Vladislav! Baby, don't hurt me

Surfing the Black Hole

14,8 x 21 cm, ink on paper, Kevin Lucbert, 2026

retrieval team for objects in the backseat

custodian of the parking garage tickets

"All clear my way"

en-route dining concierge

So, if any trans men are being told about this, it’s not true!! Smoking will not change your voice, at least not until you’re about forty years down the line and you’ve already irreparably destroyed your lungs and throat and mouth and pretty much every other organ in your body. When you hear heavy smokers with deeper, scratchier voices it is literally because their vocal cords have been ruined. This is not a passive effect of smoking, it is a very very damaging one!

It’s simply not worth it! There will be no meaningful changes except terrible ones. Voice training will do a lot more for you than cigarettes will, I promise that the people urging you to start smoking as a voice training method do not have your best interests at heart!

(And you know what, this also goes for not eating due to the idea that starving yourself will decrease your chest size. Like with smoking, there will be no meaningful changes except terrible ones. Your body is worth so much more than that and there will always be healthier alternatives!)

(Btw, afaik smoking only has this effect on estrogen from HRT. Estrogen that AFAB bodies produce naturally is not affected, so smoking is still bad for trans men)

writing “long” paragraphs is not a sign of AI — it’s a common narrative choice many writers make both in fanfiction and in traditionally published novels, and AI stole it from us.

using an em dash is not a sign of AI. it’s a stylistic sentence choice that’s been an option in place of commas and semicolons for a very long time, and AI stole it from us.

long sentence structures are not a sign of AI, but are yet another stylistic choice writers often make to create a cadence and tone that mimics the flow of poetry, and AI stole it from us.

“YA narrative breaks”? i don’t even know what the fuck this means, but i can guarantee that AI stole it from us.

italics are once again a stylistic choice that many writers love to use to create emphasis, and it’s a more stylistically acceptable and traditional form of emphasis than bold or underline text. oh, and just to be extra clear: AI STOLE IT FROM US.

stop creating fandom witch hunts over AI when you know fuck all about what it means to sit and write a story, and to spend hours fiddling with sentence structure and dialogue to get the exact right tone. writers will stop writing out of fear that their work “sounds like AI” — IT DOESNT! AI STOLE FROM US! AI SOUNDS LIKE US! — and after a while, all that will be available on AO3 is shitty AI-generated fanfiction.

because yeah, people are going to continue to use AI to write fanfiction whether you “call them out” or not. but making a laughable thread on X that uses asinine criteria is not going to fix that problem. it will just push the real writers out because people will accuse them of using AI when they haven’t, and they will (rightfully) stop writing for spaces that attack them.

Robert: Bisexual, but his self awareness and experience can vary. Either he is completely unaware and thinks he's straight until he's no longer Mecha Man and actually has time to reflect on himself, or he is not only fully aware but has a long experience list and has done some truly haneous shit in bar bathrooms. It just depends on either what's funniest or more fun depending on the context. This man truly holds multitudes.

Invisigal/Courtney: Bisexual, with a preference for women. When it comes to men, she likes smaller men, and only likes topping and being the dominant one (we're gonna pretend that stupid wet dream didn't happen and take her comment on only wanting to do the pegging as gospel), though she's more versatile and willing to switch with women. She self identifies as aromantic, but that probably has more to do with her own hang ups about 'normal' life and her insecurities of thinking she's inherently bad and incapable of being anything other than a villain.

Blonde Blazer/Mandy: Panromantic, she's definetly one of those 'I don't care about their appearance or what's in their pants, I just like people for their personality', which is fair and valid of her. I also like the idea of her being asexual, both because I think her refusing to be intimate with Phenomaman and saying it's because their genitals are incompatible rather than being honest is very in character for her, but also because I'm a big fan of female characters who are seen as very attractive and desirable sex objects having no interest in sex at all. She's not sex repulsed, and would probably be fine with it sometimes with the right partner, but she does not experience sexual attraction and it is not a drive for her.

Royd: Gay, big friendly bear of a man. Honestly I could see his sexuality going any direction, I just like him being gay the most. Though I could also see him as one of those guys everyone is certain is gay until he gushes about his tiny girlfriend who works out and can give the strongest hugs. That also feels very accurate. But for me, I prefer gay.

Chase: Gay, I dunno, he just reads gay to me. As a matter of fact, I imagine him being very prolific in his past, basically just as out there and experienced as Flambae. But because of his physical age, it's made his dating and sex life very difficult because most people his actual age aren't interested in someone who looks his age and those of the age he looks, while in a similar physical state, still are older and have the attitudes and life experience that makes it feel weird. Not to say that there isn't that golden 30 something who is totally into white foxes and would enjoy that Chase is still young in attitude and talk, but it's difficult to find. He always bitches about Flambae giving too much info and being a whore whenever he brags about his newest experience cause he's jealous that he doesn't get to be the one out at the clubs every night himself. Real gay on gay crime.

Golem/Bruno: Aroace, and it's not just cause he literally doesnt have genitals and reproductive capabilities. He's thought about it and listened to tons of people describe and explain how attraction feels to them, and he just doesn't feel any of that. And that's fine by him. It's hard enough finding people that are willing to be friends with him and treat him like an actual person and not an object without the added longing for a partner as well. When Invisigal gets drunk, she often ends up crying and saying they can be platonic life partners and use shit she steals to buy a big place in the country with enough room for his adopted baby kaiju to grow big and strong.

Flambae/Chad: Gay, I mean, he's the only one in the game with a canon sexuality, and he definetly does not try to hide it. I imagine he's one of those guys who never once thought he was straight. He has known since he was old enough to understand attraction and love that he had no interest in girls. While he's always been very certain about himself, he was concerned about his family finding out, because of certain attitudes in his culture. Of course he didn't realise just how obvious he'd always been and that his parents knew pretty early on. They might have hoped, when he was younger, that he might grow out of it, but eventually they realised 'yeah, that's not happening'. They try to be supportive.

Prism/Alice: Bisexual, an equal opportunity hoe. She's a bit picky about her partners though. She doesn't have just one set in stone type, rather they need to have the right mix of looks and personality and her willingness to be around them for her to be willing to engage. She also doesn't do casual hook ups, preferring commitment. Part of all of this is that she's been burned in the past with fans of hers being weird, and so she's developed these more stringent preferences to cope and protect herself. She'll gladly live vicariously through Flambae's wild and free accounts.

Malevola: Lesbian, this is entirely self-indulgent. Big, strong, beautiful, demon lady who is also a rampant lady kisser. But she's not one to be as constrained by titles or her sexuality and can be pretty fluid. Like, she is at least a little attracted to Robert, finding his depressing disaster vibe cute. She probably wouldn't sleep with him, but she wouldn't be against making out and some heavy petting. She and Sonar realised she would be the perfect person to keep him in line and hold him accountable when she strung him up by his feet when he found out she's a lesbian and said he wanted to see her making out with another girl. They're working on it.

Sonar/Victor: Says he's straight, but he's as straight as you can call someone who is only too willing to drop to his knees in a dingy bathroom to get something he wants. He somehow has no issues finding justifications for why he just HAS to suck that guy's dick or let that guy finger him in the alley, of course always finding excuses for why it's totally 'no homo'. Again, Malevola is working on it. They'll crack that nut eventually.

Punch Up/Colm: Straight, but more flexible than he used to think. When he and Coupe dated, they had several threesomes, a few of them with guys, and he learned that, actually, being with guys is just as fun as with ladies. He still prefers and is actively attracted to women, but he's developed a more open eye and will admit that it's not outside the realm of possibility that he could possibly end up with a guy in the future. Though that'd probably only happen if Coupe wasn't in his life anymore, cause despite the break up she is still his lady.

Coupe/Janelle: Doesn't really identify with any labels and honeslty didn't have much experience with sex outside of it's uses in her work until adulthood. She's much more of a romantic than people expect, wanting one of those wild romances from her romantacy novels. Punch Up is really the only relarionship she's ever been in and was the first person she got intimate with where it wasn't for work. The threesomes were an opportunity for her to explore herself and her sexuality, with her only feeling safe enough to let go and do so with Punch Up there to have her back. While I don't know if she'd ever end up using any labels, she's probably some version of bi or pan, where she likes everyone.

Waterboy/Herman: Demisexual, he hasn't had much experience because of his nerves and anxiety, and currently identifies most with this cause it feels the most accurate, though he'll admit that it's possible that he currently only experiences attraction to people after getting to know them because he's too nervous to let himself be attracted to a stranger. He's not so attached that he's against changing that label should he learn more about himself in the future.

Phenomaman/Katton-Ur: He obviously doesn't really have much concept of human sexuality, and it doesn't help that his kind don't have a simple 'male and female' binary like on Earth, but he's probably closer to some sort of bi or pan, where he's less attracted to someone for their gender and more for their power. That used to be physical power, but he's learning a lot about different ways someone can be powerful and is finding that that can also be incredibly attractive.

Shroud/Elliot: Gay, diversity win this man's sexuality doesn't excuse him for being a shitty little bitch. I think the idea of him and Robbie being bitter exes is so funny, especially because I see Robbie as being very homophobic. Man finds out that the guy he's been sleeping with who refuses to become anything serious and never lets him stay the night and insists they hide and sneak around and actively flirts with and oggles women in front of him and says gay people are sick and need to grow up has been yanking him around and isn't going to actually make him a hero, and Elliot took that shit personally.