Alright fellas sooooo… a little reflection time I suppose.
Admittedly, I’m a little awkward doing this! I’ve kinda grown out of sharing stuff on social media ever since middle school, so sharing my less-than-pleasant emotions is tricky. I still wanna do it. though; I think I just really need to get these thoughts out to properly move on. I’m not sure how many times I’ll have to post about it because there is a lot, but I guess we’ll find out together!
I wanted to yap about my experience with a Rise server and honestly vent about it. There’s a lot, so please grant me some patience, Dear Reader.
There are brief mentions of pedophiles, so scroll past if needed!
I joined the fandom pretty late; I’ve never really been one to interact in fandoms before aside from Zootopia, and that was all the way back in 2016. With Rise, I fell in love with the show in 2020, and I procrastinated watching the movie because I didn’t want it to end— Finally got to it in 2022, and at 18 years old, my senior year of high school, I reinstalled Tumblr to engage with more people who loved this show like me.
Now important bit of context, I wasn’t liked much at school. I don’t tend to fit in with my peers due to a bunch of cultural, philosophical, and economical differences (I’m also highly suspicious I might be autistic but there’s no diagnosis to back me up, so I won’t fully claim anything). I poured a lot of those experiences into MFIP through Salena; I suffered a lot in my friendships because people kept using me for my kindness and horrible boundary-placement skills. My therapist was fantastic help with that, so 12th grade was spent with me not giving two flying fucks about making friends and actually being unashamed to show myself. It was a struggle, but these silly ninja turtles did help me a ton. I mean, I act a lot like Leo almost to a scary extent by pure coincidence. People love Leo, so my logic was that maybe there would be people out there who love me, too. I just have to continue to be myself and find them someday!
Again, important reminder: I SUCKED at boundaries. I was freshly 18, learning how to be more firm and trust my gut about people. I was trying my damn didly hardest to not let people abuse my kindness for their gain. I was a kid trying her best after a literal decade of abuse and bullying.
So I joined this… fun little server, younger me thought, to talk to people that might understand me. I mean, I got teased a lot in school for being 18 and obsessing over cartoon turtles, but those people hated cartoons! The people in this server loved them just like me. So they must be nicer, right? This show is all about spreading kindness to your family and community, so people who love this show must be practicing that too, right?
Wrong, horrifically wrong.
When I tell you the amount of pick-me mean girls I’ve met through that server, you’ll faint. I can literally say there was only one singular person that made the entire server worth enduring. My current sister and I were the only ones that actually yk gave a damn about anyone other than ourselves. Everyone else was just… mean and selfish and catty. Over fictional turtles! Everyone was enabling their own flaws, getting close with people who enabled their flaws, and threw pity parties about it while being catty towards someone else.
Now, some of these were children, and while I have a tendency to be softer because kids are gonna be stupid by default, I also needed to teach myself that kids can be manipulative jerks sometimes and denying accountability and consequences just made it worse. It’s the exact attitude that enabled my bullies when I was younger. The people that had it worse, however, were grown ass adults. Like, adults in their mid-to-late twenties nearing thirty. I know that’s not super old, but holy shit is it too old to be acting like a high school popular girl “pranking” the nerd for liking their hallway crush.
It was such a toxic and horrible environment to get into. I just escaped high school only to find myself back in the exact same mind games. This is where that context from earlier applies: I struggled with boundaries and these people were masters of crossing it. There were so many cases where I was just lost on what to do, honestly. I was a mod for that server pretty soon after I joined, as per request of the admin. And that was fantastic practice for being assertive and not letting people manipulate me! However, not only did I have to do literally most of the work, I was bashed for it. The other mods wouldn’t do shit, and the admin only steps in after minutes of bitching and moaning about it because I couldn’t take care of it and they’re apparently the busiest person in the world. Mind you, most of the things I’ve had to handle were literally investigating about potential pedophiles in the server, and then, once confirmed, confronting them. The admin had a habit of using a very 🤖Customer Service Voice🤖 when handling confrontation, so the only one that was blunt about anything ever was me.
Any time I said, “okay, they’re literally all older than me, I’m sure they can handle it!”, a catastrophic mess would be created, and then I’d have to clean it up anyways. The one time I let them take care of something, they nearly got someone kicked out for false pedophilia accusations. One of the mods got told about that person, and instead of being reasonable, they pulled a fucking super-spy bullshit and DM’d the accused person pretending to be a new friend to try and get info out of them. It was… painful to scroll through later and find out what happened. They got caught as a mod and had to randomly leave the group chat they created with that person and their partner. And very important thing: THE FUCKING ADMIN KNEW. They were there as the mod was updating their “progress”. They just told him it was probably a bad idea, but didn’t stop him from doing it. Actively reacted to the bullshit in a way that felt like your “dearest friend in high school” watching you make a fool of yourself and cringing with the rest of the audience, not intervening for the sake of their own image. I wouldn’t have even read this stuff if I hadn’t gotten a message from a friend of the accused person requesting me to look into it more.
The one that hold anyone accountable was me. I told the mod their behavior was irresponsible, told everyone else they should have intervened, and quickly got to handling the situation myself. Two days, it took two fucking days, for me to properly investigate everything, DM a bunch of people I didn’t know (a bunch not in the server), and got proof they weren’t a pedo. While actively going to college. We almost banned an innocent person because a mod—who was also, regrettably, a friend of mine from high school—wanted to be “the hero for once” and everyone else including the admin didn’t care enough to stop it.
Every single time it was me, the youngest mod, dealing with everything. There was no one to help me, no one I could trust. Not a single person that took anything as seriously as I did, not even the admin. The admin acted tired of all the “drama” even though the one doing all the work was me.
And the cherry on top: I got told off for it. For all my work, all my diligence, I got told off. I was actively understanding my standards and boundaries better, and calling out people who were being needlessly cruel or catty or using self degradation to seek attention. And the admin, pretending to be a concerned friend, said that I keep wanting to see the worst in people. Not only would they deadass barely do anything about any situation, they bashed me for getting things done and being productive because I wasn’t people pleasing like them.
I can’t begin to tell you how shitty that entire server made me feel. The amount of stress and headaches I’ve had since my last year of high school all the way to my second year of college, just dealing with the stupidity from that server. I got shamed for being better at boundaries, for being blunt with people. I want to clarify for my own sake: I’m not a rude or mean person, and I trust that about myself. I’m kind to people because I enjoy it, I enjoy making people smile. I want to see the best in people because you never know when someone might need it. I give people the benefit of the doubt if I don’t know them well enough. However, I’ve also learned to be smarter and stronger. My belief is that I will continue to see the best in people, but then let them show me the rest. If someone shows me they don’t care about me, or anyone else, then I will believe it. If someone shows me they’re an egotistical jerk, or petty, or toxic, or whatever, I will believe it. I give people the benefit of the doubt, but I will not excuse their behavior. I refuse to believe that kindness is a weakness; that’s something my therapist helped me with a ton. There’s a balance between being a kind person and being a spineless moron. I’ve come from being the latter, and have been aiming to be the former. I’ve made a lot of progress.
This server was a massive set-back in my journey. It’s not the end of the world, and I’m still on my way to be better, but shit dick and balls did it suck having your “friends” tell you that your healthy changes are bad. It’s so hard to catch because of how sneaky and nice it all was. “Oh, but, these people care about me! They’re just looking out for me! I’m sure they have a point somehow! Maybe I have been too mean!” I was reliving my school life at this point, relapsing heavily into overthinking and people pleasing for the exact same reason of “I don’t want to hurt anybody”.
Listen man, I of all people will say this: some people need to be hurt. Some people act in such ways, that the only humbling they can get is the consequences of their own actions. Denying them of those consequences will only hurt them more.
You’d think an adult that called us friends would listen to me and trust me when I told her that. But no. There was always a huge bias towards anyone the admin deemed an actual friend, and if I dared to speak up, I’d get shut down. I tried several times, but alas! When the hell has anyone ever listened to common sense? We wouldn’t be such a shitty world if we knew how to do that.
It’s a little sad how well this proves itself, but I really do relate to Leo. I wish the people I cared about would trust me as much as I trusted them.
With all that being said, I’m gonna wrap up this first reflection. It’s getting really long. I didn’t get a chance to talk much about the “pick me, choose me, love me” culture going on there, so I’ll do that in a separate post another day. I did say there was a lot, haha!
I’ve omitted names and details to the best of my ability. If anyone that I’ve talked about reads this and has a problem with it, you’re free to. You’re free to think whatever you want of me. I’m just as free to not care.
To you however, Dear Reader, thank you for sticking around this long. I know this was a little out of norm for me, but I’m glad I got to share it with you. Thanks for letting me!
See ya next time!
-Shaf
