His fanbase consists of the next generation of My Hero Academia fans. No matter what he does, they will never be pleased. They demand more representation. They demand more art on his X (formerly known as Twitter).
He goes to an IRL meet-up at ComicCon to meet his fans. The first one waltzs up. It's a girl dressed as his main character. He/They pronouns. She is wearing a diaper with her cosplay. Leatherman freezes. How could someone representing his underage character be in public cosplaying his beloved Elliot while wearing fetish gear? He gulps down his worries and greets them with a smile. He shakes her hand; she smells like piss. She asks him to draw him Elliot wearing cat ears. Leather begrudgingly goes along with it.
"Remember,"
"No. Haha. That's just ONE fan. They're not gonna all be like that." He tells himself. After the interaction, he takes a deep breath and wipes sweat from his brow. As he raises his hand, he realizes it smells like piss. He freezes and glances around his desk frantically, hoping for sanitizer. There is none. Before he knows it, the next fan comes up to his desk. Another young woman. She is also cosplaying Elliot but with a trans flag and stockings.
"But Elliot isn't trans? I already have another character who's trans. Why is she changing my-" Before he can finish his thought, she abruptly interrupts him and moves a bit too close. She isn't wearing deodorant. Leather backs up slightly out of instinct. Something about this woman awoke his inner fight-or-flight response. The bags under her eyes sag, and her skin is pasty. She appears to be overweight but the trans-colored corset is doing heavy work. He opens his mouth to speak, but she interrupts.
"You"
"OMG, haha, Leather, omg, I'm such a fan!!" She says with joyful bliss. She breathes heavily through her mouth; he can feel the musk of her breath from behind his convention desk.
"Can I have a picture?" She pulls out her phone; greasy smudge marks reflect from the low luminescent light of the confined space. Before Leather can give his consent, she starts a video.
"Haha, OMG, can you, like, say, "Trans Rights?" She asks, making a peace sign with her fingers and recording him. Leather's mind flashes back to her costume. Her trans-Elliot costume as he looks it over. His mind is momentarily lost as he stares at his reflection on her phone. He quickly puts on a smile, its authenticity lost in the pained eyes she won't notice.*
"Trans Rights!" Leather exclaimed finally. She giggled and reached over to grab his hand again without consent. After a quick farewell, she saunters off to her friends and squeals. Leather watches on from his seat. His mind is racing.
"This must be a bad first start." He tried to convince himself.
"Are"
"It's going to get better; I just need to keep an open mind." As he tries to cope, his eyes wander to the rest of the line, and his heart stops. The line extends far outside the entrance of his booth. All girls with weird hair, pins he doesn't understand, and the worst smell he's experienced. As he slowly comes to terms with what he's seeing, his eyes become distant, and his smile falters, a watery glaze falling over his eyes. They were all the same. Shippers, maid cosplayers, yaoi fangirls, and ugly women.
"Here"
Not a single male fan as far as meets the eye. No one who loves him and his work for its quality, for the years he spent developing, for the work he managed to complete despite what that corny need farm told him years ago. As he stares at the crowd, he doesn't notice the next person slip a card onto his desk and walk off.
As he does a breathing exercise, he notices the splash of color on his booth and glances down, where he sees those words again. Those simple five words. The five words he whispered many times in the past to his therapist, recalling the trauma of that night. As he looks it over, he feels all the hope and desire he once had vanish. He finally understood their warnings. It all slowly came together as he lifted the small note from his desk with trembling fingers.
"Forever."
With one final breath, he whispered to himself, his thoughts scrambled, momentarily forgetting the smell of plague musk and piss. He closed his eyes as they began to water, blinking back tears of that night. The ones he beat, the W he achieved when he told off the monolith Null himself. When he got back at Admiral Throbnelius for liking the wrong character. It all began to dawn on him, the hell of his own creation. The advice he downplayed and ignored. The ridicule and pain from that night were nothing compared to seeing his beloved Elliot being cosplayed by a white woman in a diaper with a "Yaoi" pride pin.
"It's." Leather choked back a sob, composing himself so as not to be seen as weak in front of his fans.
"It's..." Another long, momentary pause, as he nodded in defeat.
"It's...so over bros"