This post will get rather long, please bear with me while I post all three parts of it.
People have blocked me in the past few days, and I'd rather it is for my own words than by association. I owe that to my mutuals here who have not heard from me in a while, especially those who like to form their own opinions. And I owe it to myself, because I won't keep being hypocritical thinking and talking about how people should handle things like adults but not do it myself and fade without a word.
Racism isn't petty drama, but the way it is handled can be, as it works with everything. I am not here to defend Bunny, or the other person, whose name was not stated "for the sake of their privacy" but King @ anyway — I will keep their name private as for their wishes, and call them X.
The callout was initially intended as a way of raising awareness to Bunny posing as a black person, meant to protect and validate POC. Although I have had ooc contact with him, I honestly cannot tell if he was posing as black, or how they were doing that (I am not American, and what I know of black culture in my country is most likely untrue for others, especially US), so I won't question the many people who spoke of their experience. It did catch my eye, as an external observer, that a few times it was mentioned that he "never claimed to be black", only thought to be. I don't know him or any of the people affected, but I was left with the impression that these claims were a thing brewing in a different circle, and were never brought up to him until it exploded. I don't doubt it is true and harmful for the people affected, but I have yet to see proof that it was intentional and malicious. If you have it, and will be so kind as to educate me, I would want to see it.
He addressed it in his own blog, all of the claims from the callout blog, so they weren't a secret even to his followers outside the bg3 rpc. He mentioned the past callouts, the sexualization of his character and pretending to be black. I think people are smart enough to make their own minds after seeing it there — if they thought he was black, now they knew for sure he wasn't, if they had sensed something odd with the sexualization they knew they weren't alone, and for the past callouts… I had been following Bunny for a while, and it isn't the first time I have heard about them from him. They were not public, but they weren't a secret either.
When I asked for the callout blog, I wanted to see proof of the things he had said, to cut ties with him after reading the testimonies of the affected people and forming my educated opinion. But I found nothing. All of it was telling me that what Bunny said was true: people saying they believed him to be black, people uncomfortable by the sexualization of his muse, and victims of his past. It gave me exactly nothing, except the word of strangers. Sure, I can trust POC's word about this or that being racist, because they know better. But I want to know what 'that' is. As a person who interacted with Bunny, and as a white person who writes some POC and highly sexual characters, I am not interested in "the drama", I want to know what they did wrong so I can learn from it: make sure I don't do it myself, educate my friends, stay away from others who replicate that behavior.
I thought at that point the deed of "keeping the rpc safe" was done. People had their thoughts validated, the person in question had addressed the issue, and most importantly he had added it to his rules. If it was indeed a malicious, intentional racist move, it had no room to ever happen again, and even followers from other rpcs knew of the claims and could form their opinion.
I positioned myself after Bunny's last post, when the issue of misgendering was mentioned, in his tags. I cannot possibly believe that none of the many people publicly or privately involved with the callout read this post. Be said he uses he/they pronouns (and those who follow him know that he's been using he more prominently as of late), and she is reserved for close friends. All over the callout blog he is referred to by the wrong pronouns, not just by people in screenshots, but for OP as well — recently for the excuse that "he has used them in the past, and it is what everyone else is using", but never once correcting it or addressing it. Perhaps people will call this a stretch, or a "desperate excuse to defend a racist", especially coming from a cis woman like myself, but this is a hard line for me, so I don't care. No matter the claims, no one deserves to be misgendered over and over again by dozens of people on a viral blog. It is cruel and dehumanizing. Even if there wasn't a conscious, malicious reasoning by OP, I can't possibly believe no one involved knew he was being misgendered — no one knew beforehand, or read his post, or got anons mentioning it? I don't know if they didn't speak up, or if someone did and wasn't listened to. I don't care. This alone makes me sick, and I don't wish to keep interacting with people who have seen this and did nothing about it.
The issue with X is a different thing, that I have witnessed from people close with them, as I haven't been close to them myself.
X was brought up in Bunny's callout, despite having nothing to do with him or with racism. They had a private issue with OP, and to my knowledge they hadn't talked to them in a month, and was shocked to be brought up all of a sudden and without a warning. The claims had to do with OP being "harassed" and "guilt-tripped" into writing with them. It is an issue other people have had, and I assume it has been talked out privately with other people who had the same issue, which is why OP decided to mention it. And I want to reflect a little about this.
I have known harassment in RP spaces, and outside of them, and friends close to me have as well. It can be draining. We all have lives outside the internet, and come back home tired and expecting to have a good time with our hobby, and we don't want to deal with a clingy rp partner who we know will be there the moment we show our heads. That pushes us into not wanting to write at all, because that person merely existing around us is draining, and we start to dread the moment they message us, because we really, really, don't want to reply. It snowballs. I have been there not so long ago, with a person who did not respect my boundaries regarding shipping, and I did the unthinkable: I talked to them, told them I didn't want to keep interacting, and blocked them. Just like that, they were gone, my anxiety was gone, and my muse came back.
Sure, the situation kept me away from my hobby for a while and made me physically ill, but never once was I in danger. It was merely my own inability to deal with a problem with an easy solution which enlarged the situation in my head to huge, unmanageable proportions. At the end of the day, it is a stranger on the internet, who for whatever reason is very attached to a thing I don't want to give them. It is the silliest thing. It is easily fixed.
There are other cases in which the situation is more dire. I have been, and seen friends being guilt-tripped, not into writing, but into being someone's personal therapist, or into pseudoromantic relationships. They have been blamed for their harasser's mental health issues, they've had to deal with them threatening to harm themselves if they weren't paid attention, or had malicious lies spread about them if they didn't respond the way the abuser wanted.
I get the situation above is exactly what we're all afraid of when dealing with someone who rubs us the wrong way for being clingy, which pushes us into anxiety and inaction, but none of that has been described about X. In fact, OP mentions many people have them blocked.
If the issue is so easily resolved by just blocking a person and moving on, does it really deserve a callout like that? Does a person who isn't dangerous to anyone in any way deserve to be lynched, just because many people don't like them? Their name had been removed from the callout, and Rebel had mentioned they didn't want to be named, and King @ them anyway. Where does "protecting" end, and "harassing" start?
Is harassing the alleged harasser justified? Is the backlash they have received proportional to their actions?
There are genuinely nasty and dangerous people out there, doing far worse things than being uneducated, interacting with someone with a callout to their name or being unlikeable. Sure, it is no one's job to educate strangers on the internet, but it requires the same amount of effort as removing them forcefully from the rpc. It just requires more guts, and more kindness. And blocking and moving on? That takes none, of none of those.
That is my opinion, and has always been my position regarding callouts, so I am making this post and leaving for the time being, simply because I don't want to interact with a RPC that believes that shaming and publicly humiliating people is a mature way of dealing with things. I don't want anything to do with self-appointed saviors and protectors who enjoy being morally superior more than they are willing to make the RPC a safer space. Yes, even for the unlikable, or the clingy, or the mistaken, or the uneducated people who make harmful claims but can be corrected.
Since words will be put in my mouth after this, I would like to end addressing causality. The people most involved in this situation from the beginning have been people of color — that makes sense, since the initial claims about Bunny that started this were about racism. And they have been the most vocal about it, as they deserve to be, because a white person posing as black doesn't hurt white people remotely as much as it hurts them. Until recently, I can't think of a single white person who spoke about it with more than a vague mention like "racism is bad please don't be a racist". If you can, I don't follow them.
So, disagreeing with the way the callout was handled is, necessarily, disagreeing with the POC who made it and endorsed it. That is a fact. It isn't blaming them for raising awareness about issues that affect them, it isn't charging against them specifically for being POC or being regularly vocal about race and racism, or pointing fingers at them instead of at the white people involved (because if they exist, I don't know them).
(an aside before moving on, just to cover my back because I have seen accusations like "you blocked my muse of color but not my white muse because you are racist" and I don't want those. I used to follow raphaeni, I even wrote a bit with the muse. I unfollowed — I believe softblocked — because I ran an interest checker and they didn't fill it. I didn't like their blog that much because they reblog too many pictures for my personal liking, so I did what people do and used the chance to cut ties, as I did for many others. The character being a man of color had nothing to do with it)
I think you can defend a right cause, even one that has personally harmed you, and still be an asshole and a bully about how you do it. And I think that is precisely what has happened here. It doesn't have anything to do with "mean ethnics" as it is the expression used in the callout to create the narrative that finding grays in it instantly makes you a racist. It has to do with mean people doing things that I consider toxic, to the point where I would rather not exist in the same space as them.
I wanted to be crystal clear about where I stand, so if people choose to cut ties with me, at least I know it was due to my own words and opinions, rather than someone else's. I will be stepping back for the aforementioned reasons, in hopes that people will learn how to solve issues like adults meanwhile.
If anyone wants my discord to chat or roleplay, my DMs are open. If anyone wants to offer further context or correct me, my DMs are open. If you come to me anonymously in my inbox, please don't do that — we're all adults here.
muses with a high pain tolerance where, very rarely, the pain tolerance can actively become an issue. they don’t notice when they’re injured, or if something is going on in their body and it doesn’t pass the threshold of ‘this is something I urgently need to do something about’ - muses with a high pain tolerance because they learnt to ignore their pain, so they don’t readily recognize it and can even make it worse without realising, while the people who love them scold them for not saying anything / “lying” about it (but they just didn’t notice, it wasn’t on purpose –)
He GRIMACES just slightly at the mention of their little stowaway. It was tragically easy to forget it was there if it wasn't for random bouts of uninvited visions. He chuckles, the sound humorless, "Oh, shit right let me just transfer all my knowledge PSYCHICALLY to you. Maybe you'll see me grabbing a pot straight from the hearth and not even feeling it."
One of the only benefits to having a dead ass arm. The bitterness fades from him quickly seeing the delight on Seira. His tail was making him OBJECTIVELY adorable, something he would keep to himself.
"Onions are inherently flavorful even a little burnt, my dear, you don't have to do too much to them." He kicks the sack by the first, a little SHOT OF WIND lifting another onion up to his hand, "Come over here, you seem like the type that needs to eat more than that if you don't mind me making the assumption.
"I mean—" Seira swallows the rest of the onion, and raises a hand with a knowing smile. It's a tiefling's hand, with short nails growing naturally in the shape of claws, and covered in thick, resistant skin. Made even thicker by callouses and scarred tissue. Burned and healed, time and time again, very likely to the point of numbness.
Then again, where does a farm boy get all of those injuries from?
"Yes. I mean— I guess. Ah. Thanks," he tries to conceal a moment of sheepishness hitting Brail's shoulder with his fist playfully, only to regret it an instant later. No, that was awkward. They aren't friends. They barely know each other.
He clears his throat and settles for just eating.
Only to speak again merely a couple of seconds after that. He can't handle silence. "So you are self-taught, then...? What made you want to learn?"
Angst magnet. OHOHO YOU ARE SAD. YOU ARE SO SAD. PLEASE GET HELP. Good news- you're a GREAT outlet for queer kids in fandom spaces who need some way to express their problems when no one irl will help them! Your number one fanfic tag is hurt/comfort, some of it actually pretty well written, and all your fanart is either the goriest or saddest thing to ever be created. Please get therapy <3
Send me "§" if you'd ever consider shipping our muses
// OH maybe? I think there could be a heavy "I can fix her" aspect to it, which... may or may not be a good thing, though? Trying to drag people into becoming his idea of their better selves can be problematic especially with someone with such a strong personality.
// scar talk? seira's butt's a little scarred too from the burn. also. he barely has any sensation along his back and tends to overuse healing magic whenever it still hurts
Sounded like a phrase over top creatures told themselves to experience the hardships of night. Attributing the bleak blank space of void with something negative , something painful. His fingers trailed the ground beneath him to bury the tips into the cool soil. To feel grounded , and connected to these words as he speaks. ❛ In my home , the morning did not exist. We did not have a sun to miss. ❜ He looks to the tiefling , and the flat expression carries a genuine aura. ❛ I do know it now , and I see why people miss its presence. ❜
"Do you miss it?" He has gone long periods without sun himself. Living by night, sleeping by day when he was younger. The dull, ever-present reddish light bathing the scorching wasteland that was Avernus. But the morning always came — whether he saw it, or not.
Seira turns his gaze to the sky. Filled with stars, and an almost full moon. And some scattered clouds, the kind that would gather and bring rain. He can feel under his skin.
"And what of rain, do you like it? I used to know some drow from the Underdark. They usually complained about one or the other."
// thinking about seira's "companion quest" and how you can spare xevran's life and recruit her for the final fight, but doing so earns MASSIVE disapproval from seira + a scene where he yells at you for your decisions and breaks up with you for good if romanced similarly to how astarion can break up with tav after being forced to drink the drow lady's blood 👁️👄👁️
If you encounter her without seira (if you fail to recruit him or hurt the tieflings at the grove and have to kill him), she just seems like a badass, soft-spoken and polite lady who's tragically been mind controlled and will be thankful to be freed from the absolute
janainaart
jbbartram-illu
dededos
origamiaround
romaincrisis
ellievsbear
snowghoul
