I couldnât edit my last pinned post on mobile so this is a remake where I hopefully will be able to continue editing it after my laptop dies, considering Iâm writing it entirely on mobile, this time.
DO NOT REPOST MY WORK! This means both my art and writing. This means not giving it to AI.
REBLOGGING IS NOT REPOSTING. YOU SHOULD REBLOG ALL THE TIME.
This blog utilizes a custom theme on desktop, where additional useful pages are accessible. Otherwise, please use the links below to navigate to the most important places.
THESE ARE MY OTHER ACCOUNTS:
UnVale: [link]
CharacterHub: [link] (inactive, do not recommend; see below)
Art Fight: [blog page] with more links.
Toyhouse: [link]
Bluesky: [link] where I failed to get my proper username in time.
Pronouns.page: [link]
Chicken Smoothie: [link] I was gonna review this but Iâm still figuring out how to format it
Discord: I change my name to BouncyBrain in all servers I join. Requests (friend/DM) are allowed only through shared servers. I am currently in public servers for UV, Ellipsus, and PaperDemon. There are ChickenSmoothie UMA servers Iâm in, but I wonât name them.
MY AO3: [works] [quick-reference masterlist]
MY ART: [everything] [fan and original characters] [just original characters]
BOUNCY REVIEWS:
CharacterHub (general): [page]
UnVale vs CharacterHub (comparison): [Part 1] [Part 2] (As of posting CH still has not taken a stance against allowing genAI on their platform, so I am currently strongly recommending UV over them purely because UV has a firm anti-AI stance, despite the current restrictions on posting.) (This got worse the longer I left this in my drafts.)
Ellipsus (beta): [post]
All (includes the above and others): [tag]
If you would like me to check out a (free) site, drop it in my inbox and Iâll see about it. Keep in mind I am but a poor, monolingual American.
Asks and Submissions are OPEN, anonymous enabled. Feel free to use them whenever you want idc
My favorite shots in Project Hail Mary (2026) were all the ones reminiscent of old-school sci-fi shots. It was very comfy cozy to see those. Fuck the big flashing scene though what the fuck!!!!! It didnât need to flash like that!!!!!!!! Or at all!!!!! It gave me a headache so fast!!!!!!
I know its been a while since I updated with any real writing for Fins and Fangs (for anyone unaware, thatâs my FNaF: Security Breach mer!AU, organic and not robots, Sun and Moon focus), but I do want to reiterate Iâm still working on it! Thereâs just a lot Iâm planning out and going over with a fine-tooth comb to make sure I can hit the points I want while expanding on worldbuilding I want to share without overwhelming readers and actually, yâknow, writing it.
I have so much worldbuilding I canât fit into the fic.
So hereâs some snapshots! Spoilers ahead. I mean it! These are planning and timeline notes! Yes they are laid out kind of. Badly. They are two different lists. In my defense if I let myself plot on paper I wouldnât have paper. So bad weird lists it is
I gotta stop keeping business hours on things I make Iâm not going to like it or hate it more in 7â10 business days 9amâ5pm than I will in one whatever day 12amâ6am
Banging my head against my desk Iâm fixated on a stupid idea and I canât do anything about it because I canât even work it out of my brain. Itâs stuck. Itâs like half-melted gummy bears. I canât get it out. Thereâs enough concepts to work with but there arenât enough to build it up but thereâs not enough of either to be productive or give up on it
Just watched all the Jurassic World movies! Iâd only seen Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, so Dominion and Rebirth were a new experience.
Check the additions in the reblogs of this post for full context.
I mean, it was kind of obvious from the moment you check the gacha system, but Heartopia is run by a company that does not give a shit about the users, their in-game experience, or their community experience outside the game using official community spaces.
And itâs not just from the global launchâplayers from their own country have been ignored this entire time, too, and theyâre a year ahead on updates and events compared to us. Donât forget the Chinese players have also been ignored and dismissed as you read through this.
If youâre going to read through this and defend them âbecause theyâre a Chinese/Asian companyâ get out. They exposed themselves to the global market, it doesnât matter their country of origin, and youâre being racist by defending their actions just because theyâre an East Asian country. I will defend ChinaâIâm Chinese-Americanâbecause people in America hate China just because some old white guy in charge said theyâre at fault for apparently everything wrong with this country when theyâre clearly not, but I also wonât defend Chinese companies that go global and show their ass to everyone. Donât come in here and tell me itâs just because theyâre Chinese/Asian, they have the ability to think critically and take responsibility the same as the rest of us.
Thereâs a lot to talk about, including racism, bigotry, community management, generative AI, and general game shortcomings. This discussion will be going beneath the cut only because itâs going to get really long. If you want more comprehensive picture evidence, go to my post linked above and check the reblogged additions.
Iâll be speaking as a player of the global launch, as thatâs what I had access to. Please remember to think critically while readingâIâm not all-knowing, I only know one language, and I have my own opinions.
The worst of it: racism and bigotry is rampant in the game and the Heartopia player community.
The game itself isnât free of racism. Only recently did they release an update that included a dark-skinned character acting like a monkey and making monkey noises after eating a mushroom you, the player, are unable to eat. They apparently removed this, but I never got that far because I deleted Heartopia; people in the Discord were saying itâs gone so who knows, because I didnât get much opportunity to read those messages before I left there, too.
The darker skin tones available for use are⊠pitiful. This is not excusable because theyâre a Chinese/East Asian country and I am fucking sick and tired of people excusing a lack of variety and inclusive options because of that. My fatherâ100% Made in Chinaâhas definitively brown skin that doesnât lighten beyond definitively brown. There are Blasiansâblack Asiansâthat live in China or Japan or Korea and were literally born and raised there. The only excuse for locking black hairstyles behind paywalls (aka not available for default character creation) and being extra light on literally any other features for players of color is greedy racism.
There was a Reddit post on the unofficial, player-run r/Heartopia that showed players roleplaying as ye olde slaves, putting on the darkest skin tone and the dreads that arenât free and going out to other playersâ gardens. According to the poster, they were permabanned for reporting this. (The post is currently not available as-is on the threadâscreenshots can be found in the reblogs of my original post linked at the start.)
Their Discord (officially sanctioned, which I joined through the game itself giving me the link) is full of racists and bigots who spew their hatred across every channel they can get their hands on, whether through discussion or use of slurs or posting hateful images. They were barely punished for this behavior, if they ever were. This includes during the incident in the post I linked above, where initially players defending the racism of an NPC with dark skin acting like a monkey were actually left alone, and their messages were not immediately deleted. Not until the staff got caught up in the storm and decided everything must go.
Instead of punishing players in the Discord being dicks, they punished players trying to communicate properly, calmly, and explain what was happening to the confused users who came in amidst the Silencing (again). Messages were deleted en mass, cooldowns applied liberally (from an hour and up to six), and users muted or outright banned for speaking outâat first, for speaking out too loudly, and then speaking out at all.
This is not the first time this has happened.
Heartopia uses generative AI. I donât give a fuck about live translation AI, thatâs not the point.
A while ago they made a shit-ass announcement that yes, they use generative AI in the game, and yes, theyâll tell us if they use it again. No, they didnât apologize for using it nor did they say they were going to stop. They did keep their word and tell us they were using generative AI in the update for rewards from the penguins.
The Discord, of course, didnât like this. Fancy that. They built up a community of creatively-minded people through a game that allows and encourages making music, painting, writing, designing clothes, and customizing furniture. Then they went âby the way fuck artists because generative AI is inevitable and weâre going to use it even though we have plenty of money to afford 100 artistsâ and actually did it.
Three times.
The Chinese players said no. The beta players said no. The global release players said no.
And nothing changed.
The global release uprising was what I witnessed in person. None of the staff bothered to do anything about trolls and generally hateful people that shoved their way into very civil conversations after anti-AI discussion was shuffled off to be hidden in one thread. Then they nuked at least three or four threads because of âbad behaviorâ when anti-AI users were simply attempting to protect their peace from trolls and bigots who kept coming in and dropping slurs and ableism and racism in the chat (and didnât get even a mute, much less real disciplinary action).
Their fanart channel was removed and turned into a forum channel. They added an âAIâ tag to the forums. Yes, they encourage posting and sharing art in the very same place theyâre encouraging and sharing AI-generated slop.
These people know fuck-all about managing a community, much less one this large. Someone needs to train them. On everything.
Everything about the community is horribly managed. There apparently arenât active devs in the Discord, so whatâs the point? They had bug report and suggestion channels they nuked after the AI Silencing. It didnât matter.
The staff in charge of taking care of things like bad-faith users⊠donât give a fuck. Some staff acted like a twelve-year-old freshly given power but unwilling to take accountability for their actions while using said power (fucking Meimei). Some staff apparently donât do shit at all. Some staff donât say anything and then nuke more than half the messages in the Discord because people are rightfully upset but they donât want to do anything proper to manage the uproar.
They would rather silence everyone than allow for proper communication, which is stupid because that just exacerbates everything. I saw so many people say they were leaving during the Racism Silencing because they were sick and tired of the rampant power-tripping unprofessionalism of the Discord staffâthings built up and they couldnât take it anymore.
I couldnât take it anymore. I left before my hour (then two hour) cooldown was up.
The devs donât seem to care that the community wants them to FIX THE DAMN VIBE CODING IN THE PETS FOR FUCKâS SAKE! In fact, they only ever fix things in a timely manner if it affects their financials, and even then they might not fix it all the way, just enough to placate the half-a-braincell players. They have a bug with their paid features what feels like every significant gacha update.
The gacha is so much worse than it looks from out here. Some peoplesâ homes and garages cost them thousands in real-world currency, if not more.
For the primary gachas they want you to pull for, they use âexpedition passesâ which can only be gotten in very, very low quantities while playing the game. Youâll have to purchase more with real-world currency in order to actually get everything you want from these gachas. And I do mean have to, because thereâs no other way to earn this gacha currency. Which makes it worse than literally every other popular gacha game out there.
I believe people averaged out a rough $300-$400 USD to get everything in one of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic gachas. Thereâs one for each of the Mane Six, so thatâs six gachas at 300/400 each, or $1,800/$2,400 to get all six.
Iâve seen multiple users with all six cars parked on their plot.
Thatâs without mentioning the other, non-MLP:FiM gachas available. Thereâs two outfit ones (masc and femme) and one for furniture/building materials. I donât remember any numbers for this (itâs very difficult for me) but I know itâs got to be close to $1,000 USD to get one full outfit, and more than that for the furniture/building materials.
You can, of course, play the other two gachas (with three color palettes to choose from) without paying for the opportunity! But only if youâre willing to save every single blue gem you get. Ever. You have to Scrooge this shit. Or youâll have to give in and⊠pay real-world currency in order to get the entire ensemble, because the luck to âwin bigâ is insanely low and I donât think Iâve seen more than like two people get the one outfit piece that wins you the whole set. Ever.
âItâs not even a core part of the gameplay thoughhhhhh,â people like to whine. Hi! Not the fucking point. The fucking point is that itâs no longer teehee I need to grind for primos when it involves a currency you can only get with your real world money.
As soon as itâs something locked purely behind paying for it with your hard-earned paycheck, itâs real fucking gambling. It isnât just virtual waifu gambling anymore. These people are dropping hundreds if not thousands on this game for virtual little graphics that can apparently be taken away if theyâre a little too vocally not racist. And thereâs no other way for them to have gotten there. Itâs not hunting down every single obscure chest in an area for the last few free primogems. Itâs not completing every daily and weekly quest for a handful of gems. Itâs not even logging in every day for five of them. Itâs buy them or have nothing.
This is more predatory than predatory gacha should have ever been. I donât even know if itâs, like, legal for the Apple Store or Play Store or whatever to host Heartopia when itâs got gambling like this in it or if the buffer of âitâs a virtual currency theyâre buying so it isnât directly their money going into itâ saves them.
The game is just a fucking buggy, laggy, half-hearted mess.
I thought maybe it was just release bugs, yâknow, you fix things up to release it somewhere new and suddenly youâve got a termite infestation.
No. No, itâs just like that.
Animals are just going to float, stationary, across your screen from one place to another instead of using any of their actual movement animations. Theyâre going to clip into the terrainâs geometry and disappear forever. Theyâre going to clip you into the geometry. Theyâre going to float ten feet in the air.
Your pets are going to disappear into the roof of your home, because roofs must be built on top of floors, and your pets donât give a fuck if thereâs stairs or not, so theyâre just going to merge through the floor into the roof until they decide theyâre done. Your pets are going to phase through your walls. If your house is raised then theyâre going to phase through into the space beneath your house more often than not. Theyâll phase through your oven and fuck up your cooking, forcing you to move and/or burn what youâre making. The cats, specifically, will randomly decide not to show you their interaction bubbles, and force you to either enter and exit the building mode (which can take forever) or ignore them because thereâs nothing else you can do about it. You canât even plant your crops around the stupid dog thatâs been glitched turning in circles in the middle of your garden plots for the last ten minutes.
Interaction bubbles disappear in general. They fail to display properly. Inventories donât always work properly. Sometimes you get stuck in a menu or stuck outside a menu just because the game forgets you hit the button you wanted to.
Half the tighter clothes clip through the under layer they use during animated emotes and most of the ice skating moves. Thereâs no reason for that but they fail to properly animate the clothes all the time. Which doesnât make it better.
The lag is fucking ridiculous. Itâs worse than most things Iâve experienced and Iâve tried to play current-update Hoyo games on a laptop from 2016. It doesnât matter where you are in a server (âtownâ) or how many people are on it, youâre going to lag unless youâre special. It gets exponentially worse the more whales are on your server, because theyâll have these massive mansions stuffed full to the very very limit with their gacha wins and youâre not going to get more than 5fps even standing on the farthest point from user houses, much less when youâre trying to just walk across the island into town center.
Yes, this does mean the lag can ruin the timing or accuracy when doing hobbies like cooking, cat/dog training, and snow sculpting where you have a time limit and/or multiple buttons to hit, and I was playing this on an iPad with plenty of screen room. Lag still fucked me over plenty of times. Sometimes it was literally impossible to play for ten minutes without a massive lag spike from some dumbass whale loading in and killing everything.
There were even bugs where user images on their in-game profiles were mixed up! Someone I know had a friendâs icon in place of their own on their âIDâ and that friend wasnât even online when it happened. How does that happen?
I donât think anybody on the dev team is good at English. If they hired someone for it Iâll redownload Heartopia because itâs that bad.
This isnât me being racist, itâs me looking at things like ridiculously simple grammar mistakes, or spelling mistakes, or just outright inconsistent or missing localization. I missed at least two different conversations because all the localization files for English were missing. Iâd say 90% of dialogue has at least one or two grammar mistakes, and even more than that depending on the length. Hell, I think they machine translated everything and then went âyeah close enoughâ and sent it out without rereading anything. Or having a native speaker reread anything. One of the more prominent things I encountered all the time with localization was a bonus that activated randomly, called âBread with no Flourâ andâsorry, no, I mean âMeal with No Riceâ whichâhang on, wait, it says âBread with no Flourâ in your hobby book but âMeal with No Riceâ when it activatesâand theyâre both wrong, because it should be âBread With No Flourâ or (OR!) âMeal With No Riceâ (doesnât use up ingredients when cooking them, so you get a âfreeâ second whatever that was).
Thanks to @inspacedia for the addition in the replies here that the Brazilian Portuguese localization is also a joke. I suspected but didnât know for sure how bad it was across languages, and⊠honestly if I asked too many questions in the Discord I would probably have gotten banned. If anyone else has more information on the quality of other localization attempts, feel free to let me know if youâd like to see it added here, as well. Just because Iâm monolingual doesnât mean you all donât deserve a voice in this discussion, too.
So, yeah, they donât really seem to care all that much about the actual user experience beyond âare they going to give us more money and if yes, how much more can we get them to spend than that.â There was a place to point out these localization issues and bugs in the Discord but, yâknow. Turns out they didnât know any of that, anyway. ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
Even making a book cover had to be puzzled out by users because not only did it not have a corresponding canvas available like clothes and furniture did, but it could warp so it wasnât the same dimensions as the painstakingly (expensively) discovered dimensions from users. Like, yeah, itâs close, itâs good enough, but itâs not even easy. Itâs unbelievably difficult for something that shouldâve been easy. The warping for images is, frankly, irritating.
Clothing and furniture templates only showed you the most generic, basic outlines for whatever you chose to work on. The pants had individual belt loops you could color, but it didnât show you where, and the button on pants, hats, and other similar things were all individually able to be colored but only if you scrutinized every single pixel on the canvas. Which sucked.
I donât want everything I own to be fucking PINK.
If youâre masc or donât like pink youâre pretty out of luck. Majority of stuff is femme and most likely pink. You could get idk a monthâs worth of good masc outfits out of the clothing store if youâre not so strict on the definition of masc, but they have hoodies and basketball shorts so youâre fine.
Furniture comes in mostly pink. Youâve got very limited options for buying furniture compared to clothes, and most of the time itâs fucking pink. If itâs not pink itâs beige. If itâs not pink or beige itâs white. If itâs not pink or beige or white itâs light mint.
You want red? Too bad, most of the reds are more purple than red. Yes there is a distinction. Iâm using images here because this pissed me off so much. What do you mean you donât have MORE THAN ONE REAL RED?????
Yes those are ALL RED. If I wanted pink or yellow or purple or a baby blue or something âgirlyâ I would have more to share but itâs honestly embarrassing that they went âyeah you can buy all clothes thereâs no body types thereâs no fashion restrictions, boys wear skirts girls wear suitsâ and then they went âbut also fuck you if youâre masc have a fifth of the clothes femmes do.â
I donât talk about my house. Thereâs still only one real red color. I had to give up and add blue. Brown. Green. Black and white were the MVPs.
âBut you played it for a while!â
Yeah and Iâm done. I dropped Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. Not because they hated their users (not convinced Hoyo likes their free users at all, but they donât hate us) but because their stories, for story-driven games, were so fucking boring and took too long and talked to us like babies. Heartopia doesnât have much story and itâs supposed to be cozy. Actually itâs frustrating and nothing that matters has actually changed and also their events have sucked because why are you talking to us about fucking climate change and youâre advocating for the use of generative AI???
Heartopia doesnât care. Stop playing. They donât care about what you do.
Also theyâre not fixing the pet AI I donât think they know how to code at this point
