Now's Your Chance

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

!!CHAPTER 5 SPOILERS!!

Based on this interaction people have noticed with the mannequin:

the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.

watching this from afar but thought you might find this interesting...i personally don't use AI in fanfic bc well that's not the joy of it to me + environmental concerns but this is so fascinating to me - i didn't know how widespread ai use was in fic but also the fact that people feel like they need to use ai! and all the people in the comments who are either vindicated that they knew it was ai from the writing and the people who are very disappointed by it...i think this is going to result in witchhunting and fandom drama but i think we're going to see more of these posts sadly

god i'm sorry but i'm so sick of this shit. completely unnecessary and the endless disclaimers about "this is not for harrassment" and "we are just trying to help people make ethical choices" and the claim this is supposed to get people to tag their fics for having used ai combined with language about "ai corrupting fan spaces" is extremely fucking disingenuous lmao. you cannot in one breath use supercharged language about "corruption" and "real human connection" and then in the other claim you are not shaming people. the shame is baked into these moralised judgements about the "corruption" of fandom and "real" connection. this is exactly the sort of deeply slimy two-faced shit that i absolutely abhorr.

i am going to say several things now that i have been saying in private for months. i am going to sound judgemental, but frankly, if you're sitting on your moral high horse passing down judgements about people you can take it. you cannot talk shit without expecting to get hit (as i almost certainly expect to w this, tho obvs i am switching anon off in a couple of hours bc fuck that noise).

1) i genuinely and truly believe that call outs like this are far more corrosive to fandom than minding your own business or feeling sad because you got got by some mid claude generated prose. all this does is foster an atmosphere of paranoia, hypervigilance, increased scrutiny and systemised unpersoning & dehumanisation of "immoral" and "deceptive" others. in every single case i have seen where someone is deemed to have used ai to create a fanwork, i have only seen people gleeful that they actually finally have a "moral" target they can get mad about and rip to complete shreds sans consequence and sans repercussion.

2) this is the literally most counterproductive way to get people to tag their fics for ai use. once again, i point to the shrill insistence that fandom is about Real Human Connection and the language of "corruption" - do you think these are neutral terms? are you incredibly naive and foolish? these are words loaded with shame. the subtext of all these statements is: if you aren't putting your own real blood and sweat into this work of art, you are corrupting and poisoning fandom. in one breath you are invoking both the protestant work ethic and its moralisms and dirt/purity binaries in relation to literal humanness and being part of community. shaming has literally never worked in the history of anything to get people to adhere to something. if you want people to tag their ai fics, you, person who gets upset at the concept of being "tainted", have to manage your own big feelings and create a space where using ai is a morally neutral thing* and where engaging with ai created works does not make you a fandom outcast.

3) i do think some reflection is in order to contemplate why people even feel the need to turn to ai to create fic. what are the circumstances that produce such a feeling? let's think about this, for a moment, with some empathy. do people feel like they need to create something in order to participate in fandom? if so, why do they believe that? are there certain ideas that we entrench viz. artists and writers as "real" fandom and everyone else as "second class" members of fandom? (lbr, this statement is implicit in a lot of posts that go around about how authors deserve more comments. ask for feedback by all means; but the insistence that there is a "real" fandom and implicitly therefore, a fandom which does not matter, which is not productive, which does not contribute and therefore make fandom "real" are ideas which i simply think is point blank wrong. merely being in fandom IS fandom.) if people feel the need to create, why do they believe merely writing it out themselves is not enough? are they afraid of "failing" as writers? why? do they feel they're not good enough to make art? why? if they believe this is the only way they can make friends and have community? if so, why? the answers to all of these questions, in my opinion, at least partly indicts fandom culture at present and should call for some serious self-reflection!

4) genuinely WHAT harm is being done to you by the existence of an unlabelled ai fic? what actual harm? why does it hurt you so much? what are you feeling so deceived about? yes i get that you come to fandom for human connection, but what about a fic writer using an llm actually precludes there being a person behind the fic? what specifically is upsetting you? can you actually sit with your feelings and identify what specifically you're mad about?

5) now for my really mean and problematic opinion :) : i frankly believe half the "distressed" feelings about being "deceived" by ai use are because people have created a moral identity out of not reading or using ai which butts straight up against their tastes in fanfiction running heavily towards the kind of deeply ubiquitous ao3 house style fic which almost certainly underpins LLM data training sets. in making a whole moral personality out of something which directly implicates your taste, you fabricate an insecurity which must be excised: what better way than by turning it outwards to claim that you were deceived and taken in and therefore, that the deceiver has committed some unspecified crime against fandom and must be sent into the proverbial corner? there are exactly two solutions to this. either you become more confident about your taste and you own it and you also own the recognition that this kind of prose is pretty easy to generate using an llm; or you develop a taste for the difficult, which is currently more difficult to generate using an llm but most probably will not be in a couple of years (i'm not being a doomer here, but realistic. at some point llm capacity will cross the threshold of what even a canny reader will be able to identify).

6) i think we could all do with a good hefty dose of a) DON'T LIKE DON'T READ and b) MINDING OUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS

One factual counterpoint I would offer is that shaming does, in fact, work as a useful deterrent. Shame is not a good motivator, so it doesn't help in inspiring people to DO things, but it is a good depressant, so it does help people avoid doing things.

Specifically related to fandom and fic writing cultures, shaming has been productively used to counter both plagiarism and racist writing. I'm aware those two things are different in scope and intention. I reference both to point out the difference in how shaming as a strategy has been mainstreamed or not.

In regards to plagiarism, it is absolutely a part of dominant white fandom culture to cheer on people who track down plagiarists, and to report them and get those fics taken down. Authors thank eagle-eyed readers who spot plagiarising stories in the wild, and the OTW built in rules against plagiarism, and therefore for reporting it, into the very first iteration of AO3.

One of the fundamental arguments against using generative LLMs or 'AI' is that it is a plagiarising machine on a scale as yet unavailable to individual plagiarists. It is a fact that every free-to-use commercially funded AI software out there has currently been trained on massive amounts of stolen data--stolen in the sense that the creators of the data have not given permission for it to be used in that way, nor have they been credited, nor have they been paid for it. (I will insert my obligatory disclaimer about piracy here because there is no stripping of authorship credit there in the way that plagiarism works.)

So when you look at fannish pushback against AI as an extension of its culture against plagiarism, it makes perfect sense, that is, it is morally coherent, for the treatment that fandom extends towards plagiarists of individual works to also be applied towards industrial scale plagiarists.

This maps on to the cultural schism you can see between the fans who support OTW's stance that AI-generated work is a valid transformative form of art welcome on AO3, and those who are offended by the OTW's mendacious 'because we cannot successfully distinguish between two things, we will state that there is no difference between two things' position.

This is part of a much larger conversation around credit, attribution, and cultural appropriation, and I respect people who have differing views on all of these. But I do want to highlight that 'passing off as your own some work that was built on an uncredited, unacknowledged foundation' is literally the subject of several international lawsuits, often led by people from Global South, marginalised identities. (It's why the Geographical Indicator label exists.) And 'shame, copy cat, shame' is an artistic position that has been made across cultures and art forms, many times by artists who are not making financial profit from their art. So I see no reason why fanfiction writers and artists cannot participate in this cultural stance along with other creative people.

The second example of shaming I brought up, about racist writing, ties in to the point the OP made about "the noncon and underage labels on ao3 are morally neutral statements". I think there was also a reference in tags to the "toxic LJ culture of call-outs".

Now, I was around before the OTW was formed, and noncon and underage labels were definitely NOT morally neutral terms back then. There were many, MANY heated arguments around labelling that happened on Live Journal (and Dreamwidth) and they were extensions of arguments that happened on mailing lists, because writers and readers alike fell across a spectrum of positions from 'you are abhorrent if you publish something on the internet without warnings' to 'you are censoring my artistic freedom by asking for content notes'.

This was ALSO the same time that racism in fanfiction was being discussed, and for a brief period of time, it was acceptable, if you were a member of an LJ/DW community for posting fic for a certain fandom or theme, to be able to say, 'hey, the fic you posted is racist'. Because it was considered ok for the community to have rules like 'don't post racist stories'.

Like I said, it was a brief period of time, and one of the many things that the OTW did to shape fandom culture was to create a place where you could publish fiction, but not participate in a cultural community. And again, this is a development that has been critiqued by many writers and readers--so it is an acceptable stance for a non-white fan to say that critiquing a piece of fannish writing is fine, actually.

Which brings me to the whole 'don't like, don't read' stance that I personally find juvenile. I believe that many fans use it in good faith as a shorthand to say 'if you didn't like something, don't comment in the author's space to tell them that'.

But as OP observes, the hierarchy of who is considered a 'real' and 'productive' fan excludes certain forms of cultural creation and consumption, and the fan critic has always been on the very periphery of permissible fan. "Don't like, Don't read/watch/listen" when applied to non-fannish art, whether it is behemoth produced commercial media or endangered folk tradition, is an absolutely bonkers statement to make. It removes one of the well-springs of new and original art, which is the critique of art that people disliked enough to talk about, that seeps into cultural influences enough to be incorporated by other artists. It erases the fact that criticism of art is in itself a creative activity.

Now, I am aware that 'you used AI' is being wielded as an accusation against writers from marginalised linguistic backgrounds, and as an in-group policing tool, and as a grudge cudgel. Several of the points that OP makes deserve reflection upon.

i think that's a great observation about the ao3 anglophone fandom approach to ai fic emerging from this segment of fandom's approach to plagiarism. i do think that's one of the animating preoccupations behind the tenor of fannish response to ai, but i disagree that its a useful framework to think about what llms do and how they function and i disagree that ao3's plagiarism policy is actually all that simple to enforce. (and yes i also think that it is a silly framework to use in the context of published authors and other working artists talking about how ai works)

its a provocation, certainly, but llms especially function basically on the basis of creating an averaged prediction of what comes next in a series of words. i think these two posts are useful explainers for why its not actually plagiarism, though they're talking about it in the context of art. the best an llm can do is reproduce statistically likely phrases and statistically likely plots and statistically likely characters - and i have to be frank, that is in fact, what a lot of highly structured genre fiction already does, and what i personally think a lot of litfic does. it is exactly why it was so easy for the commonwealth short story prize judge to be taken in and why it was easy for the harpers bazaar short story prize judge to be taken in: both writers have written narratives that are statistically approximate stories that are original, yet bear high resemblance to a certain brand of postcolonial fiction. the failure again is one of reading and racist reading practices.

but okay to get back to the point, i actually also do not think that ao3 is equipped to handle this kind of "plagiarism" if we're calling llm-generated fic "plagiarism", so i don't think its fair to call their policy mendacious! for example, there are at least two reasonably "big" fics in the fandom that i'm in that are rip offs of two other popular fics - one very noticeably so and one less so. neither of them can really be taken down by reporting them even though the plot structure and character work is so similar, because they cross a certain threshold of being "transformative" i.e. they have enough original stuff going on that it can't be counted as plagiarism - even though a reader reading will know exactly where they're pulling from. another case: a couple of months ago a friend of mine sent me the links to two different fics that had basically reproduced twilight the novel as fic. one had only swapped the character names out. the other, however, had replaced names of places and also altered the plot in some minor ways, again, just about enough to cross the threshold of being transformative. the first fic was taken down, the second fic still remains up.

ai plagiarises much less than any of these cases i've illustrated above do. can it reproduce individual phrases? notably yes, when chatgpt reproduced a nabokov simile in a story - decontextualised from its original context and rendered silly and facile as a result. but then, we all borrow language from each other! think about the ubiquitous "toed off his shoes"! can it reproduce plot structures? yes. but then, so do some kinds of genre fic like mystery and romance. can it even reproduce individual authorial styles? yes. but then, so do we when we do pastiche fic of wodehouse or sayers or tolkien. does it reproduce premises? yes, but then again: so do we when we remix fics, or try our own spin on specific premises. so what exactly are we objecting to as plagiarism? what compensation are we seeking precisely, as fandom?

re. "'passing off as your own some work that was built on an uncredited, unacknowledged foundation' is literally the subject of several international lawsuits, often led by people from Global South, marginalised identities." - i don't actually think this is a fair comparison at all! bioresource protection & cultural protection is a complicated and thorny issue that deserves more attention than to be brought into a fannish argument like this. we are comparing apples and peas here. the harm caused by bioresource theft are the communities disenfranchised from being able to use ingredients/produce that have been vital to their lives and nutrition historically, the degradation of ecosystems and the enclosure of lands. the harm caused by cultural theft is a similar process of disenfranchisement and poverty. what precisely is the economic harm or disenfranchisement taking place here in fandom via ai use? how are we as fans being harmed more so than the cases i've outlined above? what resources are we being deprived of? what is the wealth we are being deprived of?

if we want to make the case for ai use in fandom being antisocial, which is the drift of all the arguments i've seen, we have to actually make that case. racism in fandom is antisocial because it creates a hostile atmosphere and is cruel to fans of colour, ultimately driving them out of fandom. the same is true of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and ableism in fandom. why is ai use antisocial in fandom? what specific harm is occurring? can we name the exact harm?

there are exactly two cases i can think of against ai use in fandom that aren't already touched on by the antisocial nature of social injustice in fandom (i.e. ai reproducing prejudices): 1) it makes bad art and 2) the same case for plagiarism/reproduction as of fellow fandom authors who "take" our "ideas" and write their own spin on these fics without credit or referring people back to the "original". against 2, ao3 is impotent and there are limits to fandom shaming there, especially when its someone popular in fandom who seizes on an idea and then writes their own spin in a way that's still identifiable with the original. against 1, well fandom has fought and died on the hill of the right to make bad art as hobbyists, so unless we want to let that cat out of the bag, i don't know what we can do. the erosion of trust in fandom only happens if you care about whether or not a fic is llm generated.

as for shaming as strategy 🥲🥲🥲 - i think we really diverge here, because while i care about racism in fandom a lot, i don't think it has actually worked in any useful ways. it takes you just about as far as getting people to not actually say outright slurs to someone or in reference to characters. but it has not actually helped us deal with the problems of getting white fans to engage with racist structures and ideas in their canons (lmao ask me how i fucking know), getting white fans to look at characters of colour with interest, getting white fans to engage with characters of colour in-depth, getting white fans to eliminate forms of liberal white racism... instead we just sort of spin ourselves deeper into the rut of keeping on pointing to the fact that white characters get more attention than non-white characters, while white fans invent ever more (and increasingly ludicrous, racist) excuses to explain exactly why they find the non-white characters so impossible to engage with and we go exactly nowhere. it frustrates me and i think that at the very least maybe an examination of new fan strategies are in order on that front. but that doesn't mean i'm averse to reading fic critically in fandom or being critical of fandom's practices. god knows i spend half my time on here kvetching about it. but you know, i'm willing to do it in the case of racism specifically because racism has real and tangible antisocial outcomes within fandom, because it creates real harm.

in some ways i do think you're making my argument for me because the fact that noncon/rape and underage went from hotly contested to accepted as morally neutral is a testament to the fact that ao3 was able to make it "neutral" i.e. to make it something that people felt they could safely use, which merely described the contents of the fic. one of the best cases against shaming in relation to fic with this content was written fully a decade ago by anarfea, who rightly observed that the more people were shamed, the more likely they were to either not tag their fic appropriately or rationalise why what they were enjoying wasn't actually noncon. so again: if we can't get rid of ai fic because it is difficult to detect, it cannot be defined as plagiarism in a way that doesn't implicate fandom's legitimacy as derivative but transformative works, and shaming people out of using it doesn't work, what can we do? how can we make labelling an ai-derived fic widespread enough for those of us who don't want to engage with it be able to disengage?

so again, my question is: what do we actually want from this? what do we actually want to achieve?

This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldn’t feed them before those instances.

every single time i have had to say, "i understand that if he had food or water, he could aspirate it into his lungs under anesthesia. i am not lying to you." THEN someone would make a little note and i would stop being repeatedly asked.

not a single time was that risk explained to me. the only reason it came up was because i already knew. i still don't understand why it isn't standard pre-op counseling or pre-op check information, when me as a parent acknowledging the actual risk also put THE MEDICAL STAFF at ease because i conveyed that i had informed understanding as reason to not lie about giving my kid food.

A: Love it. Spend my time combing AO3 for it.

B: Like it. Not one of my bigger cravings, but it can scratch a certain itch if I’m in the right mood.

C: Neutral. A good author might be able to sell it, but a bad one will kill it deader than dead.

D: Not my favorite. I avoid it if I can, but it won’t necessarily put me off reading something.

The legion of gays is now in session.

It is the purpose of the legion to align our infamous forces against the heterosexual patriarchy, leaving us the rulers of Manhood.

To do this, we have gathered here the 13 most infamous gays in all of faggotry

the sturdy Bottoms:

the perverse mind of the Pigs:

the aging Zaddies and the Jocks

the frenzied PNP gays and Masc4Masc guys

the DL men and the Bears

the Scene Queens and the ever-flexible Versatiles

the feminine yet ferocious Drag Queens and the hideous Twinks

not to mention the brilliant leadership of us, the Tops.

This ALSO ties into white trans men and nonbinary emulating east asian men because they perceive east asian maleness as a "more feminine" version of masculinity and therefore "more achievable/idealized."

i have my own gripes with this in regards to how other white trans men fetishize east asian men and how they might write erotic RPF or fanart, which in a vacuum might be whatever, but there's this undercurrent of "being east asian (or appearing east asian) is an automatic pass for me to fetishize you and make objectifying comments about you" which i personally have experienced firsthand and. aaauuuughghhhh i wish ppl would be more Aware of how their tastes in RPF or whatever (fantasies about celebrities who might never see it) affects how they interact with REAL PEOPLE they might actually talk to FACE-TO-FACE??? especially when it's rooted in racism like this

my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.

the truth is actually weirder

she’s aware dandelions look like this

she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions

she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?

gosh I enjoy this website

what the fuck is going on with the smizes. they're like... spontaneously generated orbs that are released into the dystopia's water so it like incentivizes everyone to waste water and swim in sewage for the chance to have one because it bestows a magic power that means you can become a famous fashion model. and then when you find a smize it like expands like a ponyo spell in your hands and turns into glasses that make you beautiful??

another wrinkle is that the world of modelland has nations. one of them is france, but the first guy from that nation who we meet is a homunculus with a giant human hand for a head. he's the only one like that so far so i don't know. another nation has ONLY people with albinism, which is really confusing because they explicitly point out that their whole nation-state has a ton of life-threatening health complications because of it

unfortunately i have a lot further to go before i know all the secrets of modelland