I also wonder if the strong ‘opt-in concrit’ stance goes alongside the heavily minority-based nature of Ao3 writerbase. Because yeah, if you’re getting a lot of unsolicited ‘you’re living wrong’ criticism in real life, you’re hardly going to want that from your escape.

for those of you who make fun of the idea that all lowercase fiction is an artistic choice, I would like to share the reasons why I did this for a few stories, because I suspect others might be doing it for the same reasons but be unable to articulate why. And yes, I had to do it deliberately, because the word processor I was using kept capitalizing letters so I had to delete the letter and uncapitalize it or undo the autocorrect. For the few fics that I did it for, it was an artistic choice. In my case, the few it made sense for were dreamlike or dissociating, so it communicated a feeling of being unmoored from reality or the usual standards of reality. I can also point to the culprit as to who gave me the idea in the first place: E. E. Cummings, though the ‘common knowledge’ that he never used capital letters might have been a misunderstood exaggeration.

Warning: this might be a feels chapter.

Andrew briefly considered buying Xander a pack of smokes and went ‘that’s not going to help’.

This quote is original and it’s such a good line from Wolf I had to include it. He’s good people. “You look for evil in people, sooner or later, you’ll find it. Even when it wasn’t there in the first place.” (also the ‘it’s a cold place’--I forgot that line was actually in there)
actual line from the game from Nicholas: “I’m still not convinced he’s not here, somewhere, feeding on the ghosts of lost children like some kind of bogeyman.” He knows intuitively what was going on, even if he didn’t know the specifics.

Main Points:
Star Trek (the 2009!movie verse) Cambion AU (New Genesis)
Summary: Kirk lets his crew in on what's going on.
Word Count: 980
Rating: Gen

also I never thanked/welcomed spring_gloom /facepalm.  Hi, hope you enjoy your stay & good to see you again!

In the actual game, they build the Park up, and then you just...only get two missions in there. (To be fair, all the mind games individual to the character would be a little harder to do, with an MMORPG.) They almost do enough with it in the standalone game, The Park, but then...don’t actually finish Lorraine’s story there. So this wound up being about...three, four actual missions, plus the spinoff, plus at least a little bit of Lorraine’s mission, plus some of my own stuff and other horror inspiration thrown in a blender and then vacuum distilled down to a manageable and coherent volume.
I had no idea how Winter’s murder-void thing would go until he started going off on an Arkham-rant, so. Yeah, that happened. (If you don’t get the reference, don’t worry about it.)

I am actually kind of really fond of this one. Protesting is good, but it shouldn’t just end there. The population of Sunnydale should be much more diverse than we saw and I worked my speculations as to why it’s not into the story. And Xander’s reasoning for choosing Blake came out as I was writing and it actually makes a lot of sense; he’s always been one of the Scoobies with the most knowledge about the real world, for better or worse. The underbelly of things. Blake is aspirational in that he thinks he can make a difference, while Xander didn’t (and still, to some extent, doesn’t). It also...maybe wasn’t an effort to shut Buffy out, sadly, but a ‘I’d really like to be her and know I can’t be, so here’s the next best thing’ deal. And then they just get to be domestic, more, which I really liked from At the End of All Things.  (...also there's some interesting thematic things that happen when you put this opposite to the Initiative....)

( Chapter 372: Natural Science )