Nowadays, though, good ol' DA is beyond a shell of its former self. It's almost unrecognizable, and has probably lost all luster and respect that the community once had for it. I return to the site from time to time, and it's so...empty. I still use it for certain reasons that I'll talk about later, but overall, DA doesn't feel like a need-to-use site anymore, and I'd imagine that's how a lot of people who got their start on DA feel. But I try to have my posts either become really strange, or very personal, so let's start with the personal aspect of DA.

I'm pretty sure I joined the site around the time I was 12 or 13, and you know what those preteen days are like: unfiltered, unbridled horny. I was in the Sonic fandom at the time, and I'm pretty sure I named myself some derivative of "Epic Tails Fan", since Tails was and still is my favorite Sonic character. But unlike what you're putting together in your head, I wasn't there for the Sonic...art. Though I still probably sought it out at some point. No, I was there because I found out that people drew a certain kink that I have that I will not be revealing, and I wanted to find more. Learned that DA was a pretty good place for it. Signed up so I can see all the glorious 18+ material, and then...I'm not sure. Somewhere between that and where I ended up, I think I forgot all about DA. 

I ended up here, known as biggesttailsfan. My new page was to serve a few new purposes. One, to show that I was no longer just an "epic" Tails fan, but the biggest. Two, to have a place to post images of my gaming habits/life stuff. But most importantly, I got reacquainted with my old friend fanfics. At around this time, I was probably getting interested in reading fan fictions and fan comics. So I got my creative gears turning, and would eventually start uploading my content to the site.

Oh, did I mention that was during my edgy phase?

I started this post a couple of days before Christmas, but I find it really fitting that I (likely) finish it on Christmas, because that's where it all begins. On December 23rd, 2012, DA user djaik-niffsta (guy if you're reading this, and I mean no real ill will, but what the hell is this name, guy? It doesn't even sound like the Bri'ish you hail from) posted a fanfic titled Tailsmo: Unhappy Christmas. Honestly, giving it a glance over even now, it holds up as a pretty good piece of fan literature. The thing about this guy is that he's always written some good shit for as long as I've been looking at his content. However, that was precisely the issue. He wrote good fanfics. They were wholesome, emotionally moving, and well thought out. They were missing some important pieces that would take it from a good fanfic, and make it a bad one. And that's really what we're here for at Sonic Fanfic Inc.™️®️©️ OG corp do not steal. So I commented on his story, asking to make a continuation, because a fanfic of a fanfic is simply too good a proposition to not ask for. My edgy, bloodthirsty juices were simply flowing through every pore of my being, near hornily. I wasn't expecting a positive reply- hell, I probably wasn't expecting a reply at all. However, the madlad, THE ABSOLUTE MADLAD of a man said: yea, go for it. More specifically, he said that this piece was meant to be the prologue of a different series he had in mind, but since he wasn't gonna be able to make that for a while, he gave me the thumbs up for an official continuation.

Bad move, bucko.

Hell in Fur Part 1 appeared 2 days later, on the 27th. It. Was. Awful. Simply terrible, probably by 2012 standards of fanficness, but djaik was a pretty good sport about me essentially ruining his work with a shitty sequel. Maybe he thought that we all had to start somewhere, and he outta give me a bone. If you're actually reading this djaik, then I have to thank you, cuz if you had put me down (like you honestly probably should've, tbh), then this blog post would likely be either much shorter, or not here at all. 

So about the fanfic. I recommend giving it a read yourself if you like cringing at fanfictions, but in the event that you don't I'll go ahead and give you the summary of all the parts. My OCs basically brutally murder every important character in Sonic lore that isn't from 06.There's some ideas and lore aspects that I'd lift from this story and apply to some of my later works, like the introduction of the "Second Death", but it's honestly pretty bad. Written at first in play format (where every character is labeled like they're lines that are supposed to be read from an actor) into some wacky prose-play hybrid that...sucked. I overpunctuated a lot, didn't space after a comma (as is proper of a proper Grammar Nazi (that I also so happened to identify myself as at the time)), among other slights of grammatical foolishness. That's not even to critically assess the actual writing or themes of the story. I know I was going for a macabre horror kind of vibe, but I think a lot of the setup and actual descriptions of these elements were cliché at best, and really bad on average. 

The main baddies were a trio of seemingly all-powerful original characters that weren't well described or introduced, not helped by the fact that they all wore Organization XIII-style jackets, because that's the epitome of edgy fashion. I mean maybe there's some value in an undefined, all-powerful enemy, but I think that's usually reserved for cosmic/eldritch horrors, and I wasn't really good enough to really write them that way anyhow. Really, I just wanted my OCs to seem like gods, and obliterate literally everything in their path as I wanted to scratch the edgy itch of my mind. 

Inbetween all of this, however, I was writing a few other things. The three characters in Hell In Fur were being defined and given traits and personalities in their own bio posts. Ages, personalities, looks, etc., all given form finally. At this point, I was formulating a long, drawn out series focusing on my original characters (of course). However, as I was getting more and more interwoven with some other Sonic enjoyers, my ambitions grew exponentially. This story wasn't gonna be just about my OCs, no. 

Around 2013, I was gearing up for my next big project. I had more than a few friends in the Sonic community, so I thought I'd be a real cool guy and start adding in people into my story. Unexpected Visitors had my three main OCs (same as the Hell in Fur ones) as the antagonists, while Sonic and most of the fan characters would be the protags. Venom, Seth, and Daemon, were the three characters I concocted, while I would solicit other fan characters from my friends via Notes (dms for DA), and a quiz-style journal where you could earn the "privilege" of being in the story. Kind cringe. But at the time, I didn't worry about how I looked or anything like that. I was totally interested in the story I wanted to write. And write I did.

The first chapter to Unexpected Visitors came out on December 28th, 2012. For those of you keeping track at home, that's literally the day after I started Hell In Fur. I'm not going to sift through years of DeviantArt activity and memories to try to give you the complete timeline on whether or not Unexpected Visitors was a glint in my eyes before Hell in Fur, but I like the idea that both series came from the same rush of creative inspiration, and were rapidly worked on at around the same time. That's probably not true, and the real answer is probably that UV was being worked on in the background, but then Hell In Fur got focused on due to my immediate connection to Unhappy Christmas. 

Anyhow, UV itself, on its own merit, was a step up from Hell In Fur. The setup, the formatting, and general competence was better. Not exactly a whole lot better, but better still. The story took the "Second Death" idea from Hell In Fur (or was it the other way around? Don't care). In fact, it starts with that. Chapter 1 is all about Cosmo being in this land after the events of Sonic X season 3's almost finale. It ends with the Metarex coming back to take over this previously unknown land. If I may pat myself on the back, I think this is a good idea and was pretty happy I came up with it. 

But of course, there were tons of issues with this series too. Firstly, its incomplete, which in itself is kind of an issue, since all the good ideas in the world can't save a series that never utilizes them. In Chapter 2, I literally plagiarize music because I was a fan of it. Twice. The title itself is a reference to a Whitechapel album, A New Era Of Corruption (which I misspelled somehow in the chapter title, and incorrectly attributed in the description), and in the chapter, I literally copy-pasted the verse and chorus of the song A War You Cannot Win by All That Remains. Pretty sure this is a war crime in some countries. This isn't to mention that my grammar is still kinda fucky. Another criticism I can level at myself, but forgive, is that this series is the first time I really tried to write cohesive fight scenes. Pretty sure I overexplained, or tried to hard to replicate anime's fight choreography in written form. At the time, I really liked fighting anime, and thought the general acrobatic and eccentric nature of the fights where amazing when contrasted with the more grounded variants seen in a lot of western media. 

The pacing was also pretty wild. Daemon was written originally to be Tails' forgotten brother, which was something revealed near the end of chapter 2. Moments after he's introduced. Not really sure why I did it so fast, but I'm pretty sure my eagerness to get the story moving could be compared to Sonic's speed. 

After 4 chapters, and just recently introducing a friend's ninja character, the project ended, likely due to lacking time or motivation (the beginning of a pattern that persists to this very day). It's likely to be more of the motivation side of things, because after chapter 4, my gallery undergoes a significant writing hiatus. I post more slice-of-life stuff, introducing the people who watched me to my other creative interests at the time. Gaming with pictures of Soldier Front 2 (getting a post later on) and Tribes Ascend. Game Design with Gameglobe (please please please look that up, it was really cool). Animating in Pivot. Dumping pics off of my iPod Touch. A couple of art posts here and there, about my OCs and other things. March 17th was the day I published chapter 4, and my next written work would come in November 24th, starting a remake of Hell In Fur. It only gets 2 parts, so I'm not gonna dwell too much on it, but the writing was well improved in a number of areas (most importantly, the grammatical area). It didn't get completed, but it was a prologue of something new I was cooking up. Something that I'd call at that time my magnum opus.

When I link most of my other previous works, I link it with the intent for you to laugh- laugh at a younger, stupider version of myself, who's definition of good writing boiled down to figuring out how to make the bloodiest scenes and situations exist. It was cringey and almost objectively bad. When I link to you Operation Revival, though, I link it as a genuine recommendation. Don't get it twisted- I'm not saying it'll blow your socks off or anything, or bragging about its quality. But if there's something from my creative library, written or not, that I'm proud of, and actively ready to show off, Operation Revival is on the list, if not the first thing I want to show people. 

A recurring theme of my written works is that I don't finish them. Unfortunately, Operation Revival is among them (and ironically, the only series I finished was Hell In Fur), but that's not the whole story. It is finished in a sense; I finished a whole "arc" of the story, which is more than what could be said about UV. I think the two primary reasons why I didn't finish Operation Revival was because I got burnt out with all the planning and writing of the first arc, and because what I was writing on (a first-gen iPad Mini) was really starting to slow down and show its age with some of my longer chapters. Like, it would literally lag when I typed or tried to backspace once the chapter got past a certain word count (of which they usually numbered in the high hundreds, low to mid thousands). Having to deal with that, day in and day out, for what became years, probably took its toll, and helped develop that burnout mentioned previously.

But all of that is primarily caused by the increased seriousness I took the project. I had a large Google Doc that had overviews of each arc and chapter, that I developed over time. Any piece that I wrote as a tangent to the main OR series was listed in there. I would diligently wake up at around 5am every day and get to work writing. Honestly, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Ok, but that's all the facts surrounding Operation Revival. What was the story actually? Well, it starts in a fictional city called Diamond City, a city where criminal organizations act with near-impunity and cause chaos. The first chapter starts with an explosive bank heist that ends in many deaths, but not described with such brutal detail like in Hell In Fur. The perpetrators were my OCs of course. The writing developed to be more formal, had some personality to it, and just...made more sense overall. The second chapter reused some content from UV, once again for the third time introducing the "Second Death" mechanic (soon to be renamed Realm of the Dead). Since I don't mind you actually reading through Operation Revival, I'm not gonna go through the entirety of the story, as reading it isn't a complete headache.

As I said though, Operation Revival was never fully finished. The final chapter, an "epilogue" was a cliffhanger for the second arc of the story I intended on writing, but never did. Combined with the two previous reasons, I feel away from the Sonic fandom and writing in general after its completion. I wrote a few more pieces, but I haven't posted anything Sonic related to my DA in years. But why? Why all the change?

In the early days of my DA involvement, the thing that kept me coming back was the constant interaction with people on the platform. Almost every day, something new was happening with someone, be it drama, art posts, or just being social with 'em. It felt like I was cultivating real friendships with real people. But after years of being in the same community, and interacting with the same people, it leaves room for things to easily fall apart. People age and change, and with that, passions and creative output change. Some people grow tired of their fandoms, and just leave, while other just take their attention to whatever new hotness is going around. Either way, people in my circle started interacting less, and therefore, I interacted less. With less interaction, I felt less incentive to go on. I didn't write for the fame of it, but knowing people were reading and enjoying my content was an important part of my view of my content (still is, wink wink). Eventually, I just left too.

It doesn't help that DA itself was being pretty stagnant. In my recollection, the site made very few changes to itself over the many years I had used it. It was slowly becoming an aging dinosaur among an internet whose expectations were changing much quicker. Websites were becoming more streamlined, vectorized, and dark mode. DeviantArt was green. I'm not saying the change in website expectations were a good thing, but they were a thing, and DeviantArt was likely affected by it in some way. This and more likely kept more people from joining, or sticking with DA, and slowly started making the site feel dead.

As I look through my watch list, all these years later, I see a hollow recreation of everything I had once remembered. What were once artists that got many comments on their piece would be lucky to get one. The general interactivity feels so low from when it once was. My popularity and friend circle were never particularly large, but I think that's what makes it sting even more. Even with maybe 20 or so people I talked to regularly, it made me feel like there was always something going on. I have 94 watchers on my account, and I bet only 20 of them use DA to any capacity nowadays. And of all the people I watch, I think most of the ones left are ones I followed for impure reasons.

If you've heard any criticism of DA nowadays, it's probably that it's a crack den of horny and mature content. Go to the front page of DeviantArt, and you'll very quickly find some...impure material. Or so you might think. My home page does look like that, but that's probably more my fault that DA's. If you open an incognito tab on DA's home page, you'll probably find a lot of "normal", non-lewd art on it. However, for one reason or another, this idea spread and gravely affected DeviantArt's visuals and identity. This isn't me insinuating that it wasn't true, this is me just saying that it's not that true now, but the damage is already done. 

People, including SFW artists are still found on DA to this day. Some people adapted as their group left. Some weren't in it for the group at all, and just needed a reliable place to dump their art. Even a few of my old buds are kick around on DA from time to time. The magic's gone, though. We can't reclaim what once was again. 

Porn and stagnation are probably the two most commonly cited reasons for how DA tanked in cultural relevance (unless we're talking memes; people still probably dunk on DA for these reasons today). People still use it, and its still around. They've updated their UI and aesthetic to be more in line with what people expect nowadays. DeviantArt isn't dead, it's undead; a husk of memories limping about until the plug is inevitably pulled. However, for as long as it limps, it supports a wide variety of people, art, and memories. Excluding any planning, DeviantArt still hosts 100% of my written works from all those years ago, and from time to time, takes me back to a better time. It's a time that I honestly hope to replicate on this site, and any others I start to put time and effort into. 

I guess at this point, I have to strawman a bit to ask the questions I'm going to gaslight you into saying you thought: "Are you going back? Will you ever finish Operation Revival?" The answer is as it always has been: maybe, but probably not. If I continue Operation Revival, I'd honestly have to start over. I paced it bad again, but not nearly as bad as Unexpected Visitors. Characters came, went, died, and lived too fast for the most part. Lore wasn't expanded on all the ways I would've liked it to. I started writing a sister series "A Past Of Terror" in order to flesh out the backstories of my characters, but honestly, that stuff should've been inside the story proper. That'd mean more chapters, and a longer arc, but it'd make the writing so much better, and the story much more complete. 

However, it'd also mean I need to spend a bunch of time planning, character developing, and writing, and while I still have a pretty free schedule overall, that's a lot of effort I'm not sure my usually flakey motivation can pull off. I wrote OR at the height of my creative period, and I've only been slowly losing my creative edge since. I arguably have better ideas nowadays, but my ability to materialize them has been its lowest in my life. Too much self-criticism, too many expectations, too little self-discipline. Ironically, I've found myself right back into the Sonic fandom, just not nearly like I was in high school. Frontiers looks hype as shit. IDW's comics are amazing, and the Archie stuff I've read so far isn't too bad either (I'm still in the 90s/early 00s tho).

Ironically, Operation Revival is dead, and in its final of final breaths, this blog post coughs its last bit of relevance. 

Goodbye, my sweet Sonic fanfic. Possibly, forever.