#disappearances

credits ⸺ @/bbyg4rlhelps @/anitalenia

sfw. psychological horror, cult themes, manipulation/coercive control, implied violence, disappearances, yandere/obsessive behavior, unsettling atmosphere

Thinking about yandere cult leader who sees anyone who approaches you as a heretic, ready to excommunicate or violently purge them to “protect” you.

At first, the cult leader seems almost disappointingly gentle. His sermons are quiet, his smile warm, his hands folded neatly behind his back as he walks among his followers. People speak of him with reverence, not fear. They call him a healer, a guide, a man who has never once raised his voice in anger. Then he sees you standing near the back of the sanctuary, and something inside him changes so completely that the entire room seems to feel it.

He begins watching you the way people watch sacred things. Not openly—not at first. His gaze lingers a second too long whenever you speak. He remembers every detail you mention in passing. He notices when you miss a meeting, when you seem tired, when you laugh at someone else’s joke. The attention is subtle enough to dismiss, until you realize he never forgets a single thing about you.

The unsettling part isn’t how much he notices. It’s how quickly everyone else notices too.

People stop sitting beside you. Conversations end when you approach. Followers who once greeted you warmly suddenly lower their eyes and step aside, as though standing too close might be interpreted as a crime. No one explains why. They simply whisper the same phrase whenever your name comes up.

“The Shepherd protects what is sacred.”

Then the disappearances begin.

A young man who walked you home after an evening gathering is suddenly “sent away for reflection.” A woman who complimented your smile spends three days kneeling in public repentance before vanishing from the compound entirely. Another follower makes the mistake of touching your shoulder during a crowded ceremony, and by morning everyone speaks of him in the past tense.

When you ask where they went, the answers are always gentle.

“They lost their way.”

“They were corrected.”

“The Shepherd saw the corruption in their hearts.”

One night you find the cult leader alone in the sanctuary. Candles flicker around him, throwing long shadows across the floor. He doesn’t seem surprised to see you. In fact, he looks relieved, as though he’s been waiting.

“You’re frightened,” he says softly. “That means you’re beginning to understand.”

He speaks about devotion the way other people speak about weather—calmly, inevitably. He explains that some followers mistake admiration for entitlement, that they come too close, ask for too much, imagine themselves worthy of your attention. His expression never hardens; if anything, it becomes sorrowful.

José Olivares at The Guardian:

A group of 36 lawmakers says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has created “disappearances” on US soil, due to the “increasingly unreliable” online system used to track people detained by immigration authorities, according to a letter shared with the Guardian. The lawmakers, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, are urging that the DHS inspector general’s office open an investigation into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “online detainee locator system” (ODLS), which has been used for years by family members, attorneys and journalists to track people in the federal immigration detention system. “Since January 2025, that system has grown increasingly unreliable,” the lawmakers, including Senator Ben Ray Luján and House representatives Veronica Escobar and Lauren Underwood, say in the letter. “Without a functional locator system, DHS is effectively creating ‘disappearances’ on US soil, and we urge the DHS office of inspector general (OIG) to investigate this matter.” The scathing letter, submitted to the DHS inspector general office on Monday evening, comes as the Trump administration continues with its aggressive anti-immigrant arrest, detention and deportation practices.

The ICE detention system is made up of a network of large and small facilities, jails, military bases and federal prisons, many of which are privately owned and operated. Often the agency will quickly and quietly shuffle detained immigrants from one facility to another.

ICE created the ODLS in 2010 so family members and attorneys could quickly and accurately track people detained by ICE in its detention network. Before the Trump administration, ICE added people to its locator system within eight hours of their arrival to an ICE facility. But since the Trump administration took office last year, there has been a radical increase of complaints that the ODLS is not working properly.

[...] After ICE arrests someone, they will detain the person in “holding facilities”, which are typically made up of small, concrete rooms designed for temporary detention. Since they are not traditional detention centers, those facilities lack significant oversight. Lawmakers say in their letter that ICE is not quickly updating holding facility detentions in the ODLS and cite reporting by the Guardian from last fall, which revealed that ICE had been detaining people inside the secretive holding rooms for days or even weeks, in violation of its own federal policy.

Last year, Florida opened its own immigration detention facility with support from the Trump administration. Since the facility is state-run, locating people at the site has been a tremendous challenge, with the lawmakers pointing to the “unconventional” facility as contributing to the “systemic ODLS failures”. “To understand the full scope of this problem, the reasons for the ODLS’s reporting gaps, and the impacts of these gaps on detainees and their families, we request that your office conduct an evaluation of this matter,” the lawmakers write. The lawmakers also included a series of questions to the DHS OIG, including whether the locator system also shows the location of individuals in other non-conventional detention facilities, like the Guantánamo Bay naval base.

1 in every 325

I periodically get new Death and disappearance Items. (Also ones I can't remember if we did in the 2023 poll). Since we have enough to make a poll, I'm reviving it here.

A lot of the big famous ones like Jack the Ripper, we covered in 2023. If your fave doesn't go this time, odds are it was one I remembered we already did.

As long as there is a reasonable mystery such as cause of death, reasons for murder, where they went, etc., it counts.

I will not do ones that are 21st century, because it makes me feel creepy and ghoulish. I will not do ones that are credibly definitively solved.

I've been thinking all night about qMike's absolutely insane behavior on the streams earlier, trying to figure out what the hell is going on with him. Because it doesn't feel like the pills, and it doesn't feel quite like a Federation brainwashing, and it doesn't feel like it's just trauma—so then what can it be?

And qMike himself is clearly still in there—him crying out when Pac went AFK/mentioned killing the eggs, his quiet reaction when Pac explained their disappearance, the way he apologized to Fit...our guy is still in there. So what is going on?

Somehow, my brain ended up on qQuackity, and the weirdness going on with him, because we don't know shit about that, either.

And then it hit me.

Both Quackity and Mike abruptly and unexpectedly fell into a dark hole with water at the bottom, and the walls of these tunnels were made with black concrete.

The only visible difference between Quackity and Mike is that Mike was rescued a lot faster than Quackity was.

What if whatever was done/being done to Quackity...is also what was done/is being done to Mike?

ElQuackity and Mike both keep talking about killing the eggs. Both of them were...frozen? question mark? What other similarities are going to crop up—?

hey i've gotten a few comments & messages about people selling copies of TDODM lately. just added this note to the top of the fic, posting it here so you know.

hello. apparently people are selling copies of this fanfic on TikTok and Etsy. my god, i despise these people. if you are somebody who scrapes fanfiction off the internet and sells it, having disregarded the wishes of every writer who spent hundreds of hours making something for fun, intending to share it with people for reasons unrelated to profit—i hope you know that you're a parasitic growth on the entity that is fanspace and i feel deep contempt toward you. may you make no money and wake up every morning feeling ineffably wrong.

THAT SAID. there are too many of these assholes for me to stay on top of it. reporting one is like slicing a head off a hydra. i wish people other than the "IP holder" could report, but i just can't do this, my health is trash and i'm not even really in fandom anymore. so—if you've sent me an alert about this, thank you, but please don't send me more links. unfortunately i can't stop it and at this point it just stresses me out. thank you for caring about keeping fanspace free. xx

genuinely: i so appreciate it if you have given me a heads-up about one of these sellers. it's just that i feel like these reports are so hopeless in the face of everybody trying to make a quick & disingenuous buck, and i can't spend my time trying to take action anymore. i'm not in a good place and the world is on fire and i'm like, if i'm not focusing on my health or my work i want to be focusing on trying to do something that feels even fractionally less hopeless for the world.