Just a passing through Time Lord

Design Notes; The Seven Deadly Sins

Greed points at everything they want and grasps anything they can. Their true form is unseen. Their own hand partially blinds them. Different eyes puncture their crown, stolen from others. They float, detached from all. Their stick is sharpened at both ends

It is the first and oldest design, dating back to 2023

The stick sharpened at both ends is a reference to Lord of the Flies (in the book, one end of the stick goes into the earth while the other holds a severed head) I wanted it to symbolize violence

Sloth exists in a wrapped cloth that provides comfort but muffles all sensations. Sloth doesnt see, speak nor hear. The cloth overwhelms them. They are bound by a rope whose edge reaches inside their confinement, giving them the ability to free themselves if so desired.

I made an extra effort to put the rope within Sloth's control, to avoid associating inertion from mental illness to laziness

I wrapped my Blajah plushie with a bed sheet and used my robe's belt as rope to get a picture reference for the upper body. Despite eerie origins, my designs come into paper with a lot of silly methods.

Pride exists inside a golden, hollow statue. Their gaze is set upon a cracked book of pages set in stone. Their laurel crown is sharpened to the point of horns. Pride can be set free if they break the outer shell that binds them with the gavel they use to condemn others.

The pose and clothing is a reference to the painting The School of Athens, by Raphael.

Being mettalic, the book only reflects back themselves. Even if you interpret it as stone, it would still work since the pages remain static

I like to imagine the rotten legs dragging their heavy statue shell around. Ever since I was little I have a strange fear of statues moving

Gluttony is a stomach, living and consuming themselves within their confinment. They’re not represented by an underweight or overweight person; it had to be something everyone has. Their scale is purposefully unspecified; because everyones is different.

The design resembles the Horseman of Famine because gluttony and famine are connected; the excessive hoarding by some people causes famine to others. They're like two different plates on a scale

While the basic representation is just fat, I never considered drawing an underweight person to counter it and appear subversive. When talking to a friend recovering from an eating disorder they mentioned how cheap and uncomfortable it is when people use extreme thinness just for the sake of horror and I have to agree. I always avoid drawing real bodies for horror

Lust is the only one who tries to disguise itself with a human appearance, tho it has too many hands. One hand to beckon, one to threaten, and one to silence you. It kneels because not all of its victims are adults. It lives undercover and invites you in as well

Many asked about the fourth hand: it's the one you only notice afterwards and are left wondering what it means, whether it's an innocent gesture or not. How it made you feel.

It has 2 other variation designs. While what I made before is beautiful, it is not unsettling enough. It has the artstlye of an angel rather than something human and dangerous

I settled on the design after a passage in the book Second-Hand Time, by Svetlana Alexievitch. It was a passage about a teen abused by a military squad, killed when she got pregnant, and mocked over how underveloped her body was. Because of that my original idea was to have Lust wearing military boots, but that would restrict the concept too much. I thought that drawing would make that passage less haunting to me, but to no avail.

Envy is a slowly burning and constricted heart. It covers its identity with a mirror; the more it seeks to resemble the reflection of others the less it will resemble itself. But even the reflection is broken, inaccurate, and unsatisfactory.

Many have said the concept looks like a chrysalis or a flower bud, unable to flourish. I like when people interpret my drawings, they often find beautiful meanings that escaped me

I pondered whether to paint the mirror in front of them black, to symbolize phone screens, but decided against it because it would blend into the background

Least popular design but one where people have told me ''I cant stop thinking about it'' the most, which made me cherish it a lot

Wrath is not a beast acting ravenous, but a human thing slowly crawling towards you. All of their actions are justified by the halo they claim to be righteous. The closer they get, the more they shed their humane appearance

It was a challenge to make wrath differ from someone being rightfully angry. It applies to all designs; how to portray dangerous excess to very common and not entirely wrong emotions.

Wrath has no legs. Nothing to stand on

''Little by little, it turned into that wild fury in which the eyes camouflage with a black veil, the fists contract with a tremedous force and your very teeth find the enemy'' Roughly translated quote by Nikolai Gumilev that I kept in mind while designing it. Amazing writer

Like, sorry? When I was 13 I went to this event with my parents, and keep coming there every year for the last 13 years.

Also, around 2-3 years ago, same event have overcrowding issue WHERE WE ALL HAVE ESTABLISHED IT WAS MANAGEMENT ISSUES who didn't consider how many people will participate in that event.

Though, I kinda get why people sneer at adults who bring toddlers and below 12 children (I assume they are older weebs, BECAUSE SOME OF WEEBS ARE NOW 30 SOMETHINGS), The normies? Some random elderlies with wheelchair? 13 years old with their parents? God, those are nothing.

Like, at least blame on crowd management issue (THAT THEY HAVE FOR 2 YEARS), but no, muh normies, muh children (fuck i don't even remember the pornos doujinshi I bought when I was 14, it doesn't affect shit in my life), muh elderly.

God, I remember when the event was still small and shit, then some women with a long veil would open the booth about the truth of quran that gives a vibe she doesn't seem to fit in the theme. And no one give a shit. Your parents who don't know anime and just watch you walk around big tiddies anime girl while whispering how weird the experience is but didn't bother anyone? No one gives a fuck.

I wish for these college age youngins stop acting like the space was only for them specifically and act like they could dictate the real culture, while they weren't even in otaku scene during the 00s and the 10s.

But nonny, DO YOU FORGET HOW CONSERVATIVE AND QUEERPHOBIC AND MORALISTIC INDONESIAN SOCIETY IS?

The teenagers would be fine if they see the cover or know the existence of mature content doujinshi. But their parents? Nah. They would make a moral panic accusing the doujinka circles ruining the Morality™️ of children. They'll react even worse if they see the existence of queer works, even if it's not mature content.

A few years ago, maybe about 10 years or so, some print shop owner tried to spread moral panic because she found some BL circles print their doujin at her print shop. The fujoshi community worked so hard to prevent the moral panic from spreading. Or do you even remember that danmei novels was pulled from a bookstore chain because some parents' demand?

Oh, non-fandomgoers just whisper that the event is weird? Do you even read the testimonies that the exhibitor got mocked to their faces? Or the non-fandomgoers go to the event and gawked and mocked as if fandomgoers in the event are some exhibition objects? Or some Tiktok influencers filming the event, mocking the fandomgoers, to monetize their mockery? Or non-fandomgoers not bothering to learn about the subculture first, thinking this fan event as just a way to make quick bucks and selling AI-generated Art™️?

Genuinely, what do these dipshits think "fandom etiquette" means? Cause everybody in the tags talking about how evil the concept is, but I thought it just meant "tag to your best abilities, be polite, and don't harrass people"

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I think one thing that's going on here, aside of the usual batshittery, is that people have stopped considering fandom as something subversive to the system and have started considering it part of the system. To those of us who grew up in the latter part of the previous century, fandom is deeply subversive, because the system that we grew up with -- the one with all the flaws, and with the embedded corruption and discrimination and what not -- was not aware of it, or when they were aware, they dismissed it as weird at best, perverted or disrespectful at worst. The point of fandom was to look at all those power structures and subvert them. Fandom was transgressive, and therefore transgressions within it--reactions against the mainstream, including mainstream ethics-- are part of the cake. They're a feature, not a bug.

Fic certainly is part of many people's media diet and often a very major portion of what they use for entertainment, but ye olde fandom was, on average, more focused on fic as an act of writing. Fic is something you do. AO3 exists to protect authors' right to post, first and foremost.

Someone might enjoy the hat I give them as a gift or like my pics of my sweater, but knitting is still primarily my hobby that's about me doing things with my hands, not a way for other people to get hats or nice pictures. When I write fic, it's a hobby that's about me writing, not you reading even if your appreciation as a reader does provide some extra motivation for me to finish shit and post it, both the actual social interactions and just imagining that a fellow shipper will now have something to read.

As fic has gotten ever better known and easier to find online, more people have started to take it for granted and talk about it from an exclusively reader point of view. Some of them are clueless and self-absorbed. Some of them are doing it intentionally to further an agenda.

This isn't entirely new. When I was in HP fandom years ago and adjacent to some really insanely big BNFs, I witnessed a mountain of "I'm just a little guy" posturing. Twenty-five years ago, some corners of fandom were already plagued by readers treating fic writers like youtube stars who had power over them and owed them things. Some of the BNFs cultivated this crap; most did not. But it took a truly insanely massive fandom to have the glut of fic that made that possible. Those fandoms were very rare in the past. They're much less rare now, and the overall hugeness and searchability of AO3 is extremely visible.

It's not just about fandom being more mainstream. It's also about changing social pressures to monetize every single hobby and moment of time. Insert rant about the gig economy here. There's a bit of an age split simply because the younger generations have less hope and more pressure to ruin their hobbies with MLM-ish thinking.

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People pulling the "wah, wah, wah, WHITE MEN" shit do not have good intentions.

The biggest factor that lets them get a foot in the door and prevents sensible people from instantly blocking everyone who starts in on this is that AO3 succeeded.

In 2007, the norm was for m/m fans to be treated as second class citizens all over the internet.

In 2026, the norm is for m/m fans to be treated as second class citizens all over the internet aside from AO3 and sometimes Tumblr.

It is possible to exist in a bubble where AO3 looks like big brother in a way that was simply not the case twenty years ago. WWOMB and other multifandom slash archives existed and were certainly pro-m/m, but they were relatively small, not central hubs like FFN. LJ was a welcome respite from the unending "Why can't men just be friends" and worse, but we all know how that turned out. And even then, it was common for a LJ com for such-and-such a fandom to be slash-only or het-only or something. There was a huge split even if slash was starting to win out more and more.

AO3 is the infrastructure of fanfic fandom today and it puts the equality of m/m front and center in the site design itself.

Unfortunately, that also artificially inflates the popularity of m/m on AO3 allowing stupid people who are emotionally 5 to rail against m/m and pretend they're railing against The Man while ignoring what posting on their fandom's main subreddit is like.

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I do think AO3-style fandom does bear some blame (aside from the popularity of AO3 itself) for the stupid attitudes.

Meta of days of yore vastly inflated the amount we actually elevate walk-on characters and overstated how genuinely transformative fic tends to be. It's a useful legal argument, but most fic is actually a lot like canon plus some extra kissing and/or punching.

Meta and acafandom coming from the Western side of things also didn't bother to know or care about Asian fandoms for years while also being largely silent on minority characters in US media while also going on and on and on about how extremely accepting and revolutionary and feminist and special fandom was.

I do think women writing erotica at all is still revolutionary even in 2026, but if we can recalibrate our claims to be more reflective of actual fandom, I think it will leave less room for bad actors to sound reasonable. We've basically taken everything that's potentially offputting about middle class white US feminism and added "ew, weebs". So when someone is like "How come you aren't elevating the black characters?" people are left scrambling and come up with incoherent or even blatantly racist explanations. ("Rico just didn't seem like he supported Sonny." HE WHAT NOW?)

The actual answer is that we rarely elevate anyone, and we need to let go of the self-important belief that we do. We just make main characters kiss who didn't in canon, and the number of black leads is small and the number who didn't get shafted by canon is smaller. [Cf. my many rants about filmmaking visual language vs. the script and how some characters "should" be awesome but people subconsciously know they aren't and thus don't get fandomy about them.] The other answer is that people are expecting fandoms to look like HP when they usually look like two years of yuletide fics and then silence.

Fandom is special, but it's special in a far narrower sense than some of the ridiculous paeans we've written over the years, and being able to be honest about that would also help us push back against people weaponizing Bad Archive Stats to pretend that hating their NOTP is activism.

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Fandom does often let people from homophobic environments discover a Queer As Norm type of art that they can access even if they don't have a credit card and can't access mainstream entertainment from such-and-such a country.

That's great.

It was great in the 90s. It remains great now.

Fandom is also pretty willing to latch onto a variety of countries' media and a variety of ethnicities of character, but only if that media is readily available, in certain genres, and neither too good nor too bad, and only if the characters are central ones whose internal emotional life is presented as important by canon. So Thailand can add SE Asia to East Asia in the pantheon of oft-ficced media sources by coming out with some BL series that are decently acted and have okay budgets, but an Afrofuturist film three people saw at a film festival is probably not going to revolutionize AO3 fic stats.

Fandom likes all genders of characters and of ships, but m/m tends to be more popular than f/f in AFAB-heavy spaces, while f/f tends to be more popular than m/m in AMAB-heavy spaces, and we are too misogynist, too misandrist, and absolutely too transphobic about every flavor of transness to handle any kind of reasonable conversation about any of that.

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Essentially, there are parts of mainstream culture we never challenged and we still don't. I think that's okay. But pretending we were and are revolutionary on all axes makes it easier to attack us.

Print science fiction fandom was different, for a couple of reasons.

Many of the professional writers came up through fandom and so were understanding and accepting of it.

Writing fic was a pretty small part of this fandom, with activities focusing more on meta, visual art, cosplay, and so very much meta.

OTNF wrote:

Meta and acafandom coming from the Western side of things also didn't bother to know or care about Asian fandoms for years while also being largely silent on minority characters in US media while also going on and on and on about how extremely accepting and revolutionary and feminist and special fandom was.

Hello, Tumblr. I've never posted here, only lurked. But this is one of the most important things in the world to me, and I honestly need to ask you for help. Please reblog if you can.

This will be a long post. It will be summarized with a TLDR at the end, including ways that you can help.

With over 9,200 pages, we are the biggest collection of gender identities on the Internet, especially the biggest source that is readily available. We are a community that has existed since 2009, and has taken off in terms of growth in the last few years.

Today, Fandom decided to close the Gender Wiki. We were given absolutely no warning, and they've only given us a two-week deadline to move the entire wiki to a new host, which we are utterly unprepared to do. The download would also not include any of the 17,000+ images on the Gender Wiki, many of which do not exist anywhere else on the Internet.

Here is a link to the post Fandom staff gave us today, and a paraphrased summary of it below:

https://gender.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000000132176

Fandom staff says that they won't continue to host our wiki because it "spreads harmful misinformation". They believe we have gone too far in "positioning everything as a gender identity", referring to xenogenders. They mention pages with xenogenders referring to suicide/self-harm and violence --- which we, the staff members, were /already/ in the process of deleting before this notice was given to us. They decided that the best solution was not to ask us to delete those pages, or even delete the pages themselves, but instead to remove our entire database.

There are many other wikis on Fandom with much worse references to violence than the Gender Wiki, which Fandom appears to have no problem with whatsoever.

I cannot express enough that this is erasure, and it will absolutely negatively affect the LGBTQ+ community to not have this treasure trove of information readily available.

I am an admin on the Gender Wiki, and I can assure you that our entire staff team is already trying to appeal to Fandom staff. I'll add any updates if they decide to respond to us, but they have no yet given staff any more information than the above

PLEASE help in any way you can. Reblog, spread awareness, or sign this petition if you have a Fandom account. Archive any Gender Wiki pages, especially ones that don't have pages elsewhere, with the Wayback Machine or alternatively archive.is, or even write posts about them here or on other sites. Please help us save this information. It can't possibly be done this quickly without help.

Our team has been discussing our options, and we have decided our next step.

We don't want to end this project anymore than you all do. We love working on it, and we love providing to the community. However, we cannot tolerate disrespect of the very few rules we have in place. Once again, we repeat that our documents are not to be put on ANY public platforms, including social media and reuploading it to archives. This is to protect our team and protect this project. All downloads are meant for PERSONAL use, at the very least until our project is complete.

We have decided to try a middle ground for now. We don't believe there is an easy solution to removing the documents from the archive, so we will treat it as a circumstance we cannot reverse and will proceed as thus:

We will post Part 1 Volume 6 following our original plan. We will be keeping an eye out to see if this volume is also added to the archive. Pending what happens, one of two things will occur:

IF our wishes are respected and we see that no more reuploads of our documents have occurred, we will proceed as we have done until now. We will treat this as a mistake that came from us not being clear enough, and we will allow this to be the one singular slip-up for the community.

IF our wishes are not respected and we find any more reuploads ANYWHERE (but especially on the archive where our documents are currently at), or any of our other rules broken, we will be removing all downloading ability. We will continue to upload, but nobody will be allowed to download the documents and everything will be in a read-only format. If we find ANY further breaking of our rules, we WILL shut this project down.

Basically, this was the one (1) mistake we will allow the community. We once again ask to please respect our singular wish for the sake of this project and the ORV fandom as a whole.

WHILE THE PROJECT IS ACTIVE, PLEASE DO NOT REPOST/REUPLOAD OUR WORKS OR DIRECT LINKS TO THE DRIVE AND ITS DOCUMENTS ANYWHERE ON PUBLIC PLATFORMS.

The comments were full of people agreeing and listing their own fandoms where they've seen this. What really upset me was seeing fellow seasians in the comments saying things like "I'm ashamed to be seasian" or "disowning" their fellow seasians who act this way. "We don't claim them!" et cetera. i blocked everyone i could, but it left such a bad taste in my mouth.

Anyway, lesson learned. Whenever a creator is a touch too close with the fandom, I booked it out immediately. Never fucking again.

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I think they're usually using it in the same way that people do when they say corporate art is soulless. It's a "too many cooks spoil the broth" criticism about things that lack any sense of originality or individuality. Fancy autocomplete, whether textual or visual, is an averaging of popular art styles to arrive at generic blandness. One individual human, even one with terrible taste, won't usually produce that. In this use, when people say something is not art, they just mean that it's crappy art. They're not trying to litigate the definition of art as a concept: they're just speaking colloquially.

They never ask why does strangely the Indonesian air force, that has a lot of ops in west papua, is very fond of ussr and had a lot of ussr funding.

Like, it is so fucking odd seeing tankies talk about how Indonesia is evil colonizer, then act like USSR wasn't the one who support and fund the colonialization of west papuans.

Suharto colonialization bullshit is just continuing what sukarno did, except he thinks invading malaysia is too far.

Reminds me that one time a professor in Islamic study told me a lot of common believe in muslims is heretical toward the quran? Such is banning things allowed in the quran? Saying food butchered by christian and jewish people are not halal? Acting like halal food has to be butchered specifically while hunt dogs are allowed in Quran to kill during hunt? Banning statue while Sulaiman has a ton of those in his castle? Not allowing pet dog while there is stories of saints and a dog? Or how there is a text about where food that is halal is already explained in Quran enough because it has pefected it?

Also, how a lot of hadith was contextual and most people who do not have the privilege to studied it never get context?

Anyway, what makes it heretical is that they believe in something that contradicts with the Quran then proceed make those hadith have precedence over the word from The Lord Himself, according to that professor.