"New Dogs, New Tricks" prologue commentary & notes

REFERENCES: 

N/A

GENERAL:

- It's very important to me to set up and establish the more important fan characters here, instead of just tossing them in and acting like they were always around. Granted, you could find a few stories written by their original creators featuring said characters here and there, but finding bios or intro stories that actually answer the vital questions of who they are and where they come from was hard. Heck, these days, even harder because so many of the websites that hosted them have been down for years and years by this point. The fics/or the author's site has been lost to the sands of time. That's a major reason why I went "Well, I can just put an AU spin on these characters and go 'this is what they're like in my world.'" Makes things easier.

Now, the old school RR fandom (as in the fans who were around way back in the beginning) was very different from modern fandom in several ways, including the fact that people were completely free to use OCs that didn't belong to them as long as they credited the creators in the fic itself. Nowadays? People crash out if you use anybody else's character because they believe you're trying to steal them. Yes, I'm speaking from experience. It's why I put the credits in the very first chapter. Granted, I always credit other writers, but this time I just made sure to put it up front in bolded lettering. Now, what thief does that?  

Personally, I have a very strong suspicion that these kinds of people actually want their OCs stolen. 

"Huh?" I hear you say. "Why the heck would anybody want to have their OCs stolen?" Well, here's why I think that:

- What better way to get eyes on them as well as sympathy then by spinning a scary story about a big bad character thief lurking about on deviantART? 

- The accusers not only feel they're morally superior and righteous compared to the "thief", but get to portray themselves as being such in the public eye as well. A friend of mine's pointed out that none of them ever showed an interest in other people's characters, unless they could connect them with their own works. This tracks, because a couple of them don't even like OCs, but make an exception for their friends' character/or characters made by popular fans. Back when I was posting an old, now deleted fanfic, one of them expressed relief that said fic centered around the canon characters, because they didn't want to read or learn about my OCs. 

Okay. There are people some folks in fandoms (in general, not exclusively RR) who are primarily interested in just reading about the canons. Not my thing personally, but I can respect other people having preferences. But that particular person was so rude about it that I was automatically annoyed. It's hypocritical as well, because this RR fan would also constantly talk about their OC (that I honestly found disturbing)/or their buddies' equally weird OCs, and acted like I was supposed to be super familiar with all these characters. I think the strangest instance was this same person offhandedly mentioning some OC named Rammer to me. I searched their art gallery and journal, didn't see anything about this OC, and was like "Who even is that?" Didn't get a reply. I guess they were salty that I had no clue who Rammer was even supposed to be. Darn psychic powers, I guess they were on the fritz that day. 😄

But seriously, fans like that are exactly why I put that author's note at the beginning of the FF.net New Dogs.

- In the late 90s/early 2000s, the fandom liked to do this thing where they would single out somebody for the smallest, most trivial thing and publicly jump all over them for it. Very much scapegoating/mobbing behavior. I'm quite embarrassed to say that I participated in it. I was dumb and very much swept up in groupthink back then.

As an extension of the above, the fandom in it's current state is inactive and doesn't have anything going on. Rallying together against a perceived outside threat is probably the most excitement these people get out of their lives.

- Believing someone is desperate to steal their characters reinforces in their imaginations that their OCs are indeed the best thing since sliced bread. Doesn't matter that said OCs are so banal/or off-putting that I (or a number of other fans still hanging around who aren't in the orbit of those people, apparently) have zero interest in using them. The characters I'm "stealing" have a lot more potential/or actual interesting stuff going on with them.

So these accusations of theft (especially public ones) aren't done with genuine concern in mind for the person who's supposedly being stolen from. They're done just because these fans enjoy dogpiling other people and bossing them around. 

- So most of the villains we see here in the prologue belong to George Aguirre, with the exception of Dread and Death, who are EW's. He either knew Aguirre or was friends with people who knew him. Aguirre's site was already gone when I entered the fandom. The the only thing EW and I know about most of these characters was their species, and in the case of one particular OC, his appearance. So we "AU-ified" these guys for usage in our own stories because we think they're interesting. 

"You  should've asked George's permission!" Most of the people who left the fandom do not want to be bothered about it (see: Greywolf Lupous). Once again, believe me when I say I speak from personal experience. I don't know where they are now. I cannot pull an email address out of my butt, or from thin air. In fact, I think the people who scream about character theft are fully aware of all this. They just don't care because they treat it as ammo they can use against you. 

"Haha, since you can't contact them, that means you can't ask them, so you shouldn't be using their OCs in the first place!"

"Well, I know a guy who used to hang with that same crew, and he never once told me that they were upset by the idea of their characters being used by other people. I think if it that wasn't the case it would've come up in our conversations, so reverse UNO card."

 - The Court of Twilight is a name I came up with myself for my AU, since I didn't wanna constantly refer to them as "Zaygos and his henchmen". The name's based around the fact that they're all animal species that are active during the evening. For all intents and purposes, they're to the Rovers what Apocalypse is to the X-Men, or the villains from the PreCure franchise are to that series' particular group of heroes. I was also influenced by Darkseid's Elite and Thanos and his Black Order (although personally I think Darkseid's crew was more distinctive and noteworthy in DC's cartoons then the Black Order was in the MCU). 

I'm not sure how much info I should give out about these guys, because I think some stuff should be saved for the sake of future stories, but if you're curious as to my thought process for my reimaginings:

Zaygos Design-wise, the STARS-verse interpretation takes inspiration from King Sombra from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and King Magnifico from Wish. I chose his coloration (which is an actual color variation red foxes can have called "fire and ice") in order to make him stand out instead of being the same old boring red/orange color that fox characters often are. I might give him a mustache too.

Lustfox: He was very much influenced by DC villain Glorious Godfrey. His being a fox really works with this idea, given that a ton of people are highly obsessed with them.

Kaymat: Neither I nor EW know anything about this character other than her being female. However, whenever she did show up, she was always with Zaygos and co, so it just felt wrong to exclude her. We made her a cat, though mine's is a mix-breed cat and ended up going down a different path than his version did. 

Alornso: My approach to him is "take no prisoners tormented badass".

Vile Darkness: This guy was the toughest to reimagine. EW initially had him as a sorcerer who could create and animate small animals. This can be an interesting and even scary power, but I found that it really didn't work for the character per my setting. In terms of power levels, the characters in my setting are a lot stronger than in other people's fics, so he needed to be appropriately buffed up. A rule of thumb for writing fiction is that if your heroes are going to be strong, then your villains need to be stronger in order to provide an interesting challenge. I toyed around with making Vile a tall, lanky, stereotypically ghoulish-looking dark sorcerer, then, a metamorph like Mahito from Jujutsu Kaisen. 

His final form came about because I thought to myself "These guys need somebody to craft and forge weapons for them", and that became his role. So no more skinny goth wizard. He can do some other stuff as well, some of which we'll get to see in later chapters. Since he's someone whose job requires him to be hands-on, I envisioned him as having a rough, unsophisticated way of speaking -- he's basically a country bumpkin.

Death and Dread are basically the same characters EW always presented them as. I did change up the circumstances of how they and the Court of Twilight connect however, again just to simplify things and avoid plotholes.

The Court of Twilight's wardrobe was designed with their roles and personalities in mind. I will say that all these guys are a lot more serious in my stories than what they were typically depicted as being. IMO, it makes them feel more threatening.

FUN FACTS:

- Lustfox mistakenly calling Lady Dread "Lady Dream" was originally a typo in the early draft, but then I thought that him messing up her name and not really caring did a good job of showing what type of person he is.

May 2026 progress report

Second chapter of New Dogs went up Monday!

One fic idea of mine's that's risen to the forefront and is currently taking up my attention is a crossover that was mentioned several pages back titled A Horse Of A Different Color, an Elena of Avalor/My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Also, there's a one-shot idea that I'd like to complete at some point in the near future. It's one of the more grim (albeit with a point) plot bunnies I've had, and for that reason I kinda just wanna get it out there before going on to more hopeful stuff.

In other news, I'm hoping to get started on story notes and finish up Antoine's Character Corner. 

Road Rovers STARS Headcanons

Gonna try to get the next chapter of New Dogs out this week, but in the meantime, here's a little something to tide readers over.

-- My stories include moments of levity and humor, and some will be straight-up action/comedies, but my brand of humor is for the most part is quite different from the show's itself. It’s less goofy, dated, and referential for one, and doesn’t rely so much on dog jokes or Blitz being Colleen’s punching bag as well as the butt of some gigantic cosmic joke in general. Humor does not trump characterization either. If it’s going to bother you not to see the show’s style of humor, then you don’t even need to be reading my stuff. If you can deal with it though, then enjoy.

-- Hunter, Colleen, and Exile (on occasion) are not the only cano-sapiens who can understand Shag and normal dogs. This is something the show did that I’ve always found really inconsistent and confusing. All Cano-Sapiens can do this, and the same goes for any other sapient or mutant.

-- The first season of Road Rovers STARS (the canon episodes) begins in 1996 (the same year the show originally aired). The stories pick up from there. The way the passage of time in the show was handled, particularly in “Still A Few Bugs In The System”, was weird. Like, that episode actually spanned several years? I’d have to look around to see exactly how long, but when I saw that I thought to myself “Well, I'm ignoring that.”

Actually, the passage of time in many fanfics makes no sense either. Sometimes things apparently happen over the course of several years, but again, nobody ever ages and the characters literally appear to be frozen in time. I'm going to have a timeline that makes actual logical sense.

-- When it comes to criminals, the Rovers are more like real-life police officers and less like Batman. If a villain is threatening to seriously harm or kill someone and cannot be talked down, then the Rovers are permitted to use lethal force to stop them if necessary. Also, EW bought up the idea of the Rovers specifically being ordered to kill on their missions instead of merely arresting criminals in some stories (something that a ton of fanfics skirt around). 

Also, a villain(s) who goes to prison will stay there for a decent length of time. In other words, it’s not going to be like all the jails we see in comic books where criminals are just continually escaping. If a villain does manage to frequently evade the good guys' clutches, then they will do so in a logical, plausible manner.

-- Since they were so poorly handled in the show, the canon Rovers will be getting some much-needed attention and development in STARS, thanks in part to EW. I feel fans get so impressed with their OFCs that the canon characters get turned into side characters. Hunter will not be the center of the universe here though like he is everywhere else.

-- The Rovers’ owners will also get focus here. The bond between human and animals is a special one, and something I feel deserves more attention then what it receives in the fandom.

-- The STARS-verse borrows characters and concepts from certain other authors, namely Evil Writer and George Aguirre (as far as several of the historical elements go), but many of the original fan characters not made by me/Lilikoi/Fox the Writer have been adjusted to varying degrees in order to fit into STARS better. The same goes for some of the aforementioned story concepts. Also, don’t expect to see many if indeed any popular fanon concepts here.

-- I wasn’t going to even touch on this, but because I’ve noticed so many contemporary Rover fans doing this I feel the need to comment. These fans make the Rovers more like real-life dogs given sentience who often still retain/or want to retain the mentalities and lifestyles of regular dogs (IE: giving their children away to human owners to be raised as pets and only visiting them occasionally, as opposed to wanting to raise them themselves).

I go the Disney route and have sapients being sentient even as regular animals (which is what the show itself even seemed to be heavily implying). They just can’t communicate with humans. I think there’s so much to be explored with sapients that fans don’t seem to care about. It just seems so lazy to go, “Yeah, they still live and act like dogs, only they can talk now! Well that’s all, byyyye!” Would the Rovers not realize that they have the power to do things now that they couldn’t as regular old dogs? You don’t have to obey the alpha dog. You can run the pack more democratically now. You don’t have to basically let your children be ripped away from you to be raised by total strangers of a different species anymore. And so on and so forth.

-- In a reverse of the previous rule, sapients are not reskinned humans either.

-- Something else nu!fanbase does that really singes my biscuits: how Parvo’s Mutants are handled. You get people who want them to have expanded roles and be comic relief, or treat them as being interchangeable with sapiens. But the show always presented them as non-speaking grunts and monstrous, corrupted beasts (granted, they did get nerfed over the course of the series). They also look distinctly different from sapients and have never displayed superpowers in the show. I don’t mind having them being capable of speaking, albeit not nearly as well or as clearly as sapients do, but I don’t need them holding long, complex conversations or doing pratfalls. 

A bunch of fans also have the Rovers killing them, which to me is morally wrong because they are killing innocent cats and dogs that were corrupted by Parvo against their will.

The Mutants in STARS are more primitive and aggressive than either sapients, TMNT-style mutants, and mutates are. They have little interest in the opposite sex or the like. They can be cured and changed back into normal animals with the Transdogmafier, as was shown in canon on several occasions (as hard as the fandom tries to ignore this). Parvo goes on to use other animal species as Mutants, including Furo-Mutants (ferrets), Shark Mutants, Urso-Mutants (bears), and Chiro-Mutants (bats). Other villains will end up employing Melo-Mutants (badgers) and Cheetah Mutants for specific schemes.

ETA: I think this was Usami's headcanon, but I like the idea of the Cano-Mutator being the evil opposite of the Transdogmafier, bringing out the worst traits of animals.

-- Here, there's more of a focus on the Rovers' personal lives and interests beyond them just fighting crime, the lulz, and shipping melodrama. They can't fight Parvo forever. I notice 97% of fanfics make it seem like they just sit around waiting for villains to attack. And if fans ever do decide to have them do something other then go on adventures, it'll be about them starting families (especially Hunter and Colleen, because they're the Anointed Ones). Nothing else.

-- Everyone and their grandma can't just break into RRMC like it's nothing. This is a common trope in fanfics that drives me nuts! In STARS, no villain knows where RMMC is. Not saying that'll always be the case, but as of now nobody knows. And even if someone were to discover its location, there are actual security systems that will alert the Rovers and at the same time stop the intruder. Not a glass door with a bell on it that rings whenever people walk in and out.

The STARS-verse -- inception and the Stations of Canon

Still working on the second half of the latest Character Corner, but I do have this ready to go to accompany my fic New Dogs, New Tricks. This'll be the first of several posts that will establish some worldbuilding and ground rules for my Road Rovers series, Road Rover STARS.

A long, long, long time ago, my RR stories were meant to mostly run concurrently alongside the Road Rovers: Quick Strike, or QS-verse series of fics, written by That One Evil Writer. His fics would've also been canon to my fic-verse, along with my own personal (old cringe) ideas and characters. Gradually however, seeing television series and movies, as well as reading various books in addition to a lot of great fanfiction, and higher quality reboots (both fan-made and official ones) made me start to wonder "What if?..."

.. Hunter had his own set of character flaws to overcome? Not external, out of his control "weaknesses" that exist purely to make people go "Aww poor baby", but real flaws that could make people come into conflict with him, or even not like him? As someone who does not like the character (lol), I felt going this route will ground the character and make him genuinely sympathetic, because I will be getting into his mindset and exploring why he behaves the way he does. 

... The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Mighty Ducks met the Rovers? I feel the non-human superheroes should hang out a lot.

... What if some characters found different partners than they did in the QS-verse?

What if, what if, what if?

Watching new and old shows makes me wanna emulate the things I like about them for RR. I take a lot of inspiration from series with ensemble casts (Northern Exposure and Band Of Brothers -- there's definitely a number of other shows I could add to this list that I've missed out on and do plan to watch) assorted animated series (Steven Universe, Transformers Animated, One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba, My Adventures With Superman, and The Owl House are some primary examples). Another influence was fanfiction for the series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. People have done every kind of alternate universe story for that fandom under the sun and then some. It was definitely a big source of inspiration for revamping my cast and setting.

STARS wound up developing into its own unique thing separate from what anybody else is (or was) doing for their stories, though I do take certain influences and headcanons from a select few other fan writers. Of course if the original creator is still around I ask their permission. Regardless, any creator whose OCs appear are always receive credit in my author's notes. The deviantART portion of the fandom seems to get its rocks off on the idea of people going around stealing characters. That's not what's going on here, and if you believe it is, you're always welcome to actually come and ask me.

I love lore. 

 

No, not that Lore. Story lore.

I have a simple rule of thumb for this setting: KISS. What is KISS?

Keep

It

Simple 

Stupid/Sweetie 

Streamline everything. I don't want any kind of convoluted, sprawling, overly complex backstories or plotlines (the hero was separated from their mother who was captured by the villains and cloned, and the evil clone traveled back in time to assume the real mother's place, while the real mom lost her memory and became a new villainess named La Strega!) or anything of the sort. This is also why I'm mostly keeping clear of time travel. I don't want any soap opera style stories or melodramatics either. I know people and their emotions can be really messy, but this is not Days Of Our Lives.

I also went and chucked a lot of the more clunkier, awkward concepts I devised previously.

Make it fun and engaging. It should be like sitting down to watch a compelling series, or following a series of books or an old-fashioned serial you really like, so you tune itn every week just so you can see what happens next.

While the original thirteen episode run is canon, there are minor details here and there that have been changed to varying degrees to suit my own personal tastes; I.E.: Prince Charles and Princess Diana becoming werewolves. That doesn't occur in STARS because I straight up think not only was it really dumb and pointless, but also dates the show really badly. Colleen's master is the actual guy who served as England's Prime Minister in the mid-90s, not the pseudo-Queen Elizabeth the show uses. 

I only include characters that I actually want to write in some capacity. So if you don't see your favorite fan character, or one you might've made, then that's why. Some characters I feel are just better off being written by their creators. I'm not the creator, so I can only do so much guesswork about how a creator might approach their OC. A bunch of characters from the prelim versions of this setting, a number of my own included, were eventually dropped because I think they would have stretched plausibility way too much/or I wasn't sure how I could even properly fit them in (or, in the case of my personal OCS, were just lame, derivative characters). Some are just -- sorry to say -- either too underdeveloped to use or their presence became unnecessary. The only thing I know about them was a name and sometimes a species, if the latter even.

Something I'm very eager to try out is utilizing story elements that I wish other RR stories had but usually lack, like having a middle ground between the characters being animals, but uplifted animals that have expanded minds. Just about every story I see it's either one extreme -- they're humanoid dogs, but the writers treat them as being regular dogs mentally who still want to keep acting like and living like regular dogs... even though the author also wants human-style weddings for their OCs or Hunter and Colleen at the same time. If Hunter and Colleen are perfectly fine with stuff like allowing their children to be given away to humans to live with them, instead of just raising them themselves (because they're sentient now, so they totally have that option available to them), then why the heck would they even care about having a wedding in the first place then? Or courtship for that matter? Wouldn't Hunter just start humping Colleen right there on the spot? I'm sorry to be crass about this, but people are so inconsistent about this kind of thing. And in regards to giving away their offspring, wasn't the very last episode of the show all about Hunter trying to reunite with his mom because he desperately missed her??? Do people even pay attention to canon?

The other extreme is the Rovers being written like they're humans in animal costume. You could just take off the dog mask and it'd be just some boring rando looking back at you.

I want a linear timeline that flows chronologically and normally. There are so many stories out there where the Rovers seem to go on thousands and thousands of missions every day, yet the canon Rovers act the exact same way they do in the show, no one ever develops or changes physically or mentally, and no one seems to age. If the canon Rovers are still acting the exact same they do in canon after 80,000+ life and death missions, or getting attacked/mutated/brainwashed/cloned/RRMC being invaded and blown up/etc, then, uh... I call bs. I want characters to have reactions to and be affected by the things that happen to them, not just glossing over it just so they can move on to the next adventure/or shipping.

A major problem with a lot of old school fanfiction is that concepts and characters were never explained from story to story unless you'd been there from the beginning or spoke behind the scenes with the fan writers. Sometimes the opening stories weren't available to read either. Plus, even way back when I know I didn't wanna include everything that happened in the QS-verse as part of my setting. Recently, while talking with a friend of mine, I asked myself this question: if you're borrowing a concept or an idea from somebody else for an AU setting, then why copy it to the exact tee? Why not take it and put your own unique twist on it? I want to really push the AU aspects in order to truly differentiate STARS from RR: QS. As part of this, some characters are basically rebooted versions of themselves (think like how Mr. Freeze was presented in the original 1960s Batman series and how he was updated for Batman: The Animated Series) in order to fit in better with this brand new setting and because I don't know everything about them. Some of the other canons I've incorporated have likewise been tweaked. In the case of DC and Marvel, I'm just mashing together select elements from the various media we've gotten over the years. 

Now, on to that "Stations of Canon" thing I mentioned in the title of this entry. Some stories, ideas, and events that occur in STARS are my personal takes on things other writers have either written about or were planning to write. They will play out in a completely different way here though, just because they'll be filtered through this new setting as well as my own thoughts as a writer. Since I have a different take on the canon Rovers and co as opposed to other fan interpretations (to say nothing of other characters in STARS, such as say Batman or Demona), there's no way that an event should go down in the exact same way. Likewise, the presence of new OCS and other canons existing together in this shared universe would also affect a number of situations.

I don't want to undermine either the Master or the canon Rovers. A lot of stuff does that, in some case unintentionally. He had the intelligence and skill to build a Transdogmafier, except no, not really, someone else did and he just took their idea. Oh look, all these other groups and random people out on the street now have Transdogmafier technology too!... somehow. Hey, he's getting in the way of the fan writer's precious donut steel, so we need somebody to swoop from the shadows, blackmail him, and basically take over the Road Rovers! And so on and so forth. The Rover should not feel like walk on cameos within their own setting. So many times it feels like they're made stupid and weak just to make the OC or whatever look better by comparison. Also, if you read my Character Corner entries on Blitz and Exile, then you know that I plan on having all the canon Rovers level up in some form or fashion so they're not left in the dust by more powerful characters.

As I said, some of the romantic couplings between the various characters are going to be different from what you've seen done before. Unless I really like a particular coupling, I don't see a point in copying what another writer does or has done before, especially when I don't even have all the details of how the relationship is supposed to play out for their setting. Plus, as I've said elsewhere, I enjoy playing around with new possibilities and character dynamics. I find those elements very interesting to explore. Romance is not going to trump and dominate everything else either. 

I want to tell stories that, to borrow a phrase I've seen elsewhere and which I think perfectly describes what I envision -- scratches that itch in my brain in a very satisfying way.

So that's it, that's all I got to say. Hope you enjoy the stories.

Latest RR story *finally* ready for public viewing!

The prologue for New Dogs, New Tricks is up on Fanfiction.net and A03! I did say that it was gonna be little bit longer before it got posted because it needed to be proofed a second time. But later I was just sitting there thinking to myself "Man, I'm ready to just move on from NDNT and focus on something new." That's not to say that I hate the story or anything -- had a lot of fun writing for these characters -- but I really wanna move on other ideas now. Fic's mostly done anyway.

Also, as somebody who prefers FF.net to A03, it's pretty sad seeing how the site seems just barely held together with string and chewing gum these days. Seems like the spammers and other issues ran a lot of people off. 

My *new* art account and the actual reason why I left Buzzly.

If you wanna see:

-- fan and original characters 

-- fan art, including concept art for my AUs

-- writing prompts and sneak peaks of future fanfic ideas

Then just click here!

Looking back at when I first brought up my dissatisfaction with Buzzly here, I didn't really say why, apart from the people there being very unfriendly. I'm going to try my best not to get overly political about this, but nowadays, with the way creative communities tend to be, that's kind of hard to do. That's the reason why I was so reluctant to say anything initially. 

In terms of atmosphere, Buzzly feels less like an art site and more like Reddit or Tumblr Jr. In other words, there's a lot of weird people who hold extremist views there. I'm not coming at this from an angle of "Well they're bad because they don't believe what my party believes!" I don't like extremists of any stripe period. 

The worst person I know of is an individual whose said stuff like not liking furries is transphobic (???) and thought Zootopia 2 should revolve around the topic of police brutality. Since when did furries become exclusively trans? And is this person saying you have to be a trans person in order to be a furry? Worst of all was the time when someone posted about the death of FurAffinity founder Dragoneer. Someone in the comments asked (and this is paraphrased on my part) "Wasn't Dragoneer into explicit material involving children?" Well, same individual who wanted a family movie to tackle police brutality went off on the person who asked that.

I looked into the matter myself. I didn't see anything pointing to the guy being into cp, but he did have a history of defending not just kid diddlers, but zoophiles as well (before someone goes "What's your source for that? 'Trust me bro?'", there's a certain website I checked because they're very good at documenting stuff there. I'm not going to name it here however because it's very infamous). 

Yo, why are you so hot about someone asking the right questions about this Dragoneer guy? Yes, I believe people should be fully judged by the company they keep. You don't like it? Quit hanging around shady people then.

That's one of the reasons why I feel like furries have a real problem with empathy. They want empathy and understanding for themselves of course, but extending that to other people? Unless they're fellow furries, fat chance of that happening. This is a repeated pattern I've seen with the majority of the ones I've encountered before. I've said before here that I have issues with furries. At this point I'm just gonna come on out and say that I honestly don't care for them. Are there nice, chill furries out there? Yes, I've encountered a few here and there before. But the fandom overall has some major issues going on that most seem unwilling to talk about. They try to act friendly and caring at times, but generally are very self-involved, rude, manipulative, sexist, and have this constant victimhood mindset. You can see this very same subject being discussed here. Keep an eye out for the gentleman who shares an incredibly messed-up story about a young family member of his who became involved with furry fandom. 

Another common thread I've noticed is that if you have something to say about furries that isn't purely cooing praise, you are automatically dismissed out of hand as being a liar. And if somebody in the furry fandom commits a crime (which often includes crimes against children/or animals), these same kinds of people will say stuff like "Oh no, this is gonna make the fandom look bad!"/"Hey, don't judge all furries because of this person!"

...

I think a normal human response to hearing about sexual crimes against kids/or animals or what have you would be something like "Hey, that's terrible. I'm sorry [the victims] had to go through something like that." Or "People shouldn't treat animals that way. These people do not represent the fandom in any way, shape, or form." 

No. Instead it's the poor pitiful furries out there who deserve our sympathy, attention, and understanding. Not the victims of their crimes. 

Absolutely sociopathic behavior.

But that's all the Dragoneer defender (we'll just call them DD because why not?) does, run around Buzzly acting like a redditor. Someone posted a picture of a forest once, and DD left a comment under it trashing (American, presumably) right-wingers. I don't consider most of my views conservative, but it's like "What does any of that have to even do with anything? You didn't say a single word about the picture. Why can't you just appreciate someone's artwork instead of hijacking it with your political views?" These types of people have zero concept of "time and place". DD once bragged about staying indoors all the time and not having any IRL friends. Very obviously cope. It just reminded me of the Wojak meme where the person is wearing the smug face mask while you can see tears streaming down their cheeks. 

But that's what Buzzly turned out to be all about. There are other people on that site who are like that as well, but DD was the absolute worst. If I did happen to see people interacting with each other, 80% of it was devoted to whining about A.I. The rest was western politics. I understand the problems and controversies revolving around A.I., but there's actual art created by human hands there that nobody there really seems very interested in. They just wanted to be buttmad about everything. The handful of chill people there aren't enough to save the site in my eyes.

TL;DR: was on art site where nobody actually cared about art. Wild stuff.

My reaction to Digimon Beat Break

As someone who saw the last two Digimon seasons and found them to be very disappointing, Ghost Game in particular, getting an actual decent season again is a relief. 

(Actually, I just remembered Digimon Fusion exist. Didn't find that one all too impressive either. I haven't seen App Monsters, so I don't have any opinion on it.)

I'm trying not to celebrate too early since we haven't gotten to the end yet, but I'm really digging what I've seen of the show so far. The new mains are good, and I really like their partner Digimon. It's so refreshing to get a break from dinosaurs, dragons, and huskies/wolves.

ETA: LOL, someone called it "Digimon Peak Break".