I Think The Best Part Of KinnPorsche, And It Really Comes To Mind With This Latest Episode, Is That Every

SVSSS AU

I have read AUs where Shen Yuan is a separate character from SQQ, Shen jiu. And I’ve read ones where Shen Jiu and Shen yuan are related or exist in the same AU.

What I want, if any kind soul would write this for me, is a AU where Shen Yuan and Shen jiu are the same person. Shen Yuan is like SQH and reborn into Proud immortal Demon Way as an infant without his memories. He lives as Shen jiu until the moment he first kills someone (Qiu estate probably. I imagine him getting his memories back as he torches the place). All the memories as his life as Shen Yuan comes back to him and the system activates. It lets him know that he is the scum villain twenty years before canon events start.

Jaded, savage and a untrusting Shen yuan (maybe he chose to revert back to Yuan in hopes that he will get the small amount of warmth he’d had in his previous life) is forced by the system to continue down the path of becoming a sect leader. He meets disciple Qinghua along the way and they both band together as transmigrators to continue the story line. (Maybe they change a few minor plot points along the way. Gathering evidence on the Huan huan palace to give to Tianlang-Jun, once SQH had spilled about his drafts of course). SQQ uses both memories from his two lives to grow and change. He still has trauma and rage from his early years as Shen Jiu, but after a lot of talking with YQY over the years he forgives him. He also grows close with SQH and they become proper friends. (Maybe he later assists him with hiding the wounded Mobei-Jun?) of course he still has trauma and misdirected hatred on those with power who abuse the weak. He snaps when vulnerable and his communication is still terrible but he is not as naïve as he was as Shen yuan. The childhood of abuse as Shen jiu made him sharp and more selfish. But he is healing.

By the time Binghe joins the sect, SQQ has a reputation. He is still sharp tongued and insulting of those who he considers a threat or beneath him. But he is not a trope villain. He cares for children and would never harm them. Even the rivalry Shen jiu had with LQG in the book is dulled to mutual respect for each other’s skills but distance, neither browning closer until SQQ saves him. His relationship with YQY is tense, since SQQ recalls their childhood, but brotherly. YQY doting on him as usual and SQQ putting up with it. He still visits brothels, enjoying the time to gossip and talk with the women. (I suspect he has his sexual awakening before canon events begin).

He never treats Binghe unkindly, treating him with the same Shen yuan care as he treats his other disciples. He shows more control over his favouritism, only helping LBH when signs of bullying were too obvious to ignore. Of course Binghe soaks up any affection like a sponge. Maybe SQQ has a nightmare about the Qiu estate and wakes up screaming. LBH, who might have been doing chores at night, hears and bursts into the room to protect his Shizun. The moment of concern over his vulnerability is what breaks the wall of SQQ’s heart and is how Binghe moves into the room next door. Cue gay crush on shizun growing in little white sheep Binghe’s heart as he begins to work out that his Shizun had maybe suffered to. He swears to look after him.

As such things happen according to canon. But SQQ doesn’t get poisoned. Instead of defending LBD against the demon, he merely pulls them both of The way just in time for LQG to swoop in. This SQQ would be more cunning and selfish than the original Shen yuan. He wouldn’t loose all rationality over LBH brewing harmed, trusting in the protagonist halo. Other than that, events would continue up to the endless abyss scene.

Instead of spouting hatred against demons to LBH, he maybe reveals that he knows about LBH Herat Ive and tells him to jump down to save both their skins. The other cultivators would kill the boy on sight if they knew he was a demon and SQQ’s reputation would be ruined. He might even be expelled from his peak for harbouring a demon. With this method of manipulation, LBH jumps down himself. When he comes back to court his Shizun with riches and prestige, SQQ pretends to be annoyed but is secretly glad that he now has someone who he can fully trust.

Less angst and more badass SQQ really. I just want scenes of SQQ who remembers Shen jiu’s life and Shen yuan’s, being able to navigate the story with the attributes of both personalities and using the skills of both life. No getting caught in plot device miscommunication over amnesia. He has healthier relationships with all the characters and is able to tell when people are hitting on him. Just more badass and socially intelligent SQQ.

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people on senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer listed. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

The timeline, the details, the screenshots (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much.

Every friend group should include...

A himbo,

A mean bisexual,

An even meaner lesbian,

She/theys and he/theys

A token straight that’s on thin ice,

An astrology bitch who has everyone’s birth chart memorized,  

And a short king

Calling all BL academics! You should check out Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific Issue 49, June 2023. It's devoted to Thai BL and it's Thai scholars, publishing in English, and available free. So basically everything I ever wanted.

Thai Boys Love (BL)/Y(aoi) in Literary and Media Industries: Political and Transnational Practices - This is the introductory article. One interesting takeaway is that there's a market for western M/M romance in Thailand and I'm dying to know what sort of titles have gotten Thai releases.

Chinese Historical BL by Thai Writers: The Thai BL Polysystem in the Age of Media Convergence - I didn't read this one. It's about the phenomenon of Thai writers writing danmei set in ancient China.

Authorial Revisions of Boys Love/Y Novels: The Dialogue between Activism and the Literary Industry in Thailand - This one was super intersting. It was about how the backlash to certain problematic tropes affected both revisions to Y novels and their tv adaptations. It uses Jittirain as a case study and includes passages from 2gether that were rewritten.

Boys Love (Yaoi) Fandom and Political Activism in Thailand - This article has a lot about Not Me, both about the backlash to the novle due to it being originally a GOT7 fanfic (allegedly) and the political context for the series. It also discusses a few other series related to the youth movement and marriage equality.

Heterosexual Reading vs. Queering Thai Boys' Love Dramas among Chinese and Filipino Audiences -This really only covers up to 2019 and as we all know everything is changing fast. I'll be interested in future scholarship that covers the current period. Basically expands on some of Baudinette's work.

Provincialising Thai Boys Love: Queer Desire and the Aesthetics of Rural Cosmopolitanism -I just skimmed this since I'm not familiar with either series mentioned or the rural culture of Isan.

DC really said 2021 is the year for bisexuals

If I hadn’t read the books, then I would probably find the Artemis Fowl movie charming and entertaining.

Because I’ve read the books, I am pretty disappointed in it. Like WTF Disney!!!???

Rewatching SHL episode 3 and Wen Kexing really out here auditioning for Jianghu’s Top Stalker.

Swinging between moods like a cat in a ball pit.

10/10 for commitment king. 0/10 for mental health.

Sarawat: I am literally the gayest bl protagonist.

Kurosawa: hi

Sarawat: I write songs for Tine

Kurosawa: I recite poetry for Adachi

Sarawat: oh well I pined for Tine for a whole year.

Kurosawa: :)

Sarawat: what?

Kurosawa: 7

Sarawat:

Kurosawa: 7 years.

I cannot count how many books, movies and tv shows I have seen these couples.

Credits to the artist.

Joining in on that ship dynamics meme hehe

I have just tried making American strawberry cookies. But somehow my pure Britishness got in the way and now they taste like scones.

The power of the uk strikes again.