Someone on reddit is posting weird fanfiction about their company's custom keycaps
I am going to take you on a journey. It's a long one!
If you are at least Fairly Online, you're probably aware that mechanical keyboards have grown into a pretty intense hobby for office workers and PC gamers over the last decade. You may not be aware, however, that some people aren't just customizing the switches in the board, or the color of the keycaps - they are buying tiny, colorful sculptures to put on the keys as well.
"Artisan" keycaps are usually meant for your mechanical keyboard's escape key, or another spot on your board that you might not frequently touch with your finger. They are, basically, jewelry for your expensive board. Many of them are handmade resin sculptures - sometimes produced by full-time workers, mostly in Asia, but also created as a kind of basement craft hobby by people who just like keyboards.
Back in 2015, when I first got into mechanical keyboards, it was tilted far more in the direction of hobbyists than pros; now, I think the ratio has reversed towards pros pretty heavily.
A lot of strange keycaps are fun and funny, and I own several. I got a quite fancy one from a company in Hong Kong which makes a lot of these and clearly employs professional sculptors and painters. That one has been on my main keyboard for years now. I got another as merch associated with a game I worked on. I once bought an escape key with a fidget spinner on it and kept it on my board at work for years. These are all dumb plastic things that don't need to exist and will end up in a landfill when I die, but I value them, and I use them every day, so I don't hate myself for having them (yet!!).
The sales process for this stuff is interesting. Most of these creators do very very small runs of the keys - sometimes as few as 10 or less - in a certain colorway. They will then post a Google Sheets form asking people to sign up if they want a cap. If they have more applicants than caps, they will randomly select from the list and email people invoices until they run out of caps. This process is called a raffle and it is the way the community has been selling these caps for years. It's so typical and expected that even a lot of professional shops sell this way, without a storefront at all.
But a teenager can also sell their art this way, without having to set up a real company. And a lot of the hobbyist ones I used to see back in 2015 and 2016 did look like art made by a teen or a young person, or someone who was brand new to sculpture. I know that this is just me being a snob, but over the years I've seen a lot of really bad handmade resin keycaps selling for $60+ USD on Reddit.
I do remember seeing some of those posters grow as artists over time. But the desire to monetize their hobby encouraged some of them to become dogshit with regards not only to the sculpt, but to the colorway of the sculptures. Creating the sculpture and the mold is the hardest part of making a cap, so reusing it is where you'd find efficiency in your little business. An artist would put out a cap with colors that looked great, but they felt pressure to make more unique patterns and colors - maybe colorways that matched existing or upcoming keycap set colors.
But then they'd keep making more, and more, and maybe some holiday-themed colorways, and soon they're desperately posting Google Survey links to caps that look shockingly bad. A lot of these colorways were so visually scrambled and odd that it became hard to tell what the sculpt was even supposed to be.
I don't want to be a bitch but I have to be a bitch: go to this site and just start clicking around. Eventually you will find some pretty dogshit keycaps. And you will also find some like these, which which have been so obliterated by color that you cannot tell what expression the little face character is supposed to have. By the time you are making this kind of thing, or daubing a Batman logo on your teeth-themed keycap, you may have lost track of your mission, I think.
That catalog site is a pretty good survey of the kind of handmade resin keycaps that are or were sold on Reddit. I'm glad that there's a place preserving a record of the ugly hobbyist designs from years past. There is a heavy emphasis on what I think of as "teen boy kitsch"... blobby, violent, slightly-gross monsters, dicks-out demons, and so on. There's also a lot of people attempting to come up with a nasty little character they think might be popular.
The increasingly-dominant professionals are also very character-focused. Their stuff is quite expensive - these Halloween designs cost $100 USD each. They look like they require even more sculpting and casting skill than an expensive collectors' toys like an anime figurine might require, since the detail is so complex and they key is so small. I generally see them sold in sets of four, with the same characters reproduced over and over again in tens of different color palettes.
At least one of those professional keycap sellers on Reddit has a bizarre marketing strategy - which is actually the reason I wanted to write this blog post in the first place. For a long time, the Vietnamese company Craftkey has been coming up with backstories for their characters. Each time they produce a new colorway for an existing character, they'd describe them on some kind of... RPG-ass quest where they're attacking various enemies and searching for powerful magical objects?
Here is their most recent marketing copy. I must stress: this is the first chunk of text in the post and precedes all of the links you must click to view and order the keycaps.
Hello my friend.
Within the shapeless realm of Myrka, Valis and the group discovered a mysterious power hidden deep within: Frostir a source of icy energy enveloping the entire space. Frostir wasn’t just a force, but the very essence of Myrka, controlling temperature, time, and even the structure of the space itself. To escape Myrka, the group had to learn how to harness this power.
At first, Frostir seemed like an obstacle, with snowstorms and freezing winds slowing their progress. But after several failed attempts, Valis realized that only by aligning with Frostir, by controlling the ice and snow rather than fighting it, could they unlock the gate to escape. Valis used her intuition to guide the group, connecting their minds with Frostir and tapping into its power to break through Myrka’s frozen structure.
With Frostir’s icy energy, they finally found the way out of Myrka, turning the challenge into a source of strength, and leading the group to a safer realm.
Thank you.
There are DOZENS of these posts in that reddit account I linked... a massive amount of extremely vague fantasy narrative screamed into the void in an attempt to create some context for these nameless characters. Sometimes the stories refer directly to other keycap products or community members. In this case, GMK Cosmos is a new keycap set from a group buy:
Hello my friend.
After Renko and Morphex entered the GMK Cosmos world created by Mr. Kaptain Mike, they enjoyed the vastness of space and tried to understand this new world, unaware that a mysterious figure was following them. That figure was Mr. Soma, who had changed his form so no one would recognize him, and he continued to shadow them in the GMK Cosmos world.
Thank you so much
Here is a post where a keycap is saved from helicopters by The Joker, and decides to transform into The Joker in order to honor his (now dead) friend, The Joker:
Hello my friend.
Join us this week as we delve into the latest chapter of Morphex's story.
Last week, Morphex transformed into a new shape to better interact with the terrestrial species, but as he completed the transformation, a squadron of helicopters unexpectedly surrounded him, shining lights and emitting deafening noises. These loud sounds reminded Morphex of his days confined underground, instilling a sense of fear in him. In a defensive response, Morphex bared his teeth and growled, much like when he first encountered the surface world and the creatures that once threatened him. After a short while, Morphex felt discomfort from the metal objects the helicopters had fired at him. As he attempted to escape by swimming across a strait, he noticed more aircraft approaching from behind, engaging in combat with those pursuing him. One of the aircraft lowered a rope, and the silhouette of a person laughing said, “Why so serious? Let's put a smile on that face.” This appeared to be the second human Morphex had encountered since becoming aware of mankind. As Morphex reached out to grasp the hand of this figure, a missile suddenly struck the rescue aircraft and exploded. The blast stunned Morphex, knocking him unconscious. When Morphex regained consciousness, he found himself on an unfamiliar beach, and the person who had reached out to save him now lay motionless and lifeless. Deciding to transform into this person, as Morphex touched the body, he began to understand this individual's life and learned that his name was Joker.
Thank you so much
I am pretty sure that the person writing these is not entirely using AI to generate them. Some contain a certain striking (and to me, appealing) naiveté - the kind of simple, curtailed sentence construction which AI text generators frequently stamp out of a person's writing in an attempt to make them seem more fluent and sophisticated. The stories also give the characters fairly consistent personalities and magical powers, spread out over a year of periodically-posted fantasy snippets.
But maybe they are partially generated! Who knows. I am sad that I now live in a time when I can't know for sure how genuine this bizarre artistic effort really is.
Anyway, I recommend digging into this rabbit hole, because it is basically the thing that the internet is for: being kind of dumb (laudatory) and weird (laudatory) in public. If we are going to professionalize a hobby, at least we can preserve that kind of dazzled naiveté in the "professional" version of it. I hope that whoever is penning these little stories feels good about them. It is dreadfully important that the internet stays as odd as possible forever.