Welcome~ Katie. 30s. She/Her. Recent fandoms: | Final Fantasy XVI (PhoenixFlare) | The Untamed/MDZS | Critical Role | Legend of Zelda | Fire Emblem | The Wheel of Time | JJBA | Baccano! | BuckyNat | Star Wars Animation | Castlevania | Various Anime and Cartoons | . . . and lots and lots of kitties
Dion is so conflicted, emotional, raw in this scene.
Everything is coming together to overwhelm him - his exhaustion, his inability to escape his responsibilities for even a moment for an embrace.
How can he possibly avoid battle? How can he prevent open war in the city without calling on Bahamut? Why has Olivier suddenly been made emperor? Why are there no reinforcements, why is he sent into endless war?
He is grasping for any light in the darkness, the best path out of all of this conflict, but he can't find it.
He is engaged, lashing out at one of his dragoons, his facade crumbling.
And then Joshua enters. Every thought stills. Dion's gaze never leaves the Phoenix as he stares at him in open shock and wonder.
Even before the missive arrived, he's feeling vulnerable. His lover is his "loyal servant" and Dion has realized that there will always be a power imbalance there--the way he slides his hand off of Terence and leans away, not responding to Terence's words as he removes Terence's arm from him, Terence's dejected look as Dion moves away...
He has no peers, no one in whom he can truly confide. His emotions are already volatile enough--who can blame him for reacting to the missive the way he does?
Then in walks Joshua, unmistakable despite the years and the apparently-inaccurate reports of his death. Like recognizes like, and it's a port in the storm of change that's tearing Dion apart. Someone who KNOWS. Someone who UNDERSTANDS in a way that few--if any--others can.
Interest check and Mod apps for the Wyvern’s Ruby: A PhoenixFlare Zine are open! Responses will help us determine the scope of the project, so please check it out! 💜👀
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For more information, make sure to check out our info doc and Carrd !
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
29th June 2026.
This year's Strawberry Moon was extremely low in the sky, which made it look very large and bright. (A perfect photographic opportunity!)
The first rule of fandom is have fun. The second rule of fandom is find an enabler and become an enabler. Yes you should write that fic. What if it was even hornier? What if it was angstier? What if you wrote it just for me?
With all my love and respect for the kind of hard work this is, even in the interest check phase I'm very hesitant to consider a for-profit zine without concrete information regarding hard numbers on potential goals, merch scope, and how moderators and contributors are going to be compensated for their time and work regardless of circumstance. I understand that a lot of this is in flux in an interest check phase, but what is the baseline hope for some kind of sales goal? What is a baseline for the kind of merch that you would be hoping to produce? What is the plan if sales goals aren't met? I also think that several first time moderators dealing with for-profit might be adding in some daunting expectations. With love, I'm just sort of skeptical without knowing there's even an idea of a baseline plan beyond "if we don't completely meet sales goals, contributors will get to still buy the physical merch of a zine they contributed to."
Hello! Thank you for bringing up a concern you'd have with the zine. As this is our first zine, we know we wouldn't be shooting for high end numbers as that would go over our heads and experience level. However, I can share with you the base plan we have as of now and we're more than willing to tweak it as time goes to better suit a realistic outcome for us to reach.
As a starter, we're hoping to aim for a total of 100 physical zines to be produced (it's a bit of an overshoot, but it gives us room to adjust if needed as things progress); 22 of those zines will be going to the contributors as well as the mods (depending on how many we're able to fill in for such roles). In total, we've calculated that cost would be around $200, not including the merch cost just yet. As such, we would place our sales goal to be at the very least 50 physical zines (equating to $281.20 in sales cost) in order to comfortably cover the compensation.
In regards to merch, as this is our very first zine experience and the phoenixflare fandom is by no means big enough to justify going all out with production costs, we're aiming to include 1 to 2 prints and a sticker as those are simple things we're able to comfortably send out for prints. As much as we'd like to do include more extravagant things, we're well aware that it would not be sustainable for us. Our head mod considered including handwriting some of the letters that will be included as an added bonus to the physical merch we will be offering, but as they do not reside in the US, the logistics for that are complicated. We won't be tossing the idea, but rather putting it in a tentative to be determined pile as we further discuss the plans for the zine once interest checks are over.
Should the sales goals not be met in time, the head mod will pitch in and compensate what is missing to cover the compensation for the contributors as a safety net. If sales allow for it, we would ideally like to cover shipping costs for it as well but we will wait and see how things look. Regardless, contributors will always have their compensation ensured with a physical copy.
Overall, thank you for bringing this to our attention!
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