Can someone please just say the Ask Tales blog is permanently closed? It honestly hurts to look back at it with even the slightest optimistic glimmer of hope.
Hi Anon,
I'll go ahead and field this, IDK if any of my fellow former ToA mods got this message as well or not but hey, I was kind of unofficially looked to as the Owner so it's on me either way.
The short answer is yes, it is safe for you and anyone else still wondering to consider Tales of Answers over. All of us mods, while we still keep in touch, have largely moved on to other projects and gotten much busier in our personal lives, to the point where even with all hands on deck maintaining the blog at the rate we did at its peak is unfeasible.
It's also a matter of loss of interest. I still love a lot of these characters and I had a blast getting into their heads while it lasted but my interest in the Tales series as a whole has waned significantly since those days, and I think I speak for the whole ToA moderation team when I say that. Part of it is we agree that there is/was an overall severe decline in the series' writing quality for a while, but it's also just that naturally people move in and out of interests as their lives go on. Our hearts aren't in it anymore to the extent that we could produce content for this fandom with any kind of consistency and quality, and it wouldn't be fair to us or anyone who remembers our work fondly if we tried to go back to it without the passion we had when the thing started. Or, worse, start using ChatGPT or some bullshit. Honestly, that had already faded pretty significantly by the time we put a pause on the project, which was most of why we did it in the first place.
On that note, there was also a lot of Fandom Drama and toxicity to deal with back then. I've been somewhat disconnected from the wider Tales Fandom for the past several years so I don't know if it's cooled off, but at the time it was pretty exhausting to be entrenched in. For what it's worth, I don't think we were completely devoid of fault in any fandom drama that ensued, and I apologize if we ever did anything particularly incensing to anyone reading this.
In any case, I will say that yes, Tales of Answers is considered closed by its former moderation team. We consider passing it on to new mods out of the question, as it was a personal project by a group of friends and we don't really want to pass it to someone we don't know and can't guarantee would operate it in line with our own views and wishes. However, the good news is that there's absolutely nothing stopping someone else from starting a new Tales mailbox blog and taking up our mantle themself! In fact, if anyone is interested in doing so, please feel free to make use of all our character animations, which you can find on the blog itself. Most of those weren't even made by us, it was kind of a free for all to begin with.
Will we ever return in ANY capacity? Hard to say and I wouldn't count on it. For my part, I've considered occasionally popping in to make little unprompted skits whenever the inspiration strikes, but as y'all can see, said inspiration hasn't struck significantly enough in the past eight years to actually do it. Maybe I will some day, if any of the other mods still attached to the blog want to they're invited to as well. We're probably not gonna open the mailbox back up, though. Sorry.
ANYWAY now that I've disappointed everyone, if for some reason you still want to keep an eye on whatever I'm doing, I'm pretty inactive here these days. You can find me on Twitter (for however long it takes for Muskrat to kill it) at @aceofplaces, or on CoHost at @vegapunk-aurora. I have a lot of little projects I don't talk much about in public brewing in the background, hopefully some day I'll have one congeal enough to actually be worth sharing.
Now go, be free. Thanks for holding a candle for us for so long and sorry for making you do it for nothing, it is sincerely pretty validating to know this weird little shitpost factory my friends and I made when I was in high school ended up meaning something to somebody even now. Take care of yourself.
-Aurora (formerly Mod Ace)