Zine Works
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Listen to the tale of a far-journeying man. How he wandered and learned much, and where he went, and who he met, the challenges he faced and friends he left. How he fought through dungeons, built great structures, tested his strength against others, and yet journeys still.
Welcome. You are here. It begins like this.
Series
- Part 1 of Zine Works
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Why Diplomacy Is The Worst And We Shouldn't Even Try It Probably by antimony_medusa
Fandoms: SMPEarth
07 Nov 2023
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The Antarctic Empire is pursuing diplomacy on SMPEarth (why not try something new to provision the empire), but the Transatlantic organization they're negotiating with keep acting stranger and stranger to Phil, going from oblique comments to straight up rudeness. Technoblade has to pick apart this social tangle and figure out why they keep being so weird to his co-emperor, hopefully without endangering the empire as he does it. He is not psyched about this challenge, and the fact that Phil just keeps getting more and more stressed and silent isn't helping.
Or: Conference Meetings, Lobster, and some Hugs in the middle of the North Atlantic.
Series
- Part 2 of Zine Works
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She moved to the syndicate table and started unpacking her groceries. Butter, two types of sugar, some eggs. Flour, the vanilla extract she made herself in old potion bottles, a lemon she’d asked Ponk for. The syndicate had decided on a monthly meeting to meet up and learn about different subjects, and this time it was Niki’s turn to teach.
She lined up her ingredients on the table, the strange humming energy it always put off thrumming through her fingertips. How was this going to go? She had been abandoned and left to burn so many times. She didn’t want to storm away in the middle of baking, anger demanding that she destroy something, half-made ingredients left to harden indelibly as she went to break herself against stones or explosives. She didn’t want to be alone again.
OR: As four injured people rebuilt their lives, the Syndicate has started meeting to teach each other things. And this time it's Niki's turn to lead. She's going to make a cake.
Series
- Part 3 of Zine Works
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How To Make The Secret City’s Speciality Dessert - Roasted Brown Sugar Oranges And Buttermilk Ice Cream by antimony_medusa
Fandoms: Dream SMP
29 Dec 2024
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Be targeted. Be outcast. Be forgotten. Start digging an underground refuge. You hosted a party but it descended into chaos and despair, like everything does now. You can’t trust people to be there for you. You can’t trust them at all. Work on your refuge. Make it a safe spot for the lost to come to. Plant oranges.
OR: Niki builds a secret city.
AND: Niki makes a dessert.
Series
- Part 4 of Zine Works
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Potatoes Isn’t All I’m Working On: Squidkid, Legendary Armour, and Doing Things Properly by antimony_medusa
Fandoms: Minecraft (Video Game)
08 Jun 2025
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The top of the leaderboards in Hypixel Skyblock have long been occupied by the best of the best, those among us who excel at feats of strength, of magic, of creativity and of survival. To be highly ranked in a skill is to know that the list of your peers is short—that you have achieved a height of excellence few can match. However, as becomes clear to anyone interacting with those at the top of the leaderboard, static numbers don’t tell the whole story. Today we dive deep with a figure behind one of the most exciting and interesting skill competitions on the market, a conflict rooted in a most unexpected skill set: potato production.
Or: the Squid Kid interview.
Series
- Part 5 of Zine Works
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[Meta] Keeping Things Platonic: in Conversation with DSMP Authors by antimony_medusa
Fandoms: Dream SMP
29 Nov 2025
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If you search the entire Dream SMP tag today, 8 of the top relationships are “&”, with the first 6 tags being platonic and the 7th being no romantic relationships. Entire events with thousands of works posted have taken place with an incredibly high proportion of works being Gen. At the time of writing there are 1,393 works that are tagged with MCYT Fic Fight (Archive of Our Own, 2025), a popular writing event based on Art Fight where teams “attack” other participants by writing fics for their prompts, and 1,111 of them are categorized as Gen. That’s 80% platonic. An analysis of a similarly large fandom with teenage protagonists and a young fanbase—僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga)—shows 75,978 of 365,212 works are tagged Gen, or 21% of the whole fandom. Dream SMP’s 44,152 Gen works out of 89,155 is sitting at a cool 50% of the entire fandom.
Why was the fandom so focused on platonic relationships, and how did that impact the fandom space? I spoke to a number of writers about their experiences in the Dream SMP fandom and the romantic/platonic divide.
Series
- Part 6 of Zine Works
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Because he did love the whole world, despite its heaviness, loved throwing himself into it, loved the people he met. Sometimes it was even fun to kiss them, but there was no more that he was searching for. He was already complete.
OR: Etoiles, and his bro, and a conversation about love.
Series
- Part 7 of Zine Works