Good Luck Babe 🤞

writing “long” paragraphs is not a sign of AI — it’s a common narrative choice many writers make both in fanfiction and in traditionally published novels, and AI stole it from us.

using an em dash is not a sign of AI. it’s a stylistic sentence choice that’s been an option in place of commas and semicolons for a very long time, and AI stole it from us.

long sentence structures are not a sign of AI, but are yet another stylistic choice writers often make to create a cadence and tone that mimics the flow of poetry, and AI stole it from us.

“YA narrative breaks”? i don’t even know what the fuck this means, but i can guarantee that AI stole it from us.

italics are once again a stylistic choice that many writers love to use to create emphasis, and it’s a more stylistically acceptable and traditional form of emphasis than bold or underline text. oh, and just to be extra clear: AI STOLE IT FROM US.

stop creating fandom witch hunts over AI when you know fuck all about what it means to sit and write a story, and to spend hours fiddling with sentence structure and dialogue to get the exact right tone. writers will stop writing out of fear that their work “sounds like AI” — IT DOESNT! AI STOLE FROM US! AI SOUNDS LIKE US! — and after a while, all that will be available on AO3 is shitty AI-generated fanfiction.

because yeah, people are going to continue to use AI to write fanfiction whether you “call them out” or not. but making a laughable thread on X that uses asinine criteria is not going to fix that problem. it will just push the real writers out because people will accuse them of using AI when they haven’t, and they will (rightfully) stop writing for spaces that attack them.

No name. No address. No matter where he is.

Always of art.

Postcards of paintings from all around the world.

He likes researching them and learning about the artist, what the paintings mean, where the paintings hang now.

He knows she wouldn’t be there if he went, but he still looks into the cities that the galleries are in. Reading about the history and imagining her telling him about it. Imagining her exploring. Learning. Existing freely.

He doesn’t tell anyone because he knows she trusts him not to. Trusts him to not try and find her.

He likes to think she still checks in with him as occasionally the meaning or subject of a painting will hit too close to home with him and whatever the current thing that was bothering him.

He wishes he could write back. Wishes he knew how to check on her as she checks on him.

to dismiss all of that as irrelevant chatter isn’t just tone deaf, it’s narratively negligent. it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how meaning is made, how representation functions, and how performance and authorship interact. when an actor with lived queer experience is telling you, explicitly, that he relates to his character’s arc, that’s not “noise.” that’s a primary source. that’s embodied knowledge informing the text from the inside out.

and when your queer audience, the people who have carried your story, analysed it, defended it, and found themselves in it, are pointing out the emotional and thematic resonance you’ve built, brushing them off isn’t neutral. it’s cruel. it’s a refusal to engage with the very people who understand your work most intimately. it’s a failure of craft, of empathy, and of basic narrative stewardship.

if you rate episode 7 of season 5 one star, it'll show netflix that the audience doesn't want to see any form of queer representation, and the chances of byler level queerbait happening in their future projects (even the ones in the near future like wednesday and maybe ginny & georgia) will be SO much higher. if you rate that episode one star regardless of what you thought of it, it's YOUR funeral.

BUT!!! if you give episode 8 of season 5 one star, it'll show netflix that the worst way to end a show about outcasts and 'screwing conformity' is by showing us that each character ended up as a conformed version of themselves. they'll see that the cast and crew were VERY wrong for choosing to go down the path of queer erasure and bowing down to harmful stereotypes.

so yeah, review-bomb episode 8 all you want, but please, whatever you do, don't let episode 7 be the lowest rated episode of the show.

Mike trying to apologize for being so shitty to Will. And the writers not even LETTING Will accept the apology.

He is self deprecating until the very end. Insistent that Mike shouldn’t have noticed his pain or been there for him. That it was better for him to suffer in silence until he managed to get over his feelings. Because how dare he inconvenience Mike with his gay feelings?

He’s excusing all of Mike’s shitty behavior so the audience can, too. He’s stating that he was always meant to get over Mike, so the audience can too. And he’s furthering the homophobic narrative that sympathizing with a gay person as a straight person is uncomfortable and confusing work, so it shouldn’t be expected. The audience can nod along with that, too.

it honestly feels like such a slap in the face. taking a very much canonically suicidal, emotionally depressed boy and making him end up away from his friends, all alone in the basement and sobbing as he thinks about the most important person in his life slipping through his fingers.