stardust_rifle

X Japan on Ao3 Ship Meta: Part 1

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:26:31 GMT

Struck by a bout of divine madness and am now currently doing X Japan Ao3 ship stats, despite the inherent swingyness and Oops All Spiders Georg-ness of doing stats for a fandom this tiny. This is Part 1 of this, I guess. Got curious about if there were any intra-X Japan ships that had never been written about, and wound up creating this chart!

Chart is accurate as of 4/29/2026. Top 7 pairings are color-coded, as are the bottom 3.

MAIN TAKEAWAYS:

- Yoshiki is very obviously the fandom's resident Little Black Dress, as 5/7 of the most written-about X Japan pairings include him as a participant. Pretty feminine blond twink whose entire public persona is about how he's a tortured genius poor little meow meow gets shipped with everyone, many such cases.

- Pata, by contrast, is the least-shipped member of the band. No pairings involving him are in the top 7, and 2/3 least-written about pairings involve him. Whether this is due to people not finding him hot or his public persona being World's Most Normal Guy and thus less interesting then his bandmates, who's to say.

- Sugizo's ship-status is very swingy- he's a participant in 2/3 of the least-written about pairings, but he's also a participant in 2/7 of the most written about pairings. Not sure what to make of this.

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Wed, 29 Apr 2026 01:59:52 GMT

Inspired by the post on fanmix_monthly, a non-comprehensive list of songs and the characters/pairings/scenarios that M associates with them!

Ship in a Bottle by Fin Argus- Diavolo/Doppio from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.

Hurt, as covered by Nine Inch Nails- Jingliu from Honkai Star Rail. Literally everyone who gives her Mildly Edgy Tumblr Girl songs are objectively wrong, this is Her Theme and I won't hear any naysayers.

The Light Behind Your Eyes by My Chemical Romance- Solid Snake/Otacon and Sunny from Metal Gear Solid, but specifically the version of them from the original ending to MGS4 where they would have been executed as traitors to the state. Would absolutely make an animatic based on this scenario if I had the time.

Lagtrain by inabakumori- Pannacotta Fugo from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. This may be like 90% the fault of an animatic, but by god does the song fit him.

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got psycho le cemu on the brain after seeing a bunch of fic for them get posted

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 23:19:12 GMT

too lazy to actually make the edit but i can't stop thinking about a le virgin psycho le cemu vs le chad buck tick meme

virgin psycho le cemu:
- immediately pauses activities after their vocalist gets caught with speed
- only fully resumes activity almost a decade after the arrest
- still haven't fully regained the popularity they had at their peak

chad buck tick:
- refuses to disband after their guitarist gets caught with lsd
- commemorated their grand return after only three months, the anniversary of which they celebrate every year
- released multiple songs about doing drugs/lsd after the arrest
- continue to be famous and beloved

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Icon Game

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 02:26:31 GMT

Sent here by smilebackwards!

Reply to this post saying 'icon', and I will tell you my favorite icon of yours. Then post this to your own journal using your own favorite icon if you're one of those inhuman things that are actually capable of choosing between ~~YOUR PRECIOUS BABIES!~~ userpics.

Even though I don't use her that much (I was a bit too young for LJ, and am mentally more accustomed to the idea of having a single, unchanging icon), I do really love this Chuu-tan icon that I got off of Tumblr courtesy of chiisana-lion. She is A Mood.

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m's procrastinating so they did a fandom stats yipeee

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 05:00:25 GMT

because the vkei yaoi hyperfixation is doing awful things to my brain, i've been prowling the ao3 tags. i subjectively notice both an increase in malice mizer fics, and offhandedly wonder "hey, is it because of the tiktok kids? and does the increase i sense actually play out when i look at the data?"

so i decided to Do A Stats.

two things that jump out immediately. the massive spike in 2015 appears to be caused entirely by two authors mass-reuploading their old fics without backdating them. one of those authors is also largely responsible for the 2018 spike. (for posterity's sake, this person used to be my mutual. god i love how small this fandom is sometimes)

after 2018 and the subsequent crash back down to earth, we start to see a steady increase starting in 2020, which could very well be attributed to young people discovering the band on tiktok during the pandemic and starting to write fic.

now, the question popping in my brain is "why malice mizer?" when i look at other vkei bands that got really big amongst young people recently, like jiluka (53 works) and gulu gulu (4 works), there's not really this massive upswelling of fanfic writing on ao3 for them. i think this is largely due to two reasons.

firstly, the members of malice mizer have very obvious capital S capital P Stage Personas, a very clearly defined "aristocratic vampire fantasy" aesthetic, which creates more of a sense of separation from the Real People which might make it easier to write fic.

secondly, malice mizer has Lore. "why did gackt leave malice mizer?" is like the second-most speculated-about-topic on the vkei fan internet, things like kami's death, the fraying nature of the professional relationships in the band, all of that is just kind of fuel for people to mold and reshape into Narrative, and Narrative is a fundamental component of good RPF, in my opinion.

i have literally no idea how to conclude this other than that m was kind of right and now they feel vindicated. yipee.

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Three Pieces Of Meta M Found Recently That They Like

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:16:55 GMT

An Entirely Too Serious and Detailed Omegaverse Primer, which is essentially the author's personal worldbuilding headcanons for their version of the Omegaverse, but with an eye turned towards medical realism, given that they're writing for The Pitt. I <3 worldbuilding primers almost as much as I <3 Omegaverse.

Purist-Anarchist Ship Discourse Alignments, which made me laugh so hard. Gave me a flashback to arguing about Voltron ships on Tumblr, which I never actually thought I'd be nostalgic for.

And finally, Haruka Isn't Autistic-Coded – He Has an Intellectual Disability (And Why That Matters), a Milgram meta that I wish I could force everyone in the fandom to read. This came out before Trial 3, but it has overall aged wonderfully in spite of that.

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Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:45:02 GMT

Just remembered that one “meta” that argued that writing people as trans in RPF when they weren’t/aren’t IRL was like “putting people in blackface without their consent”

Generationally awful sequence of words

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Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:37:29 GMT

So excited for Three Weeks For Dreamwidth, because this time, I'm actually going to finish the damn thing (probably), given how many posts I've been storing up, but this means I've been sitting on a bunch of stuff that I'm super excited to talk about. I just love fandom history and fandom culture and tracking the evolution of fandom trends, especially when it's a fandom that not many people know about (visual kei RPF), but that heavily rubs up against other fandoms (general RPF and anime spaces), and I just can't wait to talk about it with people...

But, I have to wait for the 25th. Such are my woes...

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M Digs Through Jrockyaoi Archives And Pulls Out Interesting Shit Part 7

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 23:38:09 GMT

(bangya inside baseball) A petition to stop the hide Museum from closing down was posted in the comm. There were some comments that could have been posted today (hating on Eternal Hidegya Public Enemy Number One: Matsumoto Hiroshi) and some that are absolutely of their time (begging Yoshiki to take over the museum because of course he would do so much of a better job).

Someone should write a meta about English-speaking vkei fandom's changing relationship with the personage of Hayashi Yoshiki. I might consider doing it if such a thing wouldn't require me to use bangya Twitter, alternatively known as The Worst Twitter Fandom. (Yes. I hear you saying that your respective Twitter Fandom is the worst. I can assure you, they are not.)

~*~

Love the very funny phenomenon of people celebrating bandman birthdays and memorial days by posting fic of them. Especially really porny fic. To quoth YouTuber hazel, "Of course, the best way to show you love something is to spill your seed over it."

~*~

I have stumbled across a third Vkei Bandman Mental Hospital AU Roleplay Community! This one is actually still online, unlike the other two, so I checked out the rules out of sheer curiosity, but as soon as I got to "maximum of four mental disorders per character" I burst out laughing and couldn't stop. If only. If only.

~*~

Finally, as part of a post discussing changing the journal's layout, the mod said "Not to mention that those who write Dir en grey are pretty opinionated about the pairings they like/don't like and I'd like to have something that better represents everyone... if that makes sense. ^^;;"

Do I smell ship wars? Ship drama? Shipcourse? That makes sense, because I've noticed that there isn't really a Diru juggernaut ship or pair of ships that everyone is going for, it seems (from my archiving, I'm absolutely going to be running data on this after I'm done), aka, the kind of environment conducive to ship wars.

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M Digs Through Jrockyaoi Archives And Pulls Out Interesting Shit Part 6

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:55:49 GMT

glanced at a fic and was Abruptly Reminded of why i got into writing vkei rpf in the first place (m's Mostest Belovedest RPFest OTPest vkei rpf otp is omnipresent in any fic where one or both of them appear, yet 99% of the time they're tragic lovers separated by death, or Everyone's Gay Dads, or like the fic i just glanced at, somehow both!)

(it's not like the first one doesn't make sense, because of *gestures at RL*. but the second one pisses me off, because i seem to have a habit of latching on to Everyone's Gay Dads ships no matter the fandom)

~*~

So, you've seen this meme, right?

This is something I've noticed in RPF fandoms a lot, and while people attribute this to "i need to put every single character in the work somehow or else people will get mad", I think there's a reverse cause, which is "i need to populate every role with 'canon' characters" impulse. RPF fandoms can go crazy with this, because unlike a work that has a limited "canon", which has a much more limited cast of characters, the canon of "visual kei RPF" is "every single visual kei band and musician that has ever existed". One does not have to make an OC, even for the most utterly minor roles (unless they need to be female for plot reasons, because of how male-dominated the scene is), so yes, the bus driver can be an actually existing musician. So can the janitor, the landlord, the teachers in a high school AU, incidental friends, bartenders. An entire world where everyone is a real life visual kei musican. I find this deeply and profoundly charming.

~*~

Final observation, but this one will require some explanation for my non-vkei peeps. Pierrot is a band that was semi-popular in the vkei RPF scene. The juggernaut pairing was pairing vocalist Kirito with bassist Kohta. These men are brothers in real life.

Anyways, a new person showed up to the comm, posting links to their fic, which included Pierrot fic. This fic did not ship Kirito and Kohta. The new person felt the need to disclaim "OH. Just so you know. I have NOTHING against incest. Even if I don't write it, or read it. :D"

God bless. We used to be a society.

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M Digs Through Jrockyaoi Archives And Pulls Out Interesting Shit Part 5

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:35:35 GMT

If I had a nickel for every post made to the comm self-promoting a vkei RP set in a mental hospital, I'd have two nickels. It's not a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

(~~of course maps won't be posted until 2017 so the entire concept of "vkei mental hospital", and in fact, the entire concept of "mental hospital au" had not been rendered obsolete at this time~~)

~*~

(bangya inside baseball) First Kisaki-centric fic. Pardon me while I hurl.

~*~

More insane "who the fuck is this bandman" search rabbit holes. Found a fic shipping Kamijo (well-known bandman) with someone identified as "Sanaka" from a band called "Fatima". Quickly run off to check vk.gy to make sure that there really was a Sanaka in Fatima, and was very confused to see that there was no artist identified as "Sanaka" on their profile. Looked at the two other bands that came up as having names adjacent to "Fatima", and found no "Sanaka" there either (except Taiji was part of one of them? gonna have to check them out lol) Googled "Sanaka Fatima Vkei" and found the Visual Kei FANDOM wiki, which had a page on a vocalist named "Hitomi", and claimed that he had formerly gone by the names of "Sanaka" and "Kanoma" and been in Fatima.

Check the page of Most Famous Fatima. Their vocalist is listed as "Kanoma". Click on "Kanoma's" page. The page of this Hitomi/Kanoma matches up with the FANDOM wiki's Hitomi/Kanoma (formerly in Fatima and Moran, currently heading up a solo project called UMIYURI), except it doesn't mention him ever going by any stage name other than "Hitomi" or "Kanoma".

So where the fuck are they getting the "Sanaka" name from??!?!?!?!?

I grit my teeth and put him down as "Hitomi|Kanoma". I move on with my life.

(at least this pairing is explicable- both Kamijo and Hitomi/Kanoma/Sanaka were roadies for Malice Mizer!)

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M Digs Through Jrockyaoi Archives And Pulls Out Interesting Shit Part 4

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:56:03 GMT

(bangya inside baseball warning) Saw a fic in March of 2005 where the author was apologizing in the notes for their Ron The Death-eater esque portrayal of Yoshiki. "I know he's not like this in real life," they say. Oh, how the turntables turn. How they turn, indeed.

~*~

Late March 2005 also marks the first time I encountered a bandman who I did not recognize! "Who the fuck is Makoto!" I shouted at my computer when I read the pairing information. The comments, fic, and authors note were utterly unhelpful, except for indicating that this was not an OC. When I typed the name "Makoto" into their search bar, vk.gy helpfully informed me that my search returned over 50 results and I should consider narrowing it. Thankfully, the work itself describes our mysterious Makoto!

"He had short brown hair, so dark it was almost black. His eyes were wide and lined carefully in black. He was wearing a so-odd-it's-cute clash of patterns and colors."

Well, the last two are #justvkeithings and thus not likely to be helpful, but the first one is fairly helpful! And after a bit of searching on vk.gy, I'm 80% sure this "Makoto" is ex-Aucifer vocalist turned soloist Koshinaka Makoto. I have no idea where they're getting the "clashing colors" stuff from, because from all the pictures I can find of him he's fairly soft visual, but I've dug through all the Makotos on vk.gy and he's the only one who has A: dark short brown hair, and B: was active before 2005. He's never done anything with Toshiya (what is it with Toshiya and getting shipped with guys he's never interacted with????), so this seems to just be an author agendaposting their favorite Vkei Guy. Good for them!

~*~

And to end off, #justcutseymid2000shomophobiathings. Fascinating worldview being expressed through the juxtaposition of this icon and posting yaoi.

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And While M's On The Topic of Reccing Things

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:42:57 GMT

This video is utterly incoherent to those of you who don't have Terminal Vkei Brainrot but if you do it's utterly hilarious, I assure you. My only complaint is that I think that the "i fuck like it's for survival" line would have fit Gackt better than what they used.

(i know i still have some vkei followers, and i need all of them to see this video)

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oh he shaved off some of his jawbone and put it in his guitar? interesting use of free will there

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:02:49 GMT

a funny thing about being a Weird Trans Person is that you wind up bodily-autonomy-pilled to such a degree that you come across as an insane person to anyone else who is not similarly Pilled

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Two Fun Things M Wants To Share

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:01:44 GMT

This aggressively cute animated short about two trans people in love, with a really indie energy that makes me happy for some reason.

I've probably shared this before, but this meta on Ao3 (archive-locked) is one of my absolute favorite works on fandom. The first chapter is one of the absolute best "why do people do RPF" explainers I've ever seen, while the second chapter is devoted to analyzing the Dream SMP's fandom practices in the context of How RPF Fandoms Function, how the DSMP fandom's practices differ and stay the same, and why that is.

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M Digs Through Jrockyaoi Archives And Pulls Out Interesting Shit Part 3

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 04:48:52 GMT

More of M's horrible quixotic quest to make sure that when LJ inevitably kicks the bucket, it won't drag this massively-important-for-vkei-fandom-history comm with it! On with the observations!

~*~

In the comments section of a post published on February 25th, 2005, a commenter by the name of sadist_love snuck this little complaint in-

"Other than that, I just wanted to whine about the lack of jrock variety. ^^; ::coughs:: I know you don’t control it, but it just irritates me that ninety percent of these fics are Dir en Grey. x.x; No offense, I adore them to death, but the DeG fans are driving me mad."

you and me both buster you and me both (at the end of this, i will be getting stats on how many times i had to type the phrase "Dir en grey" for my stupid little catalog, and when i see that number i will probably cry)

~*~

In the author's notes of a fic published in March of 2005, this comment was made which is just... profoundly revealing about gender and gender presentation and women in slash fanfic in a a way that I could probably write an entire gender studies thesis on.

"Oh yeah, also, I realize Shinya is a complete woman in this. xD It's pretty much necessary because there are no women in the story, just Dir en Grey, so Shinya has to take the role of the giggling date-setter-upper. xD" (inline link added by me to provide context for my non-vkei peeps)

Again. Whole. Gender. Studies. Thesis. Truly fascinating in the amount of unspoken implications that the author managed to pack into two sentences without even trying!

~*~

Another thing I've noticed is the presence of the de rigueur I DO NOT OWN statement, which is really interesting as a linguistic phenomenon, because, like, it's fundamentally ridiculous on its face? Of course, you, teenage fujoshi, do not own these Real Human Men. The most fitting disclaimer I can think of for RPF stuff is "for the love of god i do not believe any of this shit is actually real or really happened, i am just having fun here", but while this did see occasional use in the comm, I saw way more "i do not own" stuff. Interesting little linguistic phenomenon, and I'm curious if anyone who has experience with other groups of RPF-ers from around this time period has also encountered the "do not own" disclaimer on RPF stuff?

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M Digs Through Jrockyaoi Archives And Pulls Out Interesting Shit Part 2

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:51:38 GMT

I continue! At the stage of Archivist Metadata Madness where my brain is completely and utterly consumed by the subject of said madness. Onward with the interesting finds!

~*~

In early 2005, there was suddenly a striking increase in the amount of Miyavi/Toshiya fics being posted to the comm, when this was previously a nonexistent pairing before. And it isn't just one person doing all the posting, either! There was a post advertising a comm just for the pairing (which leads to a never-archived dead link, so my investigation hit a roadblock).

(For all of my non-vkei followers, Toshiya is the bassist of Dir en grey. Miyavi is a guitarist and solo artist. They, to the best of my knowledge, have never done any sort of collaboration together.)

The first place my brain went to was "did they do a hella shippy photoshoot or something like that together around this time?" A cursory search on Tumblr and Pinterest came up empty. The second place my brain went was that this is an example of a phenomenon that I see in a lot of super tiny fan communities and subsets of fan communities where everyone is like 3 degrees of separation from each other max, where ideas and tropes spread way faster than in larger ones. I think someone just posted a Meev/Toshiya fic because they looked kind of similar (Due le quartz Meev especially), or they thought they'd be hot together, and then their five friends all sort of go "hey, that's a fun idea" and start writing their own, and from an outsider's perspective who isn't aware of how these sorts of small fan communities work, it seems like "oh my god this thing is wildly popular", but the social dynamics are more like "this got really popular within a specific group of friends" than "this got super popular in a megafandom".

(of course, I could just not be finding the shippy photoshoot that kicked this off?)

~*~

Onward to the next thing! On an "are you a yaoi fangirl" Quizilla quiz that got linked to the comm (which got archived on the Wayback Machine! yay!), they appear to be using the term "june" to describe BL with original characters? Really interesting fannish linguistics thing! (in Japan, I think the term was used to describe BL in the days before "BL" emerged as the dominant term, but I don't know if there was ever a "this is specifically for original characters" meaning there.)

(speaking of which... you can't actually get an answer, but the questions truly are a wonderful time capsule. Have fun!

~*~

And the final observation in this post- I spotted a Valentines Day fic that the author dedicated to her girlfriend. Sapphic fujo4fujo relationships are the highest and purest form of love and it delights me to see that this noble tradition of our glorious people stretches back decades.

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phrases that m deploys way too often in real life that only they think are funny

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:48:16 GMT

- "I am a centrist on the issue of X", where "X" is something utterly non-political that it would be insane to proclaim oneself as a centrist on. Ex: "I am a centrist on the issue of Naruto."

- "If you work hard and believe in yourself, then X", where "X" is something that absolutely can not be accomplished simply by working hard and believing in oneself. Ex: "Cis men can get pregnant if they work hard and believe in themselves."

EDIT: "Yeah, sure, I'll integrate that into my worldview", where "that" is something completely insane, but which would be really fun to believe.

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Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:45:31 GMT

god hates me. god hates my hubris. i am going to die and the cause of death will be typing "dir en grey" for the eight billionth time in my stupid gay little catalog .txt file that i made to go along with my stupid gay jrockyaoi archives. kill me. i make good decisions about what to do with my time because i am a sane and normal man.

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Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:26:06 GMT

visual prison would have been so good if it was good

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M Digs Through Jrockyaoi Archives And Pulls Out Interesting Shit Part 1

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 04:03:03 GMT

The visual kei autism came back with a vengance. I am currently downloading everything posted to the LiveJournal Jrockyaoi comm for preservation purposes, and have decided to do a feature for Three Weeks For Dreamwidth where I pull out interesting quotes and observations and present them for a general audience! This will probably be interesting if you're into fandom trends, fandom history, weeb-adjacent stuff, and RPF/LJ fandom culture, even if you don't know what visual kei is. Comments that make no sense if you aren't a vkei weirdo will be prefaced with (bangya inside baseball), "bangya" being a term for "visual kei fan".*

What is visual kei? If you want to go nuts, here's probably the best English-language history of the movement, but if you're just here for the fandom culture stuff, it's a subfield of Japanese rock and metal music scene primarily characterized by its unique emphasis on visuals, described by Cracked as "the aftermath of an orgy between lolitas, goths, vampires and anime characters where everybody had to hurriedly get dressed in the dark." Bandmen who crossdress regularly are so common in the scene that there's a specific term for it in English-speaking fandom (onnagata). Stagegay is omnipresent and goes insanely hard. It may not have been intended as the Perfect Music Genre For Edgy Fujos, but that is the role it ended up filling.

Follow me below the cut!

( Read more... )

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it's not that they're bad but they just have a solid 5/10-6/10 discography

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 03:36:31 GMT

research for the mamogya fanlore article is going down some dark places, a word which here means that m thought "good god if you're going to be cutting yourself for a bandman and @ -ing him the pics please at least pick one that makes good music" while collecting primary sources

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Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:32:20 GMT

If there's one thing I want English-speaking AMV/animatic culture to steal from CN-speaking AMV/animatic culture it's the presence of La gloire à mes genoux as an entry in the list of Default AMV/Animatic Songs. It fucks.

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also reminded about how much i hate every single vkei fan who is not one of my Beloved Mutuals

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:53:43 GMT

currently wearing a t shirt that says I LOVE DOING PRIMARY SOURCE RESEARCH ON TEN SEPARATE DYING WEBSITES IN A LANGUAGE I DO NOT SPEAK VERY WELL

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wiki editing really is like crack to autists i thought they were exaggerating

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:38:10 GMT

Today, I celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ by entering some sort of bizarre stupor and going on a horrible editing spree of Fanlore's Jojo's Bizarre Adventure articles.

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