When we put it to our contributors to decide on the zine’s fate, they requested an absolutely unbiased, truthful, and transparent explanation of what happened. Maegan and Ary complied, and we are posting it here for you as well. We are truly, truly sorry for any pain this has caused all involved. You all may consider this our swan song, the zine is not going to happen. We’d like to thank our wonderful contributors, whose names have been removed from the request of many. They worked hard to make this zine and were let down by us.
The following is the timeline of events as Maegan and Ary saw and understood it. (minus screenshots provided to our contributors in the server.)
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Maegan: I will try my best to post an objective timeline.
Night before last, WhaleChief reblogged our ko-fi campaign on their tumblr, which drew Mod Tobi’s attention, and they felt there were pieces on there depicting underage characters romantically involved with an adult character. The mods had established the policy regarding inappropriate relationships seen on the About page during applications, which Jude and Tobi felt this fell under. I cannot verify if this was actually posted on the about page at that time, but I recall the discussion to include it.
I can’t speak to how this was handled with banning the artist, but Jude has stated the exact language used for the dismissal was not meant to go public, they would have given the reason why they were banned as for “distasteful content” or something along those on the zine accounts. With the server ban, WhaleChief was unable to reply.
Tobi stated the artist was let go without discussion.
WhaleChief posted on twitter their dismissal with a screencap of Jude’s private message.
Cirno posted the tweet in mod chat with the screencap of Jude’s dismissal to WhaleChief, which read very similar to the announcement on the server.
Tobi recommended not responding to any tweets or anon posts on tumblr for the time being.
Then, apparently everything blew up in Cirno’s online life as the tweet grew popular, and they quit.
At 6:30 am EST I checked the discord because my phone notification wall looked insane, and discovered what was happening, though I couldn’t quite comprehend it, and the mods agreed we needed to get together on the server and figure out what was happening.
*Around the same time, 3:30 am PST, Ary also caught wind of what happened through WhaleChief messaging them on tumblr and went to the discord server in an attempt to figure out what is going on. Ary and WhaleChief added each other on discord to ensure that they have a line of communication as discussions went down.
In the interim, I caught up on the chat, looked through WhaleChief’s blog, had the largest cup of coffee in my life, and sat down to discuss what had happened with the other mods.
It is established that Whale was banned without communication.
It is established that Jude Stands by their distaste and moral reasoning for calling the content what they did, but acknowledges the ban was unjust.
It is established that the artist did not post offensive content in the discord or break chat rules and should have been given due process when so much work has been done.
It is established that the decision should’ve been brought to the team first because not everyone agrees on the ban’s premise.
It is established that Jude will draft an apology for Whalechief and all mods will agree on it and welcome the artist back into the zine if they so choose. (Tobi is absent until the afternoon)
In the meantime, we posted to the server to update contributors and made sure all Mods agreed on our actions. When they logged in, Tobi agreed.
Jude Emailed WhaleChief with the apology. We waited.
Last night, WhaleChief responds to Ary regarding returning.
Ary and I were in the middle of drafting a public announcement when Jude announced they would rather not do the zine at all because of the personal online attacks they were receiving.
Ary and I felt it would be better to let everyone decide that, as everyone worked very hard and if they wanted to see this thing through with us, we would gladly adapt and continue without the head moderator who had created the zine in the first place.
Jude And Tobi announce they will step down.
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