It’s a very important facet of abusers that they try to keep control of the narrative.
And it is very important that we do what we can to deny it.
Now that so many people have come out and spoken about the sorts of traumas that Oz inflicted on them, as you might know Oz deleted their FFXIV blogs and absconded off to Twitter.
But in the meantime, under the handles @fatelfmom and @PoRiverJamBand, Oz is busy trying to reclaim their narrative and regain control of the situation, as seen in this album: https://imgur.com/a/GFfW0f2
To anyone familiar with how abusers operate, this is all extremely predictable. It’s why I’ve been keeping an eye on their Twitter in the first place. While Oz has deleted their Tumblr, this does not mean they’re gone, that they have any plans on leaving, and that they won’t try to come back and insinuate themselves just as they were before.
And in order to do this, the first order of business for Oz is to retake command over how they are talked about in the public sphere, to drive their victims back into silence whether through fear or otherwise, and to motivate others to distrust or disregard the people speaking out.
There are many tactics that abusers utilize to see this through, and in these tweets Oz has exhibited a number of them.
Before I begin, a quote from Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft:
The abuser creates confusion because he has to. He can’t control and intimidate you, he can’t recruit people around him to take his side, he can’t
keep escaping the consequences of his actions, unless he can throw everyone off the track. When the world catches on to the abuser, his power
begins to melt away. … Unmasking the abuser also does him a favor,
because he will not confront—and overcome—his highly destructive problem as long as he can remain hidden.
[As a sidenote, please excuse the pronoun use in this quote and in others I am using in this post. A lot of books on these topics refer to heterosexual romantic relationships and use these pronouns for the dynamic because that resembles what the authors saw the most often in their practices. Anyone can be an abuser however, and to anyone- in any type of personal relationship.]