in which i’ll never be able to leave this hellsite until lia does.

he doesn’t know how this night managed to go so spectacularly WRONG. it was a simple job with an idiot for a target. nobody was supposed to know he was even there. especially not his hit. but that’s exactly where everything started to get fucked.

first, his target not only saw him, but expected him. was waiting for him. the first time seb moved, his target’s dark gaze snapped to him and he sneered a taunting smile. how did he know? well, that’s the fucking question of the night, isn’t it.

second, there was a bloody CIVILIAN in the mix. a decade ago, sebastian would have shot her himself and just buried the guilt. but that part of his life is past him now. when she refused to cooperate with her captor, who was idiotically trying to convince her sebastian was the real danger to her, the man got annoyed and fucking shot her. it was a non-lethal shot so long as she could be treated, but that still didn’t leave seb much time.

when she was turned into a human shield, seb again considered finishing her off. he hated himself the moment the thought crossed his mind, but sometimes old habits don't dissolve the moment one decides to turn a new leaf. sebastian couldn’t shoot because, for all his faults, the idiot actually managed to keep his head hidden behind hers.

all this left sebastian with just one option. CHARGE. this decision earned the young woman a knife across her throat and a shove in the other direction. the actual fight was quick enough, though sebastian earned himself a few shots to his ribs for the trouble he went through to get his hands around the man’s head before he twisted and snapped his neck.

one look at the woman told him he didn’t have time to dispose of the body tonight. which is why he now finds himself sitting on the coffee table in his flat, his main place of residence, staring at the bandaged and treated woman lying on his couch. she definitely saw his face, so taking her to the hospital isn’t an option. the body he was after tonight is in the boot of his car. he has no idea what the fuck he’s supposed to do now. she’ll live, but she’ll have scars. she’ll probably need therapy. she’ll maybe never laugh when someone sneaks up behind her for a surprise hug again.

seb dips a rag into a bowl of warm water and reaches over her to clean more of her blood off her skin. he’s changed her clothes into a pair of joggers that belong to his sister and one of his t-shirts. the rest of her clothes are burning in his small backyard. when she stirs, his eyes snap to her face. there’s a syringe beside him in case she screams. it’ll put her to sleep long enough for him to get her somewhere safe and leave her there. then he’ll just have to lay low for a while until whatever report she files dies down.

“you’re safe,” he murmurs, hoping it’s the first thing she hears. “you’re alive and you’re safe. nothing’s going to harm you.”

@seesgood

you knew this was coming. buckle up because this is going to be long and boy oh boy do i have things to say. i actually have so many things to say i don’t even know where to start. jesus.

this fandom’s ability to take drama and turn it into discourse that makes absolutely zero sense and involves people that have nothing to do with the original drama never fails to amaze me. the fact that people here are now taking the whole louise drama from a couple of days ago and dragging miles into it by overthinking their way through possible (see: made up) scenarios about people we know absolutely nothing about is astounding. people blaming her for defending herself against haters and saying she’s basically spoiling the end of the tour for us and the band, people being scared that the recent drama will influence miles and alex’s interactions in ireland (which – again – doesn’t make any sense considering their friendship has nothing to do with random people hating on louise on ig and her responding to that hate), which feels exactly like people making up conspiracies about the whole paparazzi drama back in august when i had to read with my own two eyes of people being scared that she staged the whole thing just to “boycott” or steal away the attention from the release of one man band, since it was only a matter of days before it’d come out. which is absolutely insane. (edit: i BET some people will drag miles into the new paparazzi thing. i just know it. mark my words someone’s going to do it)

now don’t get me wrong, you are absolutely entitled to your opinion on louise as a person and as alex’s girlfriend. i don’t really like her myself. she’s a human being and some kind of “celebrity” or rather public figure, so it’s only normal people either like or dislike her. that’s okay. but going from innocuously disliking her to actively villainizing her for everything she does, claiming she’s basically the worst of all girlfriends and basically saying her existence and involvement with alex is ruining everything about the band itself (to the point that you wish they’d do something as drastic as disbanding), alex’s relationship with miles and/or your experience as an am/alex fan is just… odd. it reeks of misogyny. and mind you, i’m absolutely not saying she’s faultless, because she very much isn’t; i can’t stand the way amtwt goes about idolizing her, putting her on a pedestal and acting like she’s an angel (very much like amanda and matt do on a daily basis), because no one is. she did some problematic stuff in the past, not to mention the start of her relationship with alex was ambiguous as fuck, their whole relationship is a big, frustrating question mark and yes, maybe she could handle the hate in a different way than the one she usually goes for. but that doesn’t mean she’s the fucking devil. it doesn’t mean she’s an absolute evil mastermind who brainwashed alex and everyone else in his social circle while also trying to boycott miles and milex in her free time simply by existing in alex’s orbit.

first of all, if we really want to compare her to other girlfriends, let’s at least get the facts right. she’s far from being the first girlfriend who responds to “trolls” or however you want to call them. back when she was with alex, taylor was out there calling people cunts, telling them they didn’t have a life because they spent their time on the internet running fanpages about her boyfriend’s band. she called fans delusional, went off at milex shippers; she called herself ari*n, basically said reverse racism was a thing, and refused to acknowledge she was in the wrong when confronted about it, instead calling people ignorant and basically just going on block sprees. now of course louise has done some shitty stuff too – the rape/racism jokes were disgusting and she also goes around blocking people, but the biggest insult she’s thrown at people is “ignorant” or something along the lines of “get a life”. she hasn’t really beefed with fans to the extent that taylor did – this woman literally called her boyfriend’s fans cunts without a social life because they had fanpages about him and probably left some kind of hate comments on her because they didn’t like her, and she very comfortably forgot that the very people who ran those fanpages were the ones paying for her boyfriend’s bills and her luxurious LA lifestyle. far be it from me to defend louise – because she’s just living that same life in a different font – but if you think she’s toxic, horrible, bitchy, you name it, then i’m sorry to break it to you but you wouldn’t have survived taylor fucking bagley.

with the recent drama, she defended herself much better than taylor would’ve ever done, because she’s not as aggressive. she addressed it and said something that some people aren’t ready to accept – that she’s a human being that has every right to be with him, like all the other girlfriends did. and whether we like it or not, that’s true. she might not be anyone’s favourite (definitely not mine lmao) but 1) just because she’s dating him now, in the present, doesn’t mean it suddenly makes everything his previous girlfriends did (notably taylor) absolutely innocuous, while she’s the wicked witch of the story just because she’s here now – please stop idealizing the past and start being rational about the present; and 2) this should go without saying, but i’ll say it anyway: she still doesn’t deserve to be publicly and constantly harassed on her socials just for living the y/n life she was lucky enough to create for herself thanks to the right connections and whatnot. you can gossip all you want in private, in your group chat with your friends, on twitter, tumblr, whatever space you want – provided it’s a fandom space. created by fans for fans. where none of these people will ever set foot, and if they do, then it’s on them. but not under her own posts or comments on ig, where everyone included her can see. that’s just nasty, and i don’t particularly like to say it but i’m on her side on this. she has every right to defend herself and no matter what you think of her, no matter what she did in the past, she still doesn’t deserve the constant public harassment people put her through. people on ig really need to learn how to be fucking decent human beings.

also about her controversies. the fact that she apologized for liking those “””jokes””” on ig years ago is meagre comfort, yes, but 1) what she did is still “”“less””” problematic than what taylor did, because taylor said all those things herself, louise “””only””” liked posts made by others. obviously i’m not saying that makes it okay, because it certainly doesn’t, but at the very least she apologized for it, while taylor never did – or i mean, she did once she was out of the spotlight, made irrelevant by alex dumping her and finally in her “new me” healing hippie era. we all have every right not to accept either of their apologies, but the idea that celebrities that did some ""“minor”"" problematic stuff in the past don’t even get a chance to genuinely regret their actions and apologize for them and at least try to better themselves is a direct consequence of cancel culture (which is utter bullshit) and in this case – you guessed it! – the result of pure misogyny. because we accept an apology from a man like miles (who, like it or not, did make those inappropriate comments to that interviewer and we can’t pretend he didn’t) but we refuse to accept it from them. and mind you, i’m not saying we shouldn’t accept miles’ apology – i’m his fan too and i do genuinely believe he regretted doing that. i’m also not saying we should accept their apologies just because they’re women. i’m just saying the double standards are through the roof, and that’s really interesting food for thought.

speaking of men. i’m a fan of alex, the band, miles, all of them. i love them. i also know they’re not only human beings, but also celebrities and rich white men. just like we don’t know their girlfriends, exes or whatever, we also don’t know *them*. we can have an idea of what they might be like, but we’ll never know how they really are backstage. like every public figure, their stage/celebrity personas are not a direct reflection of what they really are in private, because to an extent, the way they present themselves to us is part of the business. we are not entitled to their private life, and all we can do is speculate. that being said, the fandom’s tendency to idolize, idealize, and either sanctify or villainize them as well as their social circle is just so… ugh. especially when we go from general am discourse into milex waters, where the fandom theories and fanfiction influence seem to blurry the line between fiction and reality. are we all aware that theories are just… theories, right? that no matter how much they make sense we have no way of knowing if they’re true, and actually we might all be very much delusional? we all know that and don’t actually take those theories as 100% truth that’s set in stone… right? because some people seem to not be aware of that. with the milex theories as well as the ones about the way alex’s relationship with louise started (which, again, is all about double standards but i’ll get to that in a minute).

i do believe there was something between miles and alex; i also believe (unrelated) that alex cheated on taylor with louise and that’s how their relationship started. i don’t believe she’s a beard like some people are so adamant on saying (about that, there’s also some very thinly-veiled biphobia in some of those beard statements but i’m not going to talk about that now). i also believe louise wasn’t the only one alex cheated with - because if we believe that him and miles were romantic back in 2015-2016, then he was definitely cheating. no way taylor would’ve allowed that. she literally hated milex shippers and the idea of what their existence might have been implying. however, some people’s tendency to only see things as radical black or white/good or bad is concerning. people villainize and basically slut-shame louise for “stealing” alex from taylor, or miles, or even alexa despite the fact that they broke up an eternity ago; but fail to hold alex accountable for the fact that he was ultimately the one cheating. she was in the wrong for pursuing someone in a relationship, sure; but he was the one who fell for it and actively did the cheating on his at the time girlfriend. and yet people either ignore that, or just take out all the blame on louise for “manipulating” him into cheating. if (and again, this is just speculation) he really cheated (which probably wasn’t the first time with taylor as well as probably other girlfriends lmao) they were both nasty for it, but he was worse than her. taylor was annoying and rude to fans, but one thing’s for sure – she really loved him and she didn’t deserve the way he ended up treating her. obviously we don’t know how things really went, but my guy here definitely isn’t innocent, yet people throw all the blame on louise for what happened (hence the double standards i was talking about), like he wasn’t a grown ass man who could’ve just kept his dick in his pants but instead decided to be an asshole to the woman he was with.

with milex, roles are reversed. a lot of people here seem to be 100% convinced that theories are 100% real, that what you read in fics is exactly what happened between them, and that by default things can be very roughly simplified as alex = evil bitch who broke miles’ heart and miles = perfect little angel ray of sunshine who never did anything wrong and does nothing but suffer for said bitch who doesn’t deserve him – basically villainizing one and sanctifying the other. like alex is just a depressed and repressed whiny baby while miles is his boyfriend against all odds uwu or alternatively his emotional punching ball. the tendency this fandom has to woobify them in different ways is definitely something. and i’m not talking about fanfiction, because you can characterize them and their story however you want there (it’s fiction for a reason), but here it’s about real life. if you’re going to drag the real miles into the recent drama involving the real alex and the real louise, when – again – he has absolutely nothing to do with it, then at the very least treat all of them like the actual people they are, not some extreme caricatures of what their fanfiction personas are. because those are real people we’re talking about, and it’s essential to differentiate between fiction/theories and reality. regardless of you “shipping” alex with miles, taylor, alexa or anyone else. those are real people. none of them are angels, none of them are to be put on a pedestal. all of them are human and they probably fucked up more than a couple of times in their lives. hell, it would be weird if they hadn’t! their experiences are nuanced because they’re – guess what! - real life experiences, and not being able to recognize that nuance and analyze it at such, instead reducing everything they do or say to either black or white, good or bad, angel or devil behavior is… incredibly naïve to say the least.

Having said that, and regarding the recent drama (but also the paparazzi thing), trying to “protect” the real miles from controversies that don’t regard him by babifying him and spitting out his name in discourse where his name has never even been taken into consideration (because, for the millionth time, that drama has nothing to do with him) ultimately ends up having the opposite effect. by putting his name where it doesn’t belong (that kind of fandom discourse) you’re dragging him into it without even having a concrete reason to do so. by trying to “make sure he doesn’t get involved” you’re dragging him into things that aren’t about him when no one was even saying they were about him to begin with. and then people like the ones you find on amtwt that hate him/milex see those posts, and they use it as ammunition to hate on him and milex even more. you claim louise and amanda are feeding the trolls while you’re literally doing the same - feeding miles, milex and yourself as a shipper to the amtwt trolls lurking here who idolize louise and are just eagerly waiting to find a “crazy milex shipper” post to screenshot and bitch about on twt, jumping on the train of you making miles’ name so that they can talk shit about him, milex and milex shippers. it’s like serving it to them on a silver platter. you end up doing the very thing you were trying to prevent.

we can admit that celebrities make mistakes because they’re human beings like everyone else, while also believing they can genuinely change for the better and learn from said mistakes. you can also like/dislike someone without idolizing/villainizing them to the extreme. once again, it’s real people we’re talking about, and real people as well as real life experiences are all about nuance. we can gossip all we want, but we’re never going to know the truth about them, what they do and why they do it. most importantly, they’re never going to be perfect - and holding them to such an unrealistic standard is guaranteed to set you up for disappointment.

Hello!! I’m very very happy to have found you here on Tumblr omggg i found out about you through Insta then i found your Twitter (your art is doing extremely well and congrats!!) and then i found you here! I’m really pleased to know you’re such a sweet soul behind all the amazing artwork ^u^ i really enjoy your Miguel and Jayce stuff and can’t wait for your Peter B, you replied to my Insta comment about him 🙈😌

But anyway the real question: what do you think of building an audience on Insta and Twitter? It used to be so easy but now you get so easily pushed down algorithm-wise(?) and it sucks. Tumblr is the last safe place 😣🤞

I hope you have a good day!!!! Love your art 💕💕💕

Honestly, the only thing I know works when it comes to building a following anywhere is consistency (posting about the same thing and posting often), and also just not putting all your eggs in one basket. What I mean by that is, to not end up branding yourself as "the tumblr artist" or "the twitter artist", but instead make an account on as many sites you feel you can manage, and post something whenever you can. I use Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and Artstation, and I'll occasionally post my stuff on subreddits too, if it seems appropriate. You kinda need to know what sort of vibe you want your pages to have too. Like you mentioned, Tumblr for me too is the only place I have where I don't need to be all professional, y'know. I keep all my other accounts very clean, but on Tumblr, I don't feel weird for talking or interacting with people, and I can answer asks and such 😌

I have not had much luck when it comes to being picked up by the algorithm though, so I 100% understand the struggle. For many many years, my "growth" was actually stagnant, and I was even losing followers at one point after switching fandoms. I'm almost certain that's gonna happen again too if I stop drawing Spiderverse stuff...

I have legitimately not experienced anything like what's happening right now though, ever, and it's all very exciting. People have been so sweet and supportive, it literally makes me so happy! I really wish I could've actually giving you some advice, but I honestly just chalk it up to luck at this point. Thank you so so much the kind words though and for the ask, I'm SO glad to hear you're a Jayce fan too 😍

HAPPY (late) BIRTHDAY @zu-is-here!!!!

i can't believe i missed your b-day again!! i had to make you something this year and so why not draw the bean the legend, the sweetest baby ever as a gift!!! >:Dc

thank you so much for all of your sweet words and making your blog one of the most comforting places to be at!! hope you're having an amazing day<3333

I had to look up "causes for carbon monoxide inside home" online because I kept being reminded that CO detectors are common in america for personal home use but I could genuinely not think of a single reason why carbon monoxide could form inside someone's living space unless they had a fireplace on at all times and terrible ventilation, but then I remember how non-electric stoves are so common in america and everyone has cars in a garage that is directly connected to the house or whatever and it made sense

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hey y'all, I know this wasn't one of you, because I didn't lose any followers when I blocked these people, but just to be 100% completely fucking clear- I will not tolerate hate speech of any kind on my posts. my replies are open because I love hearing various perspectives on the stuff I talk about, but if you reply with anything that could be considered hate speech, or if you're just straight up being an asshole, I will delete your reply and block you immediately. if you put anon hate in my inbox, I won't argue with you, you're just gone. it's 20fucking24 and I am too old and too tired to give you the attention you're so clearly desperate for.

everyone boosting & supporting crab day i'm placing this on your shoulders as much as staff. they rly saw how much you were willing to pay for dumbass shit without a single conciliatory action and put all their fucking energy into making the site worse. so thanks for being so willing to give them money and the confidence to pull this shit

lukewarm take but i blame all those "every oneshot shoved into a single work, showing up in every search forever more" compliations on people who talk about fics being "just a oneshot" and similar statements that imply anything less than novel-length is a silly, pointless piece of nonsense that does not deserve its own post with its own tags and its own summary.

the number of people who think they're entitled to your time bc you like 13 is Staggering.

i want a neopets nostalgia website you can't log into, it just always looks like you're logged in to the original site circa late 2000s and the main purpose of the fansite is just to recreate the feeling of going onto neopets to do your dailies as a kid. you can click around the world map, and take something from the omelet even though you don't have an account and thus an inventory, and you can spin the wheels, and you can go look in the shops even though you cant really buy anything, and you can go play the old flash games because they've been converted somehow, and maybe there's even a fabricated issue of the neopian times you can check. like it's all very simplified and obviously entire sections of the site like the battle dome would be missing, but you can Get That Feeling again just by poking around. no accounts, so no logging in needed and no large server space or cybersecurity required for the host (not that the real neopets ever had the latter), i just want to click on little secrets on the world map and play the hannah trilogy or ice cream factory or caves & corridors again

they call me the random ask sender the way i. send random asks

dashboard unfucker has officially stopped working and I'm in anguish

The absolute gall of some people who leave comments on the internet makes me so mad. I'm out here overthinking every little word, trying not to be annoying, and then someone comments on a Doom 2 mod showcase video "I'd rather play doom with normal guns." Like. Okay?? Leave then??? Why would you even say that???? Why are you here????? That's like going to a restaurant, walking into the kitchen, and telling the chef that you prefer your own cooking. Who benefits from this??? What is the point??? Why do some people act as if they have to say something, no matter how empty and useless, about every single thing they see online?????

Pro tip: if "Boycott (...)" is trending on Twitter, don't click it. 99.99% of the time most of the Tweets are incredibly bigoted and the boycott is related to the company supporting trans people. I have not once in recent days seen a Boycott (...) trend in which the boycott was actually a valid complaint.