Late on Thursday evening, Regan finds herself recalling something her boyfriend once told her. It was something he’d read in a tech article, positing that algorithms might not be so much a reflection of you as they are a window into who you’re soon going to be—with the ability to insert things covertly into the user’s feed, a person could be brainwashed, slowly but surely, and core aspects of their identity could be shifted over time, from opinions on brands to deeply held beliefs about politics and identity.

She’s not so sure it's true, because deep into her late-night doomscrolling, long past when she’d promised her boyfriend she’d cut off her screen time, Regan’s feed starts showing her yuri.

A lot of yuri.

It's so off-base as to be comical. She's not into it. She could never be into it, no matter what, and no amount of pressing ‘I’m not interested’ seems to make her algorithm get the hint. When had she ever even interacted with any yuri content? She tries to scroll past, but it’s an endless fount of fanart and edits; some of the characters are unfamiliar to her, but many, many more of them are ones she recognises from shows and games she likes.

Maybe if it was at least canon—whatever, she’d still wonder why it was showing up on her feed, but live and let live. But it isn’t. It isn’t canon at all. It’s women with canonical male love interests paired with their female rivals, and women who have sisterly relationships depicted as being in the throes of love and lust with each other! Why can’t they just stick to their own damn media? They have so much of it these days—as far as Regan’s concerned, it seems like they have almost too much of it, and that’s not counting the infamous ‘yuri subtext’ that she’s been assured haunts so many otherwise innocent anime.

She closes the app and reopens it, hoping it’ll refresh her feed and fix whatever bug hit her algorithm. Instead, the very first post is fanart of that mecha show; the princess—with a canon male love interest!—is on her knees in front of the female enemy commander with her jaw slack and her eyes glazed over in worship. Regan’s baffled. It doesn’t even make sense! Is that supposed to be hot? They’re on opposite sides, for god’s sake—they never show any signs of being into each other! What are these yuri-addicts thinking?

And then, the one-two punch at the end of a cavalcade of blows, a caption shamelessly declaring that “good gay girls goon.”

“Good gay—” She cuts herself off, scoffing. “Oh, fuck you.”

That’s the last straw. Her phone’s tossed aside in short order. Right away, she considers picking it back up and firing off a sarcastic text to her boyfriend about how there might finally be a solution to her doomscrolling problem, but now untethered from her phone, exhaustion hits her like a truck. Regan burrows her face into her pillow, but the images pollute her thoughts, lingering long after she closes her eyes and even further, into her dreams.

Regan wakes up covered in sweat, gasping like she’s just run a marathon. She’s about to raise her hand to her head to check her temperature, suspecting a fever, only to find her phone already in her hand. She brings it up to her face and squints as the lock screen informs her it’s just gone 3 AM. Throwing it away again, she scowls; with the lack of external stimulus, she’s trapped with herself in the dark, becoming increasingly aware of the persistent, aching heat between her thighs and the itch to do something about it.

She shouldn’t, she reasons, but she does anyway.

The first image on her feed is an explicit image of the princess from the mecha show, naked, her pale skin covered in a litany of bruises and bite marks. Regan’s frustrated whine only grows more desperate as she keeps scrolling and sees that the only material for her to use to work this heat out of herself are drawings of women fucking each other’s brains out, or in some other invariably erotic situation—it isn’t just fanart, either, there’s horny illustrations of artist OCs she’s never seen before, extremely evocative and lurid text posts, and it’s just—women, women, women!

Regan wonders, then, when exactly her other hand came to rest on her pussy. Her clit throbs for attention. She’s not—into this, she isn’t, but she’s so achingly aroused, and it’s all right there for her, compelling her to scroll, each image a hook lodged so deep in her brain she was unable to find refuge even in sleep. She can’t go back to sleep like this. She’ll have to use what’s at hand, just this once. A resigned wince and a huff makes her displeasure clear to nobody in particular as she concedes and starts to rub; the touch is pure electric, and she can’t stop the desperate little mewl that tumbles out of her.

Those magical girls aren't meant to be doing things so obscene with one other! But then why, oh why does it turn her the fuck on to see them doing it? Her outrage is a waning flame facing down a tidal wave of all-consuming, endless lesbianism. Holy shit, there's more of the magical girls and—Ichigo is—she’s doing what with her tongue?!

Regan is wide-eyed. She’s rapt, the screen her world, and she just can't stop scrolling, each new post like unwrapping a present and being gifted something she never knew about herself. Canon or not, she finally makes the concession that the porn, at least, is hot. It’d be absurd to try and deny that, with how sloppy her cunt has gotten.

Oh, god, why can't she stop? The thought arises, unbidden; does she like this?

She's in a lust-haze, mesmerised, her only option to keep rubbing and rubbing and touching herself more frantically with each post that flies past, fucking herself deeper into utter transfixion with her own hand; she should stop, she needs to stop because she's not into yuri, she's not into women—but it feels so fucking goooood!

The way she feels, the way her heart is racing; does she want this?

Falling, falling, she’s falling deeper into this, bucking into her hand in a frantic rhythm that matches her equally frantic scrolling; her mind feels soft and porous, and after a while she starts to think it might be leaking out of her brain, but that’s not her brain, it’s her own drool, because she’s panting with her fucking tongue out while she frantically humps her hand like a bitch in heat—and then everything comes to a halt as it appears again on her screen; that caption from earlier, and she understands well, this time, that what she is seeing is the vocabulary of her own destruction.

Good gay girls goon.

“Good… Good gay girls goon,” she reads aloud, feeling each and every word sink in. “Good gay girls goon...”

She keeps masturbating, keeps scrolling, keeps gooning, eyes locked to her phone, unable to look away as everything she thought she knew about herself sloughs away and dissolves into sticky, desperate joy. She doesn’t even know why it’s all so hot—she can’t put her finger on it—it may as well be meaningless, arbitrary, it just is, it’s animal like the need for food and sleep—curves are hot, so many curves, but so many women with narrow bodies too, fat, skinny, small breasts, large breasts, cocks, pussy; she can’t make sense of it, and so it’s easier just to accept the one, simple fact that she can make sense of: that she’s a good gay girl, and good gay girls goon!

Fuck canon. Fuck the idea that there’s too much of this. There’s not enough. This is the hottest shit she’s ever seen. A gif of the magical girl bouncing on the Bee Queen Kaiju’s cock, endlessly looping, tongue out like a shameless whore—Regan feels her cunt clenching around a phantom cock, her body burning with the need to sit where the magical girl sits.

“Good—good gay girls, g-goon, good gay girls… goon…!”

Two tennis aces, friends since childhood, forced to face each other on the court, now shown happily married but one of them’s in a cuck chair on their wedding night because the female coach is—shit—it’s so wrong, it’s so gross, but that’s why it’s so hot, oh fuck, it makes no sense but it feels so good—

She needs this!

“Good gay girls gooooon, good, good gay girls goon good gay girls goon…!”

It’s her new mantra, a brand pressed into her identity, and the more she scrolls, the further it’s pressed in, deeper and more foundational until its so deeply and permanently seared into her shape it could never be removed.

Regan is a good girl.

She is gooning.

Good gay girls goon.

She is gay.

She is a good gay girl and she is gooning.

Good gay girls goon!

Morning comes, and it feels like being on the other side of a fever. She doesn't even remember cumming, or when she fell asleep, but she stretches out, basking in the sun filtering through her curtains feeling totally refreshed. Reaching for her phone, she opens it to see a text from her boyfriend asking if they’re still on for meeting at ten. She swipes it away, deciding she’ll think of a reason to fob him off later, and opens her social media; her hand lowers to her cunt in anticipation, but all her feed shows her is a load of het porn.

“Ew,” she mutters.

She starts pawing at herself idly while she searches for the stuff she actually wants to see. The first thing she finds is an absurdly hot drawing of the princess staring slack-jawed and drunk on unadulterated worship as she grinds on the commander’s boot, her rival watching on with jealousy. Grinning deliriously, she rolls her hips up into her hand, feeling the siren pull of another long goon sesh.

Another message from the… guy. Sigh. 

Her clit’s begging her for attention and she doesn’t really care about his feelings, seeing as he had the temerity to interrupt her, so she texts him a brief, careless message full of typos, hits send, and blocks him. God knows why she was with him in the first place. She’s gay, after all: a good gay girl who goons!