Sokka Got Some Serious Game.

Imagining Kate’s reaction to Yelena manspreading as soon as she walks in the room

that new pyrrha outfit thoooo👀💅🏻

Same here, except my parents said that it was just the devil trying to lead me from God.

Why is Blake in this image?

not going to rest until i  find out why master shake is in this image 

names and places

Supercorptober Day 20 “Kara”

thanks to kmsdraws for the prompts

Kara and Lena share the weight of names and home. 

////

When she said she had been leaving to go home, the truth was she didn’t know where that was exactly. The home she remembered is no longer there; even if it was, it wouldn’t belong to her anymore. So when she steps off the plane, she decides just to start heading somewhere. She takes a train from Dublin to Wicklow, hugging the coastline and the bay stretching beyond it, the views of the sea and mountains demanding equal attention until the greens and greys begin to feel familiar again.

She settles into the guesthouse she’s renting and starts the process of unpacking both her thoughts and her things.

She is just finishing washing the last of the dishes in the sink and placing a kettle on to boil when she hears the gentle fall of footsteps on the back steps and then an awkward rusting outside.

“It’s open, Kara,” she calls out unable to quite contain the smile that crosses her face as she sets down the tea towel and turns to face the door.

“Hi,” Kara says sheepishly, head barely poking through the small opening she’s made for herself.

Lena chuckles softly and moves forward to open the door wider, then back again so Kara can make her way inside.

“I, uh,” Kara trails off, looking anywhere but at Lena. “I-um know we talked about me maybe stopping by at some point, but uh-you — I’m realizing now as I’m standing here, you probably didn’t mean quite so soon?”

“I’m glad you’re here.” Lena interrupts, with a gentle hand on Kara’s forearm, “I was just making tea. Would you like some?”

Kara nods mutely and follows Lena into the kitchen, setting herself down on the wooden bench under the window right beside the kitchen table while Lena finishes preparing the tea.

“So,” Kara finally speaks up when they’re both sitting next to each over, “I know it hasn’t been long, but how are you?”

“I’m figuring out how to feel, I think,” she traces a small scratch in the table, “It feels different, but it’s good, I think.”

Kara nods, understanding what Lena means. “I’m glad.” taking a sip of her tea.

They sit and just settle into the warmth of the house and the steadiness of just being together.

“What was it like for you?”  Lena’s hands fidget on the table in front of her.

“Hmm?” Kara hums, attention shifting.

She takes a deep breath “going back to Argo that first time?”

Kara looks down at her hands, clutching the mug between them a little harder than maybe she realizes.

“It was-it was hard.” She says after a second, voice shaking slightly.

She clears her throat and looks up at Lena, wanting to help her find whatever answers she is looking for. “It looked like home, but it didn’t feel like the same home I thought of when I was all alone, the same one that I had carried with me across all that space.”

Lena reaches out and covers Kara’s hand with her own, the warmth of the mug radiating through both of them when she gives a gentle squeeze.

“I was grateful to see my mom. To hug her and to know she was okay, but the longer I was there, the further I felt from where I should be. I think during that time, Kara Danvers and Kara Zor-el felt further apart from each other than Supergirl and Kara Danvers ever did.

Kara squeezes her eyes shut, visibly steadying herself, shaking her head slightly.

"Sorry, I didn’t mean to, I shouldn’t talk about that.”

“Hey, you’re okay,” Lena says quickly, moving even closer to Kara, “we’re okay.”

Kara nods, leaning into Lena.

“I know…I know.”

“Do they feel closer again now?” Lena whispers after a few moments, her head now resting against Kara’s shoulder.

“With you, they always did.” She responds quietly, a little hesitantly, the next words chosen carefully. “With you, I always felt closest to who I was as just me, just Kara.”

And it feels different to hear like this, side by side, instead of broken in front of each other. Not as desperate words to get her to stay, but as a thank you for ever having known her at all.

“Walsh,” Lena says, heart skipping and voice breaking just a little.

“Huh?” Kara murmurs, caught off guard by her sudden shift.

“Lena Kieran Walsh,” she takes a deep breath and starts again, “that’s who I was before I was Lena Luthor.”

She lets her shoulders rise and fall, Kara moving with her to keep them pressed together, “who knows how far apart she and I will seem after all this.”

“It’s beautiful,” Kara says, after a minute, like she knows Lena needs the words to settle down into the air around them. To feel like she has said them to the world and not just in between the two of them.

“But you can always be just Lena with me if you want.”

Lena squeezes Kara’s hand tightly and smiles. “thank you.”

Kara nods before she takes another sip of her tea and looks out the window, her own feeling settling back down around her too.

“Can I ask you one more thing?”

Kara turns back to her.

“You can ask me everything.”

“Did names on Krypton mean something like they do here?”

Her brow crinkles a bit.

“I think, yeah, in a way. We believed deeply in history and families. Most children were named after someone in their family who had died, allowing them to live on and pass on Rao’s light. So names stayed in families for generations. But our houses have always held more meaning. My ancestors were among the first astronomers on Krypton, and we were a house of scientists up until me.”

“El means star, right?”

Kara nods, the fingers threaded in between Lena’s tightening almost imperceptibly.

“Kara Zor-El Danvers,” Lena says, the syllables fitting together with the kind of symmetry that couldn’t help but feel right.

Kara ducks her head a little, a soft smile and gentle blush coloring her cheeks. “Yeah.”

But then again, everything with Kara just felt right.

“Do you know your name has meaning here too? In Ireland? It’s usually spelled with a C, but I feel like I’m willing to overlook that.”

Kara huffs out a laugh and bumps her shoulder a little against Lena’s, easing some of the heaviness.

“What does it mean?”

And Lena knows she came here to look for answers about her own name and her own home, but right now, she can’t help but think about how those things feel tied up in Kara too.

“Friend,” she pauses, her heart quickening in the space between the words, “and beloved.”

She feels Kara shift next to her, and the words feel like they could just fall out now on their own if she let them, but she doesn’t take the chance.

“And I feel like,” she reaches out to cup her cheek, thumb stroking over soft skin, watching Kara’s eyes move from her eyes to her hands, “you should know you’re both to me.”

Kara’s eyes close, head falling forward to bring them even closer, “I’d really like to kiss you now,” and Lena can feel her smile underneath her hands, “if that’s okay.”

Lena nods and feels Kara’s lips ghost lightly across her jaw. Feels them pull against her bottom lip. Feels them press firmly against hers in a kiss that has all the weight of their histories and their names for once becoming something beautiful instead.

No matter who I ask, this is the consensus. Nothing happened except Raven calling Cinder out on her name. I chuckled at that, but that’s all.

That was…disappointing. 

I just realized how many of my friends are bi...

reblog if ur bi, ur not biphobic, or ur best friend is a beautiful valid bisexual

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much.