are you going to address your role in the whole valentine’s day video incident now that we know how much emotional harm it caused them? i’m not rlly in the fandom but from what I’ve been browsing on tumblr after watching their video, you personally hold some responsibility there
I did play a role, yes. I joined the phandom in early 2013 and anti-phan was pretty much the norm back then after Dan had spent 2012 being pretty aggressively against any talk about phan and questions about his sexuality. I was instantly drawn to the mystery. Seeing one thing as being pretty obvious (phan being real) but having d&p and most of the phandom denying it led me and many others down a path to find some sort of evidence that we were being lied to. Kinda like a conspiracy theory that you just can't stop digging into.
Then i heard rumours about a video that was as close to proof that anyone had found. But we didn’t know if the video was sincere or some kind of prank video to fool us dumb shippers. So yeah i did allow speculation about the video on my blog, i linked to it, maybe i hosted it on the blog for a while, i don’t remember.
The purpose of Phantaray was to be a place where (almost) no topic was off limits and people could say what they wanted without being harrassed by anti-phans.
I understand why Dan wanted to stay in the closet, and i understand that digging into someones private life is invasive and wrong, even if the person is a public figure. I regret that Dan found the blog and how it must have made him feel. I'm sorry for the part i played in the whole thing.
I'm glad to see how much he's grown and I like to think we have all grown in all these years as well.
