I am very busy because real life has been bombarding me with responsibilities but I wanted to get online to respond to this. ‘People’ haven’t said my writing sounds like AI. It was one strawpage message. One that has been sent to multiple writers before. The same phrasing, almost like a bot comment.

My beta reader is someone I have known for a long time. She’s been writing since before Gen AI was available for the public. I have beta’d her writing years ago too. I’ve even gone through her academic writings before. AI prose are very easy to detect and hers looks nothing like it. When she goes through my work, we barely have to change much except a few punctuations. Or we talk about it in inbox if she thinks something needs to be changed. She doesn’t change anything herself. She only sends me suggestions. I don’t even think the ‘one’ person who sent the accusation even reads my ao3 which goes through my beta reader. And I also think the assumption was sent to me after looking at my threads. Personally I think AI could try but it would never be able to properly replicate my prose. Anyway, I understand you’re concerned but I know who I am friends with. Thank you.

So true. Shirtless Jayce looking behind with droplets of sweat rolling down his torso and temple when Viktor comes to show him a report on something they were working on. Jayce is oblivious and Viktor’s distracted, his ear hot and absolutely red. It doesn’t help that the heat is getting to him too so he pushes his collar aside, lets a drop of sweat drip down the front to his chest, disappearing behind his damp shirt. This one catches Jayce’s eye and he can’t concentrate either. Thinking of licking at Viktor’s sweaty throat while Viktor’s thinking of the very same thing. They are not together yet so the thoughts to them are one-sided.

That’s a fair question and I agree that the ‘Jayce is dumb’ trope in Jayvik fic can be repetitive and, at times, carry biases people don’t consciously think about. In my body swap piece, that’s not what’s happening. Jayce isn’t written as less intelligent, the moments where he struggles in Viktor’s body are about unfamiliarity and adapting to someone else’s methods, not a lack of skill. Likewise, Viktor would face the same kind of disorientation in Jayce’s body, in areas Jayce finds second nature. Here we are looking at it through Jayce’s perspective. If I wrote this in Viktor’s perspective, you’d see him struggle too. There’s also a part where Jayce takes an experiment too far because he’s intelligent enough to reach that point in the first place. When Viktor says he’s ‘smarter than Jayce’, it’s meant as banter, not a literal assessment.

And when I described Jayce’s design as impressionistic, I meant it in the artistic sense. Broad-strokes, conceptual, big-picture thinking, not sloppy or “wrong”. His style is instinctive and visionary. Viktor says it could be better. And let’s not forget, that in my interpretation, both of them call each other out and both have moments where their work could be improved (Jayce mentioning how Viktor could be better too). It’s a balance, not a hierarchy and the differences in style are part of what makes their dynamic interesting to me.

And for the record, I’m a brown man in STEM, and my writing comes from my own professional and technical experience. I’m not here to dumbify anyone, especially a character that I resonate with because he’s a person of color as well. I’m here to explore these characters with the same complexity they deserve.