schedule where people get charged on the day they personally pledged, instead of all at once. They were apparently having trouble with people who didn’t understand why, if they pledged to a charge-up-front Patreon, they might get charged twice in a month. They swear up and down that this is not a money grab, and is part of a larger plan to convert Patreon to a more traditional subscription model.

Here’s why that’s still super frustrating, even if we trust them and assume it’s not just another damn smokescreen.

1. Literally all you have to do is explain it better???? Making a huge change like this to the entire structure of your service because some people don’t understand how it works is ABSURD. HONESTLY. WHAT.

2. They waited ages and ages to tell us the “truth”. They’ve supposedly been working on this new system for “months”, and the first anyone heard of it was eleven days before it was supposed to be implemented. They claim a “creator first” mentality, having asked for zero input from us. And apparently instead of just telling us the reasoning behind this from the getgo, they anticipated the backlash and tried to disguise it as a cool new feature instead of the terrible problem solving that it actually is.

3. It completely undermines Patreon’s original intent. LITERALLY THEIR WHOLE THING was batching charges to avoid unreasonable fees like this, from the start. It completely ruins the viability of small pledges. The regularity of the Patreon deposit is also something that many of us depend on, and having that spread out in a bunch of awkward little charges isn’t going to make any sense. Patreon is trying to stop being Patreon.

So as it is: it looks like they’re still planning to proceed with the new fee structure, despite the massive, loud and 100% justified backlash. Creators are hemorrhaging patrons. Things are pretty fucked. The damage has already been done to people’s income and to their trust in Patreon. And it came out of fucking nowhere, with no warning, in the middle of the holiday season.

Here’s who this is going to hurt, by the way: Patreon is a source of much-needed income for a lot of POC, LGBT, disabled and otherwise marginalized creators. So good job there I guess, Patreon. You’re spitting on a lot of the people that needed and appreciated you the most.

F YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT INDEPENDENT CREATORS PLEASE SPEAK OUT.

Tweet at @Patreon, @PatreonSupport and CEO Jack Conte.

Send them a complaint via their helpdesk.

Sign a petition.

Staff emails (source) (other source): [email protected] (Jack Conte, CEO) [email protected] (Heather, Creator Care Lead) [email protected] (Ellie, Community Manager) [email protected] (Darby, Res.) [email protected] (Jamie, Res.) [email protected] (Jessica, Res.) [email protected] (Tyler, VP Operations)

Commission for the lovely @kinesisboomer which was ok with me playing around with his look a second time.

(We do not talk about the first version, god knows my sins.)

Their friends @bulkheading sweet OC, Starstruck.

Man I do love his look so I went a bit crazy. Also guess this is my style now.

A birthday gift for @writingpteropod​ commissioned by @genericfangirl (who I can’t tag for some reason)!

Went to Bat Festival yesterday, but I still managed to bash out most of a chapter in the morning. I then put it on my Kindle and read it aloud to a car full of people. Hope you liked my fanfiction, friends and family! Who doesn’t want to hear five chapters of relentless Jazz abuse when you’re on your way to a family-friendly event? Hm?

Anyway, I just finished it up and now I get to share it with all of you. It’s maybe not quite as good without my maniacal Ricochet impression, but you’ll just have to use your imagination.

Couple of fixes:

Noticed the space breaks I use between scene changes weren’t showing up. You now have asterisk breaks instead.

Not really a fix, but still playing around with how much/little I want Jazz to have a visible dialect.

And awa-a-ay we go~

Part one can be found here. Part two can be found here. Part three can be found here. Part four can be found here.

IF YOU’VE BEEN WAITING TO SIGN UP, NOW IS THE TIME. Signups will close with the end of the month!

If you have any questions about anything: the signup form, the timeline of the gift exchange, the requirements of the gift, etc.; Please send in an ask! I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. You can also look at the or FAQ and To Join pages.

Another fun commission!

This time a smiling Red Alert for @silentletterwords as gift for EM

I keep seeing posts going around about people advocating that fic authors ‘stop glorifying x/y/z, it’s gross and you’re terrible for doing it.’

Now, setting aside for the moment arguing about the definition of ‘endorsing’ or ‘glorifying’, (which usually seems to mean ‘shows in any way, no matter the context,’) I want to talk about (some of) the reasons why you might get a fanfic genuinely glorifying something like unhealthy relationships, rape, underage sex, et cetera.

1. The person is someone who has gone through one of the above, and does not know that it is unhealthy.

2. The person does not realize that the behaviors are unhealthy and not romantic.

3. The person was attempting to depict but not endorse it, but had poor judgement in how they were translating the scene in their heads to writing.

None of these options say anything about malice, you’ll note. That’s because, in my experience, the overwhelming majority of fic I have come across that I could say genuinely glorifies abuse is not the work of some cackling, evil author who wants to make people believe that these things are normal and healthy. More often, it is the work of a young or inexperienced author who is still learning how to write, or to critically engage with content.

I won’t say that it doesn’t ever happen, because I’m sure it does occasionally. What I am saying is, even if you come across a fic that actually glorifies an act like rape, calling the work gross, the author gross, and going after them with metaphorical pitchforks is the worst possible way you could try to accomplish anything good here.

No one just springs into the world with a complete knowledge of what abuse is, or what’s unhealthy. That’s absurd. If people did, we would all be a whole lot less likely to get abused. Instead, we learn it over the course of years. Sometimes, we’re first taught that the abuse is the healthy part, whether it’s because of culture, media, or firsthand experience, and we have to unlearn all of that shit.

So, should people just not write anything until they’ve learned enough about the world? No, of course not. No one gets better at writing by just waiting until some magical moment to start. Writing, and having people engage with what they write, is the only way I know of to make that happen.

Hey Transformers fans. It’s time for Secret Solenoid again!

If you didn’t see the event last year, Secret Solenoid is a gift exchange for fanart and fanfiction of all things Transformers. Like any Secret Santa gift exchange, everyone who signs up will be creating a gift for someone in the exchange, and receiving one in turn from someone else.

To sign up just FILL OUT THIS FORM!

It’s fairly self-explanatory, and if you signed up last year some of the questions probably look familiar. Pretty much everything on it is to help pair content creators up with the kind of gift they can (hopefully) enjoy making!

A few things to keep in mind when signing up:

- Remember to include at least two prompts! Give your gift creator some options to work with.

- This event is OC-friendly. Go ahead and include a character of your own in one of your prompts.