ladyofleithian (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ladyofleithian) wrote2022-02-22 10:41 am
ladyofleithian) wrote2022-02-22 10:41 am
Entry tags:
I don’t know if this is a good idea…
…but let’s say I have the mistaken impression it’ll help me cope with my current mental health issues. I know a lot of my words may come off cruel, but let’s say this guy really did leave a mark.
Trigger warning for among other things, anti-Semitism.
To the guy I blocked on Discord,
You know, honestly, I don’t know why I have to be carrying around your shit while you get to hurt someone else without consequences. I’m not even asking for you to be canceled, though it would probably be useful to you if I did just so you could cry about cancel culture and how mean it is. At bare minimum, I just want someone, anyone, to at least tell you that you hurt people, and for you to listen for a change instead of coddling you and acting like your behavior is 100% justified just because you draw Reylo art that, honestly, is ugly as fuck to look at.
I know you’re incapable of change. I know you fight the whole idea of people wanting you to have empathy for others tooth and nail. Hell, whenever I came to you with my problems at times, you somehow managed to twist it to be about you. It definitely came to a head last year when instead of owning up to misusing a famous Holocaust quote to talk about fandom drama, you were more upset over the idea of people somehow “bullying” you by being sympathetic to a Jewish author you helped harass, and losing followers, than the idea that you actually hurt someone who didn’t do anything other than try and correct you and your shithead friend about “oh hey, don’t exploit my people’s trauma for your own gain”. She was kind to you (pronoun issues aside, and I don’t think she really knew you were a trans man), and expressed sympathy for your suicide attempt — and yet for some fucked up reason, you couldn’t care less about the fact she had a Holocaust survivor in her family. Why? I don’t get it. Why was she so unworthy in your eyes of compassion, even when she didn’t do anything wrong? All she did was open up about her transgenerational trauma, and you somehow not only didn’t care, but saw it as evidence that she was a monster/cyberbully.
And it would be easy to say “well, good old Mumsy was a narcissist and Daddy was an enabler” but you know what? I've met people on Reddit and elsewhere who’ve been abused by their parents in many ways, and most of them don’t turn out the way you did. People make r/raisedbynarcissists the butt of jokes for allegedly being a circlejerk, but a lot of the people there are nothing like you. They may have gone through hell, but that didn’t necessarily doom them to being jerks. And I know people are going to come at me and yell at me for the good/bad survivor thing, but why the hell do we have to pretend that people you’ve hurt aren’t allowed to say “ouch” when you hurt them? Why are we supposed to just take it, and take it? Why are we supposed to bury our anger and pretend that we’re at fault for you and your random acts of cruelty? Hell, it’s not like women are given the same luxury; we just give men infinite chances and make excuses for their actions, and all the while, we’re not allowed to say “you’re hurting me". Meanwhile, you’re allowed to verbally abuse people online; hell, that fucking server I was in didn’t even so much as send you a reprimand even when you explicitly told a former friend that you hoped they killed themselves.
Yeah, you did that. And for what, exactly? Hell, if I remember correctly, the reason you gave for doing it was because they’d made threats of suicide in the past, or something. Whatever that friend did…it doesn’t make their alleged toxic behavior right, but why the flying fuck did you have to explicitly say you hoped they killed themselves? And this is probably minor in comparison, but you didn’t even so much as add a spoiler tag as a trigger warning (you know, like it’s procedure for the chat, when dealing with triggering content like, I dunno, suicide? For fuck’s sake, if people can have a trigger warning for pregnancy, it costs zero dollars for you to so much as use a spoiler tag or…something), even though you could have triggered somebody. But it was abundantly obvious, wasn’t it? You didn’t care about who got triggered. You didn’t care about anything except finding a way to spite someone you were angry at in one of the worst ways possible. And somehow, people in the server still fucking worshipped you even when you did that. Nobody called you out on it, nobody so much as said it was cruel and selfish (considering that you didn’t care about triggering anyone). There’s having a bad day, and then there's crossing the Moral Event Horizon while doing so. Honestly, dude, I think you’ve crossed it so many times I don’t even have a word for it. And all on the “smaller” scales too.
You lack empathy. That’s obvious, at least (except for people who would prop up your cause). Hell, when people talked about people who were triggered by Kylo, you just laughed them off, treated them like they were weak. Now, I have ambivalent feelings about Kylo as an abuser, but I wouldn’t just dismiss someone being abused. Hell, I’m not doing that with you; I’m just saying that nobody fucking out there deserved you taking out your maelstrom of issues on them. There’s no reason you have to hurt people, and just because someone’s been abused doesn’t mean they’re doomed to abuse others. Otherwise, everyone who’d been abused ever would be doomed to repeat history. It would mean that abuse survivors didn’t get a happy ending — and honestly, fuck that noise. For fuck’s sake, even The Courage To Heal basically said outright that having a bad childhood doesn’t give you a license to hurt others. Numerous books on the subject have basically said that other people aren’t punching bags for your own issues. Unhealthy coping mechanisms are a thing, and so is trauma rewiring the brain, but it doesn’t mean that other people don’t have feelings. And hell, as shown here, it’s not like you have empathy for other victims. You were willing to brush off other traumatized people as completely lacking in importance. Just because they hurt your feelings — by existing, at that — over a fictional character. You don’t have to agree with them or like them, but at least pretend to give at least one billionth of a shit?
I just don’t know why you’re this way, and why I had to put up with it. When I blocked you, you tried to ruin my reputation, even calling me everything that’s wrong with fandom just because I blocked you. Hell, I don’t know why I’m on the same level of the people who harassed Kelly Marie Tran off Instagram, or tried to mess with Adam Driver’s marriage, or the people who threw a hissy fit over a black stormtrooper when the TFA trailer first came out, just because I got exhausted with your rants sucking the life out of me. It wasn’t even like it was just you going through emotional pain; it was you being a pissbaby just because people didn’t ship Reylo. It was you calling Kylux shippers misogynistic just because they unfollowed you after you happened to post Reylo art (never mind that you can’t really predict why people unfollow you. How do you even know it was because of the Reylo art) and forcing your own poorly negotiated kinks down people’s throats. (I don’t care that you’re into Rey fisting Kylo; I care that your research seems to be mostly made of kinky badfic) Hell, you wanted Hux to wipe out Earth just because a few people didn’t ship Reylo. Shit, I don’t even know why you’d be so threatened by that. Are you that insecure? Do you think that certain people not shipping Reylo means that their love isn’t true enough? Why can’t it be that all that matters is that you believe in that ship? That you care about these two characters? Hell, it doesn’t matter to me that Darkpilot isn’t canon or popular (other than your self-righteous ass bitching at me in my head about shipping two men); what matters is that I care about the dynamic they could have had. (And hell, they have more chemistry than Reylo ever will. I mean, Reylo couldn’t find “chemistry” on a map) But you, for some reason…you think that if a few people don’t think Rey and Kylo are soulmates, if the ship isn’t their taste, that your ship is somehow not true-love-ish enough. It’s not enough that you see something in their dynamic that’s interesting; you have to make everyone ship it and shove the fact you ship a straight ship down people’s throats. You have to act like just because people don’t ship Reylo, they’ll automatically doxx someone they don’t like, or put needles in someone’s cookie, etc. And I don’t know about other people, but I don’t do that. And hell, I might not agree with people who don’t ship Darkpilot, but having a different taste in ships is not automatically a crime. Hell, I came across a whole Tumblr blog dedicated to hating on Darkpilot, and I blocked it, I moved on. Why the fuck is just blocking people and moving on something people never, ever consider? Why do they have to make a fucking production over someone not liking their ship, or kink, or whatever? Hell, there was someone at das_sporking who threw a tantrum in the comments just because someone said that sex slavery wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t even like said person said anything worse than that, and yet people can’t just suck it up and not be an asshole to people who have triggers or just plain Squicks. (And Millennials wonder why people have respect in the negative numbers for them)
In fact, you’re like that with darkfic as well as Reylo. I can remember a lot of when you complained about cancel culture even when the subject didn’t involve it — in other words, making the fucking conversation about you even when other people didn’t want it to be. You very rarely cared about other people’s issues when you couldn’t make it about you — the one exception I can think of is you actually listening to me and expressing sympathy about the former friend who touched me inappropriately when I was twenty-two. I mean, I don’t know what to call it, but that incident did make me feel scared and icky. And you…you did at least put yourself aside for a moment to give a shit about me. There is that. And you did support me in writing Darkpilot, on a lighter note; I don’t know why you couldn’t have given Kylux writers the same benefit of the doubt you gave me, but I guess it was at least one moment you weren’t going for the gold medal in the Being A Piece of Shit Olympics.
And honestly, that’s harder to deal with than just hating you, because it means there could have been a parallel universe where you lived up to all that you could be. Where you didn’t have to be perfect, but you were kind when it really mattered. I don’t know what’s going to happen to you, but in my experience, there are people where you can explicitly spell out “stop it, you’re hurting me" and they get angry at you for daring to say that, and they don’t get it even when people all but spell it out to them in ways a toddler would understand. I’ve had moments where I’ve had that little fantasy of them having a redemption arc, even when I’m far away from them, but it’s highly unlikely that they even care that they’re hurting people. They won’t redeem themselves. At least in fiction and fanfiction alike, I can at least pretend that people just “get it" and turn their lives around. At least in my Bendemption fics, or other redemption arc fics, I can pretend people "get it" and try to actually fix what they broke. Maybe that’s why I’ve gotten so attached to redemption arcs; it’s my way of not being driven crazy by the fact that most people like you, Discord Guy, don’t change. And that just fucking hurts, the idea that there is good in you, but the bad parts come out more often.
On the subject of darkfic — I wouldn’t even have an issue with darkfic writers (and artists) like you if not for the fact you think you’re morally superior to everyone just because your works are “edgy”. Hell, one darkfic co-write I was in was like this — it didn’t matter about the amounts of character assassination, plot holes and Unfortunate Implications that there were in the co-write; the fact they were writing darkfic in and of itself made them morally superior to the “stupid little girls” who dared to write fluffy stuff. Darkfic has a right to exist, but it’s not automatically better than other forms of fic. Hell, I may like horror stories, but I don’t think that stuff like, say, romantic comedies are automatically inferior to them. And darkfic today isn’t even intelligent or well-written or anything. I read my share of Harry Potter darkfic back in the day; one example was Harry being left catatonic after the Dursleys went too far. But the author didn’t ogle what was going on with Harry like darkfic today would do, like it was titillation. (I mean, for fuck’s sake, Saw III adjusted a scene in one of their traps so it wouldn’t look like wet T-shirt fanservice; how the fuck can Saw III actually claim the moral high ground here?) And it at least tried to give Voldemort some depth (which is more than I can say for Rowling). And there was another that showed Pansy Parkinson’s dad having body dysmorphic disorder, which actually gave Pansy more depth than canon even attempted to give her. There are other darkfics too, stuff that explored the idea of the worst case scenario, and what they had in common was the whole idea that the writers knew what the fuck they were doing. They explored canon, made you think about it in a different way, and they actually cared. Darkfic writers today, by and large, just write the fanfic equivalents of exploitation films. Except exploitation films don’t have the hilariously out-of-touch idea that they’re somehow God’s gift to media. Even A Serbian Film at least had a motive (if not reason) for being that way; as absolutely incoherent and needlessly disgusting as it was, at least the director thought he was raising awareness for how bad some things in Serbia were. His heart was in the right place, even if his logic and storytelling ability got lost along the way. Darkfic writers today don’t even have a misguided desire to do good; they just think that people should see them as morally and creatively superior to everyone else for no other reason than just…because. It’s like if the author of “Dipper Goes To Taco Bell” somehow thought they were better than everyone for using Taco Bell’s name in vain. You…when it comes to darkfic writers having big egos, you’re no exception. Hell, it applies to everything else — why the hell do you think you can get people to not unfollow you? Why do you think you can make somebody love you? Even on Discord, it was like you wanted to be better known for being a whiny chungus than actually producing and promoting your content. Hell, I wasn’t really noticed much in the server when I was there, but I still put my content out there, I still wrote. I kept my complaining to at least a minimum, at least online. You, meanwhile…you seemed to have this impression overall that you could make people love you, and you can’t. (Hell, maybe people would like you better if you actually gave a rat’s ass about them)
I really should have been honest when I told you why I blocked you (which I only did because a mod who happened to be one of your enablers suggested I talk to you even after you tried to destroy my reputation). I wanted to lay into you — I was actually scared the whole of our last actual conversation that I’d say something unkind. I tried to be diplomatic — maybe I thought things would somehow end well. But they didn’t, because you fell back once again on how somehow your character flaws are someone else’s fault, and you tried to make it look like somehow you were the bigger man. You did a fantastic job at giving me the impression that I was the bad guy for setting boundaries; hell, even after everything that happened, I still wonder if I just wasn’t “kind” enough (even though among other things, I gave you fucking psychological resources to help you, because I wanted you to be happy. I guess being kind really does get you punished more often than not), if I was just a white cisgender woman who was unjustifiably mean to the trans MOC who was justified in his abuse of others somehow. (Hell, dude, I don’t care much about myself as much as other people you hurt who weren’t me) You exploited it too, to other people. During that same incident you helped harass a Jewish writer, you decided to somehow blame evil white women who wanted to harass authors of color even though that incident had nothing to do with the stupid accusations you made and also, how the fuck did you know your targets were white women?
But then again, I have a feeling that even if they weren’t all the evil white women you think are the biggest monsters in fandom…I don’t think you would have given a fuck about what they had to say. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought my white femaleness meant I didn’t have a right to say “ouch". If it makes you happy, Superboy Prime, even after what you did to me and others, I feel like I don’t have a right to say “ouch" when it comes to you. And I don’t even know why you’d do it considering that you barely gave a rat’s ass about other racial issues unless you could use them to make the side you hated look like monsters. Even when it came down to bullying a Jewish writer. I don’t even think you’re actually against bullying; you’re more than happy to do the same thing you accuse others of when you’re inconvenienced.
And honestly, I really doubt you'll even give a damn what I have to say if you implausibly run across this. You’ll find some way to play it off as cancel culture because that idea would just stroke your ego. It would fit your narrative, some crazy hysterical woman trying to take down a man who’s never at fault for how he treats others like garbage. It would fit your narrative that the world is mean to you and you alone, and being forced to give a shit about people is somehow an invitation for you to play the Wounded Gazelle Gambit. But no. Honestly, I don’t want to cancel you, because that would just feed your persecution complex (like it does for everyone who gets canceled). I don’t want to save you either; you can’t save someone who seems goddamn determined not to be saved. What I want is to forget you ever existed. I want you out of my head; if I could wipe my memories of you, I’d do it gladly, because I don’t want any remnant of you in my head. I want you to stay out of my life; you probably already have been doing that, but I don’t want you to so much as try to contact me. I want you to fade into obscurity. As a bonus, I want to make sure you aren’t hurting anyone else too, but most of all, I want your voice out of my head. I want to write Darkpilot without you screeching about how I’m somehow a misogynist (because everyone knows men can’t be misogynistic. /sarcasm). Hell, I don’t want to take over fandom; just live in it. I’ve been a fan since I was thirteen, even before Reylo came along and made an already toxic fandom worse (among other things). I played the KOTOR games, read quite a bit of Legends before I lost interest circa Christie Golden’s first offering to FOTJ. Things you wouldn’t recognize or give a fuck about because Reylo isn’t mentioned. I don’t want you to kill my love for Star Wars, because you don’t deserve that level of importance in my life, and you don’t deserve to be promoted to keeping women out of fandom (even if you did explicitly say that people who didn’t think Kylo was a misunderstood Woobie not responsible for his actions weren’t “true fans”. Tell me, is Kylo your self-insert? Is he a fantasy you have where you can get everything you wanted, including revenge, without having to face the idea that your enemies are human, and that the world doesn’t revolve around you?), even your hated white women. (And hell, you’re not actually interested in critiquing any racist actions white female fans have taken; you just want to demonize those you hate) Girls can like Star Wars. Even JJ Abrams, who you hate for killing off your power fantasy…for all his faults, he was dedicated as fuck from the beginning to making sure people knew that Star Wars love knew no gender. Hell, even real life guy friends I have who like Star Wars actually like me being here. And there’s more of them than there are of you.
So that’s why I wrote this post. I want you out of my head. Your very memory leeches off of me. I might have to apologize to the Luke/Mara fans who freaked out when Mara got killed off, and the people who think Anakin is the Antichrist, and people who think it was Obsidian’s fault KOTOR II didn’t get finished, and who had more of a backlash to Kreia than even TLJ Luke. Because for all their annoying qualities, at least they never came as close to nearly killing my Star Wars love as you. They might have been opinionated, loud and unfair, but I never felt like I was the bad guy for saying “ouch” around them. And they would have had the courage and compassion to say “no, a Reylo concentration camp AU isn’t romantic". I feel like if I could, I’d send them flowers as an apology. I don’t know what happens next, but I hope that I never have to think about you ever again. I’d compare you to a child, but most children have more empathy and more of a moral compass than you.
-From idril, the woman you drove away
Trigger warning for among other things, anti-Semitism.
To the guy I blocked on Discord,
You know, honestly, I don’t know why I have to be carrying around your shit while you get to hurt someone else without consequences. I’m not even asking for you to be canceled, though it would probably be useful to you if I did just so you could cry about cancel culture and how mean it is. At bare minimum, I just want someone, anyone, to at least tell you that you hurt people, and for you to listen for a change instead of coddling you and acting like your behavior is 100% justified just because you draw Reylo art that, honestly, is ugly as fuck to look at.
I know you’re incapable of change. I know you fight the whole idea of people wanting you to have empathy for others tooth and nail. Hell, whenever I came to you with my problems at times, you somehow managed to twist it to be about you. It definitely came to a head last year when instead of owning up to misusing a famous Holocaust quote to talk about fandom drama, you were more upset over the idea of people somehow “bullying” you by being sympathetic to a Jewish author you helped harass, and losing followers, than the idea that you actually hurt someone who didn’t do anything other than try and correct you and your shithead friend about “oh hey, don’t exploit my people’s trauma for your own gain”. She was kind to you (pronoun issues aside, and I don’t think she really knew you were a trans man), and expressed sympathy for your suicide attempt — and yet for some fucked up reason, you couldn’t care less about the fact she had a Holocaust survivor in her family. Why? I don’t get it. Why was she so unworthy in your eyes of compassion, even when she didn’t do anything wrong? All she did was open up about her transgenerational trauma, and you somehow not only didn’t care, but saw it as evidence that she was a monster/cyberbully.
And it would be easy to say “well, good old Mumsy was a narcissist and Daddy was an enabler” but you know what? I've met people on Reddit and elsewhere who’ve been abused by their parents in many ways, and most of them don’t turn out the way you did. People make r/raisedbynarcissists the butt of jokes for allegedly being a circlejerk, but a lot of the people there are nothing like you. They may have gone through hell, but that didn’t necessarily doom them to being jerks. And I know people are going to come at me and yell at me for the good/bad survivor thing, but why the hell do we have to pretend that people you’ve hurt aren’t allowed to say “ouch” when you hurt them? Why are we supposed to just take it, and take it? Why are we supposed to bury our anger and pretend that we’re at fault for you and your random acts of cruelty? Hell, it’s not like women are given the same luxury; we just give men infinite chances and make excuses for their actions, and all the while, we’re not allowed to say “you’re hurting me". Meanwhile, you’re allowed to verbally abuse people online; hell, that fucking server I was in didn’t even so much as send you a reprimand even when you explicitly told a former friend that you hoped they killed themselves.
Yeah, you did that. And for what, exactly? Hell, if I remember correctly, the reason you gave for doing it was because they’d made threats of suicide in the past, or something. Whatever that friend did…it doesn’t make their alleged toxic behavior right, but why the flying fuck did you have to explicitly say you hoped they killed themselves? And this is probably minor in comparison, but you didn’t even so much as add a spoiler tag as a trigger warning (you know, like it’s procedure for the chat, when dealing with triggering content like, I dunno, suicide? For fuck’s sake, if people can have a trigger warning for pregnancy, it costs zero dollars for you to so much as use a spoiler tag or…something), even though you could have triggered somebody. But it was abundantly obvious, wasn’t it? You didn’t care about who got triggered. You didn’t care about anything except finding a way to spite someone you were angry at in one of the worst ways possible. And somehow, people in the server still fucking worshipped you even when you did that. Nobody called you out on it, nobody so much as said it was cruel and selfish (considering that you didn’t care about triggering anyone). There’s having a bad day, and then there's crossing the Moral Event Horizon while doing so. Honestly, dude, I think you’ve crossed it so many times I don’t even have a word for it. And all on the “smaller” scales too.
You lack empathy. That’s obvious, at least (except for people who would prop up your cause). Hell, when people talked about people who were triggered by Kylo, you just laughed them off, treated them like they were weak. Now, I have ambivalent feelings about Kylo as an abuser, but I wouldn’t just dismiss someone being abused. Hell, I’m not doing that with you; I’m just saying that nobody fucking out there deserved you taking out your maelstrom of issues on them. There’s no reason you have to hurt people, and just because someone’s been abused doesn’t mean they’re doomed to abuse others. Otherwise, everyone who’d been abused ever would be doomed to repeat history. It would mean that abuse survivors didn’t get a happy ending — and honestly, fuck that noise. For fuck’s sake, even The Courage To Heal basically said outright that having a bad childhood doesn’t give you a license to hurt others. Numerous books on the subject have basically said that other people aren’t punching bags for your own issues. Unhealthy coping mechanisms are a thing, and so is trauma rewiring the brain, but it doesn’t mean that other people don’t have feelings. And hell, as shown here, it’s not like you have empathy for other victims. You were willing to brush off other traumatized people as completely lacking in importance. Just because they hurt your feelings — by existing, at that — over a fictional character. You don’t have to agree with them or like them, but at least pretend to give at least one billionth of a shit?
I just don’t know why you’re this way, and why I had to put up with it. When I blocked you, you tried to ruin my reputation, even calling me everything that’s wrong with fandom just because I blocked you. Hell, I don’t know why I’m on the same level of the people who harassed Kelly Marie Tran off Instagram, or tried to mess with Adam Driver’s marriage, or the people who threw a hissy fit over a black stormtrooper when the TFA trailer first came out, just because I got exhausted with your rants sucking the life out of me. It wasn’t even like it was just you going through emotional pain; it was you being a pissbaby just because people didn’t ship Reylo. It was you calling Kylux shippers misogynistic just because they unfollowed you after you happened to post Reylo art (never mind that you can’t really predict why people unfollow you. How do you even know it was because of the Reylo art) and forcing your own poorly negotiated kinks down people’s throats. (I don’t care that you’re into Rey fisting Kylo; I care that your research seems to be mostly made of kinky badfic) Hell, you wanted Hux to wipe out Earth just because a few people didn’t ship Reylo. Shit, I don’t even know why you’d be so threatened by that. Are you that insecure? Do you think that certain people not shipping Reylo means that their love isn’t true enough? Why can’t it be that all that matters is that you believe in that ship? That you care about these two characters? Hell, it doesn’t matter to me that Darkpilot isn’t canon or popular (other than your self-righteous ass bitching at me in my head about shipping two men); what matters is that I care about the dynamic they could have had. (And hell, they have more chemistry than Reylo ever will. I mean, Reylo couldn’t find “chemistry” on a map) But you, for some reason…you think that if a few people don’t think Rey and Kylo are soulmates, if the ship isn’t their taste, that your ship is somehow not true-love-ish enough. It’s not enough that you see something in their dynamic that’s interesting; you have to make everyone ship it and shove the fact you ship a straight ship down people’s throats. You have to act like just because people don’t ship Reylo, they’ll automatically doxx someone they don’t like, or put needles in someone’s cookie, etc. And I don’t know about other people, but I don’t do that. And hell, I might not agree with people who don’t ship Darkpilot, but having a different taste in ships is not automatically a crime. Hell, I came across a whole Tumblr blog dedicated to hating on Darkpilot, and I blocked it, I moved on. Why the fuck is just blocking people and moving on something people never, ever consider? Why do they have to make a fucking production over someone not liking their ship, or kink, or whatever? Hell, there was someone at das_sporking who threw a tantrum in the comments just because someone said that sex slavery wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t even like said person said anything worse than that, and yet people can’t just suck it up and not be an asshole to people who have triggers or just plain Squicks. (And Millennials wonder why people have respect in the negative numbers for them)
In fact, you’re like that with darkfic as well as Reylo. I can remember a lot of when you complained about cancel culture even when the subject didn’t involve it — in other words, making the fucking conversation about you even when other people didn’t want it to be. You very rarely cared about other people’s issues when you couldn’t make it about you — the one exception I can think of is you actually listening to me and expressing sympathy about the former friend who touched me inappropriately when I was twenty-two. I mean, I don’t know what to call it, but that incident did make me feel scared and icky. And you…you did at least put yourself aside for a moment to give a shit about me. There is that. And you did support me in writing Darkpilot, on a lighter note; I don’t know why you couldn’t have given Kylux writers the same benefit of the doubt you gave me, but I guess it was at least one moment you weren’t going for the gold medal in the Being A Piece of Shit Olympics.
And honestly, that’s harder to deal with than just hating you, because it means there could have been a parallel universe where you lived up to all that you could be. Where you didn’t have to be perfect, but you were kind when it really mattered. I don’t know what’s going to happen to you, but in my experience, there are people where you can explicitly spell out “stop it, you’re hurting me" and they get angry at you for daring to say that, and they don’t get it even when people all but spell it out to them in ways a toddler would understand. I’ve had moments where I’ve had that little fantasy of them having a redemption arc, even when I’m far away from them, but it’s highly unlikely that they even care that they’re hurting people. They won’t redeem themselves. At least in fiction and fanfiction alike, I can at least pretend that people just “get it" and turn their lives around. At least in my Bendemption fics, or other redemption arc fics, I can pretend people "get it" and try to actually fix what they broke. Maybe that’s why I’ve gotten so attached to redemption arcs; it’s my way of not being driven crazy by the fact that most people like you, Discord Guy, don’t change. And that just fucking hurts, the idea that there is good in you, but the bad parts come out more often.
On the subject of darkfic — I wouldn’t even have an issue with darkfic writers (and artists) like you if not for the fact you think you’re morally superior to everyone just because your works are “edgy”. Hell, one darkfic co-write I was in was like this — it didn’t matter about the amounts of character assassination, plot holes and Unfortunate Implications that there were in the co-write; the fact they were writing darkfic in and of itself made them morally superior to the “stupid little girls” who dared to write fluffy stuff. Darkfic has a right to exist, but it’s not automatically better than other forms of fic. Hell, I may like horror stories, but I don’t think that stuff like, say, romantic comedies are automatically inferior to them. And darkfic today isn’t even intelligent or well-written or anything. I read my share of Harry Potter darkfic back in the day; one example was Harry being left catatonic after the Dursleys went too far. But the author didn’t ogle what was going on with Harry like darkfic today would do, like it was titillation. (I mean, for fuck’s sake, Saw III adjusted a scene in one of their traps so it wouldn’t look like wet T-shirt fanservice; how the fuck can Saw III actually claim the moral high ground here?) And it at least tried to give Voldemort some depth (which is more than I can say for Rowling). And there was another that showed Pansy Parkinson’s dad having body dysmorphic disorder, which actually gave Pansy more depth than canon even attempted to give her. There are other darkfics too, stuff that explored the idea of the worst case scenario, and what they had in common was the whole idea that the writers knew what the fuck they were doing. They explored canon, made you think about it in a different way, and they actually cared. Darkfic writers today, by and large, just write the fanfic equivalents of exploitation films. Except exploitation films don’t have the hilariously out-of-touch idea that they’re somehow God’s gift to media. Even A Serbian Film at least had a motive (if not reason) for being that way; as absolutely incoherent and needlessly disgusting as it was, at least the director thought he was raising awareness for how bad some things in Serbia were. His heart was in the right place, even if his logic and storytelling ability got lost along the way. Darkfic writers today don’t even have a misguided desire to do good; they just think that people should see them as morally and creatively superior to everyone else for no other reason than just…because. It’s like if the author of “Dipper Goes To Taco Bell” somehow thought they were better than everyone for using Taco Bell’s name in vain. You…when it comes to darkfic writers having big egos, you’re no exception. Hell, it applies to everything else — why the hell do you think you can get people to not unfollow you? Why do you think you can make somebody love you? Even on Discord, it was like you wanted to be better known for being a whiny chungus than actually producing and promoting your content. Hell, I wasn’t really noticed much in the server when I was there, but I still put my content out there, I still wrote. I kept my complaining to at least a minimum, at least online. You, meanwhile…you seemed to have this impression overall that you could make people love you, and you can’t. (Hell, maybe people would like you better if you actually gave a rat’s ass about them)
I really should have been honest when I told you why I blocked you (which I only did because a mod who happened to be one of your enablers suggested I talk to you even after you tried to destroy my reputation). I wanted to lay into you — I was actually scared the whole of our last actual conversation that I’d say something unkind. I tried to be diplomatic — maybe I thought things would somehow end well. But they didn’t, because you fell back once again on how somehow your character flaws are someone else’s fault, and you tried to make it look like somehow you were the bigger man. You did a fantastic job at giving me the impression that I was the bad guy for setting boundaries; hell, even after everything that happened, I still wonder if I just wasn’t “kind” enough (even though among other things, I gave you fucking psychological resources to help you, because I wanted you to be happy. I guess being kind really does get you punished more often than not), if I was just a white cisgender woman who was unjustifiably mean to the trans MOC who was justified in his abuse of others somehow. (Hell, dude, I don’t care much about myself as much as other people you hurt who weren’t me) You exploited it too, to other people. During that same incident you helped harass a Jewish writer, you decided to somehow blame evil white women who wanted to harass authors of color even though that incident had nothing to do with the stupid accusations you made and also, how the fuck did you know your targets were white women?
But then again, I have a feeling that even if they weren’t all the evil white women you think are the biggest monsters in fandom…I don’t think you would have given a fuck about what they had to say. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought my white femaleness meant I didn’t have a right to say “ouch". If it makes you happy, Superboy Prime, even after what you did to me and others, I feel like I don’t have a right to say “ouch" when it comes to you. And I don’t even know why you’d do it considering that you barely gave a rat’s ass about other racial issues unless you could use them to make the side you hated look like monsters. Even when it came down to bullying a Jewish writer. I don’t even think you’re actually against bullying; you’re more than happy to do the same thing you accuse others of when you’re inconvenienced.
And honestly, I really doubt you'll even give a damn what I have to say if you implausibly run across this. You’ll find some way to play it off as cancel culture because that idea would just stroke your ego. It would fit your narrative, some crazy hysterical woman trying to take down a man who’s never at fault for how he treats others like garbage. It would fit your narrative that the world is mean to you and you alone, and being forced to give a shit about people is somehow an invitation for you to play the Wounded Gazelle Gambit. But no. Honestly, I don’t want to cancel you, because that would just feed your persecution complex (like it does for everyone who gets canceled). I don’t want to save you either; you can’t save someone who seems goddamn determined not to be saved. What I want is to forget you ever existed. I want you out of my head; if I could wipe my memories of you, I’d do it gladly, because I don’t want any remnant of you in my head. I want you to stay out of my life; you probably already have been doing that, but I don’t want you to so much as try to contact me. I want you to fade into obscurity. As a bonus, I want to make sure you aren’t hurting anyone else too, but most of all, I want your voice out of my head. I want to write Darkpilot without you screeching about how I’m somehow a misogynist (because everyone knows men can’t be misogynistic. /sarcasm). Hell, I don’t want to take over fandom; just live in it. I’ve been a fan since I was thirteen, even before Reylo came along and made an already toxic fandom worse (among other things). I played the KOTOR games, read quite a bit of Legends before I lost interest circa Christie Golden’s first offering to FOTJ. Things you wouldn’t recognize or give a fuck about because Reylo isn’t mentioned. I don’t want you to kill my love for Star Wars, because you don’t deserve that level of importance in my life, and you don’t deserve to be promoted to keeping women out of fandom (even if you did explicitly say that people who didn’t think Kylo was a misunderstood Woobie not responsible for his actions weren’t “true fans”. Tell me, is Kylo your self-insert? Is he a fantasy you have where you can get everything you wanted, including revenge, without having to face the idea that your enemies are human, and that the world doesn’t revolve around you?), even your hated white women. (And hell, you’re not actually interested in critiquing any racist actions white female fans have taken; you just want to demonize those you hate) Girls can like Star Wars. Even JJ Abrams, who you hate for killing off your power fantasy…for all his faults, he was dedicated as fuck from the beginning to making sure people knew that Star Wars love knew no gender. Hell, even real life guy friends I have who like Star Wars actually like me being here. And there’s more of them than there are of you.
So that’s why I wrote this post. I want you out of my head. Your very memory leeches off of me. I might have to apologize to the Luke/Mara fans who freaked out when Mara got killed off, and the people who think Anakin is the Antichrist, and people who think it was Obsidian’s fault KOTOR II didn’t get finished, and who had more of a backlash to Kreia than even TLJ Luke. Because for all their annoying qualities, at least they never came as close to nearly killing my Star Wars love as you. They might have been opinionated, loud and unfair, but I never felt like I was the bad guy for saying “ouch” around them. And they would have had the courage and compassion to say “no, a Reylo concentration camp AU isn’t romantic". I feel like if I could, I’d send them flowers as an apology. I don’t know what happens next, but I hope that I never have to think about you ever again. I’d compare you to a child, but most children have more empathy and more of a moral compass than you.
-From idril, the woman you drove away