I’m Hils. I’m British, I’m ace, I’ve been part of online fandom since the 90s.
My fic can be found on AO3 and more recently linked on Tumblr under the My Fic tag.
I post weekly fic recs on a Monday which can be found on the Fic Recs tag.
I occasionally make gifs which can be found on the My Gifs tag.
You can also find me on Bluesky.
My TV/Drama liveblogs can be found on the Hils Watches tag. If you’re interested in a specific country’s dramas or just a specific drama here’s a breakdown of what I’ve liveblogged so far:
South Korea - Hils Watches Kdramas
- Hils Watches Tale of the Nine-Tailed 1938
- Hils Watches Love Tractor
- Hils Watches Goblin
- Hils Watches Strong Woman Do Bong Soon
- Hils Watches Taxi Driver
- Hils Watches Lovely Runner
- Hils Watches Blood (dropped)
- Hils Watches Arthdal Chronicles
- Hils Watches Imitation
- Hils Watches My Secret Vampire
China - Hils Watches Cdramas
- Hils Watches The King’s Avatar
- Hils Watches Mysterious Lotus Casebook
- Hils Watches Cross Fire
- Hils Watches Fairyland Lovers
- Hils Watches Love Me, Love My Voice
- Hils Watches In Blossom
- Hils Watches The Spirealm
- Hils Watches Tibetan Sea Flower
- Hils Watches Snowfall
- Hils Watches Justice in the Dark
- Hils Watches Time Raiders
- Hils Watches Desire: the Series
- Hils Watches Kill to Love
Thailand - Hils Watches Tdramas
- Hils Watches My School President
- Hils Watches Moonlight Chicken
- Hils Watches He's Coming to Me
- Hils Watches Enchanté
- Hils Watches Cooking Crush
- Hils watches Only Friends
- Hils watches Meet You At The Blossom
- Hils watches Thamepo
- Hils watches Pit Babe
- Hils watches Khemjira
Taiwan - Hils Watches Twdramas
- Hils Watches Oh No! Here Comes Trouble
- Hils Watches Stay By My Side
- Hils Watches Kiseki: Dear to Me
- Hils Watches Unknown
- Hils Watches See Your Love
- Hils Watches First Note of Love
- Hils Watches Secret Lover
Japan - Hils Watches Jdramas
- Hils Watches My Beautiful Man
Other
- Hils Watches Heated Rivalry
Movies - Hils Watches Movies
- Hils Watches Conjuring Curse - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
- Hils Watches Misty Creed - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Kpop - Hils Watches Ateez
- Hils Watches Matz Travel Vlog - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
- Hils Watches Kingom: Legendary War - Ep 6
- Hils watches Ateez+
- Hils watches Ateez: Homecoming Train
- Hils watches Wanteez
sometimes hongjoong wears outfits that remind you this man is part of the fashion community and designs his own clothing. other times hongjoong wears outfits that make you wonder if his mommy dressed him for kindergarten this morning. and it still works but only on him
men who act like touching their wife will set them on fire but like touching their tall bumbling boyfriend is a disease they have to succumb to
men who insist that clothing is genderless and wear high heels as a treat
men who insist their little self made characters have no gender and that they do not mind being called gendered terms of any gender and also sometimes are so babygirl it makes me want to cry but that's neither here nor there
men who are princesses and love their mom very much
men who kiss other men. like every other man. like every single man that they see at any given time. like any of them. like ANY
men who know the dance to every single girl group song in existence and who just want to drink their terras and watch their goddamned dramas in peace
men who love their boyfriends so much they brand themselves for lives in latin (the gay language)
and jeong yunho, who, against all odds, actually has a bed frame
[two tumblr soldiers bleeding out on the internet frontlines]
“heh… remember strawbebby…. And ranibow spramkle… always made me laugh”
“Don’t talk like that man. We’re gonna get out of here i prommy.” [mortar fire sails overhead and land nearby] “christ its like a childrens hospital out there”
[through shallow breaths] “I always loved…… the color of the sky…………”
it's not mentioned in the song but in the corner of the piano man bar there is a mouse hole and inside that hole is a smaller replica of the bar staffed and patronized by mice who perfectly mirror all of the characters and they all say squeak us a song you're the piano mouse and mouse what are you doing here while they put cheese in his tiny jar
I'm loving the discussions about the role and purpose of fandom, as well and what activities are needed to keep fandoms alive and flourishing!
However... as a fandom creator (writer and artist), I sometimes feel like too much pressure is concentrated on creators. I don't know if this is a frustration others share? Not only should we keep making things, but somehow we also end up becoming these central fandom figures who can feel pressured into responding to comments (or else we're called arrogant or ungrateful), making friends (or else we're rude for ignoring well-meaning people who reach out), and being the drivers and pillars of that community (running events, responding to memes, etc. – and everything falls silent if we stop). It's a lot of work!! I don't always have the time and energy to make things for fun and then also engage in all the ways people might sometimes feel entitled to because they enjoy my works.
I really wish that more "non-creating" fans in the community would discover their fandom power!! and not just rely on the visible "producing" creators to be the only people worth engaging with. It takes nothing more than passion to write a meta-post about a character or a plot point, or to create an ask game, or to DM someone else who you see posting funny tags – not just the creator! Maybe your followers have other tips for evening out the balance a little more?
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this, anon. This is an observation I've seen in many parts of life, not just fandom.
A lot of people feel as though they need permission or an invitation of some sort in order to contribute. That's why I always end my answers by asking people to share their thoughts. I want to make it explicitly clear that I want people to add things into the reblogs (which I can then share out for more people to see) and the replies (which people can at least read even if I can't reblog).
I have heard fans who are readers but don't write fic say that they think they can't get an AO3 account unless they plan to post something. This is incorrect, of course, but a lot of people make that assumption.
I think at least some people (I don't know what kind of percentage) assume that someone who is writing fic or posting art or making podfics and video edits etc. has some sort of expertise that "allows" them to post.
People with less confidence or with less practice etc. sometimes need an extra nudge before they realize that they're welcome to contribute too. If that's the case for you, please allow me to say:
You are welcome to post in your fandom, even if no one invites you to. Even if you think you're not good enough. Even if your idea isn't "popular."
Start a conversation. Share a thought. Talk to folks who reblog cool shit. Be a folk who reblogs cool shit. You don't have to do everything in order to do something.
As mentioned above, please do share your thoughts in the reblogs and replies to keep the conversation going.
Record and post clips of your show to get more people into your fandom
Make incorrect quote memes
Make silly little TikTok-style edits of your favs
Make character playlists
Figure out the layout of buildings/cities
Recreate those building in the Sims or with an online floor planner or even just draw it out because holy hell writers will be so thankful for that
Make your blorbo in various video game character creations
Build a pokemon team for your blorbo
Make up silly headcanons! What does everyone do at the fair or the beach or during a fire drill?
Outline a fic idea you have — maybe you don’t have the time or energy or you just don’t feel confident enough to create it, but share it anyway!
Create outfits based on your blorbo’s design or outfits they would wear
There are so many ways you can engage with fandom that aren’t making fanart or writing fanfics. Fandom is community - Please don’t be afraid to join in!
(I've been on tumblr for 15 years, far longer than I was ever on twitter, but I've never engaged much beyond reblogging so please pardon how many times I reference fandom activities I witnessed on twitter)
Collect interviews with the author, producer, director, mangaka etc
Similarly, translate interviews
I remember someone in the haikyuu!! fandom kept a twt thread of every time two characters were in the same panel. Not sure what the tumblr equivalent would be. I guess just a regular old post with lots of additions? (Send help; i'm not sure why my brain is struggling so badly to translate twitter threads to tumblr posts)
Run a quote bot account: I'm not sure of the status of quote bots in a post twitter era, but those were quite fun. Again an example from the hq!! fandom, there was the hq!! bastille bot which would spit out a bastille lyric + a ship. The siken bot would spit out a line of poetry + a ship name. On tumblr maybe the equivalent would be a gimmick blog?
Run a ship/character week. I think these are probably the easiest kind of fandom event to run. it doesn't take more than one person, a blog, and rudimentary graphics skills.
Are socmed AUs still a thing?
Make gifs
Try to figure out the layers to a character's outfit and share your studies with the world. (I'm looking directly at you, Hoyoverse and all you're what-even-is-that how-do-they-even-put-that-on character design. beautiful, but confusing)
Update fandom wikis
Log fandom history on fanlore.org (another project run by the Organization for Transformative Works, aka the parent of ao3)
Volunteer for the Organization for Transformative Works/ao3
Fandom wikis!! One thousand blessings upon everyone who maintains fandom wikis, oh my god.
Some suggestions:
Transcribe episodes for film/audio canons
Podfic! We can always use more podfic, and most people's phones have a voice recorder.
Create bingo sheets (e.g. make a fanwork with five or more of these tropes for a bingo; read/reblog fanworks in five or more of these categories for a bingo)
Be a Your Blorbo expert consultant! If I'm writing about a character I don't have strong feelings about, but I know one of my friends is constantly reblogging and posting about them, even if it's all silly memes and "character <3"-type posting, I'll sometimes reach out to them for advice on if I'm getting Their Blorbo right. It's absolutely invaluable and I appreciate these people so much.
We are all just enthusiastic nerds on the internet. You have as much right to share your enthusiasm as anyone. One of the things I love about tumblr as a platform is that you can just start saying whatever about something you like, and you will find other people who like it too.
So, anyway, I say as though we are mid-conversation, and you're not just being invited into this conversation mid-thought. One of my editors phoned me today to check in with a file I'd sent over. (<3)
The conversation can be surmised as, "This feels like something you would write, but it's juuuust off enough I'm phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm."
They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird... And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the "he would not fucking say that" meme?
Yeah. That's what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.
Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the "suggestions" are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my "decline" every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don't know.)
It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I'm over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:
ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, "Look how they massacred my boy."
Fearing that it wasn't just this one manuscript, I've spent the whole night going through everything I've worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I've not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It's fine; it's all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter's wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.
This is a sentence from a Batman fic I've been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:
"It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas."
This is what the AI changed it to:
"It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug."
Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words "Batman Muppet threesome?"
Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit's side piece too much???? What have I wrought?
Anyway. Double-check your work. The grammar software is getting sillier every day.
#although I have to wonder why such an accomplished writer would have grammar software at all
(Sorry for the formatting on this; I'm on mobile.)
Why use grammar software? Because I'm a human who makes errors, and it can be helpful to have tools that I, as a writer and editor, can fall back on to catch very basic things that sometimes get missed.
I don't rely on it because sometimes (quite often, as of late) it can be wrong, but it can be helpful when checking your work. I use them to scan quickly for excess commas or the occasional homonym before I fire my files off to another human to give them the final pass. Or I used to.
I've talked a lot about how the integration of AI is making a lot of grammar software dumber. This is because they are not being trained exclusively on grammar rules anymore but on user-suggested data.
It's why, for a long time, when you tried to type "quirked" into Google Docs, GD would suggest "querched" instead because that is how a lot of people misspell the word "quirked."
It is a flawed, lousy system that is getting exponentially worse. Especially now, so many of them have "Let AI rewrite your sentence for clarity and engagement" options.
It's not really an issue for me because I have the knowledge and the support to turn things like this into an annoying issue that makes for an amusing post on social media.
But if I were a less experienced author and didn't have an editor who knew my writing style well enough to know something was wrong, that manuscript could have gone to print as is, and that's also why I suspect a lot of books right now read like carbon copy clones.
People aren't being taught these skills, but they are being trained to appease the software, which is, in turn, trying to please an algorithm.
Pro-Writing-Aid has become very bad for this, offering a "grade" at the top of your file. And yeah, it looks just like getting your term paper back. The last time I accidentally turned on the grading system, it gave me 50% out of 100 for grammar and style, based on what the algorithm thinks Romance should read like.
When I asked it to find grammar and style errors, it couldn't find any. It just didn't like that I was different from what it was being trained on. (Girl help, I was assigned Not Like Other Girls by the Algorithm and got a bad grade in vampire smut.)
And again, were I not me, were I a younger or inexperienced author, I might take that to heart and start altering my style to get a Good Grade based on what the machine wants.
And that's how I know we're in the Bad Place because there are people doing that. They think the machine is smart because someone tacked the word "intelligence" onto it, and they are writing to appease the software instead of using it like a tool that you can and should ignore.
And that's an issue.
For me, it was worth it to pay for those tools for a long time. Now it's not, and I'll be saving my money for other things.
The ableism is showing in a lot of the tags, and I need you to know I'm mentally holding some of you under water until the thrashing stops.
You are not intellectually superior for never using or paying for grammar software.
Regardless of the fact that some corporate jobs now require you to use programs like Grammarly (it was required to be on my company machine when I worked with certain clients), grammar software is an accessibility feature.
The fact that it's being made intentionally shit by the companies that own them is a major issue and is not the fault of the people who do struggle to read and write and who would benefit from easily accessible, competent writing aids.
It's the fault of the people pushing for the enshitification of everything we know and love to please an algorithm.
Get off your fucking high horse and think with some compassion instead of your ego. Not everyone is the same. Not everyone has the same experience or opportunities. That doesn't make them stupid or worthy of your derision or scorn.
But the way you talk about them sure makes you worthy of mine.
More reasons to hate AI being in everything. Like sure, people who struggle with grammar and whatnot DO deserve an accessibility option, but it should be a WORKING one (which is me agreeing with the OP, not arguing against using this stuff.). Like don't need things like grammarly but so what? Maybe some day I will. Just because you don't need something doesn't mean the people who do need it should have a shittier version. Obviously people should all be taught grammar for no other reason than having a shared ruleset for a language helps with clarity of communication, but you can't educate your way out of things like dyslexia. Grammar tools should be to language what calculators are to math, but currently they aren't because they suck balls. And they're EVERYWHERE. And unfortunately they are happening at a time when we're starting to have literacy issues (for a wide variety of reasons, most of which boil down to "early language and reading acquisition is helped IMMENSELY by parental involvement and parents don't have the time because if they stopped working one of 3 jobs to teach their kid to read then they wouldn't have money for food".), and the confluence of these things means that people aren't looking at the poor quality output of AI writing and realizing how bad it is. Not on the scale that is needed to force AI developers to make better tools or to force the cessation of their use altogether.
Checkmate (or how I went completely off the deep end)
I was rolling over the IOMT chess pieces theory (if you believe in that) in my head, and thinking about the connection I made to the GH5 trailer. Then I started thinking about Yeosang, and how he always seems to be watching things from a distance, and all of the angel and possible psychopomp imagery around him.
And then I started thinking about--of all things--a painting hanging in the Louvre by Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch, called The Chess Players, or sometimes (erroneously) called Checkmate.
Still here? Okay, follow me down this weird ass rabbit hole.
The Devil is in green, casually and confidently playing for the soul of a Conflicted Man, while an Angel looks on, either in pity, or waiting to carry the young man's soul to the afterlife should he lose. It's unclear.
The painting was wrongly called Checkmate for years, because it looks like the young man's King is in check. He's lost the game and his soul with it.
But an anecdotal story says that Paul Morphy, an American chess master, saw the painting and recontextualized the entire thing. He saw what others hadn't: that the Conflicted Man is not yet damned. He has one move left on the board to make and could save his King. A painting about damnation becomes a painting about hope. It just took a chess master to see it.
The painting itself is said to represent the eternal moral struggle between good and evil, salvation and damnation, and the enduring hope of the human soul, making it a striking and powerful piece of art.
So what does that have to do with ATEEZ lore? Is my brain rot that far gone that I'm seeing hidden meaning in German paintings from the Romanticism period?
Well. Yes and no?
Listen, I'm aware of how far off of my cracker my cheese has slid. It's fine. If I were rich I'd be considered eccentric, but I'm poor so I gotta settle for Bat Shit. But I'm having a great time. IT'S FINE.
And I'm not saying ATEEZ lore is based off of this painting (pffffft no. please. absolutely not), I'm just seeing unintentional parallels here and I wanna talk about it before my brain's motherboard overheats.
And honestly, when I looked up the painting, it was just out of curiosity because I was thinking about Yeosang being an angel and chess and stuff. I'd seen the painting before, but I didn't remember the colors or anything. I was just like...isn't there a painting with an angel watching a chess game? Lemme look that up, and BAM. You're getting this post shoved at your eyeballs. (I'm sorry.)
So let's start with the Angel and Yeosang.
Like the Angel in the painting, Yeosang is often depicted as watching what's happening, separate from the others, like in Ash, and even The Real.
The same thing happens in the GH5 concept trailer.
@ghostjes's recent post about him being an angel or death, or some kind of psychopomp, is what got me started on this rabbit hole. Though the idea that Yeosang is some kind of angel isn't new, of course.
However, if Yeosang is the Angel watching the chess game between Sopro's influence and the member's souls, waiting to take them to the Underworld (like we saw on their year-end stages when he paid the Ferryman), he's clearly taking himself there too, since Sopro is also affecting him.
As for the Devil and the Conflicted Man: I can't help but notice the colors each of them is wearing. (the colors prompted the post, in fact.)
We see the Conflicted Man wearing black and red, just like the members in the GH5 trailer and in Not Okay. The young man's King is in danger and you all know my theory about Sopro targeting Hongjoong, and Hongjoong being somewhat aware of this.
And as @thirstkanaphan theorizes, RED is the color of awareness. I would also say that red is the color of Life Itself. Which is why Sopro, being aware that it's alive, is red in color. The young man in the painting wearing red is aware of his fate should he lose (he dies), and perhaps aware of that he has one last move to make to save his King.
The Devil is dressed in green, a color I don't typically associate with the devil. In pop culture he's usually in red or black, after all. What does that have to do with the lore? Well I think it's interesting that we've had all this talk about the color green lately. And there the Devil is, dripping in it. It caught my eye.
We see green (and red/black) all over Not Okay, usually when the members are being tortured with their traumas. If red is the color of awareness/life, then green means something too.
Perhaps green is the color of Death?
This is certainly backed up by the staticky glitchy insects we see in Not Okay, first coming out of Jongho's tv (indicating his athletic dreams are dead) and then out of Yunho's brother's empty GREEN clothing, meaning his brother is dead and isn't coming back.
Green being the color of death is certainly possible, considering all the theories about green, including the Green Flash/Green Light, meaning a soul coming back from the dead, as seen in POTC.
There's green on the stage when it looks like they're descending into the Underworld.
And now I'm thinking about Hongjoong, bathed in green light, taking out an android guardian with the chili pepper bullet...
ANYWAY--
I don't really know. I'd love to get the Loretiny Think Tank working on this one.
If the IOMT chess theory is even anywhere in the vicinity of correct (lol who knows? probably a load of barnacles), but if it IS, then maybe we can think of the entirety of Golden Hour as one big metaphorical chess match between the members and death, with the King (Hongjoong) constantly in danger and all of their souls at stake.
But if ATEEZ are the Conflicted Man, who is the Devil? Sopro?
Or something else?
And are ATEEZ aware that they aren't checkmated yet? That they have one last move to play, whatever that may be?
It's your move, Captain.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I'll go be wildly unhinged in silence now.
Back in the day I worked at a certain very famous and very high caste art museum in the US as a junior curator. Part of my job was to catalog the objects in the museum database. This includes details like provenance, measurements, and a visual description of what the object looked like.
Like I said, the museum was a pretty snotty institution. It’s got a LOT of objects it’s way famous for possessing, but nobody knew about the absolutely massive collection of Moche erotic pottery it had because the curators were totally embarrassed by this stuff.
Some examples:
Pretty hot shit, right? They never, ever put any of this stuff on public view or published it in any catalogues but - we legit had like several hundred pieces of Moche ceramics in the “dirty pots” category. Anyway, I was left alone to just do my job with regard to the database for several years, ok? And I figured, well, these’re accessioned objects in the museum’s collection - better get down to bidness.
I catalogued every goddamn bestiality, necrophiliac, cocksucking, buttfucking, detached penis, and giant vulva drinking cup in that collection. I’d be like,
A drinking vessel in form of a standing man wearing a tunic and cap. He holds an oversized erection in his hands and stares into the distance (note I did not say “like he’s hella-constipated”). The vessel has a hole at both the tip of the penis as well as around the rim of the figure’s head, thus forcing the drinker to drink only from the penis or risk spilling wine all over themselves from the top of the vessel. Red and orange slip covers the surface of the piece.
Pretty straightforward, right? Apparently the deep seated fear of these objects that the curators exhibited was meant to spread to me as well, but - no one ever gave me that memo, because I guess Midwesterners reproduce asexually. When the curators understood that I had catalogued all of these objects in addition to the other, non-sexy pieces in the collection, they were apparently livid, but knew they had no legs to stand on in terms of getting pissed at me for it.
I visited the museum’s online public access database a few years back and - every single description I wrote of these pieces has been totally neutered to say something like Male figural vase.
Long story short? Just call a dildo a fucking dildo. It’s all gonna be ok, I swear.
Museums should have sections dedicated to artifacts like these with a warning that says “There’s a lot of private parts in here but we’re dedicated to displaying history so we won’t censor these. Enter at your own risk” or something. It’s prudish to deliberately hide history because of some ding dongs.
when i went to the travelling Pompeii exhibit a few years ago it was nice to have a section just gently sectioned off with all the fun phalloi and graffiti. they had a warning on it, but they ALSO had a warning on the ‘hey this is where the simulated eruption happens, if you have trouble with flashing lights or loud noises let us know so we can show you the shortcut’ bit, and I appreciated both.
