Hello! This week, we’re showing up slightly late to talk about rook unions, stoned foxes, and Irish-accented emails.
What should Star Fox look like?
On May 6, Nintendo held a surprise Star Fox Direct presentation showing off a new entry in the series for the Switch 2. The new look of Fox McCloud and his squad drew immediate criticism on the internet as a “repulsive” switch from cartoons to taxidermy, with many comparing McCloud to the infamous “Stoned Fox”. Applying more realistic fur and glassy eyes has broken some kind of spell and made everyone question why they’re playing an anthropomorphic fox mercenary in the first place.
The choice to remake the original Star Fox game yet again was also controversial. Star Fox 64 (1997) was a remake of Star Fox (1993); 64 was then remade as Star Fox 64 3D (2011) and Star Fox Zero (2016). But now it feels like the series may have lost the plot despite repeating the same story four times. Maybe Fox McCloud’s rail shooter adventure just made more sense on a 16-bit console than it does today.
The dramatic reactions to Fox’s glow-down come in part from furries, who are undeniably a huge part of the Star Fox fandom. While it’s an overstatement to “blame Star Fox for furries” generally, it’s also true that users on the Star Fox subreddit are 50 times more likely to participate in the furry_irl subreddit than the average Reddit user is. They’re even more likely to cross over with the Sonic fandom, which was in a similar uproar over the look of Sonic in 2019 theatrical trailers, with criticism again focused on the character’s fur and eyes.
The outsize response to an unsexy fox points to the impact of character design on the internet today. Entire genres, such as gacha games and fighting games, exist to sell characters. Fan edits and fan art keep franchises like Star Fox alive through periods of corporate neglect. And characters now travel far afield from their original contexts, appearing to new audiences through mash-ups and shortform animations far more outlandish than anything in Super Smash Bros. A bad Star Fox game could be forgotten in weeks; an ugly Star Fox could haunt the fandom for years.
Rook together strong
Marathon — the latest extraction shooter by Bungie, the studio behind Destiny and Halo -- can be cruel. As a PvPvE game, players ostensibly have the opportunity to team up against AI opponents and extract from the map in peace. But Marathon's systems goad players towards acting out of self-interest or paranoia, making cooperation scarce — unless you're playing as a rook.
Since Marathon's release, players across YouTube and Reddit have been documenting a steady call to action for rooks to "unionize," resulting in a unique pattern of social player behavior that isn't officially sanctioned by the game. Rooks are basically Marathon's bottom-feeders; when you choose to play as a rook, you're spawned into the middle of a match with few resources and no crew. You're generally encouraged to sneak around the map and glean what you can from the aftermath of previous battles, hoping that you're not spotted by a crew of other players. Multiple rooks can spawn in a map, and there's no direct obligation for them to work with one another.
But as players became more familiar with Marathon's systems, people on Reddit began posting videos demonstrating how rooks, when working together, can dominate maps full of pre-built crews. One post describes an impromptu crew of seven rooks overtaking Pinwheel, an area known for containing high-tier loot and encouraging teamfights. "Rook together strong" persists as a popular movement, evidence that cooperation still has a place in Marathon’s brutal, runner-eat-runner world; chances are that, if you load into Outpost as a rook today, you'll eventually hear those words spoken over proximity chat, uttered by a fellow rook with lofty ambitions.
Are you a house-husband alpha or a clingy omega?
Unbothered beta. Bodyguard alpha. Bratty omega. These aren't just fun ways to describe letters from the Greek alphabet — they're possible results of "The Ultimate Omegaverse Quiz," which was published earlier this year. For those not in the know, "Omegaverse" refers to a genre of erotic fanfiction that rose to popularity across the 2010s, mostly driven by Supernatural fandom on Tumblr. These works are set in a world where people have a "secondary sex" that affects their personality and pheromonal attraction: alpha (dominant), omega (submissive), and beta (the status quo). It's a potent narrative framework that enables complex intersections of themes related to gender and sexuality.
The idea of making an Omegaverse-themed personality quiz is nothing new, especially since the genre came to prominence during Buzzfeed's heyday. So what makes this the "ultimate" — or as one Redditor put it, "unofficially-official" — Omegaverse quiz? According to its creators, their quiz is more comprehensive than others, supporting four different archetypes for each of the three secondary sexes. The "fixer beta" is much more rational and logic-oriented than the "bestie beta," for example, who is more just "here for the vibes." It's also a bit easier on the eyes than other personality quizzes; its visual design is reminiscent of Co-Star, the app for people afflicted with an interest in astrology.
But what makes "The Ultimate Omegaverse Quiz" more broadly compelling is that it shows how Omegaverse fiction has stood the test of time, cementing itself as a key node in the online fanfic ecosystem. Whether or not it's your cup of tea, you have to admit that Omegaverse fiction saved us from a more boring alternate timeline in which fanfic never evolved past Twilight.
How big could a file be?
A recent joke about Discord got our attention: in it, the poster appears to receive one of those unsolicited scam DMs you get from hanging out in public Discord servers. The payload in this case is an outrageous 725TB file. (You can’t even send 1GB over Discord, but never mind.) The image started a debate in an EX meeting about things that could be zipped to create such a file for real. Wikimedia Commons is apparently up to 853TB, with most of that coming from .jpeg and .tiff images. The Internet Archive is 45 petabytes, making an even more impressive gift to send over DM. The more you know!
Chum Box
AI
In the ongoing OpenAI trial, Musk departed from his usual bombast about Grok when assessing the AI race: Claude in front, ChatGPT and Gemini in second, Chinese open-weight models third, and Grok in a distant fourth. [link]
A new internet-checkpoint music playlist (where people leave diary-style comments about their lives) started gaining traction [link] before the songs were exposed as “AI slop” by the channel “rap god 3 hours clean” [link]
Games
Note from Chris: My dad, who’s been in the games industry for decades, just launched a Kickstarter for a wacky family board game he’s been play-testing and fine-tuning for years. I’m biased, but I’ve had a great time playing it, and it’s the type of idiosyncratic little game I love to find. It’s called Rubber Ducky Rampage — check it out here.
“You found lost media” was the latest cross-fandom craze to briefly take over corners of Twitter and Bluesky [link to a huge 30-minute compilation]. The basic format (“You found lost media”/“It’s problematic media”) feels like it’s descended from the item discovery messages of some old RPG, but we couldn’t think of an exact match. Maybe Pokémon’s “[Pokémon] used [ability] / It’s not very effective…”
New Roblox gem: Steal Candy From A Baby [link]
Little Caesars Arena - Main Menu [link]
The internet
Wikipedia chose the article “Shipping ethics controversy in fanfiction” for a recent homepage spotlight [link] in a move that fanfic authors immediately compared to 9/11 [link]
Otaku birria edit [link]
The classic Irish-accented email scam [link]
Music
An awesome drum pad tutorial told through Metal Gear Solid codec calls [link]
The original composer of Ghosts ‘n Goblins is making charming advertisements for her music on TikTok with the help of her son [link]
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One Last Thing
“as a jersey mikes employee this is the vibe every time a customer walks in that door 😁❤️”