My AO3/Whump sideblog Still pretty active on my main, but it's time I gave this passion of mine space to breath organically. I write for way too many fandoms, constant Febuwhump/Whumptober Participant. Contribute way too much to the Whumpapedia :) AO3: NatK 21, London
Follow my main: natk2002
A demon has cursed you with the inability to have children or form a family, and as soon as you learn of this you went to tell the witch who you promised your firstborn child, as this clearly will prevent you from fulfilling your side of the deal.
Chapters: 37/?
Fandom: The Rookie (TV 2018)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Tim Bradford/Lucy Chen
Characters: Tim Bradford, Lucy Chen (The Rookie), Angela Lopez, Nyla Harper, Original Characters, Aaron Thorsen, Wade Grey, John Nolan (The Rookie), Celina Juarez, Monica Stevens (The Rookie), Wesley Evers, Percy West (The Rookie), Tamara Colins, Rita Calderon, Jackson Evers, Noah Foster (The Rookie), Dara Teska, Sarah Whittler (Original Rookie-verse Character), Luna Grey
Additional Tags: The Chenford Twitter GC really inspired me to put pen to paper, Established Tim Bradford/Lucy Chen, Feral Tim Bradford, Angela Lopez Takes No Shit, Not Even from her bestie Tim Bradford, Hurt Lucy Chen (The Rookie), Explosions, Guns, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-Typical Behavior, Worried Tim Bradford, Worried Boyfriend Tim Bradford, Best Friends Tim Bradford & Angela Lopez, Inaccurate Police Procedure (Rookie 2018), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Torture, Blood, Temporary Character Death, LA Clear (The Rookie), POV Multiple, Undercover Lucy Chen (The Rookie), Hurt, Eventual Comfort, Restraints, Minor Character Death, Canon Divergence - No Tim Bradford/Lucy Chen Breakup, Undercover (UC) School (The Rookie), Undercover (UC) Work (The Rookie), Lucy Chen Whump (The Rookie), Tortured Lucy Chen (The Rookie), My Medical Knowledge Comes From Wikipedia, Angry Tim Bradford, Protective Boyfriend Tim Bradford, Hurt Noah Foster (The Rookie), Tortured Noah Foster (The Rookie), References to Episode: s02e11 Day of Death (The Rookie), If you've watched Red Sparrow you'll probably get an ooh moment in chapter 21, heed the tags, Cliffhangers EVERYWHERE so be weary of that, Tim Bradford/Lucy Chen Happy Ending, Drugged Lucy Chen (The Rookie), Metro-Police Liaison Sergeant Tim Bradford, Author is Slow To Update Because Uni sorry :(, BAMF Tim Bradford
Summary:
AO3 is exiting open beta! Learn more about how far we've come since launching open beta, our future plans for improvement, and what you can do to contribute at https://otw-news.org/4w2dn3tc
Reblogged from test three after replying twice on all previous reblogs; every previous post or reblog also includes two tags. Replies, comments, and tags from original post and two interim reblogs are not visible on fourth reblog of this post.
Views of notes on each of the prior tests (Note, there are four existing posts at this point, each with comments and tags, so test three is a reblog of test two, test four is a reblog of test three; in previous iterations of tumblr all of the tags, replies, and comments on those posts would have been visible in the notes of every one of those reblogs).
Literally none of the reblogs with tags or comments are visible on the blog activity, the only visible activity is the replies and even as the OP of the post I can only see the replies on the individual reblog that was replied to.
This seems to make it impossible to have a conversation with anyone on a post except the person directly replying to your reblog, so instead of being a conversation in the town square kind of feeling, it has more of a "I hope my email finds you well" or passing notes vibe.
AO3 is an anti-capitalist marvel and we should fight like hell to keep it that way
So this has been rattling around my brain for some time, but just now I saw a post about people pushing for ads and for monetizing fic on AO3 and about its connection to professional publishing, and it rattled me enough that I thought: I’m going to write this today.
For the longest time, my most popular Tumblr post was about the OTW elections in 2016 and how things seemed to be a shambles over there. In the earlier days of AO3’s fundraising, I was baffled by what the board could be doing with that amount of money, and didn’t understand why they wouldn’t get fucking organized, and hire a director or a more formal accountant and people who could update the Archive’s code, or do dozens of other things that seemed glaringly obvious to me (remember the million dollars in the Paypal account?). I thought a lot about getting involved myself to see if I could help change things (arrant youthful arrogance! haha), but had the kind of job at the time that made that almost impossible. I would scour OTW posts and news and talk to my friends who were volunteers and just kept thinking, Why is this like this? It could be so much better!
But here’s the thing: it's been some time since I realized that I was really, really wrong then.
I was wrong in two ways: in my perspective, and—though this second thought is less developed—I also think I was wrong in my naïveté about what happens when you try to “organize” something like AO3, and about how that project can easily become one of corporatization and monetization. (Since many of us create based on copyrighted material, I appreciate that monetization of this space would not be simple. But hey: don’t give capitalists a challenge, because they will run like hell until they find that loophole, enshittify the thing that matters to you, and somehow make you pay double for the thing you created in the first place.)
So firstly, perspective. I was looking at the situation and thinking whyyyy, when I should have been looking with heart-eyes and wondering howwww?
The amount of joy I have gotten from AO3 is almost incalculable. There is nothing in my adult life that is more consistent or ongoing than my use of AO3. That sounds wacky, but bear with me: over the last almost-twenty years, my life has changed a lot. I have changed a lot. The one thing that hasn’t? Visiting AO3.
AO3, the community that contributes to it, and the works hosted there have gotten me through heartbreak and illness and warzones and loss and a global pandemic and fear, and they’ve accompanied me in times of joy and discovery and love and change and excitement and accomplishment. I think this must be true of so many of us. This website has millions of users and millions of fanworks, and over the last 18 years this incredible source of joy has been run entirely by people who love it, just because they love it.
That is such a remarkable thing, and—while I know we all know this and talk about it; none of this is new—we don’t celebrate it and marvel at it enough, I don’t think. About a year ago I was describing AO3 to my spouse and saying: this is something built by (primarily) women and queer people, which is in itself more unusual than it should be, and it centers creativity and exchange and is not monetized in any way, despite the fact that everything else in the world that has this size and scope is monetized. Users contribute content and expertise and energy; volunteers contribute content and expertise and energy; often users are volunteers, so this is also a space in which those who benefit are continually engaged in preserving and supporting the space they inhabit.
And this? This is an anti-capitalist wonder. It is a near-fucking-miracle that this thing exists in the form that it does in 2026, and it only exists this way due to the love and generosity of thousands of people around the world, who give of themselves so that this joyful project can persist and endure.
I really do not think it is an overstatement to say that the existence of AO3 in this form represents an incredibly revolutionary, subversive, political act, and one that is ongoing. (I know this may be giving “syllic, please touch grass!” energy; people are being exterminated as I type this, and you should also volunteer and donate and fight and speak out in the world whenever you can, but I will perish on the hill that these two things are not mutually exclusive. Creation matters.)
So ten years ago (when, incidentally, the conditions for AO3’s existence in this form were much kinder and conducive), when I was asking, “Why is this such a shambles?” what I really should have been asking was, “My god, how is this fucking possible?” Because it’s truly an amazing thing. It’s actually one of the most amazing things in my life, but I’ve gotten so used to it—it’s such a bedrock of what I do most days—that I often take it for granted. I don’t feel deep gratitude and appreciation for it nearly as regularly as I ought.
Now. In an ideal world, we would not be asking volunteers around the world to keep a website with millions of users running without paying them for their labor. And people far more knowledgeable than I say there are ways to make AO3 technologically better, and that would be ideal too. There are also real issues to tackle within it, as there are in the broader world—systemic racism, for one, and the general depredations of modern technology, which AO3 is really not prepared to handle, I don’t think. So it makes sense that we’d all want to see some of these things addressed.
But here’s the thing. I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life working in big, big non-profit organizations, and I have seen first-hand the ways in which people with the best possible intentions begin to engage in corporate actions that move the organization further and further away from its mission, even as they think they are not doing so. This is because so much of our thinking is grounded in capitalism. The concepts of making things “organized” or of things “running smoothly” are so deeply intertwined with the corporate, monetized structures of our overall culture that it is almost impossible to get just a “little” corporate. Corporate is hungry. Corporate eats up the things around it. You start making one thing “efficient,” and then before you know it someone realizes that there’s a way to make it more “efficient,” and (guess what!) there’s always a tool or method developed in the deepest corporate hellhole of the United States that is available to help you achieve that “efficiency”! Once it begins, this is a process that is hard to stop.
I am obviously not saying that there is no point in thinking about how we might make AO3 stronger, more nourished as a space, or more grounded in deep expertise that already exists within our community (and as a side note, let me say: it was hard to find words that weren’t economically based when I was trying to describe this)! I’m not a slippery-sloper, and all of those things are possible, I’m sure. But I guess I am saying there is no easy answer to some of these questions or criticisms, because what AO3 is now is so unique and incredible and counter-cultural. Even as things about it are changing—I have a whole other rant about metrics, engagement, and the way in which some newcomers to fandom are bringing to it capitalist practices that I find really damaging—it still remains a marvelous, almost belief-defying thing. And I am beginning to think that many of the things about it that can be so frustrating may actually also be the things that are preserving the space’s character. The overall current of capitalism (and it’s quite the current) is so hard to withstand; you need to work actively to resist it. AO3 does, actively and passively.
It’s decentralized and horizontally organized, and depends on people’s goodwill and care, and the people volunteering to run it are determined to keep it as it is, when there would probably be great financial incentive in transforming it at this stage in its existence. It’s not owned by anyone; no one profits. It is, as the name suggests, ours: communal, collective, and, at its best, a shared responsibility.
Historically, spaces and communities of shared creation have been limited in size; they are often based locally, or depend on existing connections. And AO3 radically democratizes that, by remaining committed to being a space with no barriers to entry (except perhaps waiting for an invitation to access some fanworks, which is fair enough), and which has a deep respect for authors’ and artists’ and podficcers’ work. It allows those creators to keep their work as their own, and does not seek to scrape it or profit from it, but simply provides—for free! Without trying to sell creators anything! Without stealing creators' data to fund its operations!—a communal site to share what they make using their talent, and to connect with other makers. It’s a place where first-time writers and people who have spent decades writing can converge and convene, and it continues to be shepherded primarily by people who are not centered in broader society. That’s amazing.
I have no good way to end this, except to say that I’m going to directly volunteer my energy where I can to preserving AO3, and that I will be donating to support it, and that I am so, so grateful to everyone who has done so over the years, and continues to do so. And if you’re like me, I encourage you to take a moment today to think: I am part of something incredible. This thing is special and unique. I should value it, for all kinds of reasons, every day. And I should fight to keep it alive, as it is, because its existence is a kind of resistance, and that really, really matters right now.
its the final day of febuwhump! later today, i'll share the link to the hall of fame where you can submit until 3 march your name as a completionist of the event, PLUS do not forget that you have until 5 march to submit your works to the ao3 collection!
just because its the last official day doesn't mean you dont have time to catch up!
AND if you hang around until next weekend, you can participate in our community comment marathon where we share our love for the works on ao3 and tumblr that were shared but maybe weren't appreciated as much as they should've been, or the works you havent had the time to read this month!
This is maybe gonna sound trivial in the grand scheme of things, but I need to get it off my chest.
Anyone who says they still enjoy Hudson & Rex, does not care about the show. They don't care about the remaining characters or the creative aspect of storytelling (or more likely can't even grasp the basics of it). They have no regards for Sarah, Jesse or Joe, not even for Rex (who many claim to be the reason they still watch) as characters.
Because if they did, they would understand what a disservice this whole (disastrous) change has been to them. If they cared or respected the work of the actors, they would be mad at how their characters have been mishandled in the aftermath of losing Charlie (who they have treated as a B-level, side-character and not as the protagonist for six seasons... but that's a whole other post).
They (writers and producers if that wasn't already clear) had these characters move on as if nothing happened. They did a time jump and supposedly everything was fine, as if Charlie never existed in their lives—as if we didn't watch all of these characters and relationships develop on screen for six seasons.
Sarah loved Charlie, she was in love with him (still is and always will be in my book) and they'd just bought a house together for gods sake. They most definitely had plans for the future, were going to get married (this is not me making things up, we saw with our own eyes it was heading that way, before everything went to hell), but they just had her move on, and be fine with a snap of their fingers in the form of a dumbass time jump.
There was no shown grief, denial, anger or depression and so forth. No showing her deal with the aftermath of losing the man she loved and was building a life with; they had her jump straight to the stage of acceptance in the five stages of grief, in less than five minutes. Because, and I repeat, they have chosen to act as if Charlie never existed.
This is a disservice to Sarah as character, because the Sarah of seasons 1-6, would never have let Charlie go, never (if you don't believe me, go watch S03E09 Grave Matters, it's an example of how much Sarah would fight for Charlie). Not to mention it's also a disrespect towards Charlie and Sarah's love story, which was built over several seasons.
The points above can be said for Joe and Jessie as well. There was no grief portrayed by them either, they were not shown to be affected by Charlie's "death" in anyway, and he was their close friend and colleague. It was just *snap* moving on, Charlie who??
This whole team was a family, they looked out for one another, they fought for each other, which we saw multiple times through the years. So to have the remaining character just be fine, without seeing any of their emotions dealt with on screen, is a disservice and it's turning all of them into empty-shell caricatures of the characters we have known for six years. It's character assassination and just plainly poor storytelling.
I mean, they even managed to character assassinate Rex. That should tell you something about how badly they screwed up, when they have even mishandled the personality of A DOG. A DOG.
Once again, the partnership and bond between Charlie and Rex was the whole foundation of the series, it was the heart and soul of it (this has been repeated ad nauseam and if someone has watched this show for even one season, and doesn't grasp that, then... I have no words...)
Rex has always been loyal to a fault, he and Charlie had a connection from the start. It was highlighted several times that no-one understood Rex the way Charlie did, they practically had telepathic communication at times. Rex has been show to be lost without Charlie and be worried about him and vice versa; Charlie was ready to beat a man to death because he thought he killed Rex (S04E11 Capital Punishment). Rex saved Charlie's life numerous times, and he'd never willingly leave his side (Charlie even said this himself in S06E11 Dog and Pony Show).
Yet, they made Rex also just be fine without Charlie and had him be partnered up with a random guy... Like *shrugs*. Now some people would probably argue that Rex is "just a dog", but the problem is that the show never treated Rex as "just a dog". He was always treated more as a human (or super-dog if you will); you can't just change that after seven seasons and act as if he all of a sudden doesn't have that level of emotional understanding.
And this wasn't even only applied to Charlie and Rex, in S04E04 Leader of The Pac, he was shown missing Sarah when she was away. In S05E20 One For The Road, Rex kept sitting at Jesse's desk after he was shot. Which proves my previous point, this team was a family and they all cared for each other. All of them.
Rex not being the slightest affected by Charlie disappearing and not coming back home, is literally erasing his whole personality, and turning him into... something akin to a robot-dog. Because even in real life, dogs are affected—to various degrees—when they are separated from their owners, and they can even grieve when their humans pass away (the real-life story of Hachi is enough proof of this, go watch the movie based on him, but be warned, you'll likely bawl your eyes out). So for Rex, who had a unique bond with Charlie? It's complete character assassination for him to continue and supposedly "bond" with a new dude and forget Charlie. It's not who Rex is, it's that simple.
The fans who actually gives a damn about any of these characters, should be fucking mad at how they have been written post season 7 (or even post S07E02, if you will, but this post is already long enough to delve into that), because it's a complete failure from a writing perspective, and a damn insult towards the previous seasons stories and relationships.
So, anyone who’s continued to watch, does not care about Hudson & Rex, and they probably never did, they just care about "cute doggo" and then turn their brains off; but that seems to be the audience the production wants—and the rest of us are labeled as the "unhinged ones" for being upset and having the nerve to vocalize all of this.
Febuwhump 2026 Day 1 - "I like you better broken". Mona comes face to face with her ex.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Ride or Die (Visual Novel)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Mona/Ellie Wheeler (Main Character (Ride or Die))
Characters: Mona (Ride or Die), Main Character (Ride or Die), Ellie Wheeler (Main Character (Ride or Die))
Additional Tags: Febuwhump 2026, Febuwhump, Emotionally Hurt Mona (Ride or Die), Established Main Character/Mona (Ride or Die), Febuwhump 2026 Day 1: “I like you better broken”, Betaed for once
Series: Part 1 of NatK - Febuwhump 2026
Summary:
