The Ravens Nest

The Nocturneverse, Against All Odds, Substack & Censorship

All of this panic over “protecting kids,” the sudden flood of age-verification laws, the 18+ bills flying through Congress, the platforms quietly complying or throttling mature content like The Nocturneverse, it’s not incompetence, anyone worth their salt would know this is intentional destabilization.

Classic Hegelian Dialectic:

Create (or tolerate) a problem.

Whip the public into outrage (“This can’t go on!”)

Then roll out the pre-prepared “solution” that gives you more control than you ever could have grabbed without the chaos that you inflicted yourself.

The problem was never just predators.

It was a justice system that’s been limp-dicked for years: prosecutors who won’t touch hard cases, judges handing out probation for violent offenses, repeat groomers walking free while a kid with the wrong profile gets crushed for jaywalking. That failure was allowed to fester until the public screamed.

Now the so-called “solution” isn’t fixing courts, funding real investigations, or throwing the book at actual monsters. It’s mass surveillance, facial scans, age-gating the entire internet, liability threats that force every platform to over-censor, and laws that pre-empt stronger state protections.

But why? What Are The Desired Outcomes?

Fracture independent creators and communities.

Drive traffic to a handful of compliant mega-platforms.

Normalize handing over ID and biometrics to read a story or join a chat.

Make everyone so exhausted and outraged that they beg for whatever “safety” is offered next.

Go ahead…prove me wrong, folks.

Stop being played by the outrage cycle. It’s working exactly as designed.

Which brings me to the personal update I promised.

Joe and I have spent years keeping the Nocturneverse hard-R: visceral when the story demands it, gory when it earns it, language that fits the character, nudity only when it has context. Never gratuitous. Always something a thoughtful parent could vet. We self-rated. We played nice with the implicit rules of mainstream platforms.

Then the squeeze hit. Traffic on Against All Odds cratered quite a bit. It was not holidays, not a few blocked trolls, but the quiet choke from geoblocks, age walls, and platforms bending to government ultimatums.

I spent all day Friday, chasing fruitless self-hosting options that didn’t pan out and found a sort of “Less Bad” option. I was up until 7 a.m. Saturday Morning migrating archives, fixing continuity, adding context… and realized just how much work we’ve poured into this for fun, for free.

Enough. No, I’m not slapping it behind a pay-wall. I promised I would never do that and I won’t.

I’m saying I’m done with being unilaterally reasonable.

Substack is being de-emphasized. I’ll post here occasionally, but it’s no longer the main home. We’re not waiting for the next shoe to drop and please spare me the naive assumption that it will never happen here.

What’s next:

• Archives and new battle reports are moving to ScribbleHub (quiet, unnoticed, safe for now) and my own site if that ever becomes a thing.

• Scrubbing New World of Darkness IP, building our own original setting with the same characters and stories. So there will probably be some changes in terminology and structure here and there. I dunno, y’all, got a lot to scrub, I’m just sayin’. Bro if you need help…

• Going fully unrated no more pulling punches to stay inside someone else’s shifting line. If shit gets weird, bloody, Ronnie’s PTSD gets triggered in a big bad way, drugs get used, so on and so forth, well, we did make attempts to be reasonable. How’s that working out for us? Pretty good?

• Exploring real publishing: print, paid, exclusive rights. called one of the arcs (Thousand Year-Old Vampire: The Chronicle of Thrasamund) “The Greatest Vampire Story Ever Written.” Maybe it’s time we believed them enough to stop putting the work that we are passionate about on platforms that can throttle us overnight.

We didn’t start this to get rich. I literally just wanted to make vampires cool again, stories are worth telling, and sharing them with people who get it is fun. When the system punishes restraint while the real threats adapt in hours, restraint stops being a virtue.

If you want to keep reading the Nocturneverse as it grows rawer, freer, maybe even on paper one day, follow the new spots. Links below.

And if you’re tired of the destabilization game, do one thing: go to badinternetbills.com and call your reps.

Tell them the First and Fourth Amendments apply online. No exceptions. No compromises.

See you on the other side.

As an aside, this whole move feels a lot like Draven Nocturne finally releasing his song, Symphony of The Damned.

He could’ve kept playing the toned-down arena shows forever, giving the labels and the censors their safe version. Instead he went independent and dropped the real thing. It personal, brutally-honest, and unrated, a gift to the fans who never wanted him leashed in the first place.

That’s what this tactical retreat is, our version of Symphony of The Damned.

No more unilateral restraint.

Just straight to the people who get it.

Like you.

The Nocturneverse on ScribbleHub (@Runeknight3’s posts were added after the fact so they’re out of order for now.)