🔅

they/them proship and nsfw dni

[pringlesmcningles]

lalallaa here comes careware

a lttle doodle based off a post i saw on twitter hee he he...!!!!!! csuch a silly concept. Careware you will always be real 2 me

Link 2 post: https://x.com/YourAntiGayRulr/status/1972423797300228417?t=dh2OmxZjhVWYzK9uKG3eMw&s=19

[veryluckyclovers]

[bitrix0]

[taxed-up-trotter]

✨

[clodsire-the-random-creature]

Sorry for the poor quality image! But I made p.ai.nter in Tomodachi life

[september2384]

I’m so happy I’m not the only person making pressure characters in tomodachi life LMAO

[cynxo0]

EDGAR ALERT

sorry for not posting art much 💔💔

[henry-the-yearner]

I'm going to hold everyone's hands when I say this, but please. Kat, Wil and Zerum aren't victims that were manipulated. (CW: SA, HARASSMENT (BOTH NORMAL AND SEXUAL), HOMOPHOBIA, RACISM, STALKING, ABLEISM)

In this (admitedly badly written) essay, I'll be going back on everything they've done and put it in comparaison with both experiences I've lived (not with the dev teams, but similar enough) and other people's testimonies/experienves.

First, Zerum.

I've seen people paint Zerum as a misunderstood woman that simply blocked Ren because of a past argument. I'll start here with the fact that she has done nothing but lie in her apology. First, she claims she "doesn't condone how Zeal has acted", only to be caught still being his friend on a platform. You cannot claim to not condone this shitty behavior, only to still be friend with the person. She then says she'll take her leave, but has been caught still holding onto her power on the official discord server and roblox community server. (after being called out, she had left the discord server, but hasn't left the roblox group.) I'd also like to add that her statement was predicted by Ren's document.

Now, I'm going to share my own experience with a somewhat similar situation. I've been a victim of sexual harasment for 3 years. I had friends saying it was fucked up. I had teachers aware. No one cared. No one ever did anything. It was all "oh, that's not good", and no action. Always "I don't associate with this", never any punishment. Shit, it was nothing but a funny joke to them. My friends knew, and kept hanging out with the people that harassed me. Whether it was stealing my stuff and rubbing it on their you-know-where, creepy comments about what I could be enjoying, non-consensual sexualisation, etc. These "friends" stayed with my harassers, despite claiming that "they didn't condone it". I want you to sit there ONE moment and ask yourself how it feel. I fully relate to Ren in the sense that the so called people that "didn't condone this behavior" stayed with my harassers and gave them a community, even after knowing. That's not being an innocent victim. That's being complicit.

An ex friend of Zerum has also confirmed she knew before the doc came out, either ways. This person also explains in their testimony that Zerum had been talking behind people's back, exploited them [person speaking] for art and threw them away when she got bored. This is a behavior that many people have confirmed, such as this person who was seventeen at the time and three other artists that had been in touch with her. This is, in no way, the behavior of an innocent person.

I, too, have been a victim of exploitation by other people. I was only fifteen when I was randomly given a huge responsibility in a moderately known game by a specific fandom on ROBLOX. Fifteen. I wake up being a community server moderator, all alone. I was fifteen and had to deal with people spamming slurs, pornography, plus the harassment that came with applying the rules. The fear of opening my messages because it was likely gonna be nazi rhetorics, gore, etc. I couldn't leave. I admired the person. Truth to be told, I still do. I still talk to them, a year later. The situation has calmed down over time, but the exploitation still happened. I was overworked by school and had to baby sit a server full of idiots afterward. If I said anything, I'd disappoint the person I admired. I had to suck it up and take in the bullying, the feeling of emptiness I felt, the pain. I can promise you, it destroys you. It exhausts you. You start blaming yourself, telling yourself you deserve it. Much like how Zerum vented to these people, this person I admired did the same. I was FIFTEEN with a grown adult constantly seeking reassurance from me. "Henry, please say you like it." "C'mon, it's a good update, right ?" "Henry, I can't do this, am I a bad person ?", "Henry, should I [IMPORTANT DECISION A FIFTEEN YEAR OLD SHOULDNT TAKE] ?" or venting, telling me about his mental issues, etc. It breaks you. It destroys the person. This isn't an innocent behavior. This is abusive.

This grown woman has made queerphobic comments such as "Guys I go find queer pages online and tell them to kill themselves trust", "can't have shit as a het", "why do people act like ur only cool if ur under some sort of queer umbrella", then saying she's "not trying to say she's oppressed". My goodness, miss, you are TWENTY TWO and mad because queer people are proud of existing. How can you call yourself a queer ally when you make jokes about pushing minorities to suicide ? HOW in HELL is that an "innocent behavior" from "a person that doesn't know any better"?

I've been a victim of a lot of queerphobia and have witnessed a lot of queerphobia. A LOT of queerphobia. Whether it was online, or IRL. I live in a homophobic household and am forced to stay in the closet. Any "suspicious" thing I do ends up in disgusting comments about how I'd be kicked out if I were gay or transgender. Any hint I tried giving to my friends about my gender identity (transgender man) has resulted in weird stares with me having to backtrack. Comments as simple as "I think I'd cut my hair to have a more manly haircut" got me in situations where I wasn't safe. I can't talk to my lover in front of my mother because they're non binary. I am stuck in an iron prison where I have to be reminded that I'll never be who I want to be by my own body. Some days, I can't stare at myself because I feel nothing but disgust. I've been called online things such as "faggot, tranny, pedophile" for being QUEER. I have been mocked for being gay at school. In no way can I see this grown woman pretend that gay people are seen as cool and that cishetallo people suffer from the "evil queer oppression" when people like her have destroyed me to the point that TO THIS DAY, I still have many negative thoughts and am queerphobic to myself. Innocent behavior ? This ? Are we FUCKING KIDDING ?

Zerum has also shown racist behaviors through Sebastian's character and it's creation (in which she uses an asian person to create a chilean character), but also through her strawpage. This woman is palestinian and has conveniently said "no, actually, i'm not palestinian but black!"(picture needed, easily found on twitter) to excuse her use of the n word. She has lied about being black to use the n word. Do I truly have to explain the issue here ? This is racist. She is lying about being a minority to use a slur. It does not matter if Zerum is a part of another minority, it does not excuse lying about being black.

The mere state of being black puts many people into dangerous situations everydays, especially right now in the USA. Whether it's being assaulted on the street, passive racist comments or the immigration police (ICE), these people are at risk for something they didn't choose. This is not something funny to lie about just to say a slur, especially when black people, hispanic people, latino people, and many others are put into places similar to detention camps where they have shitty life conditions. Some of my friends live in the USA and live in fear of ICE. They have to live knowing they can be deported. Racism isn't fucking funny. That's not an innocent behavior.

Similarily, Zerum has admitted supporting Zeal on her strawpage before claiming it was a mistake and then changing lies and saying she was hacked. Same woman that said she didn't condone Zeal's actions.

I have a strawpage. I've been using this platform for years. You don't just "get your page hacked". That's not how it works. The person needs to know your personal email to do this as you can't connect with the strawpage's URL. It's pure bullshit.

I've seen people excuse her behavior on her strawpage with "well, maybe she broke down from all the hate she recieved", and let me make this clear : This. Is not. An excuse. For racism and supporting a sexual abuser.

I'm mentally unstable. There, I said it. I seem stable, don't I ? So fucking stable, no ? I'm not. I've gone through therapy, it barely helped. Two years. It barely did anything. I break down almost every weeks. These horrible breakdowns where I either hurt myself or someone else. These horrible breakdowns you see in movies or games where they scream, sob, make incoherent rants. Those where you can't think straight. Where your brain convinces you everyone hates you. Where you can see thing. Where you can hear voices. THOSE breakdowns. THOSE attrocious things. And let me tell you something. I have. NEVER. gone out of my way to be racist and say I was in favor of a sexual abuser. Not ONCE. I've had my buttons pushed. My pain had been made worse. I was intentionally manipulated. People knew what to say to enrage me. I gave people silence treatment to innocent. I hurt them. I'm ashamed. You know what I did ? I took accountability. I apologised. I tried making things better. I communicated. You know what I didn't do ? PRETEND I WAS HACKED. It's a shitty excuse. Even if she had broke down, it wouldn't be anything near enough to justify what she did. She didn't even TRY apologising for her racism or for condoning a sexual abuser. She simply said "sorry i got hacked". A pitiful excuse.

DO NOT FUCKING USE WHAT I GO THROUGH EVERY WEEKS AS SOME SHITTY EXCUSE FOR HER BEHAVIOR.

Going on with the next person, Kat.

Kat has released a statement on their own perspective, and I am deeply sorry that Zeal has done these things to them. However, none of this excuse exploiting artists (no, "dude i swear i wanted to give them the money but they said no" does not work) and for toxic behaviors with their friends. We need to stop babying them and pretending that what Zeal has done makes them innocent.

I'm not going back on that one. Refer to what I said about Zerum when she did the same thing.

Kat has also weaponised someone's NPD diagnosis as a "gotcha moment". This is ableism. NPD does not make anyone less human and most definitly isn't something to weaponise. It's a disorder.

Ableism hurts everyone. Whether someone is mentally disabled or physically disabled, it's a pain to go through it and deeply affects your life. Talking here as someone with suspected autism and with low empathy, this shit hurts. I'll never be normal. I'll never get along with others. I'll never be able to function normally because I was born different. I don't know what's wrong with me. Why I'm like that. I spend my nights thinking I'm worthless. My mother weaponises my lack of empathy as some sort of gotcha moment, too. I'm heartless to others. I'm a monster that doesn't care about people's issues. But also, I need to stop being so sensitive. It's not an issue if the clothes I wear make me feel uncomfortable, itch me. If a sound it physical torture. If sentences repeated multiple times make me want to cry. If some sounds overwhelm me. Some smells. Some silences, some eye contacts. I need to suck it up. I need to have a filter. I "can't just say what's on my mind". I can't be myself. My issues will always be discarded because "others aren't like that". Ableism hurts me. It hurts others. It hurts everyone. I'm not about to stand here, watch Kat weaponise a disorder and say nothing.

Finally, Wil.

Wil, just like Zerum, has said he would no longer associate with Pressure or Zeal. Interestingly, this is contradicted by him still being friend with Zeal on another platform. Wil, like Zerum, was aware.

Again, refer to what I said for Zerum. It's the same. The exact same.

Wil has non-sexually groomed a minor into stalking so he could get informations on others to harass them. I don't think I even need to explain here what the issue is ?

I've been followed home by people from my school. I've had classmates search every socials that exist to find me. I've had classmates find my personal fanfictions I published on a secret account. They mocked me for my tastes. Made fun of me for what I liked, what I disliked. I lived in fear of walking home. I lived in fear of physical assault. I lived in fear of people knowing my darkest secrets. Of people knowing how rotten I was to the core. Nothing excuses stalking. Nothing. And nothing excuses grooming, sexual or not. I was a victim of bullying. I had scars on my arms, people called me a witch. They excluded me, isolated me. It went as far as claiming I'd have commited crimes. The only thing that protected me was one single member of the school staff that knew I wasn't like that. I've been verbally and physically assaulted. Is this enough for you ? Is this enough of a reason for WHY harassment isn't good ?

They're not good people. They're rotten to the core. Stop finding excuses about them. Stop it. Stop.

[sharkfiinn]

[nexstage]

Honestly, I don’t know what to say. And it has been a few days since the document reveal. This will be a messy recollection of all my thoughts and feelings concerning Ren’s situation and the future of Pressure First of all, my whole support to Ren. I hope and pray that she will have justice, support and a good recovery. That she can still find joy in what she does, meeting new great people, and other cool experiences. What has happened to her was a horrendous atrocity.

… To be honest, I never knew that dev teams in Roblox could be so rotten. My only experience with Roblox has been Pressure -through other pieces of media, not the game itself- and I have enjoyed it a lot. I have met great people, seen excellent fanarts, and read amazing fanfics, so that’s where my ignorance comes from, adding that I put my distance between myself and the fandom and the dev team of the game for my mental health. Before Ren’s document, the only proof of trouble within the dev team or the community as a whole were a few tweets but that happened several months ago and I can’t even remember what was said in them. What I know about Roblox in general is both good and bad but is basic as I was never interested in playing the games, except Pressure and that was just for an analytic experiment. The safety and content issues for children is something it has been very criticized. Beyond that, I didn’t go any further.

The issues of Pressure (I am not including Grace because I haven’t read the document just gave it a peek) that imploded in this week should tell us something, imo, and is that development teams and their leaders maybe have become self-entitled. Too self-entitled. I can be wrong about this because not everyone is like that but to believe you can do such disgusting things to someone of your own team, someone you know for a long time and then act as if you can’t be touched by the consequences is baffling and outraging. And it’s not an isolated case. I don’t know how many of you are or used to be Warcraft players, but if you are or know someone who is then you might know the scandals and the lawsuit and the reasons behind those.*

It is again a mix of self-entitlement, toxicity, power imbalance, and lack of respect and true community among the members of the dev team, including the higher ups. … I got into Pressure because of mere curiosity when I saw a fanart made by a Gravity Falls fanartist that I follow on Tumblr and Twitter. The characters, the theories, the analysis, the story, everything pulled me in. I was invested and I liked it. Now? I’m not sure anymore.

Either Pressure will become a thing of the past or by some miracle, a new team, a MUCH BETTER AND NOT MORALLY-BANKRUPT team will take care of it and keep it alive. Ive seen a lot of people leaving already, fanfics being discontinued, followers are protesting on Ren’s behalf, damage control is being made for nothing, and so on. It is also a sad irony that Zeal, its own creator, destroyed it just like he ruined Ren’s life and thought it would stay like this, a secret festering. But it didn’t work, did it? The truth came just when Pressure was at its peak with Half A Slice of Cake updates, just to show that you can hide or run away from your awfulness all you want but what you did to others will always catch you.

What is paradoxical is that even when Pressure is dying, a part of it will remain alive. That part is Ren, the voice actors and people not involved in this mess that composed other elements of the game, and us, the fans. While I understand that many of you will leave or are leaving to show support to Ren and because you would never approve or cheer for a rapist, it is also understandable that this game and its characters have become a source of comfort and that it’s hard to let them go. On a technicality, because that’s what it is, the world and characters of Pressure were made by Zeal, and the team are like the supporting beams. However, the fan artists and the fanfiction writers gave them life. They explored what those characters were mean to be in so many ways that anyone could ever imagine.

Ren’s music amplified this, and each song got attached to each character making them more profound. I can’t even imagine Sebastian or Painter with another voice that isn’t the one they had from the beginning. As far as I’m concerned, they did the whole work and Zeal and the dev team just profited on the popularity. Still, I have to remember that people need to move on, to distance themselves, to figure out what will be the next step.

… Do I believe then that Pressure is over? Well, it seems to be. The game that is. Will I try to play the game? I will never do it. What about the Pressure we love, the one we built? I think that’s up to each one of us. I’m still divided on what to do. Figuring it out will take time.

Processing this will take time. Some stuff reaches its peak and then falls apart. We have to keep going. For now, what truly matters is supporting Ren in a meaningful way and also learn from this grave case. That just because we create something amazing, that doesn’t mean we can do with others whatever we want. Links about the lawsuit against Blizzard and its reasons:

Court Approves EEOC’s $18 Million Settlement with Activision Blizzard

LOS ANGELES – U.S.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/08/06/blizzard-culture-sexual-harassment-alcohol/

The Activision Harassment Suit Feels Painfully Familiar

A complaint filed this week alleges corrosive behavior that seems increasingly endemic to the video game industry.

[miles-edgewords]

everything i was too scared to say about pressure

now that pressure’s gone to shit for obvious reasons, here’s a list of things that made me mad about the game & the dev’s treatment of it that i was too afraid to talk about before.

please note: this is not in any way comparable to the deplorable actions of zeal towards ren. that is by FAR the worst thing to come out of any of this, and it needs to be taken seriously. i am posting this as what, prior to the allegations, would have been constructive criticism. now it is coming from a place of anger and disgust, so i’m not mincing words.

additionally, i am on twitter once every few months at most. most of the things i’m citing here aside from the game/wiki are things i either encountered very recently or things i specifically searched for.

-SEBASTIAN-

the fish, the myth, the legend. a character with so much potential, handled in just about the worst possible way. let’s talk about him.

the way his ethnicity was handled was lazy and quite honestly insulting. as a white individual i can’t comment on the experience of being chilean-american, but nearly every recent post i’ve seen from chilean fans (and more largely hispanic fans in general) has been negative, and with good reason. sebastian being chilean felt like a complete afterthought. it never came up in the game at all despite zerum’s claims that he was entirely fluent in spanish and spoke it all the time prior to his arrest (and that, despite speaking in english 100% of the time, he “thinks entirely in spanish”??) and that he,, likes empanadas. obviously, a character’s ethnicity does not need to be a large part of their personality, but it feels like zerum reduced him to a stereotype while conveniently avoiding any actual effort or work that could’ve been put in to flesh it out even slightly.

extending my previous point, half of sebastian’s lore and other facts about him were not present in the game. if you didn’t go searching on the pressure wiki, you would not know that he was chilean-american, or that he had a younger brother, or where his ring came from (more on that later), or any of the dozens of other “fun facts” shoehorned into the official wiki by zerum. this is a problem i have with more games than just pressure, but they took it to the extreme.

speaking of the ring… oh god, the ring. for those unaware, “zerum” is both the screen name of sebastian’s “creator” (whether she actually created sebastian is currently being disputed and it’s not looking good for her, but i digress) and the name of her original character, a bunny-humanoid who we know absolutely nothing about. i will refer to the oc as “OC!zerum” to avoid confusion. there was originally no lore between OC!zerum and sebastian in the game, but as people started shipping themselves with sebastian and creating ocxcanon content, zerum became upset and announced that he had been married (or engaged, it’s unclear) to OC!zerum the whole time, so any ocxcanon content was invalid and banned from the discord server and other places she could see it. now, if she genuinely wanted to create a romance subplot for sebastian, fine. it was the way it was handled that was infuriating. the whole situation was treated like a “fuck you” to anyone who made any ship content with sebastian outside of shipping him with OC!zerum… despite the fact that nobody knew anything about OC!zerum and she was not a character in the game. A ring was added to sebastian’s character model as a “reminder”, and every so often zerum would vaguepost about her frustrations towards people not “respecting her boundaries” which would send her fans hunting for anyone posting any non sebastianxOC!zerum content. people were doxxed, sent threats, and insulted. it was extremely ugly and unprofessional on zerum’s part.

this brings me to another point: zerum, and to an extent many of the other devs and writers including zeal, not understanding the concept of a fictional character being public. when you put your oc into a video game or any other piece of public content, you are losing your ability to have full control over them. it sucks, but you have to learn to live with it. people are going to create things that don’t align with the way you see your characters, and you have to accept that. the fact that sebastian was “zerum’s oc” and “belonged to her” was reiterated over and over again to the point where you’d thing you were looking at an adoptables page, not the page for a video game played by millions of people.

with every recent update, sebastian became more cruel, mean-spirited, and inhumane. this directly went against everything zerum and zeal said about his character outside of the game, and it was pretty explicit that it was done solely to make players stop shipping themselves with him. i wouldn’t be surprised if adding an actual animation of him during the death scenes instead of just the light from his eyes was another attempt at that. (quick note, i hated that they did that. it took away the spook factor completely and just made it goofy and aggravating, which i suppose makes sense if they wanted people to like him less). i shouldn’t need to explain why this is a shitty and weird thing to do, not to mention a horrible strategy for game development in general.

-P.AI.NTER-

so much potential, so little time. (except there was a lot of time, actually. it just wasn’t used properly.)

my first gripe with the way painter was handled was that members of the team repeatedly told off anyone who asked about their pronouns or identity (they are a computer, it was a reasonable question) because it “wasn’t relevant to their character” all while giving a hundred fun facts about sebastian that were completely irrelevant to the game but were all added to the official wiki. it was handled super weirdly and even just “painter doesn’t really have a concept of gender” would’ve been an acceptable answer. instead, people were shut down and borderline made fun of for asking.

sebpainter, the ship between sebastian and painter, was very popular for a period of time. now, to the best of my knowledge, pretty much everyone who enjoyed that ship would have had absolutely no problem with the ship not being canon. what was strange was that it was only after this ship started becoming popular that zerum started insisting that they saw each other as siblings. again, if it had ended there, it maybe would have been a little borderline on her part, but still basically okay. and then it got worse. zerum and her fans would harass anyone who enjoyed the ship, all but directly calling it incest despite the fact that in the game there is no reason to infer that they see each other as siblings. players were just expected to have read all of zerum’s twitter page and gathered information about their relationship there. it was really weird and i can’t imagine anyone involved on any side of the argument felt comfortable about it. (and this is coming from someone who personally saw them as sibling figures. the harassment towards shippers was fucked up and completely unjustified.)

-ISSUES WITH THE DEVS IN GENERAL-

the ring incident, the sebpainter discourse, and a lot of the other discourse surrounding the characters in pressure boiled down to a certain type of unprofessionalism on the part of zerum, zeal, and some other members of the team. they saw themselves as being on the same level as the fans to an unhealthy and overall negative extent. things like expressing dislike towards sebpainter or jokingly telling people to “cope” because your ocxcanon is better than everyone else’s are things that are perfectly acceptable to do as a fan, but unprofessional and potentially dangerous to do as one of the creators. entire hoards of people would attack each other online because of statements casually thrown around by the development team, and zerum in particular had a habit of treating sebastian like he was still her personal oc and not a character in a video game. again, you can have your own personal version of a character you create! that’s perfectly fine! but when you put them into a public game, you are giving up your ability to make that the widely accepted version of them.

almost every interaction, and i mean, like, 95% of them, that we have seen zeal have with fans has been negative, hostile, and strangely defensive. he has threatened to sell the game on multiple occasions when completely valid criticism was brought up, victimized himself in every possible situation, and never acted mature or like he fully understood the extent to which his actions were reaching people. his suicide threats now are a repetition of behavior he’s had for a long time. any time someone would accuse him of something, he would guilt-trip them, bring up his autism and poor mental health, and refuse to actually acknowledge what he was being accused of. if his first half-joking threat to sell the game had been a one-and-done, whatever. everyone freaks out sometimes, it happens. but instead of getting better, zeal got worse. it happened multiple times to the point where everyone was walking on eggshells posting any sort of constructive criticism or bringing up anything he’d done wrong. i can’t imagine how it must have felt to work on the team during that time. as we now know, he would only get worse.

i want to state again that none of this in any way compares to the atrocities committed by zeal against ren. that should be the main focus right now. this is just a rant written by a tired college student because it finally boiled over. please send your support to ren and to others who have come forward about their experiences. if you see something, say something. keep yourselves safe, keep each other safe. thank you for reading. <3

[voidentity000]

Don't forget the time Zeal asked the community to do more male Eyefestation art per Zerum's request when the community began to anthropomorphize them as a butch plus sized shark woman

[leeinpluto]

support Ren / NoLongerNull

this will be the last I post Pressure

I don’t think it’s appropriate to keep drawing pressure after this situation. These are the sketches, captions, and prewritten script for a comic I was originally working on. I don’t want to finish it anymore. I’m only posting this because it feels like a waste to let the time I spent on it disappear.

Pressure was the first thing I ever drew this passionately.

I made hundreds of pieces, and there were characters that brought me real comfort.

I’m sorry to speak about something this heavy, but I don’t think I’ll be able to forget this for years. Whenever I feel low, this will likely come back to mind.

I want to be clear that Zeal is the one who ruined this. It took tremendous courage for Ren to speak up. Because she did, I was able to learn about Zeal and the developers’ actions. Continuing to draw and enjoy it without knowing would have been far worse. it's so disgusting.

even the part in the doc saying she hoped no one else would get hurt, Zeal didn’t listen to a single word Ren said from start to end.

just pathetic at all.

[mcavoy]

The person I reblogged this from is awesome as fuck.

[jjsp34ks]

Art the VA of P.ai.nter, made a Lore doc about Lopee! Please Read!

Lopee

(Okay so just from that single portrait alone I kinda formed a whole thing... Here goes. Dunno if this is anything like what's in your head

[i-simp-4-psychopaths]

First animation test. Used Painter

I made this about a week ago, but i abandoned it as soon as I heard the news with Zeal and Ren.

I might refine and polish it if things settle down after the court case but if not take it.

[m1ssjayy]

Im so sorry about what happened. Including game and all victims fate.

And if the game would die anyway, I want to show my artworks, like one last goodbye for this beautiful project that inspired me so much.

Maybe that is not the last art I drew with that fandom, but I don't really know how all situation would end.

Perhaps the artists, creators, and creative people of this fandom are the only people left to leave one last glimmer of warmth after all the horrors that have happened. For their hearts are filled with sincere love and inspiration.

[leeinpluto]

peck😘

[miruku-shina]

seb and sea bunnies doodle