To clarify, I don't use "baddiecore" as shorthand for "women like this band, therefore it is fake metal," because that argument is moldy basement water and should be poured directly down the drain. The issue isn't femininity, nor is it aesthetics. The issue certainly isn't Courtney LaPlante being charismatic, stylish, beautiful, or marketable. Metal has survived decades of men in corpse paint, leather pants, eyeliner, bullet belts, and theatrical nonsense. Nobody gets to suddenly discover the dangers of image just because the frontwoman has a good makeup brush.

The issue is the sound. More specifically, the problem is what happens when a band that once sounded genuinely uncanny starts sanding itself down into something increasingly legible to the modern metal streaming economy: clean lines, glossy production, huge choruses, curated heaviness, and songs that feel built to circulate seamlessly through playlists, reaction channels, festival slots, and TikTok edits.

That isn't the same as saying Spiritbox is talentless. They aren't. In fact, that's exactly why it's annoying. Bad bands are easy to dismiss, but Spiritbox is frustrating because the talent is undeniably still there. Courtney remains one of the most compelling vocalists in modern heavy music, capable of moving from glass-clear melody to full-body violence without making either mode feel like a costume. Mike Stringer is still a distinctive guitarist, and the band still understands atmosphere. They still know how to make a breakdown feel expensive—but expensive is part of the problem.

The early Spiritbox material had a different kind of atmosphere. The self-titled EP didn't sound like a band trying to be enormous; it sounded like a band trying to build a room you couldn't fully map. “The Mara Effect” suite moved with patience and tension, while “Aphids” had this crawling, unstable pressure. “The Beauty of Suffering” felt expansive without becoming obvious. Even when the production was cleaner than a lot of underground metalcore, there was still a sense of distance and weirdness. The songs breathed strangely.

Then, Singles Collection sharpened that promise. “Perennial,” “Electric Cross,” “Trust Fall,” “Belcarra,” and “Bleach Bath” sounded like a band finding a language that was recognizably metalcore-adjacent without being trapped inside metalcore’s usual furniture. The songs had hooks, absolutely, but the hooks didn't feel like the whole point. They emerged from the tension instead of replacing it. The clean vocals felt spectral, not merely pretty, and the heavy parts felt less like scheduled impact moments and more like pressure finally finding the weak point in the wall. That's what made early Spiritbox feel special: the heaviness and melody weren't taking turns politely. They were infecting each other.

This is also why the usual defense of their later sound can feel so evasive. “They have always had clean vocals” is true, but it misses the point. The problem was never that Courtney sings, just as the problem was never melody or accessibility on its own.

The problem is what the melody started doing.

In the earlier material, melody often deepened the atmosphere, making the songs stranger, sadder, and more suspended. Later, melody increasingly became the organizing principle. The songs began to feel built around the clean hook, with the heaviness arranged around it like set dressing. The screams still arrive, and the riffs still hit, but more often, they feel contained inside a structure that already knows exactly where the chorus needs to land. That is the softening of the strange.

Eternal Blue is where the shift becomes impossible to ignore, though even there, it isn't a simple collapse. The album has real moments. “Holy Roller” is still a monster, “Circle With Me” works because it understands scale, and “Constance” is emotionally effective without needing to prove how heavy it can be. There's a reason the album connected with people, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But Eternal Blue also marks the point where Spiritbox became easier to summarize. The mystery thinned. The songs became more polished, more digestible, and more streamlined. The band didn't lose their identity, exactly; they just made it brighter, smoother, and more readable from a distance.

And once that happened, the machine knew exactly what to do with them.

Modern heavy music doesn't need a band to become Imagine Dragons with breakdowns in order to absorb them. The process is more subtle than that. The edges stay visible, the screams stay in the mix, and the guitars remain heavy enough to reassure everyone that this is still metal. However, the overall shape becomes more compatible with the market: big choruses, a clean visual identity, genre fluidity that never becomes too inconvenient, heaviness deployed in satisfying bursts, and production so polished it starts to feel laminated.

This is where “selling out” becomes both tempting and insufficient. It's tempting because, from the outside, the trajectory looks obvious: a strange progressive metalcore band becomes increasingly glossy, popular, and positioned as one of the big crossover names in modern metal. The early weirdness becomes less central as the songs become more stream-friendly and the presentation more fashion-conscious. The whole project starts to look less like a haunted machine and more like a premium product with tasteful shadows.

But “selling out” also implies a level of intentional calculation that we can't actually prove. Courtney has pushed back on the idea that Spiritbox is making music according to some commercial formula, and I believe her when she says there isn't a shadowy label goblin demanding a specific BPM, song length, or clean chorus quota. That isn't how most of this works. A band doesn't have to sit down and say, “Let's cater to the mainstream,” for the music to become more mainstream-facing.

Sometimes the incentives are ambient. Sometimes success teaches a band which version of itself travels farthest. Sometimes the audience grows around a particular sound, and the band keeps feeding the room that keeps opening its mouth. Sometimes “evolution” and “optimization” wear the exact same perfume. That is the more interesting criticism. It isn't that Spiritbox cynically betrayed metal in a boardroom, or that Courtney is lying, or that fans are stupid for liking the newer material.

The point is that intent doesn't erase outcome, and the outcome is a band whose early progressive strangeness has been increasingly softened into a smoother, more consumable form of modern metalcore.

You can hear it in how the later releases handle heaviness. Rotoscope leaned into a sleeker, industrial-pop pulse. The Fear of Fear had heavy moments, especially “Cellar Door,” but even there, the EP felt incredibly controlled—almost too controlled. “Jaded” is a strong song, but it's also Spiritbox at their most neatly packaged: emotional, heavy enough, melodic enough, polished enough, dramatic enough, and instantly understandable. It's good, but it's also suspiciously perfect for the lane they now occupy.

That lane is exactly what people are trying to name when they say “baddiecore.”

The term is messy. It's half-joke, half-genre tag, and half-insult—which is one too many halves because the math is already cursed. It carries obvious baggage, especially because people love using taste as a way to sneer at women, younger fans, hot people, pop sensibility, makeup, sexuality, and anything that makes metal feel less like a locked shed full of divorced men arguing about blast beats. The term needs to be handled carefully, but it does point toward something real: a style of modern heavy music where metalcore, pop, alternative metal, R&B-adjacent melody, nu-metal drama, influencer-era aesthetics, and huge clean hooks all become part of the same glossy organism. It's heavy music that knows how to pose. It's heavy music with good lighting, where the breakdown isn't just a musical event, but a clip waiting to happen.

Spiritbox fits that world now far more comfortably than their early material suggested they would.

That doesn't make every later song bad. Tsunami Sea especially complicates the argument because it isn't some total descent into toothless pop-metal. “Soft Spine” has real bite, “No Loss, No Love” tries to get knotty, and “Fata Morgana” has scale and force. There are moments where the band seems to remember that tension is more interesting than sheen. But even when Tsunami Sea reaches for complexity, it often feels like complexity under glass. The production is massive, but massiveness isn't the same as danger. The songs are adventurous in places, but the adventure rarely feels out of control. Spiritbox no longer sounds like they might disappear into the fog they created. They sound like they've mapped the fog, lit it professionally, and sold tickets.

That is the disappointment.

The early releases had a sense of discovery. They sounded like a band making strange shapes because the strange shape was the point. Later Spiritbox often sounds like a band making refined Spiritbox songs: sleek, dramatic, efficient, heavy in the correct places, beautiful in the correct places, and strange only when the strangeness can be folded back into the brand. The uncanny became aesthetic. The pressure became choreography. The atmosphere became a mood board.

And maybe that's enough for most people. Maybe that's why they are bigger now. Maybe the streamlined version of Spiritbox is exactly the version built to survive in a metal landscape where bands are expected to be heavy, accessible, visually coherent, emotionally direct, algorithmically portable, and festival-ready all at once.

But I miss the version of Spiritbox that felt less certain of itself.

I miss when the songs felt like rooms with wrong dimensions. I miss when Courtney’s cleans sounded less like a hook arriving and more like a figure appearing at the end of a hallway. I miss when the riffs didn't feel arranged around impact moments, but rather like they were growing out of the song’s nervous system. I miss when the band’s beauty had more rot under it.

That's why “Spiritbox went mainstream” feels too flat as a criticism. Plenty of bands get bigger without losing the thing that made them compelling. Popularity isn't the crime. Accessibility isn't the crime. Clean vocals aren't the crime. Looking good in a music video is absolutely not the crime.

The crime is becoming less strange.

Or maybe it's not a crime; maybe it's just a loss.

Spiritbox is still good at what they do. They may even be better, technically, at building the kind of songs they want to build now. But the version of the band that first felt genuinely special wasn't special because it was perfectly constructed. It was special because it felt slightly unstable. It had an atmosphere that didn't always resolve cleanly. It had heaviness that didn't always arrive like a scheduled appointment, and it had melody that haunted the song instead of selling it.

Now, too often, the haunting feels decorative. And that is the softening of the strange: not the disappearance of heaviness, but the domestication of it. Not the absence of talent, but the refinement of talent into something safer. Not a band becoming unrecognizable, but a band becoming too recognizable, too quickly.

Spiritbox didn't lose their sound. They just made it easier to consume.

For some listeners, that's evolution. For me, it feels like watching fog get bottled and sold as perfume.

A donation link, in the broadest ethical sense, is usually framed as support for the creator. Someone reads your work for free, enjoys what you do, and chooses to toss a few dollars into the metaphorical hat.

It is not payment for a specific fic. It is not a condition of access. It does not turn the fic itself into the product.

I understand why people are more comfortable with that, even though individual platforms may still have rules against promoting those links in certain fandom spaces.

A paywall is different.

When a writer locks exclusive fanfiction behind Patreon tiers, Ko-fi memberships, or paid posts, the transaction changes. It is no longer “support me if you like what I do.” It becomes “pay me to read this.”

The fanwork itself becomes the thing being sold.

That is where the ground starts to give way.

Fanfiction has always lived in a complicated space. It is creative, transformative, communal, and deeply personal. It can be literary. It can be unserious. It can be healing. It can be horny. It can be all of that before breakfast.

But it also usually relies on characters, settings, names, relationships, and narrative frameworks that belong to someone else.

In Jujutsu Kaisen fandom, a Sukuna x Reader fic is not valuable to its audience only because of the writer’s prose. It is valuable because it invokes Sukuna. The character recognition is part of the appeal. The fandom context is part of the market.

That does not mean fanfiction has no original labor in it. It absolutely does.

Fanwriters build tone, plot, pacing, characterization, emotional stakes, erotic tension, atmosphere, and entire interpretive frameworks out of their own skill. Some fanfiction is more thoughtful about character than official supplemental material. Some fic writers understand emotional continuity with frightening precision.

The labor is real.

But real labor does not automatically settle what the labor produces.

That is the uncomfortable part, and I want to sit in it rather than rush past it. Skill and effort are real. They are just not the same thing as ownership, and they do not by themselves answer whether the finished work is yours to sell.

A fic can be the best writing in the tag and still be built, at its foundation, around a character that is not yours.

This is why “but writers deserve to be paid” is not a complete argument.

Yes, writers deserve support. Yes, creative labor is labor. Yes, fandom often survives on unpaid work from people who are overextended, underappreciated, and expected to produce indefinitely.

But the question is not whether writing has value.

The question is whether monetizing access to fanfiction built on someone else’s characters is the same thing as monetizing original work.

I do not think it is.

There is also a difference between original commissions and fanfic commissions.

If someone offers paid custom writing using original characters, original worlds, or broad trope prompts, that is one thing. “Write me a dark romance scene with a possessive immortal king” is not the same as “write me Sukuna x Reader.”

The first may be trope-based original writing.

The second is a paid custom fanwork using a recognizable copyrighted character as the selling point.

That distinction holds even if the paid post itself is labeled vaguely.

One pattern that is worth talking about, without naming anyone, is the way explicit fandom language can disappear once a work is monetized. A fic may be promoted elsewhere as a specific character x Reader piece, while the paid post uses a vague title, a generic description, or no clear IP markers at all.

That does not automatically prove bad intent, and I am not interested in pretending I can read anyone’s mind. But structurally, it creates a strange kind of plausible deniability.

The work needs to be recognizable enough for the fandom audience to want it, but vague enough on the payment platform to look less directly tied to the source material.

That vagueness does not make the issue vanish.

If the audience understands what they are paying for because of off-platform promotion, fandom context, tags, previews, Discord posts, Tumblr posts, or prior branding, then the character name disappearing from the Patreon title is not a moral cleansing ritual.

It is just a curtain.

Maybe a very pretty curtain.

But still a curtain.

The paywall is the point.

Some people will say this is no different from fanartists taking commissions. The comparison comes up constantly, and I understand why.

Artist alleys exist. People sell prints, charms, stickers, zines, commissions. Some rights holders tolerate it, some do not, and enforcement is inconsistent either way.

So let me be honest about something, because pretending otherwise would weaken everything I have already said:

I cannot draw a perfectly clean copyright-based line between a paid Sukuna fic and a paid Sukuna drawing.

The character is the selling point in both. The skill is real in both.

But that is exactly why I do not think copyright alone is the whole argument.

The real line is older and stranger than copyright, and it lives in culture, not abstraction.

Fanfiction grew up especially attached to noncommercial gift culture. Not because fic writers deserve support less than artists do, but because fic communities have survived for decades by insisting the work is transformative, unofficial, and not sold as a substitute for the original.

That posture is not decoration.

It is part of what has kept fic legally breathable.

“Transformative and noncommercial” has been one of the major pillars of the fair-use posture fandom has long relied on.

Which is why this is not only about one writer’s vibe.

When a fic gets locked behind a paywall, the writer is not just changing their own relationship to their work. They are wearing down one of the cultural shields that has helped protect everybody — including every free fic in the same tag, written by people who never charged a cent.

The noncommercial part of that posture gets harder to point to when fanwork about copyrighted characters starts moving as gated content.

The person paywalling their Toji fic is, in a small and probably unintended way, making the rest of us more visible to precisely the kind of attention fandom has spent years trying not to attract.

That is my real answer to “who is it hurting.”

Not a corporation’s feelings.

Us.

The whole weird campfire.

This is the deeper cost.

The fic becomes gated content. The reader becomes a customer. The character becomes part of the sales pitch. The fandom becomes a market.

And once fandom becomes a market, the norms shift.

That is already visible in the language around paid fanfiction. People talk about tiers, exclusives, previews, early access, monthly drops, locked posts, custom requests, and premium content.

Those are not gift-culture terms.

Those are subscription economy terms.

That does not make everyone using them evil, but it does mean we should be honest about what is happening.

This is commercialization.

Not in the abstract sense. Not in the “everything online is capitalism, so nothing matters” sense.

In the plain sense:

access to fanwork is being exchanged for money.

That is where I think the line should be drawn.

A general tip jar is one thing. A reader saying “I like your writing and want to support you” is one thing. A writer offering original commissions is one thing.

But locking Jujutsu Kaisen fanfiction behind Patreon or Ko-fi memberships is another thing entirely.

Charging for custom Sukuna x Reader, Gojo x Reader, Toji x Reader, Nanami x Reader, or any other recognizable character fic is not just “supporting a creator.”

It is selling a fanwork.

I already said the harm is diffuse, and I want to be fair about how diffuse.

Maybe no rights holder ever notices. Maybe no account ever gets taken down. Maybe the shield never actually gets tested. Maybe readers are happy to pay. Maybe the writer needs the income. Maybe everyone involved feels fine about it.

But fandom ethics are not only about whether a corporation notices.

They are also about what kind of culture we are building.

Are we building a culture where fanfiction circulates as shared creative play, or one where the best work disappears into subscription silos?

Are we building a space where readers support writers voluntarily, or one where fandom desire is treated as a revenue stream?

Are we comfortable with turning access to fan-created stories about copyrighted characters into paid content while still benefiting from the protective language of “it’s just fanwork”?

I am not saying every fanwriter with a Ko-fi link is a villain.

I am not saying people who accept donations are destroying fandom.

I am not saying writers should be shamed for wanting support.

I am definitely not saying readers are entitled to unlimited free labor from strangers.

What I am saying is that there is a meaningful difference between appreciation and transaction.

There is a meaningful difference between “support me if you want” and “pay to unlock this fic.”

There is a meaningful difference between original writing commissions and paid custom fanfiction using someone else’s characters.

And there is a meaningful difference between a fandom gift economy that allows voluntary support around the edges and a subscription model that turns fanfiction itself into gated merchandise.

That difference is worth defending.

Because once the line disappears, it does not disappear neutrally.

It disappears in favor of the marketplace.

It disappears in favor of tiers, exclusives, locked posts, and customer access.

It disappears in favor of the people most willing or able to monetize communal desire.

It disappears in a way that makes fandom feel less like an archive, less like a conversation, less like a campfire of shared obsession, and more like another storefront.

I do not want fanfiction to become another storefront.

I want writers to be supported. I want readers to be generous. I want fandom to value creative labor without pretending copyright does not exist.

I want people to understand that “I worked hard on this” and “I have the right to sell this” are not the same sentence.

Fanfiction can be valuable without being a product.

Maybe that is the heart of it.

The work matters. The labor matters. The writers matter.

But the moment access to fic about someone else’s characters is locked behind payment, the ethical equation changes.

Pretending otherwise does not protect fanwriters.

It just makes the conversation harder to have honestly.

Support writers.

Tip writers, where appropriate.

Commission original work.

Respect the labor.

But paywalled fanfiction is not just fandom with a donation button attached.

It is monetized access to a derivative fanwork, and we should be willing to say that without needing to turn it into a witch hunt.

—

Further reading / context

These are not here as a magic “I win” button, but they are useful context for why fandom has historically been careful about commercial promotion and monetized access.

Archive of Our Own, Terms of Service FAQ AO3’s own explanation of its Terms of Service, including rules around commercial activity. https://archiveofourown.org/tos_faq

Organization for Transformative Works, “TOS Spotlight: Commercial Promotion” OTW’s explanation of why commercial promotion is restricted on AO3. https://www.transformativeworks.org/tos-spotlight-commercial-promotion/