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 essentially it’s only ever mentioned with the fact 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. this was supposedly only enforced in the discord server (which would’ve been fine on its own, it’s her server ig) but it was enforced everywhere else, too, just not officially. there was an onslaught of posts from her that were a mess of passive-aggressive rants about ocxcanon/selfshippers despite both zerum and zeal claiming they were “fine with selfshippers outside of discord”. now, if she genuinely wanted to create a romance subplot for sebastian, it would’ve been at least somewhat more manageable, but it didn’t seem like that was the intent at all. the whole OC!zerum situation wasn’t treated like a plot point, it 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 her 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 once again 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. that may just be my personal preference, though). 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. this applies especially when you’re the creator of a roblox game where a lot of the fandom is younger and lacks nuance. 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