I Am Laughing So Hard I Am Crying. Good Eye And Sense Of Humor.

I am laughing so hard I am crying. Good eye and sense of humor.

Don't get me wrong, I am BEYOND excited about this! But it does remind me of something......

I've never placed any original work on AO3, but you've given me the idea that perhaps the website should be flooded with original stories about studio executives slimeballs and some of the actions they've undertaken to avoid paying fair wages for labor, and so on. Don't have to cross the line to be creative and blow off steam. You can still hide it behind the registered user lockscreen.

Don't break the strike, break the shoddy practices that lead to treating humans as less than.

Just gonna throw out the idea that if you write original fiction and post it on AO3, you might want to hide it behind registered users only while the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are on. The studios are going to start looking for ANYTHING they can develop; original stuff they can access and tweak and not have to pay for? Even better.

It's also worth noting that if someone engages in strike-breaking practices while a strike is on and they are NOT a guildmember, my understanding is that you will be banned from future membership. So some studio slimeball wants to develop your thing and have you write the script right now? Sounds awesome! But you will never be able to join the WGA.

Independent Claws

Summary: You are lost in a cycle of avoidance caused by a painful past. Peter shepherds you towards a happier future.

Pairing: Peter Parker X Reader; written as mostly Fem!Reader

Warnings: Angst, Alcoholism (mention), Hurt/Comfort, Language, Mature situations, etc, etc Minors DNI

*Reblogs, reblogs, reblogs, and likes are great. Please do not post, copy or transfer to other sites on social media or use with AI.*

Chapter One: Tense

Your skin appears orange under the glow of the street lamps as you chain the rusty bicycle to the fence railing and tread softly down the street. A mental image of black gloves, left sitting on a desk back home, taunts the only part of you uncovered. "Idiot," you mutter to yourself, looking down at your hands, balling them into fists. It isn't the weather for which the gloves are necessary, although your breath frosts in the night air. You need stealth. But at least the navy blue hoodie, t-shirt, and pants are dark so you keep on walking, head down, going over your plan in your mind. Going over it and over it as you had done ever since this afternoon when the devil of opportunity presented himself and then your stupid angel conscience sent by your late mother decided to make an appearance to even the score.

--------------------

You had been watching and crushing on Peter Parker since forever, and he often wore sweaters and hoodies back in high school, but over the last few years he seemed to grow warm so quickly and shed them as if he radiated thermal energy beyond what was normal. On the first day when he made eye contact, you'd given him a shy nod of recognition in the college class you shared, surprised he had even remembered the green-eyed classmate from long ago who hugged the walls and lockers always looking for a place to hide, to avoid interaction.

As the semester continued, you tried desperately to remain inconspicuous, unapproachable, but still watching him, wide eyed like a cat in the darkness under a bed. Peering up through your fingers while taking notes in class as he pulled a sweater over his head, watching his thick brown hair go awry and stand up as if he was touching a Van de Graaf Generator at the science museum. Yeah, it shocked you too because sometimes his t-shirt would ride up higher and made your own neck hairs stand up as straight as his hair. But the hoodies, Peter wore those hoodies the most often. They looked so soft, so touchable and when you heard the faint but crisp ziiiiip as he ran his hand down the front and shook his arms out of the sleeves it always made your head turn. Not too fast though. You had learned to be careful. Once, hearing the familiar sound you flicked your eyes up when he removed his navy blue hoodie, which happened to be your personal favorite hoodie, and caught his brown eyes staring straight at you. That was when you dropped your pen just so you could duck to the tile floor, missing his smirk and lifted eyebrow as he shrugged the hoodie over the back of his chair.

The disrobing, as you mentally termed it, became a regular habit and made worse by the quieter nature of the calculus course compared to the mayhem of high school. No class clowns making noise, no troublemakers. Just students watching the professor while taking notes, and you, despite the mental scolding you gave yourself, watching Peter. Any notes you took on him were seared to the back of your eyelids. You rarely spotted him outside of class, even though you had grown up not too far away from his street and you tried very hard not to see him outside of class anyway. What point was there to extend your martyrdom outside of the hour you spent within four walls? You were more than a little ashamed of yourself already. The devil on your shoulder often smiled and said just a little more time when you gazed at Peter's left ear and the brown hair that curled temptingly around it; but the angel on your right gave you that sad somber look that made it clear Peter Parker wasn't for the likes of you. Not when he had been in love with Gwen, who was an angel on earth and now an angel in heaven, and not now, with your feral attitude and your heart hardened against anyone who might try and lure you to comfort and safety. That was what that hoodie symbolized if you'd bothered to analyze it. Maybe you were aware of that in some remote way, but it was like the craft store heart-shaped cardboard box you had painted for your mother when you were a child. You kept those thoughts hidden away in a part of you that hurt too much to look at. Just like that paper scrap and photo filled box, the only thing you’d kept of your mom after she passed away. You couldn't touch either where you'd hidden them; you couldn't look at them, it kept everything remote and cold and manageable.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it was your mother sending an angel friend that placed the opportunity before you, although you scarcely believed in heaven, not anymore. Or maybe there was some cosmic electric charge that rearranged and short circuited Peter's brain so that he left the hoodie, the navy blue one, resting on the back of his chair when the class ended. You didn't notice at first, you were staring at the back of his head as he walked toward the door along with everyone else, while you were busy memorizing the muscles that ran across his shoulders. Shoulders and biceps that you just then realized you could see as his short t-shirt sleeves pulled tight across them. But most likely it was that wild devil that forced your eyes to cut to Peter's vacated chair and there was the hoodie, forgotten. A quick glance to the door of the classroom revealed he had disappeared.

Without a word, you snatched the hoodie to your chest and left quickly, searching around the building exit for Peter but with no sign of him, the choice was made with no regret. You scurried silently down the hallway and went straight into the restroom where you stuffed the hoodie into your backpack. Five minutes later you were on your bicycle pedaling home with a hoodie, a backpack, and a devil of a grin on your face.

--------------------

Home is where you should be right now, not in the shadows creeping down an alley by Peter Parker's house in an attempt to do the right thing. After sitting in your upstairs room while your dad was somewhere out drinking himself into a bitter and vengeful stupor, you had lost the battle with your conscience. Your dad's worldview had always been finders keep, losers weep. Even if he was never around any more now than he was when your mom got sick, somehow he hadn't been quite able to make his the world owes you something kid type of logic stick with you either, another disappointment that he never failed to point out.

No matter how you tried to justify it, no matter how much you wanted just some thing to hold, to wrap around you, never mind some one, you could not keep what was never yours. Stupid old hoodie you told yourself as you put your arms on your knees and breathed in the essence of Peter in the soft fabric. That scent almost broke you... almost. It felt like what home could be when there were warm hearts and hands that comfort each other. When tired eyes were allowed to close because there was no need for a wild-eyed wakefulness that danger downstairs had crossed the threshold drunk and delirious. That thought, the thought of a different disappointment, that the example of how to do the right thing had been forgotten was why you were tiptoeing past a run down garage to reach an old beat up car so that you could return Peter's hoodie. It may have been a stupid plan by someone who couldn't seem to muster the courage just to hand it to Peter the next time class met, but then again it was academic not emotional intelligence that was supposed to be your asset anyway. Your intelligence being the academic asset that was to get you a degree and take you far away from the warm memories and cold reality. Far away from watching what the one you could never have. At least that is what you told yourself as you stopped at Aunt May's car. You had only met her a few times, crossing paths at the store, picking up medicine for your mother. May had asked after her and your look of surprise at her knowledge didn't go unnoticed but her eyes were soft and kind, not unlike Peter's.

The lights were on in their house; maybe in the kitchen and an upstairs bedroom. You were confident from years of climbing up and down stairs silently in your own home that none of the neighbors had heard you in the alley, and perhaps that made you careless. The plan was to leave the hoodie in Aunt May's car, a place where anyone might forget a hoodie. Since the car was an older model it probably didn't have an alarm, at least you hoped it didn't. You also hoped it wasn't locked, but that hadn't occurred to you until just now. Too late. You stood there for a minute, just a minute; the brief thrill of having the coveted hoodie and its symbolic aura now fading as you pulled back the hood and tugged the zipper down, not thinking about the ziiiiip.

One last soothing stroke of the soft fabric and the hoodie was in your hand, ready to toss in the front seat. One tug on the driver's side handle and whew, it wasn't locked when...

"In the future, if you're going to steal cars, you really shouldn't dress like a car thief."

Out of the shadows stepped Spider-Man.

Shit. You are in trouble.

To be continued...

A/N: Please let me know if I left off any warnings you think would better serve readers.

Name, Image, and Likeness

SAG-AFTRA & WGA on strike ask viewers and fans to support them and I hope folks realize that this is not about a small percentage of wealthy celebrities but the overwhelming numbers of members who provide the meat and potatoes to the artistry we consume. It is reminiscent of athletes also having to fight to protect their own autonomy for the future in media and other representations.

Finally, it is also about the majority of labor across the country being used and abused in the past but especially right now and across multiple industries-- the top tier of society taking advantage of desperation felt by citizens who need to pay the bills, to eat, to provide care for others; the top tier changing laws to promote child labor, to destroy education that provides opportunity, to shoehorn the populace into categories that we didn't ask to be placed, to take away the right to take a water break in dangerous heat (Texas rescinded a mandatory water break law) at a time when workers are dying due to high temperatures. Those are just a few examples of the way workers and their families are abused and viewed by those in power that think of them as expendable, as weak, as easily replaced.

Power in numbers can provide a possible solution and in the coming days, I hope that others join in to show that human labor has value and it is time to value the human that provides that labor for the betterment of all.

Honestly, I do make an attempt at proper grammar and spelling when I comment as well as proofread prior to hitting send, so hopefully no one will label my remarks as bot-like. However, I often include or cite quotes within works that have caught my interest or attention. If I've developed a longer back and forth with the author, then I sometimes write a little less formally just as one might in real life face-to-face interaction. It can be tricky to understand 'tone' in text and I do not like to unintentionally offend anyone.

PSA: bot comments are taking over ao3

The above examples have been provided with the authors' permission to demonstrate what these look like.

Basic rundown:

They are all 3 sentences long

Perfect grammar, capitalization, and punctuation

Like absolutely flawless English teacher-style writing with only a single exclamation mark, ever

No mentions whatsoever of character names, settings, situations, or anything that could be tied to the story

The usernames may be identical to people who exist on ao3, but the name is not clickable, and no profile is associated with it EXCEPT when you directly search for that name. What this means: the comments come from an unregistered (not logged in) reader, bots scrape the site for real usernames, attach that to the comment, and post

Please spread the word about this so authors can filter comments and report them accordingly

There has been some speculation about why this is happening at all, and the best guess is that this is a feature that AI-training story-scraping tools are implementing to try and make their browsing traffic look legitimate

Because with a little imagination, one picture/video can tell more than one story...

Pretty girl who stole my heart.

The silly way I'm smiling for this...