Karrista and Tara'lena Dawnchaser

I don't even mean this is a pejorative way. The Borg are a religion; when they talk about achieving perfection, they're talking about a form of transcendent Becoming.

They're basically a religion devoted to creating God by networking brains and merging flesh and steel.

As they shouted out with glee,

"Unholy Drink Cloaca

You think you know, though. What’s really got her quiet. She’s really good at hiding it, just like she was good at hiding things when she was alive. Before, she would just put on a brave face and laugh things off. “No, of course I don’t want to be a girl”, “No, of course I’m fine if you don’t invite me out”, “No, of course I’ll top and I don’t mind”. You were the one to see past all of that. You coaxed her out with gentle talks, you were the one speaking quiet, honeyed words long past everyone else had gone to sleep and it was just the two of you, like no one else existed.

So you know exactly what’s wrong with her right now. You recognize when she stifles herself all too well.

Someone tells a joke and the group laughs. She smiles – cute, she always showed her teeth and now you can see the little pointed ones – but doesn’t really laugh along with them. She shudders softly, rubbing her arm. You track her eyes, and they’re moving along one of your friend’s necks. They laugh, and her eyes flicker with the movement.

They catch yours for a moment, blood red like gorgeous gemstones, and she turns away quickly, evading her gaze. She’d be blushing if her heart still beat. But you know her. You know what she needs.

The friend group peels off, one at a time each going home to sleep or get to work, until it’s just the two of you. Empty streets in the early morning, still hours before morning light, quiet and vacant. Your breath carries in the air – she has no breath to speak of. She’s quiet again, like always. You take the lead, veering off the path toward a park. It’s pretty public, but there’s a wooded area near the back that’s usually not monitored by park rangers. You aren’t going to say why you know the best wooded places to hide from authority figures.

She’s confused but follows diligently, bobbing along behind you. Sometimes you wish she could turn into a bat so you could put her in your pocket. But she’s cute enough as is.

You’re finally far enough off the beaten path that no one can see or hear, if some night jogger were to come by, or some ranger looking for troublemakers.

She smiles crookedly, cocking her head. “What’re we…?” You swallow hard, deliberately, and watch her eyes track down to your neck. Like you knew they would. “U-um… what…?”

Your fingers are trembling when you reach down to grab the hem of your shirt. She startles, nearly jumping out of her skin as you pull it over your head, finding somewhere nearby to set it, neatly folded. Then you lean back against a tree, leaving your bra on and looking up at her, brushing your hair behind your back and out of the way of your neck.

“You’re hungry,” you say with a smile. “You’ve been eating out of IV bags for so long, you haven’t had a warm meal probably since you turned.”

“No,” she says quickly, waving her arms. “No no no, I-? I can’t-?”

“Hey.” Your hand reaches out, catching her wrist in your grip. Her skin is cool to the touch, and you can feel the strength beneath the skin. Like if she moved the wrong way, she’d rip your arm out of your socket. It’s kind of thrilling to know she could hurt you, and the restraint she shows to keep you safe. “I want it.”

“You…?” She pauses before her eyes go wide. “What?! Why-? I-! You can’t-?”

“Please?” you ask softly, taking your hand back and brushing your fingertips along your chest, shoulders, neck. “I’ve got a first aid kit in my backpack. You can bite wherever, it’s fine.”

“That’s not-!” she replied weakly, whimpering softly. The way she trembled, eyes wide, mouth hanging open as she panted softly… That’s it. You got her. You know her like the back of your hand.

You reach out to grab her again, pulling her toward you. She moves willingly – you don’t have the strength to move her otherwise – and lightly presses her body to yours. Even through her clothes, she’s cold. She doesn’t need to breathe, but she’s panting now, cold breaths along your neck as she leans in.

“This is messed up,” she mutters softly, hands finding your hips.

“We both want it,” you retort. “It’s consent.”

“I… I won’t want to stop…” she whimpers, lips brushing up your jaw.

“You won’t drain me,” you smile, hands tangling in her hair. “I trust you.”

“I’ll need more,” she pants, uncontrolled now, tongue licking a stripe up your neck as she moans. “I won’t ever want to stop feeding on you, ever.”

You pull her in closer, feeling her lips and teeth press up against soft, sensitive skin. “I won’t want you to,” you reassure her. “Please.”

The first bite is like heaven. Needles aren’t pleasant, but this feeling is… different. Probably something to do with the venom vampires have, some sort of anesthetic. There’s a pinprick of pain, heat that floods your entire body, and then you feel the fangs sink beneath the skin. You can’t help but whine at the feeling, grabbing her shirt and pulling her, closer, closer, needy. You want more.

Teeth pierce through you, and when she starts drinking, you feel like you could get drunk off of it. Blood loss, maybe, or… maybe if you’re being honest, you’re a glutton for it. You’ve wanted her to bite you since you learned she turned. Since you got that timid coming out text, her quietly mentioning she’s a vampire now, you’ve wanted her on top of you. Strong hands holding you under her, teeth biting painfully into you. You can feel her groaning and panting, eyes wide and watching you from your neck.

“Good girl,” you moan, petting her hair. “You’re doing amazing.”

She whimpers, almost sobbing, drinking even deeper from you. Your legs go out at some point, and you find yourself falling to the ground. She catches you, sets you down, straddles your lap and keeps drinking, never leaving your neck. You can see yourself getting paler as she drinks from you. You do trust her, but… fuck she’s drinking so much. Her own cheeks are flushed bright red now, your blood in her veins, filling her with strength and warmth.

When you start to see spots in your vision, you gently tap her shoulder. Her eyes find yours. It’s strange to see a girl pout while her teeth are buried in your skin, but she manages, and it’s adorable, and you have a tough time getting her to stop. But if you didn’t, you’d probably die.

She pulls away with a gasp and a pant, mouth bloodied from your wound, happily lapping up the remainder as she moans and shivers. You can tell she’s as worked up as you are about it. It helps that when she’s done cleaning your neck with her tongue, she shoves it into your mouth. You taste yourself in a way you aren’t used to, but you taste her, too. She’s warm now, fingers cupping your face, holding you in the kiss as deep as she can get it.

When she pulls away, the world is darker than you remember, swimming with fog and popping little stars.

“Are you okay?” she asks softly, nosing up under your jaw.

“Really dizzy,” you slur. “Gonna pass out.”

“I’ll take you back to my place,” she smiles, picking you up like it’s the easiest thing in the world. You smile at that – she never lets anyone come over to her place. It’s a rare honor. “Thank you. Really. I needed this bad.”

“Mm, not so quiet now,” you giggle, drunk from blood loss.

“I’m not,” she admits, able to blush properly now. “I hope you’re alright sleeping over for a while. It’s been a long time since I’ve had proper blood, and I’m not going to want to stop for days.”

Days of being bled dry by her, drinking from you, touching your bare skin, biting you over and over and over.

“Yes, please. I can do that.”

It's very capitalism. Like, what, are we going to STOP making our product just because it's often infested with the souls of the damned? Hell no! That's just a QC problem: get some minimum wage worker to do a quick ghost check, problem solved.

And it's not like there's a Federal Department of Spectral Safety that's gonna fine you for occasionally releasing a product which has the soul of an ancient evil in it. At least, not yet. And besides, we can always lobby their regulations to be toothless. Just make sure Darren down in the basement catches at least 95% of our inventory that has soul-eating properties.

1. Four letters long

2. No repeated letters.

I think "Jade Nukem" was the best option I'd come up with.

The reason I started this blog is so we can have frank conversations about things, so please let’s talk about this.

Imagine if every time you turned on the TV or watched a movie, no one looked like you. For some of us, that’s never happened. We see ourselves constantly, so it’s hard to truly understand what not seeing yourself represented in media is like.

I do have a personal window to this experience. While I am white and male, there’s an area where I am the minority - my religion. Jews are just under two and a half percent of the US population. I have had many experiences where I’ve been in situations where everything is geared towards a group I do not belong to, and zero consideration is given that not everyone at that event is part of the majority.

You just feel invisible and like an outsider. It’s not a great feeling. And I just experience it a tiny portion of time, only things that are geared specifically towards something religious. Most minorities have this feeling all the time, whenever they’re outside their personal community.

Now imagine, after years of not seeing yourself ever, you finally see someone that looks like you, but nothing about the character rings remotely true. They don’t sound like you, they don’t act like you, the facts about their day-to-day life are just wrong. It’s clear whoever wrote the character didn’t truly understand the lived experience of the character, so the character feels fake.

You bring up Sisay. Michael Ryan and I didn’t technically create Sisay (she played a small role in the Mirage story), but we did do a lot to flesh out her character as the creators of the Weatherlight Saga. We turned her from a minor character into a major one.

And while I’m proud, in general, of our work on the Weatherlight Saga, I don’t think we did justice to Sisay as a character. Neither Michael nor I have any knowledge of what it’s like to be a black woman. Nor did we ever talk to someone who did.

And if you’re someone like us that has no knowledge of that experience, you probably didn’t notice. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

Imagine if we made a movie about your life, and we just made everything up. We invented people you never knew, we gave you a job you never had, and we had you say things you’d never say. The movie might even be a good movie, but your response would be, but that’s not my life - that’s not me.

Now imagine we put the movie out, and people that never met you assumed that was what you were like. When people met you for the first time, they assumed things, because, you know, they’d seen the movie.

That’s what misrepresenting people does. It not only makes them feel not seen, it falsely represents them, spreading lies, often stereotypes, making people believe things about them that aren’t true.

Our move towards diversity is just us trying to better reflect the world and the people in it. We’re trying to do to everyone else what a certain portion of people get every day without ever having to think about it.

But why are we “making it the forefront of their character”? We’re not. We’re making it a part of their character. But in a world where you’re not used to ever seeing it, it feels louder than it is. Things that are a natural part of the world that you’re used to feel like the background of the story because you understand the context to it.

If a man kisses his wife before going off to a battle, that’s not a big deal. It’s just a thing a husband might do to his wife when he leaves. It’s not the forefront of his character. It’s just part of his life. But you’ve seen it hundreds of times, so it feels normal.

When someone does something that isn’t your lived experience it pulls focus. It seems like a big deal, but only because it’s new to you. It’s just as mundane a thing to that character as the man kissing his wife is to him.

Even the turn “pushing” implies that it’s unnaturally here, that we’re forcing something that naturally shouldn’t be. But why? That thing exists naturally in the real world, and it doesn’t make the real world any less. Maybe you’re less aware of it, but is making you aware of how others live their life “pushing” something on you?

How you live your life is represented constantly, everywhere. Why isn’t over-representing your experience at the expense of everyone else’s “pushing” it? Why is media only being the experience of those in power the “proper way”?

Having more depth and variety doesn’t lessen stories. It makes them deeper, more rich, more nuanced. In short, it makes them better stories. In my former life, I was a professional writer. I took a lot of writing classes. One of the truism of writing is “speaking truth leads to better stories”.

There’s another famous quote: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” You’re used to being over-represented, so being a little less over-represented feels like something has been taken from you. But really it hasn’t. Having a better sense of the rest of the world comes with a lot of benefits.

I’ll use food as an example. Let’s say all you were ever exposed to was the food of your heritage. Yeah, that food is really good, but sometimes isn’t it nice to eat foods of other nationalities? Isn’t your life better that you have a choice? Isn’t your exposure and access to the food of other nationalities a positive in your life?

Exposure to variety is a positive. It allows you to learn about things you didn’t know, experience things things you’ve never experienced, and get a better sense of understanding of your friends and neighbors.

Our actions are not to harm anyone, and if you think that’s what we’re doing, please take a minute to actually absorb what I’m saying. You’ve spent your whole life metaphorically eating one type of food, and we’re just trying to show you how much you’ve missed out on.

And while this might not impact you directly, we’re making a whole bunch of people felt seen. We’re bringing joy. Think of it this way. We make a lot of cards. Not every card is for you. But if it makes someone else happy, if they get to include it in a deck, and it makes Magic better for them, how is it harming you that we include it? You have so many cards that you can play.

To this poster or people that share their viewpoint, the narrative that a gain for someone else is an attack on you is just not true. As I just pointed out above, you play a game all about personal choice, about players getting to choose how they play and enjoy the game. Why should life be any different than Magic?

Because it gets described as "it made the Federation a morally gray society instead of a utopia!" or "it fought back against Roddenberry's vision for the Federation and Star Trek!" and it's like... did you watch the same show?

DS9 didn't think the federation was any less of a utopia, than TNG or TOS or VOY, it said EVEN IN A UTOPIA, THERE WILL BE CHALLENGES, THERE WILL BE USURPERS, THERE WILL BE SNAKES IN THE GARDEN: THAT IS WHY WE MUST FIGHT!

Homefront/Paradise lost are about how even in a utopia, authoritarians will sell fear and get people to give up their freedoms. Fascists will burn the Reichstag to create a crisis they can exploit.

Doctor Bashir, I Presume showed that for a society without money, people still worry about success, and their legacy, and they'll do horrible things to their children to make sure they can be that legacy. And the episode CLEARLY DISAPPROVES OF THIS! The man responsible realizes the error of his ways and submits to punishment to save his son.

I don't want to list examples all day, I have other stuff to do, but DS9 very much didn't say "utopias aren't real, every so-called utopia has evil somewhere in the foundations", it said that utopias are something you have to fight to maintain. You can't take the easy answers, listen to the fascists promising safety, and avoid examining the faults of your society. Sorry. But the good news is that you can, you can win, and you aren't alone.

DS9 was aiming for more of a "realistic utopia" than other Treks, it's true, but despite that realism it still said a utopia was possible. It used that realism to show that a better world must still be fought for. And it warned against anyone selling easy solutions to those battles.

Because as has been pointed out recently, fascists don't sell eternal war and oppression to the in-group: they promise safety and power and belonging and prosperity. They're gonna oppress them to save us.

DS9 said those men are not to be trusted, and must be opposed. It won't be easy, there will be struggles, but they will be stopped. The world will get better. We can do this, together.

DS9 is a love letter to paradise. It wants the Federation to be heaven, and to make that happen, it shows us all the ways it isn't, or threatens not to be. It implores us to not take it for granted and shows us what will happen if we do.

It's not a "haha, the Federation is bad, too" gotcha; it's a "do you want this? work for it. do you have this? make sure you keep it. do you love this? try to make it even better".

DS9 is a gardener overlooking a beautiful garden and telling us stories of slugs, drought, and how much upkeep it takes to keep the garden as beautiful as it is. It's a parent telling us of their child's difficult puberty and instructing other parents to first, love unconditionally, and second, be prepared to spend late nights talking with their child about their problems because no amount of love can change the fact that life is often complicated but that doesn't mean the love isn't required anyway. DS9 is a lover coming back after a nasty fight, hurt but not disillusioned, to sit down and talk about what went wrong because the relationship is good and matters to them and they believe it's healthy enough that troubles can be talked about and resolved.

So many of these episodes, including two of my favorites, "In the Pale Moonlight" and "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" exemplify this idea perfectly. Two people, Starfeet Officers, Sisko and Bashir, are emotionally destroyed by the choices they make in the episode. They are angry and infuriated at the situation and the others involved, but they hate themselves for their decisions. We see it in the keystone quotes, "Because I can live with it" is Sisko attempting to convince himself of those very words; "Is that what we have become, a modern day Rome" is Bashir expressing his opinion, his disgust against something he is powerless to stop.

Prelude to Axanar is a fan-film, not canon, but there is speech from it that expresses this idea of doing what is easy versus doing what is right in such a "Star Trek" way. "The greatest challenge laying before us, is to do what must be done, without undoing the dream of the Federation." Section 31 undoes the dream of the Federation, it is the easy way, the wrong way. Director Sloan tells us people like him are needed to protect us from a world that doesn't share our idealism. Sisko tells us that we may lose the war, but we will lose it doing what is right and those after us will be stronger for it.

*cackling*

AO3 was built by a bunch of us with our free donated labor for the purpose of being a space free from commercial spam.

It’s not a public service. It was built by us to house the type of fandom culture we liked.

AO3 forbids commercial links because they are making a very specific claim about the legality of fanworks, and that claim is about noncommercial fanworks.

They’re not saying that commercialized fanworks are against the law. They’re just not prepared to host them–nor defend them in court.

In case people missed it: The OTW will not honor DMCA takedown orders that are basically, “I own X work and that’s a fanfic of it, and that’s copyright infringement so make it go away.”

The OTW says, lolnope, we don’t think that’s copyright infringement. If you disagree, sue us.

The OTW says: Disney - we will not remove explicit Mandalorian fanfic. Rowling, Warner Bros - we will not remove trans Harry Potter fanfic. Gabaldon - we are not removing Outlander fanfic no matter how much you think it’s illegal or a personal violation. Yarbro, if someone puts “The Adventure of the Gentleman in Black” on AO3, you will need to actually take it to trial to (try to) get it removed; none of this C&D order followed by fans caving because they can’t afford a lawyer.

…So far, nobody has sued them. (This is, in my mind, the strongest proof we have that fanfic is not copyright infringement. In 13 years, not a single person or company has scrounged up a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against AO3/the OTW for hosting fanworks.)

But they’re not willing to put themselves on the line for commercial works. Those get considered differently in copyright law. They’re not always infringing - there’s a whole history of parody books & songs to prove that - but the OTW is not dealing with them.

The OTW does not care if fans are making money. The OTW cares if fans making money interfere with its legal defense of its archive.

Events like Strikethrough and Boldthrough happened in the early to mid-2000s. It felt like you’d wake up every day in 2007 and find another fandom group on LJ gone. (And not just fandom groups either, important community groups for education and trauma survival were also wiped out in those purges as well.)

And while not exactly the same, Yahoo Groups–and yes Yahoo Groups was a major online fandom hub at one point–were deleted as late as 2019 with very little warning, leaving a lot of older fandom groups scrambling to back up decades worth of content.

I might be projecting, but Fanfic.net seems to be wobbling too. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out they go under in the next few years despite performing similar purges of adult content in 2012 and allowing for obnoxious ads, which made the site unusable on mobile unless you wanted to see an ad what felt like every couple of paragraphs. (It might be better now, I haven’t checked in a while.)

It has only been in very recent memory that fandom has gained any sort of foothold that isn’t poised directly over a precarious faultline that could at any moment open up and swallow entire communities whole, and a huge part of that is the volunteers at Ao3 who decided to play chicken with the likes of Anne Rice and won.

I never, ever saw anyone publicly post or share fic of her books before we had AO3. Even on LiveJournal that stuff was buried under privacy filters and a zillion disclaimers, and it was still super rare and very short.

If anyone were to try and lawyer up against AO3 in the beginning, I was sure it would either be her or Rice. That specific silence spoke volumes. That silence told me that multiple lawyers probably made it very clear to them that the case wasn’t strong, and wasn’t worth their time.

It took me all of a minute to find their 2023 Annual Report (that every 501(c)(3) Non-profit has to do by law), and in that year, they had $1.16 million in revenue with $822 thousand in expenses. They have about $3.1 million sitting in the bank as operating cash and reserves and a million dollars worth of server equipment (depreciated to $225k).

They break down exactly what their money is used for, line by line, with standard accounting practices. (AO3 cost about $364k to run in 2023, with about a third of that in hosting costs and equipment.) This is not some friends running it out of their garage, it is organized, documented, and above the board. Staff is not getting paid for this, it's volunteer run. In 2023, they paid $21k to auditors, $16k to their finance/accountants, $12k to accountants, and $60k for 'other professional services' which typically ranges from office cleaning, one-off repair expenses, training and certification, or even catering and event services. They spent more on fees and the software expenses than they did people (~$183k vs ~$109k)