Hey all, last night was a rollercoaster of EPIC proportions and I'm just organizing my thoughts, here we go.
Essentially what happened to the ROS discord was a long time coming, there were years of suppressed drama before this, and the last incident (ha) that went down was fairly minor in comparison. The Toons have had a long history of extremely poor communication, "jokes" at the expense of fans, multiple instances of fan exploitation (recruiting fans as assistants and underpaying them, recruiting minors as mods despite NSFW channels), undisclosed AI use, and broken promises (to the tune of thousands of dollars in donations and 2 years of radio silence). Yesterday, a server member advocated for the original version of ROS to be archived somewhere for fans to read, a sentiment that many members on the server as well as mods shared. Toon's response to this eventually spiraled into a meltdown, bans for all involved in the conversation (mods included), and the mass deletion of all content on the server (another habit of theirs, deleting criticism and denying readily available information). Many people chose to leave the server in solidarity as this event unfolded.
It's my opinion that it didn't have to end like this. Their own website says that the original may return in some form someday, but as many of us have learned, "someday" almost always means "never". Again, I love you guys.
