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(Title is a reference to a Honkai Star Rail boss battle theme. Honkai Star Rail is available now etc)

I am not a cheerful person, so I assume if I preface with "I'm gonna get real here for a second" your response will, and should be: "Oh no."

I'm gonna get real here for a second. But do note-- despite everything I say here I don't expect anyone to do anything. Nor to worry about me.

Anyway. On to saying worrisome things.

This is something kind of new to my experience of writing on the internet, but I have two competing drives when it comes to sharing my work nowadays.

One of the interesting things about having written The Solstice War way back when is that it got nowhere near the amount of attention Unjust Depths did but it still got *enough* attention to kind of blow my mind. Nevertheless the attention it got was attention that was readily acceptable to how I used the early 2010s internet. There were comments and discussions about new chapters. Random people sent me hate messages for being unacceptably weird to them and I ignored them. Etc. Very standard stuff. All of the discussion sort of fit into the boxes I wanted it to fit into when I wrote say, an emotional moment, or a death, or a big battle-- the interpretations didn't fall too far from intent. However, this is very low key for how "being a fan of something" is now interpreted-- how the act of "carrying out" or "demonstrating" fandom works now. Fandom in this case being used to describe the phenomenon of communal, public engagement in the appreciation of a work-- "fandom" has always existed but Fandom, on the internet, is a mode of operations typified by intensification. People have always drawn fanart, but in Fandom, the act of drawing fanart is a kind of canonization of a specific view of a work-- people who consume your fanart are consuming not just depictions of characters but a vision of the work, an understanding that if agreed upon is propagated and if its too dissimilar to how others feel will likely be suppressed about as violently as you can suppress things by posting. This happens 'round the clock to popular things.

It may not be a surprise to close readers to find out that I'm sort of a paranoid person in my daily life. After all, all of my stories lavishly depict a variety of securocrats. These people are in the work because I'm fascinated with them-- and in a sense, because I am of a kind with the intelligence officers of the world in that the things humans do with information scares me and thats why I fantasize about wielding power over them. It is because of this that there is not just one drive described in the first sentence, oh how far we've come from it-- but two competing ones.

First: every so often I struggle with the thought of deleting all of my work and running away and never sharing another word with the public again. Unjust Depths kind of freaks me out sometimes because when I started it I never thought people would drawing fanart of it. I never thought there would be *so much* fanart that I would be able to look at some and others and form opinions like "I don't like how this person draws my characters." (If you think that is perhaps mean or ungrateful of me to do, this is also part of that intensification.) I never thought that the interpretative discourse surrounding my work would reach such a degree that some people starting to read were confused about who the main character is, because the character everyone always talks about is not the any of the characters in the first episode, nor the second episode, nor the third episode. I am a vain person who wants to "own" her work-- I want to on some level be acknowledged as the person who makes this stuff, who underwent the effort to create it, and without whom it would not exist. Sometimes, as the author, I look at the world that has grown around my work, and I feel a little bit insane. I felt an honest sense of relief when someone tried to bad faith psychonalyze me in a post about my work-- because it acknowledged my existence as a being with intentions who is responsible for this work. I was like "oh thank god, they think I'm a psychopath, that means the work is still mine."

I also struggle with the idea that if I disappeared, Unjust Depths would be incomplete but would "exist" without me, permanently. Copies of it would be out there. It's impossible to destroy it now. Aside from working on it which LETS BE CLEAR DESPITE ALL OF THIS I REALLY DO LIKE WRITING THE STORY, HA HA, I AM SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW WRITING IT anyway-- the idea of it existing sans myself is something kind of vexing to me. Because like I said, I am a vain woman who didn't do all this work for four years to go unacknowledged for any of it!

My second drive is this: when I was growing up I had stories in my head and the crushing realization that nobody would make them. I started writing when I was 12 on the family computer, going to fanfiction.net and writing lesbian OC pokemon fanfic. Girls kissing girls in some kind of setting fascinated me way back when. I always wanted a story like Unjust Depths to exist and nobody would ever make it. When my wife shows me all the lesbian fantasy stuff she reads now I also feel insane, which is a description I use to represent my feelings in so many situations, because I am a healthy person who, as you no doubt realize from reading all of this, is doing great and has a normal brain. Anyway, I'm the heroine of reality who has to solve the problem, I appointed myself to this position. I have to make this thing that I've been grappling with inside my own head all of my life and I have to put it on the internet for free so everyone can see it and nobody will be barred from it. Because to do otherwise would betray my convictions about what art should be, how it should be distributed, who should have access to it, who DESERVES to have it.

So even though sometimes I just look at all the Stuff and I feel like I'm hallucinating, I continue to write Unjust Depths. I am writing other things too! I may share those someday and maybe you can write fanfics and make fanart about it that plain doesn't accord with my reality. I love writing I swear nobody is making me do this why would they even I am only losing money on all of this ha ha ha. And anyway none of you *should* alter your behaviors and I doubt you will and that's fine. Part of me IS flattered that you devote any attention at all to me and my work and you're all essentially harmless. Intellectually I know you do this out of love and enjoyment, my better self knows this. I'm just a deeply antisocial and paranoid person who doesn't get along well with others at all and that's why I don't let any of you talk to me anymore! And why I am writing this on my fucking zonelets vent blog that none of you will ever read.

Anyway if someday all of the writing disappears you know my demons won! (This is not very likely to happen at this point, enough people are there to talk me out of it.)