A Callout/Open Letter to an Abuser and the Abused
This is a long post. Please be patient with it. To start, I am in no way trying to demonize or slander any of the mentioned parties. I am trying to be entirely and thoroughly honest and to hold all parties accountable for their actions and create a desire for change and more personal accountability across the server. I will be identifying patterns of abuse in a specific player and hopefully he will respond accordingly and embrace this as an opportunity to make some positive changes. At its most basic, this is a statement about a player and several of his fellow guild members who crossed the line.
As my close roleplay friends on Wyrmrest Accord have noticed, I have been absent from the server for some time now. While I have several reasons (an illness in the family, work getting more intense, dedicating more time to other passions) I would like to mention one of the chief reasons I’ve been absent from the server: The House of Crows. Specifically, Isato also known as Demetrius Deveraux. Now I know if you’ve read this far based on your personal interactions, you might already be ready to defend him and discount what I am going to say, and I know some of you have experienced exactly what I am revealing in this letter.This post isn’t to start a flame war, this isn’t one butthurt roleplayer crying to the community because things didn’t go his way. I would ask of you, the reader, to withhold your judgement until you have read this whole post. If after you’ve heard me out you still feel the same way, at least you heard me out, that’s all I can ask for.
Anyway.
I’m going to start by laying out patterns of abuse. I will be using a very famous and well renowned book titled, “Why Does He Do That?” written by Lundy Bancroft. I highly recommend reading it, as it helped me identify abusive behaviors both in others and in myself and fight to correct them. Below is an excerpt from the book.
“The qualities that make up an abusive man are like the ingredients in a recipe: The basics are always present, but the relative amounts vary greatly. One man may be so severely controlling that his partner can’t make a move without checking with him first, and yet, oddly, he contributes substantially to the domestic work and child care. Another man may allow his partner to come and go as she pleases, even accepting her friendships with men, but there is hell to pay if she fails to wait on him hand and foot, or if she makes the mistake of asking him to clean up after himself… Each woman who is involved with an abusive or controlling man has to deal with his unique blend of tactics and attitudes, his particular rhythm of good times and bad times, and his specific way of presenting himself to the outside world. No one should ever tell an abused woman, “I know just what you’re going through,” because the experience of each woman is different.
Viewed from another angle, however, abuse doesn’t vary that much. One man uses a little more of one ingredient and a little less of the other, but the overall flavor of the mistreatment has core similarities: assaults on the woman’s
self-esteem, controlling behavior, undermining her independence, disrespect. Each abused woman has times of feeling that a riptide is dragging her under the sea, and she struggles for air. Confusion has been part of the experience of almost every one of the hundreds of abused women I have spoken with.” (Lundy 220-222)
This story starts well before my introduction into it. I won’t make any claims of anything I don’t know or don’t have receipts for or was not privy to in person myself. I will also add that a lot of this stuff happened 2+ years ago for me, but some of it is still currently on-going. For me that started when I met one of my good friends on the server, Pleo. We met through an ongoing plot line where our character’s clashed and then interacted, she was in the guild at the time and I was not. Now through several roleplay sessions we got it in our heads that we would continue to roleplay, and that my character Ulysses, since he was already locked in street brawls and conflict with the guild as a whole, would make an excellent heel to this evil/crime themed guild. This would make it easy to write some more internal stories with an in-house heel and make for much easier dialogue and communication, or so we thought. I had a talk with the guild master Isato in voice chat that was meant to set clear goals, expectations, and boundaries of what we were comfortable roleplaying. After this talk I joined the guild with great enthusiasm and confidence.
Unfortunately, that confidence was short-lived. In the coming weeks and months, plots that had been thoroughly discussed among myself, Pleo, Isato, and other guild members were entirely ignored, altered, or outright stolen by Isato. The chief example I will use is a plot-line I wished to write but was about my character possessing a power ring. The gist was my character was going to generate a power ring that was a new source of energy outside of any currently existing in the world that would augment his current strengths. This would provide both an explanation as to how one man was able to consistently fight an entire guild and also a goal for those within the guild to strive for; fighting my character and taking the ring for themselves. Alternatively, they had the option to side with my character and be granted a small taste of power.
That is not how the story went. Almost immediately, my character was isolated and my chief connection, Pleo, was barred from events that involved my character. Any roleplay battles were always slated to end in the defeat of my character despite our previous agreements. This would cause me to get quite upset–I’m all for organic and spontaneous roleplay, but when a plan is create with a promise of a storyline, then altered, then it’s disingenuous to a person’s roleplay partners and in this case the guild as a whole.
I was isolated within the guild. Whether it was intentionally done or otherwise, that simply is what happened. I would plan events with Isato he would say “Talk to me later and we’ll set it up”. A week would go by. I would ask again. Get the same response. This went on for over a month on two separate occasions, despite the careful planning of myself and Pleo, as well as others within the guild. Many events that members tried to create would be promised to be addressed then ignored. In creating a backlog of events, this created an atmosphere of craving Isato’s approval. When your “turn for interaction” came (for lack of a better term), you took it because the player had been wanting to do this event so badly, no matter how much Isato interfered, altered, or redirected the event. This is the first controlling and manipulative behavior I saw that really stuck out to me, and it wasn’t just happening to me, it was happening to many of my fellow guild members.
Basically to sum up the first pattern in a nutshell, it’s this: guild members craving events and roleplay are isolated and made to wait, creating an atmosphere of poor communication generating confusion and desperation for said roleplay event. This creates leverage in playing the event how the manipulator wants said event to go.
In my case, this abusive pattern was used to take my storyline and redirect it for Isato’s personal use, despite the hours of careful planning and writing that I had done for it, something I consider to be tantamount to plagiarism or theft of someone else’s storyline, and I know I’m not the only person who experienced this within the guild.
The second incident was more blatant; an outright infringement of boundaries previously set.
Fast forward to a month after the first event. I was quite livid that my storyline had been usurped and I was trying to work with this guild and Isato to redirect things In a healthy direction. This would come in the form of my character attacking the guild’s established fronts and headquarters. This was planned with Isato and other members in chat, and after a few revisions a conclusion was agreed upon. However, before this plot could be enacted, a guild meeting was held. The purpose of this meeting was to establish that as a villain guild, House of Crows would be adopting the practices of slavery again. Naturally my character’s reaction was less than favorable, but let’s go back to those boundaries set.
I will roleplay most things, provided the other parties roleplaying them are comfortable with it, but two thing I won’t roleplay are rape and the murder of someone’s character. Now you can roleplay whatever you like so long as it’s consensual in my book, however it needs to be just that. I’ll remind the reader that at the beginning of all of this before I joined the guild there was a voice chat with Isato as well as several other guild members. Among other things discussed were the boundaries of what I would be okay with happening to my character, and I said, something along the lines of, “You can do whatever you want, so long as you don’t kill my character or rape my character. I can write bloody torture scenes or mindfuckery all you like.”
Here I was, two, maybe three months in, and one of two guidelines set was being broken at this event, as during it they tried to humiliate my character by turning him from male to female with the intent to have him be raped and become a sex slave for other guild members. Not. Cool. You can see how this would be classified as undermining my independence, disrespectful, and controlling behavior.
Another instance of abuse given to me was by an ex-officer of the guild who would prefer to remain nameless, I’ll refer to them as Lee. Lee was an officer within the House of Crows who decided to leave the guild along with a few other friends, for character development reasons. This split was meant to be amicable. It was agreed upon between Lee, their friends, and Isato through several chats that they would phase out of the guild over the course of two weeks. Within twenty four hours after this was decided, Isato called a guild meeting to publicly announce that they were leaving the guild and proceeded to force them out before they were ready. This caught Lee and their friends by surprise as the time frame they had established was not observed, nor was the split remaining amicable as planned. It robbed these leaving members the chance to continue roleplay with members still within the guild after the split. By outing them in this manner, Isato had once again undermined these players’ independence and corrupted their public image to serve himself. These players had formed their own guild and were trying to move on in spite of these events and would still regularly interact with the House of Crows. that changed when a member of House of Crows spied on them under the guise of friendship, entering their voice chats and relaying information back to the House of Crows who then used this information against them. You can see how this behavior is a clear breach of respect and trust. This breach went deeper and came to a head when Lee was called out as being abusive to one of her long time roleplay friends:
http://wyrmrestaccordsecrets.tumblr.com/post/150294095492/foxes-who-think-they-are-wolves-are-talking
The link above is a WRA secrets post made by a House of Crows member alluding to said abuse, however I have since spoken to both parties, Lee and their friend, who assured me this was a fabrication created by the House of Crows to smear this ex-officer publicly and cause further rifts to form. You can see how this is is doubly problematic as this sort of behavior is not only an attempt to corrupt someone else’s public image but also a blatant lie and manipulation tactic generating the kind of confusion Lundy Bancroft wrote about.
Finally, more widely known instance of abuse (though I think has some confusion around it) involves someone who wants to remain anonymous. For my purposes, I will refer to her as “Debbie”. Now for those of you unfamiliar with the House of Crows, they are an 18+/adult themed guild. Debbie is not 18. Debbie explained to me that during her tenure within the House of Crows, it was known among most members that she was a minor. The best case scenario is negligence on Isato’s part and the worst case scenario is his feigned ignorance of Debbie’s age. The House of Crows and its guildmaster either knowingly permitted a minor to join their guild and participate in adult content, some of which went beyond established boundaries, or did not know at first and refused to take responsibility after the fact. I know anyone can go on the internet and see just about anything, but when you set a standard you need to keep it.
(CW: Violence, nudity) http://bubblesteaart.tumblr.com/post/158413069096
The link above is from an event staged by the House of Crows in Stormwind. Debbie’s character was beaten, stripped naked, paraded through the streets, tied to a cross and burned alive. Gruesome stuff. However, the devil lies in the details; Debbie wasn’t playing her character. The avatar you see in the images in the link above are not Debbie’s character, nor was the art featured commissioned by her (it was actually commissioned by someone else within the guild behind her back). Debbie originally was participating in the event. She voiced her disapproval when her character was beaten in the House of Crows’ RP hub, stating, “Do whatever you want, I’m done.” Whatever followed, she had not consented to. She then proceeded to log off, logically assuming that would be the end of it, as I think most people would.
However, rather than speak to Debbie once she had cooled off, the participating guild members created a faux simile of her character and proceeded to strip her naked, parade her through the streets, and burn her alive with the expectation that Debbie as a player would be totally accepting of this. Now I don’t know about you, but when someone tries to kill off my character without me even being present for it I would reject that notion and so did Debbie.
So, with no resolution in sight, Debbie decided to leave the House of Crows guild, which resulted in her harassment. This harassment escalated so much that Debbie felt there was no other recourse but to leave the server entirely. Even that didn’t end all of the harassment she received. This is a complete refusal to acknowledge someone’s independence and agency over their own story and character. It’s putting his own desires for an outcome to a story that is supposed to be a collaborative effort by all parties involved.
Given these two detailed examples of abuse and the seven other unwritten stories I heard, I felt the need to address this to hopefully inspire a positive change towards accountability and observing consent. I would much prefer no one else have to go through this and I would much prefer the perpetrators see their errors and learn from them, but this won’t happen unless we all hold the parties involved accountable for their actions. I know some of you might discount or question the validity of these accounts, and to those of you who do, I implore you to investigate further. If any errors or inaccuracies are found, please detail them to me.
Out of nine people I spoke with, ten including myself, only two other people allowed me to use their stories, provided I protect their identities. So of 10 people who experienced this behavior, 3 of us felt comfortable enough to speak out, the rest of these people were too afraid to speak out due to fear of harassment. Two of these other eight were so badly harassed that they left the server and have not returned since. Three people speaking up out of 10 is 30 percent. If 70 percent of people you have previously interacted with are so fearful of retaliation from you, that speaks volumes to the kind of person that you are and the behavior you exhibit.
Yeah, we all pay our 15 dollars a month but this doesn’t entitle us to overstep our bounds in favor of our own desires. There came a point when their in-character behaviors bled into their out-of-character actions, and this crossed the line. Behind every computer, behind every character, there is a real person with the right to the same respects we give ourselves. With that said, I will take a moment to reiterate that this is not a call to harass, slander, or otherwise do things of ill intent or nature to the House of Crows members. We can only precipitate change when we as a community hold ourselves accountable and that means doing the right thing. It’s okay to stick up for yourself and call out the toxic and abusive behaviors you see in others, it’s not okay to repeat them. Uphold the standards you set for yourself and uphold the standards you agree upon with others. The only person’s behavior that you can control is your own, when we lift ourselves up we lift everyone up. I can’t tell you how to deal with toxic behavior but moving forward, we all must deal with this with respect and decorum. Otherwise, we’re not any better than those we condemn.
You ever just read something and go, “and I know another instance or two of this very thing not including the people mentioned” like I’d hear from my friend who wanted a break from Alliance, and was on Horde, say, “Ugh they can’t just leave me alone. They want me to log online so they can attack my character for.. really no reason when I just don’t want to log in right now.” He was being pestered about it.
They really like attacking their own people huh.
