but yeah other than that, doing alright!

i never had a 4chan phase, but logging on there now is the closest i've felt to having something like it. like, there's a conscious thought of "every second i spend here is just making me more antisocial. this is designed to enable my worst self"

like I know its always been bad but there is truly nothing left over there. art posts vanish into nothingness, literally the only things that gain any traction are blackpill type sentiments and inter-community discourse that mean nothing in the real world. its the crab bucket website now

it never gets easier i fear (and this is also the joy of pursuing art, btw)

(the task being to please Everyone, both in game and irl)

its sad bc i really love dlc miquella because it feels like he's directly responding to this fandom behavior! like, ok everyone had a very set idea of what this kid is Supposed to be in this story, many of which are fully at odds with each other. he had an impossible task and that broke him

so as a result we just have everyone basically making OCs in place of canon characters who were deliberately passive/distant in the story. then the DLC comes out and no matter how fs spins it, they wont be exactly like their OCs and that makes everyone mad lol

tbh i think the years long gap between base game and DLC is more to blame than shipping. like >2 years was enough to make people Think they figured out miquella/radahn/etc, when really all we ever knew of them was what other characters saw in them