I am here

The point of civil discourse is not to uphold Victorian manners, play nice for the oppressor, or constrain activism to a specific set of rules.

The point of civil discourse is to present and exchange ideas in a manner that is compatible with human psychology.

Being inflammatory/polarizing puts people's guards up. Once you've insulted someone in an argument, no matter what a horrid bastard they might be, you've sacrificed all your credibility/pull with them. Why should they believe you know best for them/society if you've shown you don't respect them as a person?

“Go on…GUESS WHICH ONE OF US IS WHICH…”

No but Paul Dini could have, in a BTAS episode that aired almost exactly a year before this comic came out.

Oh, and yknow, was actually GOOD.

Let's ask the judge his thoughts

I love how the show is like 'hey we made it a whole thing that Elisa thought she was always a gargoyle, but we've been there and done that, let's just push through that this second time. We have to keep it to be consistent, but we don't have to make a THING out of it.'

And Goliath, you're right that she's right, but I think Lexington deserves some more credit here. He's just as affected as the rest of them and is fighting just as much as anyone else that impulse to believe he's always been in this way, but that doesn't make sense. It's a great little moment they give to him when I think it could have been easy to let it sit with Goliath. They could certainly have played it off as a simple matter of he had never fallen before, so to have done so, something is fundamentally different in the world. And while sure, that's at play, I think Lex's putting it into such stark logic is what elevates this moment to one of belief that their perceptions have been messed with.

To be fair too to the gargoyles, their world's have already shifted once so fundamentally. It's not so hard to believe it could happen again and that they're misplaced in some why, be it culture, time, bodies, etc.

Still. I will absolutely adore this character moment we got of Brooklyn trying to set things straight, Hudson saying something that could be seen as outrageous but doesn't matter because if it's his reality, he'll state it as it is no matter how silly it might sound, and Lexington following a thought puzzle to it's logical conclusion and then bucking the expectations of the rest and stating it outright, no matter how they may take it.

It is...demonstrative of Mr Bench's abilities that his only thought on how to find Spider-Man is to search Manhattan's ENTIRE water system room by room.

I love that, of all Spidey's villains, Vulture is the one most liable to show up to a caper with just like, a gun.

(Attempting to add information that's true to the spirit of the question by including information from outside AO3)

How many works do you have on AO3? 38, then RoyalRoad has another 3, and Kindle has another 10, but those 10 represent books from the same three serials on RoyalRoad.

What's your total word count? 381,794 on AO3, then RoyalRoad has 1,661,646, Kindle Unlimited has another 2,145,276, and Patreon has another 15 chapters with ~75,000. Total is 4,263,716. This doesn't include Dark Wizard of Donkerk, AGARES, Shadows of the Limelight, and a few others. I think I would feel comfortable being quoted as having 4.5 million published words. If I pressed publish on every in-progress project that's within a reasonable distance of completion, it would be past 5 million.

What fandoms do you write for? It's all original work, with very few exceptions, and if I do write fanfic I tend not to visit the same fandom twice.

Top 5 fics by kudos? Worth the Candle (original work, now hidden, litRPG self-insert fantasy, 8,782 kudos) Worth the Candle: The Exclusionary Principle, 9th Edition (original work, splatbook, 501 kudos) A Common Sense Guide to Doing the Most Good (Superman, effective altruism, 493 kudos) Eager Readers in Your Area (original work, near future scifi, 327 kudos) Instruments of Destruction (Star Wars, project management, 313 kudos) Honorary mention to Metropolitan Man, which was originally published on fanfiction.net and has 1,591 favs, though the ratio of kudos to favs is unclear.

Do you respond to comments? I have 2341 unread comments on AO3. I don't know that I can easily calculate the number on RoyalRoad, but I would guess I've read about 300, of the 7,321 total. I read all comments on Patreon, reddit, and discord, unless there's a long-winded argument or I am tired that day. Comment aversion keeps me sane. I do sometimes think to myself that it's good for engagement to read comments and reply to them thoughtfully, at least in the abstract, but these efforts usually don't last terribly long. I think as an author you're the steward of the work, and in an ideal world this means being an active presence among the readership, never balking at criticism, never giving too much away, just a dedicated and tireless caretaker. I didn't become a writer to manage socials though.

Whats the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? Hrm. Metropolitan Man, maybe?

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? Not going to directly answer this, because it's spoilers, but let's just say that one of my fics ends with everyone in heaven. But also, there's a fair bit of angst about the particulars of heaven and some readers have called it horrific or upsetting for various principled reasons.

Do you get hate on fics? Absolutely, it's one of the reasons that I stopped reading comments. I've been told to kill myself multiple times because I did not portray Superman as a beacon of hope.

Do you write smut? No, aside from a few explicit scenes in non-smut works. Someday, Kensuke Fucks the World will come out, but it's not straight smut, and not written for you to jerk off to. I've also written a fair amount of unpublished smut.

Do you write crossovers? Nope. My approach to writing doesn't tend to be amenable to it.

Have you ever had a fic stolen? Yes, but I don't think "stolen" is the right word. I've had my copyright infringed, and I've been plagiarized, both on multiple occasions.

Have you ever had your fic translated? Yes, a few times, though I tend not to pay attention to the translations because I have no capacity to verify them or (usually) get any feedback from that pool of readers.

Have you ever co-written a fic before? No, though I've had some co-writing experiences that didn't produce all that much of note.

What's your all-time favorite ship? Fuck, I think it might legitimately be Draco and Hermione. That's embarrassing. But not Dramione in a cringe way, in a way where it's about learning not to be the person who made you and the triumph of love in the face of hatred. In this essay, I will

What is a current WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? I somehow believe that I will finish all my WIPs some day. I guess if I had to pick one, Glimwarden.

What are your writing strengths? I guess if pressed I would say worldbuilding, but I do think I'm pretty good with dialog too.

What are your writing weaknesses? Workmanlike prose, a tendency to have conversations not get to the point or wrap up cleanly, a decided lack of joy

Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language? I have never done this. Seems tough.

First fandom you wrote for? Uh … looks like it's Terminator.

Favorite fic you've ever written? I think it might be Eager Readers in Your Area, mostly because it's short and to the point, and I never have thoughts about what I would change to make it better, even on reread. There are fics that I'm more proud of, but those I'm more reserved in my affection.

~~~~

Saying that the pairing is "cringe" is maybe a bit harsh, but every Dramione fic I've read casts Hermione as the reader self-insert and Draco as the rebellious bad boy. And then sometimes, Draco also has done nothing wrong. Being generous, they're about the lure of the forbidden with most of the jagged edges sanded off. Sometimes there are overtones of this female fantasy of "he's so dangerous, he wants me so badly he'd hurt me, but he'd never hurt me, and he's so forceful, but in a way that affirms my fantasies and makes it so I don't have to state my desires". Draco Malfoy as a Christian Grey billionaire CEO. And you know, as much as this doesn't appeal to me, I do think women having this fantasy and exploring it in fiction, or even real life with certain boundaries, is great. You go women. It's the naked honesty of desire that makes it cringe to me, that's a me problem. But from my understanding of Dramione fic, this is what's drawing in authors, and this is the vast majority of the fics. I've been recommended "good ones" in the past, and they were good by virtue of having good prose and writing, but they were still following these basic patterns. And also some of them were set after the books, when Hermione is a working professional and Draco is pretty much reformed, and Ron is a loser that Hermione can and should reject to get him out of the picture.

So I doubt that I'm doing anything actually unique here, but I've never encountered the thing that I'm doing, because it's the ugly parts of this relationship, and not ugly in a way that I, the author, find hot.

There's something that I find really compelling about Hermione Granger, or my reading of her. She's someone who grapples with the world by Knowing Things, and thinks that if she Knows Enough Things she will have earned her place in the world and demonstrated virtue. This is a pretty classic geek characteristic, a way of adapting to the world, and to how school systems work, a sort of Fact-Centered worldview that prizes arcana and quibbling over details. It can be annoying, a fact obsession, but facts are concrete things, and you can keep collecting them, and if you give a fact at the wrong time, at least it was still a True Fact, and therefore virtuous.

I think it's wonderful to have a character like that get whacked with a big stick of emotion that they're not in any way psychologically prepared for, because all the frameworks this character has developed revolve around Knowing Things. And if you then further put this character in a position where this is an emotion that doesn't make sense to them, that goes against what they think of as their role in the world, that's even better. They have no mechanisms for dealing with being in love, they can't fact or logic their way out of it, they repeat "this is a terrible idea, I shouldn't be feeling this way" over and over, and that doesn't actually help. It's good tension.

And on the flip side of this, you have Draco, who is a little shit, and it doesn't take all that much of a stretch to say that he's not just a shit, he's a person who has crafted the image of himself as a shit. He wants his father's love and respect, he wants to be a bad guy, he wants to run with the wolves ... and it's pretty clear that he just doesn't have it in him. There's something so performative about Draco Malfoy. Sixth book, he just doesn't have it in him to kill Dumbledore, sorry for spoiling. Maybe he's not a good person deep down, but he is at least a bit of a fraud, an actor. He wants to be seen as tough, he wants to be seen as mean, in his ideal world everyone would think of him as a hard man who is not to be fucked with. He's driven by a massive inferiority complex, both with regards to Harry and his dad, but probably also numerous other characters. And at least in my reading, I don't think that's him, though I'm not enough of a Potterhead to try to support this with the text.

I think it's wonderful to have a character like that get confronted by the fact that they're not quite who they're pretending to be. Watching the façade of self-assurance crumble is great, and it's even more great if you're watching it from the inside, when that character still has to project the character they've been playing while they scramble to deal with what's happening internally.