Mochi, 90s kid, mcyt (side)blog. also @achillessulks ✨
about this blog:
mostly life series but sometimes other stuff (empires one and two, xlife, 100 hours of hardcore, witchcraft, vampires, bannerfall, increasingly mcc, etc.)
I don’t watch hermitcraft! please don’t expect me to know things about hermitcraft!!
you may have heard of me from selective editing.
yes I started the “scott is Literally nice” thing. as far as I’m concerned, all flower husbands is toxic. at heart I am a jimmy solidarity stan blog.
I also like les misérables and the iliad.
AO3 is here
FYI: if you’ve sent me an ask and I haven’t responded yet, that’s most likely because I decided I had to do stupid amounts of research by watching and/or reading a bunch of stuff first. if you’re patient I’ll get to it eventually.
what I really don’t* understand is why it seems that literally every no-name streamer and youtuber feels the need to come crawling out of the woodwork to provide their opinion on why harassing children because they made some art you don’t like is acceptable. like I don’t fucking know you and quite frankly your perspective is unnecessary and unhelpful here if you’re a newer and/or smaller creator. trying to capitalise on the current discourse for attention (and thus money) is disgusting, exponentially so when you then attempt to delete all evidence of your pro-harassment stance and make a halfhearted “statement” in a discord server where only your most devoted fans will see it, after receiving the slightest amount of pushback. it is spineless behaviour. it is repulsive. the refusal to take accountability for saying or doing something shitty is a consistent theme with these sorts of content creators. and is it not just fucking wild that this conversation keeps getting turned into “is it okay to make fanworks that are Against The Rules” instead of “hey isn’t it fucked up that people in positions of power and authority are saying they’re fine with the targeted harassment of, need I remind everyone, primarily children”?
it’s been brought to my attention that anathra privated the vod in which he talked about boundaries discourse, presumably because he realised how bad it make him look. unfortunately I didn’t think to archive it at the time, but I do have some transcriptions of key moments, so hopefully people can understand the extent of what he was saying and what kind of person he is.
this is long so it’s under a cut, but tl;dr anathra was blaming victims of harassment for inviting abuse, defending content creators’ “right” to send their audiences to harass children, comparing fanfics to nonconsensual deepfake porn, and saying it’s “weird” and “wrong” and “unhealthy” to write fanfic or even talk about headcanons for fun with your friends in private spaces. he also spent quite a while talking about other ccs’ relationships with their audiences in a way that made it quite evident he knew nothing about the topic whatsoever.
roughly in order:
“[pyro and maddy] both found that [fans shipping pyro with other people]’s been affecting their lives, and that they needed a change or a way to help them be able to navigate this crazy world, but also looking after their mental health and stuff. so it was a good chat, to see him talking about it and being open about it, because like, it’s not an easy thing to come out and say, ‘hey guys, this is—we understand how the fandom works and like often people look for opportunities to do all the shipping and stuff and whatever it is, and do fanfics and whatever, and then create these fan relationships essentially, fan-made relationships, but it can be quite damaging for creators’ mental health,’ and stuff like that. so it was very very good to kind of like see them openly talking about it with their community.”
“so the thing is, a lot of creators nowadays know how the fan spaces work. so it’s, when people—when creators say, ‘hey, look, we know how to—we can, if you guys don’t respect our boundaries, we’ll know,’ and they will know, because there’s people that come back and support them and let them know and say ‘hey, this is happening here,’ and then they can actually go in and say—then they can go in and react to it and/or deal with it (…) compared to people who have been doing this for a lot longer, who may not be as familiar with, or find it as easy to get into, those spaces.”
“a lot of people nowadays who are in content creation—probably far more people than the OGs, the people who started doing content before the fandoms got into these positions—so far more people nowadays who are in content would’ve grown up in fan spaces. so yeah, so compared to people who are OGs, like say, okay, for example, ldshadowlady or xisumavoid, like these creators have been in the limelight for such a long time. yes, they do know the fan spaces, but it’s been a very long time since they’ve been in any kind of fan space. (…) and at the same time, in the youtube side of things, maybe not quite to the same, they maybe… they would’ve been far bigger, far quicker than, say, a lot of people nowadays. so like things like pyro and maddy, they would’ve both been before they got in, got their careers to where they are now, would’ve been of an age where they probably would’ve been familiar with fan spaces and stuff. so the thing is, a lot of creators nowadays know how the fan spaces work.”
“anyway, the main thing is, that like, creators know. if they want to keep an eye on things, they will. so there was like, there was a lot of people who were asking questions which were like, ‘oh, well, like can we do it in a place where you won’t see it?’ I was like, ‘no, that’s just as disrespectful.’ um, actually tweeted about this a little bit earlier as well; ended up in a conversation with someone (…) and it was like, talking about fans overstepping boundaries and believeing that they’ve got ownership over the creations of creators and stuff like that. and the way I likened it to, is there are people out there who will treat, say, shop assistants or cashiers with utter contempt and just treat them as like, ‘you are doing your job and you have to deal with me as I am, and that’s that.’ like there’s no respect, there’s no manners, it’s all ‘me, me’ and ‘the customer is always right’ kind of nonsense. and it’s that kind of attitude of like basically treating people as inhuman, and it’s those, that’s the same kind of attitude that people would have towards creators. there’s some people like that who’ve got that same kind of attitude (…) so it’s basically the karens of the world. so karens of the world don’t just exist to annoy shop managers, karens of the world also exist online and treat creators as not people, or they don’t realise that they’re treating them as not people. they think ‘oh, well, you’re putting all your stuff online, so… doesn’t matter.’ [reading chat] ‘don’t mind the ban as such, but pyro said something along the lines of I’ll send my people after you if you do, which I do not like.’ it’s… it really like, the thing is, if you are not doing things that they’re… if you’re not pushing the boundaries, shouldn’t be an issue.”
“[fanfic is] not longer being posted in the sbk community discord, but we are not gods, we can’t know for sure that that means that that kind of stuff is not appearing somewhere else. someone could well still be posting stuff that breaks our guidelines in other locations, or talking about it in private. um, we hope that they aren’t, out of respect. like, spending your time and putting in hours into, say, private fanfic is a bit weird, if you understand what I mean.”
“if a group of people are coming together and writing fiction about [ccs] or making art about them, or with other characters or whatever, and they’re doing that in private, it’s still weird. it’s still disrespectful and it doesn’t reflect well on who they are as people.”
“I’ll be honest, it’ll be just like using AI to create stories and stuff with people against their will. so using their image and stuff against their will, that is very similar, and using it for private use or in a small community use. that’s just—that’s—that’s what—that’s where I see it as. and while one can’t specifically police that, it’s not really healthy as human beings to do that kind of stuff.”
“you have to try and encourage people to understand that, even if they’re doing it in private, it’s weird and it’s wrong.”
“and if you really really really want to go ship characters in a certain way, there are people out there that have characters that can be shipped and stuff like that in a certain way publicly, and those people do not mind it as much. so there are people out there who will happily offer up their characters for all sorts of weird things.”
I always feel the need to clarify that I really like scott and all my endless hatred and loathing is from a place of deep affection. I have no interest in rehabilitating him or woobifying him. in fact I want him to get worse
from what I’ve seen there are three primary ways in which straight* men flirt with their male friends in mcyt: 1) just wanting to convey affection (cute), 2) the audience responds positively to seeing this sort of thing (shipbait), and 3) the idea that we could be queer is comical to me (gay sex jokes). one of these is fine, one is financially motivated, and the other is genuinely homophobic. but being able to disambiguate the three can be very helpful imo
fun moment from yesterday’s meccha chameleon stream
scott: and I want a kinda blue demin jacket… which was mine first! before jimmy came and stole it. he came to me and he was like, “I need help deciding what skin to do,” like “I need ideas for change of skin,” and I was like, “just pick a real-life outfit that you like.” I’m pretty sure I even sent him the photo of him in the… the demin jacket, and was like “use this one.” as an example, like I wasn’t expecting him just to use it exact. it did not help his case at the time of trying to cease flower husbands when he then rebranded to my outfit though.
also I think a lot of people assume that critical thinking involves being negative and nothing more. critical thinking involves analysis of context and intention and effect, and so on. saying “this thing is misogynistic so it’s bad” is not critical thinking; saying “this thing is misogynistic because of these specific qualities and characteristics” is. you can critically analyse something and still like it! in fact I’ve found that critical analysis tends to enhance my enjoyment of a text or corpus or whatever, because I’m able to understand it better.
there’s this very interesting fandom game of telephone that happens sometimes where a streamer will say something relatively benign and then the absolute worst kind of fans will take that and wildly extrapolate from it and start claiming the streamer said all sorts of shit they didn’t say. and then even years on you’ll see people claiming the streamer said something ridiculous but if you ask them for some actual evidence or maybe a source or anything then you’re the bad person
obviously I criticise scott for a lot of things; I don’t think being a fan of someone means you have to uncritically support everything they do or say. one of the things I do think he does well, however—or at the very least better than pretty much every cis mcyter out there—is being a good ally for trans people. it baffles me that people would think otherwise. I tend to pay attention to these sorts of things when I watch someone, so it sticks out to me: do you default to he/him for mobs like the ender dragon? are you close friends with any trans people? how comfortable are you using someone’s preferred pronouns? what if they use multiple pronouns, or neopronouns? do you correct yourself if you slip up? are you uncomfortable with being referred to by gendered terms that aren’t commonly associated with your actual gender?
I wouldn’t call scott a perfect ally, but saying he doesn’t try to use his platform and influence to support and uplift trans people is just ludicrous. I do notice that sort of thing; it does matter. the charity work he’s done through mcc is particularly significant, as is the fact that he’s worked closely in a professional setting with many trans people (his current default skin was commissioned from a trans woman who’s also worked with noxcrew to design cosmetics for mcc, for instance). he’s been outspoken against transphobia and about the importance of allyship. he doesn’t even have one of those “boundaries” against depicting his characters as trans or anything. also he calls himself a girl all the time but I like that about him for a different reason
there’s this very interesting fandom game of telephone that happens sometimes where a streamer will say something relatively benign and then the absolute worst kind of fans will take that and wildly extrapolate from it and start claiming the streamer said all sorts of shit they didn’t say. and then even years on you’ll see people claiming the streamer said something ridiculous but if you ask them for some actual evidence or maybe a source or anything then you’re the bad person
I will admit it’s been very vindicating seeing people criticise legundo for defending how pyro was threatening to stalk and harass his own fans, because I have disliked legundo ever since that one time he quote-retweeted a 15yo to call them an abuser (for the crime of saying it’s fine to write stuff that breaks ccs’ rules as long as the ccs don’t see it) and then, upon being informed that said teenager was receiving harassment and death threats as a result, doubled down by saying that hopefully this would serve as “an important life lesson.”
this is (part of) what I mean when I say the whole “boundaries” shit is a consent issue. “if you don’t want me to hurt you, don’t do this thing I don’t approve of” is not an acceptable term to set in an interpersonal relationship, much less one where you as the creator hold all* of the power and the fans have little to none. don’t wear that short skirt or that low-cut top, and so on. it’s victim-blaming. there is no world in which it is appropriate for ccs to endorse or support the harassment of children. at least in my opinion
