If I have to see that bloody post (from Twitter, because of course it's from Twitter) - about how the poster "actively dislikes" FFXIV players who don't engage with Zenos in the way that fits their interpretation of his dynamic with the WoL - one more time... well I might just become actively dislikable.
Don't let's be telling other people how they should think about a story or how they must portray their own characters. It has the same energy as someone marching around a public park and yelling at people for enjoying a sunset in the wrong way.
Although perhaps OP should try this at some point. They may find the results instructive.
“Navigation is hard, it’s not intuitive.” - I keep hearing this.
If any twitter friends have questions, I would love to answer any to try and help make using Tumblr easier for you, if you choose to use it. It’s honestly very simple and has a ton of creative features.
(More below!)
A big big big thing I want to stress - Tumblr is NOT a quick consumable metric chasing website, it’s not built to be. I would recommend Instagram if you want to chase metrics and consume media versus focus on the artistic or RP building atmosphere of it.
Don’t worry about the “layout” so hard. If you want to make one, there’s free layouts out there but it’s a legacy thing, so I wouldn’t make a priority. Unless you give someone your NAME@tumblr link versus tumblr.com/NAME link, they’ll never really see it (you’ll never see it). Focus on that later.
Asks: A built in CuriousCat/Telloynm
Messages: DMs
Conversing/Interacting:
Lovenotes in tags (People write comments in them along with the actual proper tagging when reblogging - not required but it makes people’s days and will inspire them to do the same for yours/others)
Commenting (self explanatory - comment on an image and we can reply back)
Re-blog commenting (If you make a text post, we can reblog and add our own text to it - can make it a back and forth chain but I wouldn't recommend unless it’s RP or questions or intellectual debate)
(Hey look, I don't have a 280 chara limit)
(This baby can fit so much text customization)
Asks: a great feature to ask questions or submit reblogged writing prompts for RP. Comes with Anon feature (togglable).
Reblogging is exposure. Likes are personal and do not populate on dashboards like on Twitter. People can still access them from your page but odds are they aren’t going to do that. You can make your Likes private for only you to see if you wanted as well.
You can upload an array of things from Text, Photos, Quotes, Music, etc. as shown on the easy access post bar at the top of your dashboard.
Tumblr has an Archive function, so if you want to search everything you tagged with XYZ, it will show you everything you uploaded with that tag. No blackhole like Twitter.
Already mentioned but don’t censor tags. They aren’t used as weapons here. You don’t get punished for using the full words, it’s for the protection of others to use the correct terminology when tagging so they can add it to their Blocked/Muted Words list.
Yes you can post nsfw here again.
Posting text - if you highlight your word/sentence, a bar will pop up with some text customizations. You can also use keyboard functions CTRL B/CTRL I. To undo it, click on the icon again so it goes from (on) blue to (off) black.
Omg what’s that? An EDIT button? We can edit our posts after posting.
All in all - click the post photo button, upload photo, write caption, tag and post. That’s literally it.
If not getting 100+ likes instantly honestly and truly bothers you (that's called social media addiction btw lmao), go to Instagram. Best wishes my friends - may the blue bird rise and fly with it’s one remaining wing again ♡
I'm sorry for the relative silence here, considering everything that has been going on in the last (roughly) year and a half it has been really hard to focus on any creative outlets. Everything has felt pretty heavy as I have been piecing together what exactly happened to myself and the people I used to share a community with.
Although my former FC is basically non-existent at this point, I feel it is appropriate to say that I no longer associate with its' leader @morganaux (sernoudenet on Twitter and formerly here) and to clarify why.
I have been struggling with what to even say about the situation. There are so many layers that I don't honestly know if any single cross-section could explain all there is to unpack. When it takes multiple people six months to explore everything they know as fact... I think that shows its not so much of a 'he said, they said' scenario as the few people who still support Morgy have tried to claim.
I feel guilty not speaking up sooner, considering this person is a member of the FFXIV community who I'm fairly sure some of my mutuals follow. Its so hard to speak out when he publicly acts innocent, like he has quietly moved on and refuses to acknowledge what he's done.
The reality feels so cold in contrast, with the knowledge I have- that he has done this multiple times before, burning down or wearing down those he has hurt with false sincerity; claiming innocence, claiming people misunderstand the significance of the intentions behind the knives in their backs, claiming he is the truest victim of the mess wrought of his own actions.
He quietly retweets fan art, cute animals, head canons, and all kinds of fandom things- but also others' tweets to identify with their own traumas- the same traumatic thoughts and feelings he incites in others through a mixture of gaslighting, lashing out, and playing the victim. He tweets passive aggressively about people he feels the victim of, (justified or not) even amid posts about his dearly beloved OC.
At this point I should just block him and try to scrape all memory of what I went through from my mind, but un-fucking-fortunately I know him too well to believe it's over when it's over. He still makes passive aggressive tweets about people he hasn't talked to in one, two, ?? years, a person who was a good friend to him for 10 years before he scapegoated them to maintain his own sense of righteousness.
Seeing as I witnessed him maintain not one, not two, not three- FOUR venting channels in his own discord, including at one point one specifically made for sh*tting on a single person, defending it's use and encouraging others to participate saying 'this is how victims cope'...
I know it's not over, and if he had a single shred of...anything... He could leverage against me he would have already tried to 'cancel' me. I'm not turning my back again to see if he decides to throw another knife.
For a long time I wanted to believe I had simply misunderstood the situation, that his intentions weren't so self-serving. The more I saw, the more I heard testimony from others that matched my own, the more I began to un-repress and process my own memories and connect the dots... And the less sense his own account made.
While I tried to maintain my friendship with him I ignored all the red flags, my own rise in anxiety, the isolation I felt. I felt so much pressure to fit into his equation, to be a supportive friend, to keep track of how he was feeling that I stopped taking care of my own mental health.
All the while he got angry for people not checking on him when he asked for space, threw a fit when anyone failed to accommodate his whims, and even accused his three closest friends of purposefully excluding him by taking screenshots without him in them or even hanging out together when he was offline..
And he would have people believe that most of the issues he was involved in centered on his friends not communicating with him. But in my case at least, nothing could be further from the truth.
I told him I felt uncomfortable with the fact his (at the time) friend had publicly lashed out at me in his discord server for stating my opinion. He suggested I work harder to befriend this person, that he couldn't and wouldn't approach his friend about it because he wasn't a FC member and only there as a friend of himself and his two closest friends.
He lashed out at a former friend (and FC mate) of mine -on my behalf- because they wouldn't stop messaging me while I was at work... And when this person subsequently put me on blast thinking I had put him up to it I mentioned considering posting my side of the story- to initially be shamed (by the person mentioned above) for suggesting I protect myself, stating it could make things worse for the people who had already publicly attacked this person...
I approached him about another former friend of his angrily ranting about a character I had though at the time they knew I was planning to RP (I had spoken about it both in-game and in a discord we all shared) because I didn't know them well enough to feel comfortable saying that made me feel uncomfortable and unwelcome in the space. I approached my former friend because I knew from experience he took things like this seriously and he was the one who had invited this character TO role play in the first place.
He reacted by telling this person he had no idea why I was upset, asked them to address an issue they had no context for - prompting them to write an apology, and then reinforced their worry that I hated them by saying I "probably disliked them since [I] hadn't written them an apology" in return. I had thought they both wanted to drop the subject because he stopped responding about the situation.
He decided the situation was resolved and kept inviting us around one another for at least four months while keeping up the illusion that I disliked this person despite me trying to remain friendly- and said nothing about the situation until AFTER he had nuked his FC and almost everyone was done with his bullshit. I had asked him to be honest about the situation and finally got "[name] thinks you dislike him" ???
(I might add more details about these situations because it's honestly much more of a mess than it might seem, but I'd probably have to write a fucking book to explain everything well in-sequence of events.)
But those examples aside, I told him up front that the favoritism he showed and my concerns being glossed over was messing with my head, that I didn't know if I felt safe in his FC, that the whole situation was making me feel like I was losing my grip on reality, that at one point feeling like I was being discouraged from defending myself was beginning to make me feel su*cidal. These are things he knew.
He reacted to this ignoring both cause and effect, ignoring me unless I reached out first or it concerned RP, continually inviting me to hang out with people he knew I felt uncomfortable with (or vice versa) and normally turning down anything I invited him to do otherwise- including several times that I offered to help him with Eden or dungeons he wanted to farm when he previously said he was free to do so. A couple of times he declined saying he was waiting to see if he could convince another friend... and then threw a fit about 'no one wanting to help him' despite declining my offer and not reaching out to me after his other friend declined (I was still online but he decided to vent on discord instead).
Behind my back he talked shit about me, enough that someone who had known him 10 years and was familiar with his behavioral patterns qualified it 'constant' bashing, whenever I came up in conversation. And even included confronting me about the three situations I mentioned above in a plan he was working on to 'fix' his FC, as if he thought I was reaching out to him to stir up drama.
Eventually it came out that the friend I mentioned in the first example was emotionally abusing his friends (and I found out later told him two of them were talking shit about him- prompting HIM to lash out at them). One of them mentioned that person had still been talking shit about me 6 months later on a private account and when I got upset that THREE people I had thought were my friends didn't tell me, I made a few jokes in poor taste (that I do now regret) about the situation to try and prevent myself from having a mental break down.
The person he led to believe I hated left the discord server at that point and he decided to divert some of the blame for (in his words) 'being worried for this person's life' -whom he had attacked over the situation- to me... blaming them leaving and him having trouble contacting them on me.
I told him if this former friend was indeed attacking people and he was so worried we needed to talk about the situation, since in other situations his response was to ignore the hurt caused. He blew up about me messaging him at work, he blamed me for every situation I had brought to his attention. He went to his mods to rant about me and sent one of them to scope out the situation in hopes they could shut me up.
This is the friend of 10 years, who quickly became concerned and not for the reasons he had hoped. They shared a few screenshots of things said to gaslight me behind my back as the conversation progressed. Eventually the other mod jumped in and, knowingly or not proceeded to gaslight me FOR him, based on what they were told. By him.
They reinforced everything he was saying in guise of a neutral perspective and my efforts to prevent a full-scale breakdown failed. I lost all grip on reality for several days- in which at some point I wrote an apology to him for accusing him of several things that were later proven true- and one thing he, himself, proved he'd lied about to the other person involved.
I spent almost two weeks in a self-imposed social break to sort everything out and attempt to cope with what I was told was reality. I fell into the deepest depression I've been in since I had to run away from home, and honestly if it wasn't for my wonderful SO and our house mates, I might have really hurt myself.
It turns out another situation had been brewing parallel to my own. People had been coming to the social mod, the friend of 10 years, with their own worries about him. Almost every. Single. Member. Including at least four people who came forward with fears that if they did a single thing that he interpreted as an insult or threat they would find themselves exiled, called out, and ranted about in a jumbled mix of truth and fictional-malice until their own friends turned on them to support his victim complex.
These four people came forward on the condition that their names be kept anonymous to protect their identity. He didn't take kindly to this, quickly demanding names so they (his mod team) could handle the situation. The mod refused, knowing he has a history of lashing out at any criticism against him and to protect those who were already afraid of bringing the problems up to Morgy.
He reacted by lashing out at this person, claiming they ruined his life, and attempting to weed out those who had spoken out against him by kicking anyone he didn't feel 'safe' being around from his FC. He posted a message in his FC discord about resuming his 'reign of terror'... Which, even if it was a joke, was in in poor taste after pruning his FC of anyone he didn't think could be convinced of his 'good intentions.'
I missed this first culling of his FC members, I assume, because I had apologized and at the time submitted to his version of events. He approached me soon after I noticed the changes in the discord and FC roster; claiming he really wanted to work things out and remain friends- going as far as to say he was so nervous about my reaction that he was shaking.
I wanted to take him at face value despite everything that happened because yeah, I did want to believe he was sincere, that he was a good friend, and that all of it had been an unfortunate misunderstanding. And at first I did until I started talking to other people who knew him and getting their side of the story. Nothing he said added up. Between first-hand testimony and over a hundred screenshots from multiple people the ONLY things that were clear and consistent were that he lied and fit his narrative to whatever he wanted to achieve.
He tried to reduce conflict by omitting information, he controlled people's perception of one another by how he spoke about them and how close he let them to himself and others, he built a support group by polarizing his friends against his 'enemies' and if anyone had a problem with him... They were wrong, and got added to the pile of 'aggressors' he had accumulated over the years, to be bashed and spit on for years to come.
He may have sensed my change in opinion when I directly asked him to help me reach out to the person who thought I disliked them- managed to come to an understanding and we mutually apologized for the situation... Without his meddling. Or maybe when he realized I was still on talking terms with the people he had lashed out at and directly asked him why he had kicked people who did absolutely nothing to him... Or it could be that I kept in contact with the person who 'ruined his life' by trying to protect his friends from him. I don't know.
While we were still talking he tried to identify with me and bond over the feeling of loosing the FC, a group of people that despite the anxiety, and pain I had felt in the environment he'd built I did deeply respect and care about... Despite the dissolution of that group and the abuse I suffered being -at the core- his own fault. He even went as far as to say my description of the PTSD and fear I was experiencing described exactly how he was feeling, too.
As our conversations further weighed on my mental health I had to take a break from interacting with him. I was honest again, with what I was told, what I knew, and asked him for honesty about the situation... What he had said about me behind my back and why because I wanted to hear it from him. I wanted to see if he would acknowledge the harm he caused both to me and the rest of the (former) FC.
He never did, and probably won't. He asked for some time to tend to his own stress levels and mental health and then blocked me on all social media and discord, and kicked me from his FC without ever making an effort to reach out.
Of the few people who are still close to him, one of them suggested that "maybe he just decided he didn't want to be friends anymore." But after him begging to have a conversation to iron out all the facts, claiming to be so anxious about such a conversation going well that he was 'shaking', admitting that what he did hurt people and that my being wary of him was understandable, asking me -directly- to let him know if he did anything 'shady', and stressing he REALLY wanted this conversation to take place when we were both able to handle it because of how important he felt it was...
I feel like its fair to say that him suddenly cutting off all contact isn't quite so simple. He could have done that at any point. Before pointedly ignoring my concerns, before gaslighting me, before blaming me for the results of his own actions, before accepting an apology for accusing him of things he did legitimately do, and certainly before directly telling me had no real problems with me, that he it was super important to him that we remain friends, and that I deserved his honesty.
I'm not going to try and tell anyone who they should be friends with or not. Frankly, people can change and in a lot of cases experiences with individuals will be different.
But on that same note, if I had known then what I know now I might have saved myself from roughly two years of anxiety and avoided the state of dissonance I now find myself in. I still have moments where I want to doubt the things I experienced first hand. My mind is still trying to repress my own memories to cope.
A part of me still cares about him despite everything because as far as I knew, he was my friend and I am still trying to reconcile what I found to be true.
At this point I feel like I should say please don't harass Morgy if you read this, but honestly? If you have any reason to hold him accountable go for it. He needs it. And if you have any gut feelings about him or anyone in his circle please listen to it. The few supporters he still has are willing to ignore anything he has done previous to the fall of his FC and have shown they are willing to debate and accuse people who speak out about legitimate concerns involving him.
If anyone has any questions I am willing to answer them and share the proof I have.
And in the off chance anyone wants to (further) argue with me about my experiences or whether or not I suffered enough to be considered a victim, please Google some images of a hand giving the middle finger. But if after that you still really want to play stupid games? I can find you some stupid prizes.
I don't owe him my silence. Or peace of mind. The only thing I owe him is to be as entirely, brutally, honest as possible given the information I have. I think it's a fair offer considering the mind-numbing volume of honesty he -still- owes all of us.
- - - - -
I may add more onto this. Unfortunately the entire situation is a lot more complex, but I wanted to get the backbone of my own experiences out there and there is so much bullshit it can't all be seen from any one direction. A lot of the circumstantial evidence loops back into other situations and makes it hard to comprehensively represent everything on any sort of singular timeline. As I said in the beginning there is a reason it took a small group 6 months to piece it together.
I am far from the only person hurt, and the entire situation was a mess with people feeling unnerved or pressured into going along with his agenda. For the most part now that I have more context I don't blame most of the people involved for their own actions. I fully support those who can't or won't come forward about the situation whether they just want out of his drama, or are afraid to come forward.
i want to talk a little about my time on twitter over the past year, for the sake of sorting out my feelings on the experience and how i want things to be going forward
some of you who know me personally know that the nature of my career was such that i did not keep regular hours- couldn’t keep them, really. this essentially left me unable to interact with the FFXIV community at large in any consistent way. having never really known anything else, i was okay with that. i had my blog here on tumblr, and i had my small circle of close friends who i kept in touch with in game and on discord. that was fine.
when c19 hit, my job changed practically overnight. i won’t get into the details here, except to say that i was very fortunate. the kind of work i was doing changed, and suddenly my schedule became consistent. for the first time in my life, i was working a 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday routine. it was stability unlike any i’d ever experienced as a millennial in the workforce. this level of stability gave me a sense of freedom, and with that freedom, i decided to try something new. i’d heard about large parts of the FFXIV community heading to twitter after the mass exodus that followed the Great Tumblr De-Sexification. with some trepidation, i followed.
i’d only used twitter sparingly before that. i didn’t have a clear understanding of how the platform really worked, or how best to use it. there was a rather large learning curve, but the sheer size of the FFXIV community there encouraged me to stick with it. for the first time in a long time, i felt like i was really connecting with other players. it felt much more personal than my blog had, and i liked that feeling.
it didn’t take me long to pick up the basics. twitter wasn’t very good for pictures, video, audio, or even just simple writing... but it was great for shouting brief, snappy soundbites into the void, and if you could do that in a way that funny, you could build a following relatively easily. i found my niche and nurtured it well. my gimmick- typing every tweet in all capital letters, “to make sure you can hear me over the Internet”- was well-received.
i guess this is probably just another case of me being late to the party on something everyone else already knew, but i pretty quickly got addicted to that endorphin rush of tweeting something and watching the numbers go up. but as much as i was enjoying my growing notoriety as FFXIV twitter’s resident shitposter, it was getting harder and harder to ignore how volatile the community could sometimes be
i’m not going to lay this at the feet of the FFXIV community, at least not wholly. anyone who’s been part of it for any length of time can tell you that it’s about as susceptible to the same pitfalls as any large fandom tends to be. there’s a specific kind of culture on twitter, though- it’s a very personal, violently angry kind of culture. simple disputes over fiction would escalate into moral crusades that sometimes had real and extremely damaging consequences.
this has been written about elsewhere far more eloquently than i can express, i’m sure, but after awhile, i began to realize that twitter, as a platform, thrives on this kind of negative engagement. due to how it limits other forms of media, and the way its timeline algorithm works, vitriol is the only content that can truly succeed there. it’s true of the whole site, and no less true for FFXIV, where dogpiling was something that happened with frightening regularity.
i was prepared to ignore it. i saw that it was a problem, and i think in my heart of hearts i knew that the rapidly escalating tension was eventually going to become too much for me to bear, but to be frank, i was addicted. i was addicted to the cycle of getting likes and retweets, and i was addicted to the negativity. i was ready to turn a blind eye and act as though i was above it all, so long as i got my fix
it was only once the problem came home for me that i kind of got shaken out of my trance and realized i needed to change things. i’m not going to go into details here, either, other than to say that my significant other became the target of one of FFXIV twitter’s frequent dogpiles, and i couldn’t stand to see her treated that way. it had to end. it had to stop. so i did.
and now i’m back on tumblr again, for the sake of having a space to express myself creatively.
it’s a weird feeling, coming back to this after being away so long. but it’s comfortable, like an old sweater that still fits. i missed it.
anyway, that’s my story. again, no real driving point behind me posting it here, other than me sorting out my feelings and getting them all down on paper, so to speak.
