Tokusatsu: Girls Remix Exchange Signups Open
Feb. 20th, 2026 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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fandomcalendarOne of the simplest and purest pleasures in fiction is to ride along as an unhappy person becomes happier, and this at the heart is the charm of the self-pub coming-of-trans novel Our Simulated Selves.
On first glance the premise of this one could seem dire: depressed incel, told by dream girl that they would not date even if the incel was the "last man on Earth," uses advanced brain-scanning technology and giant quantum supercomputer to set up a simulation world where literally everybody else on Earth does disappear immediately after that argument, and see how long it takes sim self and dream girl to get together in this apocalypse scenario. (The reader, who has already seen our protagonist describe dysphoric brain fog and experience mysterious joy about playing a girl character in D&D, will at this point certainly have some ideas about the ways that this sad incel is working from some fundamentally incorrect principles.)
Most of the book is from the POV of sim protagonist with occasional outside-world interjections and responses from the simulation runner, which means you also get sort of a fun inside/outside view of an apocalypse-ish survival situation -- within the simulation, protagonist and dream girl are running around gathering up non-perishable food and trying to figure out how long the power grid is going to last; meanwhile, outside the simulation, Protagonist Zero Version is like 'shit, I didn't really think through that they'd be treating this like an apocalypse and I forgot to write any code for food spoilage!' But the main satisfaction of the book is in watching our protagonist go through the work of transformation to become a better and happier person -- with a little added weight, because at the same time we're also seeing the worst and cruelest and most unhappy version. Overall I found the reading experience really charming and sweet!
On first glance the premise of this one could seem dire: depressed incel, told by dream girl that they would not date even if the incel was the "last man on Earth," uses advanced brain-scanning technology and giant quantum supercomputer to set up a simulation world where literally everybody else on Earth does disappear immediately after that argument, and see how long it takes sim self and dream girl to get together in this apocalypse scenario. (The reader, who has already seen our protagonist describe dysphoric brain fog and experience mysterious joy about playing a girl character in D&D, will at this point certainly have some ideas about the ways that this sad incel is working from some fundamentally incorrect principles.)
Most of the book is from the POV of sim protagonist with occasional outside-world interjections and responses from the simulation runner, which means you also get sort of a fun inside/outside view of an apocalypse-ish survival situation -- within the simulation, protagonist and dream girl are running around gathering up non-perishable food and trying to figure out how long the power grid is going to last; meanwhile, outside the simulation, Protagonist Zero Version is like 'shit, I didn't really think through that they'd be treating this like an apocalypse and I forgot to write any code for food spoilage!' But the main satisfaction of the book is in watching our protagonist go through the work of transformation to become a better and happier person -- with a little added weight, because at the same time we're also seeing the worst and cruelest and most unhappy version. Overall I found the reading experience really charming and sweet!
Clarifications
Character &/Reader nominations will not be accepted. Please nominate only canonical characters or broadly defined original characters. Feel free to re-nominate as Character &/ Any, or Character &/ Original Character.
Please nominate under Crossover Fandom or they will be rejected:
Inception
Arthur (Inception)/Tommy Conlon
John Blake/Eames (Inception)
Dune Movies
Paul Atreides/Anakin Skywalker
Bullet Train (2022)
Tangerine (Bullet Train)/Sergei Kravinoff (Kraven the Hunter)
Tangerine (Bullet Train)/Tom Ryder (The Fall Guy)
The Fall Guy (2024)
Tom Ryder (The Fall Guy)/Nikolai Kravinoff (Kraven the Hunter)
Tom Ryder (The Fall Guy)/Sergei Kravinoff (Kraven the Hunter)
Multifandom: Goreswap 2026 Sign Ups Open!
Feb. 19th, 2026 04:19 pmslashmarks posting in fandomcalendarNominations for Unsent Letters 2026 are now open (a little late, my apologies)! The tagset is here.
Nominations will remain open until Feb 25, 11:59PM UTC (countdown).
Please disambiguate all relationship nominations (include the fandom in parentheses after the relationship). This will help your nominations get approved faster!
AO3 Collection | Rules
Mod contact: DW PM or unsentlettersexchange @ gmail
Nominations will remain open until Feb 25, 11:59PM UTC (countdown).
Please disambiguate all relationship nominations (include the fandom in parentheses after the relationship). This will help your nominations get approved faster!
AO3 Collection | Rules
Mod contact: DW PM or unsentlettersexchange @ gmail
- You may nominate 7 fandoms, and 7 relationships in each fandom.
- Please disambiguate all nominations: add the fandom in parentheses to the end of the relationship, e.g. Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso (Rogue One).
- Please nominate under a specific media type if possible. Nominations under [Fandom] & Related Fandoms or [Fandom] - All Media Types will be accepted, but please note that requests under All Media Types will not match to an offer under a specific media type, and vice versa.
- Nomination clarifications will be posted to this community. If a clarification question is unanswered by the end of nominations, I will amend the nomination to the best of my knowledge.
- If you spot duplicate nominations, let me know in a comment to this post.
Star Wars: May the Fourth Be With You 2026
Feb. 17th, 2026 09:37 pmmaythe4th posting in fandomcalendarI never got around to writing up Anne McCaffrey's The Mark of Merlin when I read it last year, but I've been thinking about McCaffrey a lot recently due to blitzing through the Dragons Made Me Did It Pern podcast (highly recommended btw) and osprey_archer asked for a post on my last-year-end round-up so now seems as good a time as any.
The important thing to know about The Mark of Merlin is that -- unlike many of the things I've read recently! -- it is not, in any way, the least little bit, Arthuriana. They are not in Great Britain. There are no thematic Arthurian connections. There is absolutely zero hint of anything magical. So why Merlin? Well, Merlin is the name of the heroine's dog, and he's a very good boy, so that's all that really needs to be said about that.
Anyway, this is McCaffrey writing in classic romantic suspense mode a la Mary Stewart or Barbara Michaels, and honestly it's a pretty fun time! Our Heroine Carla's father Tragically Died in the War, so he asked his second-in-command to be her guardian and now she's en route to stay with Major Laird in his isolated house in Cape Cod. Tragically scarred and war-traumatized Major Laird has no Gothic-trope concerns about this because Carla's full name is Carlysle and her dad accidentally forgot to tell him that the child in question was a daughter and not a son; Carla is fully aware of the mixup and but has not chosen to enlighten him because she thinks it's extremely funny to pop out at Major Laird like "ha ha! You THOUGHT I was a hapless youth and wrote me a patronizing letter about it, but INSTEAD I am a beautiful and plucky young co-ed so joke's on you!"
There is an actual suspense plot; the suspense plot is that Someone is hunting Carla for reasons of secret information her dad passed on in his luggage before he died, and also his death was under Mysterious Circumstances, and so we have to figure out what's going on with all of that and eventually have a big confrontation in the remote Cape Cod house. But mostly the book is just Carla and the Major being snowed in, romantically bickering, huddling for warmth, cooking delicious meals over the old Cape Cod stove, etc. etc. Cozy in the classic sense, very little substance but excellent for reading in a vacation cottage while drinking tea and eating a cheese toastie.
As a sidenote, I did not know until I started listening to Dragons Made Me Do It that McCaffrey's Dragonflight preceded The Flame and the Flower, the book that's credited as being the first bodice-ripper romance novel and launching the genre of historical romance as we know it today, by a good four years. It's interesting to place this very classic romantic suspense novel -- which was published almost a decade after Dragonflight, but, at least according to this Harvard student newspaper article I turned up, at least partially written in 1950 -- against the full tropetastic dubcon-at-best dragonsex Pern situations, which clearly belong to a later moment. And speaking of later moments, it's also a bit of a mindfuck for me to think very hard about McCaffrey's place in genre history and realize how very early she is. I was reading McCaffrey in the nineties, against Lackey and Bujold. Reading her in conversation with Russ and LeGuin is a whole different experience.
But this is all a tangent and not very much to do with The Mark of Merlin, a perfectly fun perfectly fine book, very short on the wtf moments that have characterized most of my experiences with McCaffrey, and if anything comes late to its moment rather than early.
osprey_archer asked for a post on my last-year-end round-up so now seems as good a time as any.The important thing to know about The Mark of Merlin is that -- unlike many of the things I've read recently! -- it is not, in any way, the least little bit, Arthuriana. They are not in Great Britain. There are no thematic Arthurian connections. There is absolutely zero hint of anything magical. So why Merlin? Well, Merlin is the name of the heroine's dog, and he's a very good boy, so that's all that really needs to be said about that.
Anyway, this is McCaffrey writing in classic romantic suspense mode a la Mary Stewart or Barbara Michaels, and honestly it's a pretty fun time! Our Heroine Carla's father Tragically Died in the War, so he asked his second-in-command to be her guardian and now she's en route to stay with Major Laird in his isolated house in Cape Cod. Tragically scarred and war-traumatized Major Laird has no Gothic-trope concerns about this because Carla's full name is Carlysle and her dad accidentally forgot to tell him that the child in question was a daughter and not a son; Carla is fully aware of the mixup and but has not chosen to enlighten him because she thinks it's extremely funny to pop out at Major Laird like "ha ha! You THOUGHT I was a hapless youth and wrote me a patronizing letter about it, but INSTEAD I am a beautiful and plucky young co-ed so joke's on you!"
There is an actual suspense plot; the suspense plot is that Someone is hunting Carla for reasons of secret information her dad passed on in his luggage before he died, and also his death was under Mysterious Circumstances, and so we have to figure out what's going on with all of that and eventually have a big confrontation in the remote Cape Cod house. But mostly the book is just Carla and the Major being snowed in, romantically bickering, huddling for warmth, cooking delicious meals over the old Cape Cod stove, etc. etc. Cozy in the classic sense, very little substance but excellent for reading in a vacation cottage while drinking tea and eating a cheese toastie.
As a sidenote, I did not know until I started listening to Dragons Made Me Do It that McCaffrey's Dragonflight preceded The Flame and the Flower, the book that's credited as being the first bodice-ripper romance novel and launching the genre of historical romance as we know it today, by a good four years. It's interesting to place this very classic romantic suspense novel -- which was published almost a decade after Dragonflight, but, at least according to this Harvard student newspaper article I turned up, at least partially written in 1950 -- against the full tropetastic dubcon-at-best dragonsex Pern situations, which clearly belong to a later moment. And speaking of later moments, it's also a bit of a mindfuck for me to think very hard about McCaffrey's place in genre history and realize how very early she is. I was reading McCaffrey in the nineties, against Lackey and Bujold. Reading her in conversation with Russ and LeGuin is a whole different experience.
But this is all a tangent and not very much to do with The Mark of Merlin, a perfectly fun perfectly fine book, very short on the wtf moments that have characterized most of my experiences with McCaffrey, and if anything comes late to its moment rather than early.
Syr Hayati Beker's What A Fish Looks Like is perhaps the weirdest/coolest/most interesting thing I've read so far this year -- an apocalyptic collage novel(la), told in letters, posters, angry breakup notes, and a series of strange fairy tale riffs about breakups and loss and change and transformation on both the personal and the planetary level.
In the frame story for What A Fish Looks Like, a queer radical collective in a city living through massive climate collapse has gotten its hands on 100 tickets for the last big trip off-planet. It's T minus ten days: who's going? Who's staying? Who heard the gossip about Jay and Seb making out on the dance floor, even though they had a really messy breakup and Jay has a ticket out and Seb has no interest in leaving, and who wants to use the Saga of Jay and Seb to distract themselves from the fact that the oceans are rising and the skies are red and this year's bad fire season never ended?
In the interstitials, a community outlined in personal letters and party invites and notes on the bathroom door of a favorite bar counts down to the point of decision. In the stories themselves, a person has a bad break-up and and takes on some polar bear DNA about it; a closeted teacher loses a student to a big wave in the new and frightening ocean, and meets a mermaid about it; a stage manager forges ahead with a production of Antigone in a burning city and turns into a spider about it. The people who appear in the stories also appear in the interstitials, part of the community; the book is slippery about to what degree the stories are meant to be read literally as an accounting of events and to what degree they're metaphors, wishes, retellings. The interstitials make it clear that there is certainly a theater and a fire. Probably nobody actually turned into a spider about it, but who could say. The world is getting weirder, and who knows what's possible or plausible anymore?
I'm including a screenshot of one of my favorite pages of the book -- most of the stories are text but a lot of the interstitials are in images like this one -- which I think gives a good sense of the kind of community portraiture that makes What A Fish Look Like stand out so much to me.
Highly recommend checking this one out: you might be confused, you might be depressed, you might be inspired, you absolutely won't be bored.
In the frame story for What A Fish Looks Like, a queer radical collective in a city living through massive climate collapse has gotten its hands on 100 tickets for the last big trip off-planet. It's T minus ten days: who's going? Who's staying? Who heard the gossip about Jay and Seb making out on the dance floor, even though they had a really messy breakup and Jay has a ticket out and Seb has no interest in leaving, and who wants to use the Saga of Jay and Seb to distract themselves from the fact that the oceans are rising and the skies are red and this year's bad fire season never ended?
In the interstitials, a community outlined in personal letters and party invites and notes on the bathroom door of a favorite bar counts down to the point of decision. In the stories themselves, a person has a bad break-up and and takes on some polar bear DNA about it; a closeted teacher loses a student to a big wave in the new and frightening ocean, and meets a mermaid about it; a stage manager forges ahead with a production of Antigone in a burning city and turns into a spider about it. The people who appear in the stories also appear in the interstitials, part of the community; the book is slippery about to what degree the stories are meant to be read literally as an accounting of events and to what degree they're metaphors, wishes, retellings. The interstitials make it clear that there is certainly a theater and a fire. Probably nobody actually turned into a spider about it, but who could say. The world is getting weirder, and who knows what's possible or plausible anymore?
I'm including a screenshot of one of my favorite pages of the book -- most of the stories are text but a lot of the interstitials are in images like this one -- which I think gives a good sense of the kind of community portraiture that makes What A Fish Look Like stand out so much to me.
Highly recommend checking this one out: you might be confused, you might be depressed, you might be inspired, you absolutely won't be bored.
Pokémon: Perished Pidove Exchange 2026
Feb. 14th, 2026 06:01 amsockshuppet posting in fandomcalendarI went into Lessons in Magic and Disaster somewhat trepidatiously due to the degree to which her YA novel Victories Greater Than Death did not work for me. The good news: I do think Lessons in Magic and Disaster is MUCH better than Victories Greater Than Death and actually does some things remarkably well. The bad news: other elements did continue to drive me up a wall ....
Lessons in Magic and Disaster centers on the relationship between Jamie, a trans PhD student struggling to finish her dissertation on 18th-century women writers at a [fictional] small Boston college, and her mother Serena, an abrasive lesbian lawyer who has been sunk deep in depression since her partner died a few years back and her career simultaneously blew up completely.
Jamie does small-scale lower-m magic -- little rituals to make things go a little better in her life, that usually seem to work, as long as she doesn't think about them too hard -- and the book starts when she takes the unprecedented-for-her step of telling her mother about the magic as a sort of mother-daughter bonding ritual to see if her mother can use it to help herself get less depressed! Unfortunately Serena is not looking for a little gentle self-help woo-woo; she would like to UNFUCK her life AND the world in SIGNIFICANT ways that go way beyond what Jamie has ever done with magic and also start blowing back on Jamie in ways that eventually threaten not only Jamie and Serena's relationship but also Jamie's marriage, Jamie's career, and Serena's life.
Serena is an extremely specific, well-observed character, and Serena and Jamie's relationship feels real and messy and complicated in ways that even the book's tendency towards therapy-speak couldn't actually ruin for me, because yeah, okay, I do think Jamie would sometimes talk like an annoying tumblr post, that's just part of the characterization and it doesn't actually fix everything and sometimes even hurts. But the book's strengths -- that it's grounded very much in a world and a community and a type of people that Charlie Jane Anders clearly knows really well and can paint extremely vividly -- are also its weaknesses, in that it's also constantly slipping into ... I guess I'd call it a kind of lazy-progressive writing? The book is full of these sharp, vivid, messy moments whenever it's focused on this particular relationship and Serena in specific, and without that flashpoint, the messiness vanishes. Jamie goes into her grad school classroom and thinks about how the white men are always so annoying but the queer and bipoc students Always pick up what she's putting down. Jamie's partner Ro sets down boundaries in their marriage after a magic incident goes wrong and they are Always right and Jamie is Always humble and respectful about it, because respecting boundaries is Always the Correct thing to do. (Ro is the sort of person who says things like "this is bringing back a lot of trauma for me" while Jamie's mother is actively, in that moment, on the verge of death. I'm all for honesty in relationships but maybe you could give it a minute?)
I don't know. I think there is quite a good book in here, but I also think that good book is kind of fighting its way a little bit to get out from under the conviction that We Progressive Right-Thinking People In The Year 2025 Know What Righteous Behavior Looks Like. You know. But sometimes it does indeed succeed!
I did really enjoy the book's hyper-local Cambridge setting. Yeah, I see you name-checking those favorite restaurants, and yes, I have been to them and they are pretty good. Also, as a b-plot, Jamie is uncovering some lesbian literary drama in her dissertation that gives Charlie Jane Anders a chance to play around with 18thc pastiche and write RPF about Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, and Charlotte Clarke and sure, fine, I didn't know very much about any of those people and she has very successfully made me want to know more! There were a bunch of times she'd drop something int he book and I'd be like "that's SO unsubtle as pastiche" and then I'd look it up and it was just a real thing that had happened or been published, so point again to Charlie Jane Anders.
Lessons in Magic and Disaster centers on the relationship between Jamie, a trans PhD student struggling to finish her dissertation on 18th-century women writers at a [fictional] small Boston college, and her mother Serena, an abrasive lesbian lawyer who has been sunk deep in depression since her partner died a few years back and her career simultaneously blew up completely.
Jamie does small-scale lower-m magic -- little rituals to make things go a little better in her life, that usually seem to work, as long as she doesn't think about them too hard -- and the book starts when she takes the unprecedented-for-her step of telling her mother about the magic as a sort of mother-daughter bonding ritual to see if her mother can use it to help herself get less depressed! Unfortunately Serena is not looking for a little gentle self-help woo-woo; she would like to UNFUCK her life AND the world in SIGNIFICANT ways that go way beyond what Jamie has ever done with magic and also start blowing back on Jamie in ways that eventually threaten not only Jamie and Serena's relationship but also Jamie's marriage, Jamie's career, and Serena's life.
Serena is an extremely specific, well-observed character, and Serena and Jamie's relationship feels real and messy and complicated in ways that even the book's tendency towards therapy-speak couldn't actually ruin for me, because yeah, okay, I do think Jamie would sometimes talk like an annoying tumblr post, that's just part of the characterization and it doesn't actually fix everything and sometimes even hurts. But the book's strengths -- that it's grounded very much in a world and a community and a type of people that Charlie Jane Anders clearly knows really well and can paint extremely vividly -- are also its weaknesses, in that it's also constantly slipping into ... I guess I'd call it a kind of lazy-progressive writing? The book is full of these sharp, vivid, messy moments whenever it's focused on this particular relationship and Serena in specific, and without that flashpoint, the messiness vanishes. Jamie goes into her grad school classroom and thinks about how the white men are always so annoying but the queer and bipoc students Always pick up what she's putting down. Jamie's partner Ro sets down boundaries in their marriage after a magic incident goes wrong and they are Always right and Jamie is Always humble and respectful about it, because respecting boundaries is Always the Correct thing to do. (Ro is the sort of person who says things like "this is bringing back a lot of trauma for me" while Jamie's mother is actively, in that moment, on the verge of death. I'm all for honesty in relationships but maybe you could give it a minute?)
I don't know. I think there is quite a good book in here, but I also think that good book is kind of fighting its way a little bit to get out from under the conviction that We Progressive Right-Thinking People In The Year 2025 Know What Righteous Behavior Looks Like. You know. But sometimes it does indeed succeed!
I did really enjoy the book's hyper-local Cambridge setting. Yeah, I see you name-checking those favorite restaurants, and yes, I have been to them and they are pretty good. Also, as a b-plot, Jamie is uncovering some lesbian literary drama in her dissertation that gives Charlie Jane Anders a chance to play around with 18thc pastiche and write RPF about Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, and Charlotte Clarke and sure, fine, I didn't know very much about any of those people and she has very successfully made me want to know more! There were a bunch of times she'd drop something int he book and I'd be like "that's SO unsubtle as pastiche" and then I'd look it up and it was just a real thing that had happened or been published, so point again to Charlie Jane Anders.
Picking up a book called Part Time Girl about a high school kid who switches (physically, magically, inconveniently) back and forth between Being A Boy and Being A Girl, I was like, okay, I know pretty much what the vibes of this are going to be. And the first couple chapters in which protagonist Michael/Kayla worries about a Sort Of Girlfriend and a Hot Boy and I Have Taken This Part Time Job As A Girl But Now I Need Girl Clothes, Bra Shopping! So Stressful!! did not really lead me to think anything different!
Then about 40% of the way through the book our protagonist was suddenly running through the woods from evil wizards, and I'm like, okay, this I did not expect.
It turns out the plot of this book is NOT high school drama and figuring out your complicated gender feelings! The plot of this book is that evil racist homophobic wealthy wizards called the Clan (yes) run the world and you have to team up with your traumatized neighbor to fight them, while also figuring out your complicated gender feelings along the way.
Also, the protagonist and the traumatized neighbor bond by hanging out and watching the 2014 kdrama Healer, the plot and cast of which is lovingly described in text. This is in fact plot relevant because they later use their arguments over which cast member is hotter to prove their identities to each other when it's in question. Now I do love Healer but given that it came out, again, in 2014 and I haven't heard anyone talk about it pop culturally in more than a decade, this possibly surprised me even more than the evil wizards.
I can confidently say that at no point did I predict some of the major turns this book took, and I will put them under a spoiler in case you, too, would like to experience this Experience as I confidently believe it was meant to be Experienced: ( here we go! for the ride! )
Then about 40% of the way through the book our protagonist was suddenly running through the woods from evil wizards, and I'm like, okay, this I did not expect.
It turns out the plot of this book is NOT high school drama and figuring out your complicated gender feelings! The plot of this book is that evil racist homophobic wealthy wizards called the Clan (yes) run the world and you have to team up with your traumatized neighbor to fight them, while also figuring out your complicated gender feelings along the way.
Also, the protagonist and the traumatized neighbor bond by hanging out and watching the 2014 kdrama Healer, the plot and cast of which is lovingly described in text. This is in fact plot relevant because they later use their arguments over which cast member is hotter to prove their identities to each other when it's in question. Now I do love Healer but given that it came out, again, in 2014 and I haven't heard anyone talk about it pop culturally in more than a decade, this possibly surprised me even more than the evil wizards.
I can confidently say that at no point did I predict some of the major turns this book took, and I will put them under a spoiler in case you, too, would like to experience this Experience as I confidently believe it was meant to be Experienced: ( here we go! for the ride! )
A month long writing challenge focused on tropes, tags, and formats that have (for better or worse) fallen out of style.
From May 1st to 31st, creators will post their takes on each of the days' prompts, in any medium. Fan fiction, original stories, poetry, meta-analysis, and (even though writing is in our name!) yes, visual art as well! Currently all event documentation is on Tumblr, so the links below will redirect to the appropriate Tumblr posts.
Quick Links:
Update on legal cases: one new victory! :) One new restriction :(
Feb. 10th, 2026 03:03 pm![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
denise posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_newsBack in August of 2025, we announced a temporary block on account creation for users under the age of 18 from the state of Tennessee, due to the court in Netchoice's challenge to the law (which we're a part of!) refusing to prevent the law from being enforced while the lawsuit plays out. Today, I am sad to announce that we've had to add South Carolina to that list. When creating an account, you will now be asked if you're a resident of Tennessee or South Carolina. If you are, and your birthdate shows you're under 18, you won't be able to create an account.
We're very sorry to have to do this, and especially on such short notice. The reason for it: on Friday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed the South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law, with an effective date of immediately. The law is so incredibly poorly written it took us several days to even figure out what the hell South Carolina wants us to do and whether or not we're covered by it. We're still not entirely 100% sure about the former, but in regards to the latter, we're pretty sure the fact we use Google Analytics on some site pages (for OS/platform/browser capability analysis) means we will be covered by the law. Thankfully, the law does not mandate a specific form of age verification, unlike many of the other state laws we're fighting, so we're likewise pretty sure that just stopping people under 18 from creating an account will be enough to comply without performing intrusive and privacy-invasive third-party age verification. We think. Maybe. (It's a really, really badly written law. I don't know whether they intended to write it in a way that means officers of the company can potentially be sentenced to jail time for violating it, but that's certainly one possible way to read it.)
Netchoice filed their lawsuit against SC over the law as I was working on making this change and writing this news post -- so recently it's not even showing up in RECAP yet for me to link y'all to! -- but here's the complaint as filed in the lawsuit, Netchoice v Wilson. Please note that I didn't even have to write the declaration yet (although I will be): we are cited in the complaint itself with a link to our August news post as evidence of why these laws burden small websites and create legal uncertainty that causes a chilling effect on speech. \o/
In fact, that's the victory: in December, the judge ruled in favor of Netchoice in Netchoice v Murrill, the lawsuit over Louisiana's age-verification law Act 456, finding (once again) that requiring age verification to access social media is unconstitutional. Judge deGravelles' ruling was not simply a preliminary injunction: this was a final, dispositive ruling stating clearly and unambiguously "Louisiana Revised Statutes §§51:1751–1754 violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution", as well as awarding Netchoice their costs and attorney's fees for bringing the lawsuit. We didn't provide a declaration in that one, because Act 456, may it rot in hell, had a total registered user threshold we don't meet. That didn't stop Netchoice's lawyers from pointing out that we were forced to block service to Mississippi and restrict registration in Tennessee (pointing, again, to that news post), and Judge deGravelles found our example so compelling that we are cited twice in his ruling, thus marking the first time we've helped to get one of these laws enjoined or overturned just by existing. I think that's a new career high point for me.
I need to find an afternoon to sit down and write an update fordw_advocacy highlighting everything that's going on (and what stage the lawsuits are in), because folks who know there's Some Shenanigans afoot in their state keep asking us whether we're going to have to put any restrictions on their states. I'll repeat my promise to you all: we will fight every state attempt to impose mandatory age verification and deanonymization on our users as hard as we possibly can, and we will keep actions like this to the clear cases where there's no doubt that we have to take action in order to prevent liability.
In cases like SC, where the law takes immediate effect, or like TN and MS, where the district court declines to issue a temporary injunction or the district court issues a temporary injunction and the appellate court overturns it, we may need to take some steps to limit our potential liability: when that happens, we'll tell you what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. (Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out the exact implications of a newly passed law or run the risk assessment on a law that the courts declined to enjoin. Netchoice's lawyers are excellent, but they're Netchoice's lawyers, not ours: we have to figure out our obligations ourselves. I am so very thankful that even though we are poor in money, we are very rich in friends, and we have a wide range of people we can go to for help.)
In cases where Netchoice filed the lawsuit before the law's effective date, there's a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, the court hasn't ruled on the motion yet, and we're specifically named in the motion for preliminary injunction as a Netchoice member the law would apply to, we generally evaluate that the risk is low enough we can wait and see what the judge decides. (Right now, for instance, that's Netchoice v Jones, formerly Netchoice v Miyares, mentioned in our December news post: the judge has not yet ruled on the motion for preliminary injunction.) If the judge grants the injunction, we won't need to do anything, because the state will be prevented from enforcing the law. If the judge doesn't grant the injunction, we'll figure out what we need to do then, and we'll let you know as soon as we know.
I know it's frustrating for people to not know what's going to happen! Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us: you would not believe how much of my time is taken up by tracking all of this. I keep trying to find time to updatedw_advocacy so people know the status of all the various lawsuits (and what actions we've taken in response), but every time I think I might have a second, something else happens like this SC law and I have to scramble to figure out what we need to do. We will continue to update dw_news whenever we do have to take an action that restricts any of our users, though, as soon as something happens that may make us have to take an action, and we will give you as much warning as we possibly can. It is absolutely ridiculous that we still have to have this fight, but we're going to keep fighting it for as long as we have to and as hard as we need to.
I look forward to the day we can lift the restrictions on Mississippi, Tennessee, and now South Carolina, and I apologize again to our users (and to the people who temporarily aren't able to become our users) from those states.
We're very sorry to have to do this, and especially on such short notice. The reason for it: on Friday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed the South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law, with an effective date of immediately. The law is so incredibly poorly written it took us several days to even figure out what the hell South Carolina wants us to do and whether or not we're covered by it. We're still not entirely 100% sure about the former, but in regards to the latter, we're pretty sure the fact we use Google Analytics on some site pages (for OS/platform/browser capability analysis) means we will be covered by the law. Thankfully, the law does not mandate a specific form of age verification, unlike many of the other state laws we're fighting, so we're likewise pretty sure that just stopping people under 18 from creating an account will be enough to comply without performing intrusive and privacy-invasive third-party age verification. We think. Maybe. (It's a really, really badly written law. I don't know whether they intended to write it in a way that means officers of the company can potentially be sentenced to jail time for violating it, but that's certainly one possible way to read it.)
Netchoice filed their lawsuit against SC over the law as I was working on making this change and writing this news post -- so recently it's not even showing up in RECAP yet for me to link y'all to! -- but here's the complaint as filed in the lawsuit, Netchoice v Wilson. Please note that I didn't even have to write the declaration yet (although I will be): we are cited in the complaint itself with a link to our August news post as evidence of why these laws burden small websites and create legal uncertainty that causes a chilling effect on speech. \o/
In fact, that's the victory: in December, the judge ruled in favor of Netchoice in Netchoice v Murrill, the lawsuit over Louisiana's age-verification law Act 456, finding (once again) that requiring age verification to access social media is unconstitutional. Judge deGravelles' ruling was not simply a preliminary injunction: this was a final, dispositive ruling stating clearly and unambiguously "Louisiana Revised Statutes §§51:1751–1754 violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution", as well as awarding Netchoice their costs and attorney's fees for bringing the lawsuit. We didn't provide a declaration in that one, because Act 456, may it rot in hell, had a total registered user threshold we don't meet. That didn't stop Netchoice's lawyers from pointing out that we were forced to block service to Mississippi and restrict registration in Tennessee (pointing, again, to that news post), and Judge deGravelles found our example so compelling that we are cited twice in his ruling, thus marking the first time we've helped to get one of these laws enjoined or overturned just by existing. I think that's a new career high point for me.
I need to find an afternoon to sit down and write an update for
dw_advocacy highlighting everything that's going on (and what stage the lawsuits are in), because folks who know there's Some Shenanigans afoot in their state keep asking us whether we're going to have to put any restrictions on their states. I'll repeat my promise to you all: we will fight every state attempt to impose mandatory age verification and deanonymization on our users as hard as we possibly can, and we will keep actions like this to the clear cases where there's no doubt that we have to take action in order to prevent liability. In cases like SC, where the law takes immediate effect, or like TN and MS, where the district court declines to issue a temporary injunction or the district court issues a temporary injunction and the appellate court overturns it, we may need to take some steps to limit our potential liability: when that happens, we'll tell you what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. (Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out the exact implications of a newly passed law or run the risk assessment on a law that the courts declined to enjoin. Netchoice's lawyers are excellent, but they're Netchoice's lawyers, not ours: we have to figure out our obligations ourselves. I am so very thankful that even though we are poor in money, we are very rich in friends, and we have a wide range of people we can go to for help.)
In cases where Netchoice filed the lawsuit before the law's effective date, there's a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, the court hasn't ruled on the motion yet, and we're specifically named in the motion for preliminary injunction as a Netchoice member the law would apply to, we generally evaluate that the risk is low enough we can wait and see what the judge decides. (Right now, for instance, that's Netchoice v Jones, formerly Netchoice v Miyares, mentioned in our December news post: the judge has not yet ruled on the motion for preliminary injunction.) If the judge grants the injunction, we won't need to do anything, because the state will be prevented from enforcing the law. If the judge doesn't grant the injunction, we'll figure out what we need to do then, and we'll let you know as soon as we know.
I know it's frustrating for people to not know what's going to happen! Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us: you would not believe how much of my time is taken up by tracking all of this. I keep trying to find time to update
dw_advocacy so people know the status of all the various lawsuits (and what actions we've taken in response), but every time I think I might have a second, something else happens like this SC law and I have to scramble to figure out what we need to do. We will continue to update dw_news whenever we do have to take an action that restricts any of our users, though, as soon as something happens that may make us have to take an action, and we will give you as much warning as we possibly can. It is absolutely ridiculous that we still have to have this fight, but we're going to keep fighting it for as long as we have to and as hard as we need to. I look forward to the day we can lift the restrictions on Mississippi, Tennessee, and now South Carolina, and I apologize again to our users (and to the people who temporarily aren't able to become our users) from those states.
Space Swap: A Multimedium Multifandom Fanworks Exchange
Feb. 10th, 2026 04:29 pmextrapenguin posting in fandomcalendar