Yes I love the Darkling, Yes I have taste

⸺ on soulmates and suffering.

There is a strange contradiction within writing for and engaging with a popular ship—on paper, it seems like the dream. There are readers. There is demand. Due to the nature of a popular ship, you get more attention for writing it than you would for a more niche ship, but the emotional buy-in your audience has is fundamentally more shallow.

It is harder for people to find you and harder for them to remember you, unless you are one of those super established authors whose work has become fandom bedrock. A fic can get more hits, more kudos, more bookmarks, and still feel weirdly less engaged with because the audience is grazing rather than attaching. They may like it. They may enjoy it. They may even love it. But obviously attention is not the same thing as investment.

A spike of interest is not the same thing as people being willing to follow you through the long middle of a story, through the awkward updates, through the chapters where plot has to happen and everyone is not just kissing against a wall. Popular ships often generate a lot of initial enthusiasm, but not always the kind of sustained emotional feedback that helps people finish long projects. So your fandom and ship ends up with this huge archive of beginnings. Gorgeous premises. Incredible first chapters. Fics that are clearly written by people who were excited for three weeks and then realized that they had accidentally committed themselves to a full narrative inside a fandom ecosystem that rewards the next shiny idea faster than the continuation of the old one.

And because of the popularity of the ship, there is almost always a culture of expecting authors to stick to often out-of-character fanon interpretations, where deviating from that fanon is often treated as a reason to harass the author. This further disincentivizes those authors and others who are watching the harassment from participating in fandom or that ship in general for any real length of time, which perpetuates the cycle of bad fanon as the most vocal readers and writers drive out newer fans who could help breathe new life into a fandom with their interpretations.

Unfortunately this means that while there is an insane backlog of fics for me to read, most of them are understandably abandoned—it is much harder to sustain the motivation required to complete a story.

Book Sasha: there are two thrones on that dais. Marry me. Rule Ravka with me. Please. Pretty please? You’re so hot when you try to kill me.

Show Alina: *leaves him for dead *

!! unhoused trans woman needs help with hotel rent again !! (1/21/26)

hi y'all, you know the drill. there's a huge event happening locally that causes hotel prices to skyrocket this time of year, so nat's rent is higher than normal. she also has to serve a day of jail time that will not just prevent her from working but significantly put her at risk for violence. we want to make sure she at least has a safe room to come back to.

right now she needs $338 minimum to make rent (and this doesn't take into account food, or transportation costs to work and to/from jail).

can we try and get her $400 this week for cushioning and comfort?

you can donate to her at $NatalieEves on cashapp, or through me via venmo and paypal (@/deepseametro and paypal.me/cirow). Please notate if it's for nat!

$0/400

nat is terrified rn. she has to serve a day in jail tomorrow and the stress of this on top of money is eating her up. can we help her at least know she'll have a home to come back to?

Last week I had a bigoted asshole be absolutely racist and vile in my dms and since then I've been terrified of losing my 12+ yo blog, here is a link to my archive in case you all need proof I've been here for more than a decade.

Our last post so you can back track and learn more about our situation.

I can't avoid asking for help anymore, if it were just me I would just let myself due but our kids, my partner, our cats and my in-laws do not deserve to go hungry.

We have kids and elderly, we have 4 diabetics at home, the insulin went bad after a blackout and the replacement we got is not enough.

We need help affording groceries, bills and my meds.

Our eldest son is still suicidal with dysphoria and we missed his second appointment at the trans clinic due to lack of money. We want to get back on track.

My healthcare renewal is this january 20th or I will lose it and I can't lose it.

$50/$950

hi I'm maeve. some months ago I was wrongfully let go from my crappy job, and have run through my savings since. my abusive roommate/sublessor has already kicked out one vulnerable trans woman for struggling to make ends meet, so I am facing possible eviction if I can't pay rent by january 1st

$0/500

my cash app is $bananabreadeater, and my venmo is @breadmangler - anything at all helps keep a roof over my head!

click for better quality & to see the full image. sometimes they get cut off weirdly!

*art by Cave Canem

**art by David Pearson