#stede anon gate

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

Stede Bonnet? More like stupid bitch

ngl u right tho

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

idc that jack was mean to stede, jack clearly had his reasons for what he was doing, the onus here is on ed 100% for not sticking up for stede. if someone is insulting your friend in front of you, that’s on you for not saying shit about it, especially if the insults are related to body image. if stede had let someone insult ed’s body in front of him you would lose your shit so maybe chill with the double standard

I'm gonna say some things that sound kind of mean, but I want you to either a) read the whole thing; or b) let this be the last anon you send. Don't come at me about the first paragraph in my inbox if you don't read the rest of it. Deal? K good.

I genuinely wouldn't lose my shit because it's not that big of a deal. Ed's a big boy he can stick up for himself. I don't actually take the insulting of body image that seriously because I'm not insecure about how I look. I get that I might feel differently if I was but I'm not so to me body image insults are like any other insults. Of course I back my friends if someone else insults them, but that's not what's going on in Ed's mind. In Ed's mind Jack has a crass sense of humor and uses not-so-gentle ribbing to relate to other people, which is perfectly acceptable for pirates, and that's what he's doing to Stede. He doesn't think that Jack is using fighting words here. Under those circumstances I would pull the friend aside and say "Hey babe his sense of humor is a bit crass he doesn't mean anything by it he's just trying to joke around with you." So basically you're kind of assuming a lot about me, about the situation, and how mad I would be if a similar thing happened to Ed and your assumptions about me have all been wrong so far. I don't have a double standard. You're just assuming that I have the same standards that you do. I don't. I think your standards make you sound like kind of an uptight person actually.

Additionally, Ed literally doesn't know he has body image issues, Stede never opened up about the bullying he experienced, so Ed can't know that it's actually serious for Stede. That being said, I think his response is actually pretty appropriate when correcting for that.

Pictured here: Ed telling Jack to stop. Ed telling Stede that this is just Jack's humor. Ed reassuring Stede that he disagrees with the insult. These are the captions that HBO max put up, I'm not just making shit up. Ed doesn't want to be a buzz kill but he doesn't want Stede to feel bad and he wants his favorite boys to get along. I think he walks the line rather appropriately given the information that he's working with. If he'd made a big stink about it it would have embarrassed Stede and killed the vibe that he and Jack had going. What you're expecting from him is the exact wrong move IMO.

So you know. He told Jack to stop, what more do you want from him?

Also Stede is 48 fuckin years old. If he's that upset he's grown he can say something. He doesn't because he's Stede, but that means he's made it his own business and nobody else's. Ed's not a fucking mind reader.

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

ed probably should have just killed stede in e4

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

if you can forgive stede for saying ed was "born of the devil" to his peers in e10, you can forgive ed for not immediately jumping to defend stede when jack teases stede for being feminine

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

hopefully stede gets a boyfriend who treats him better than ed does in season 2!

I hope Stede and Ed fuck in season 2. Ed's pussy so good he'll have Stede seeing god.

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

it would still be queer rep if they ended up with other men lol. is not shipping a pairing a crime now

Yeah it would you're totally right weird flex to be in my inbox about it tho because I'm not the person who said that was a bad look.

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

I am gonna talk about the izcourse one more time today, but the villain of this post is not the Izzy stans nor Izzy himself. It's the anon. So this does not actually count towards breaking the promise I made this morning about taking a break for a couple days.

I know we occasionally poke this fucker by grading their anons or whatever and I know the Izzy Stan's are presumably having the time of their lives considering that he's not blocked yet on that side of Tumblr, but I'm gonna say something pretty uncomfortable for all of us alike. This anon sucks, they're racist and ableist and probably some other ists that they just haven't gone mask off about yet. They are suicide bating and they are waging a harassment campeign, but the fact that they're in the inboxes of literally everyone proves that this is not an ideological thing. It's just about making other people, and probably themselves, miserable.

We are baring witness to someone else's months long mental breakdown. I think it's one person because they say the same things over and over again in the same type face. If that is the case they're probably unemployed or young enough to not need a job yet given how much time to post they have, although one of my many sometimes nemeses on this sight has suggested they're in their thirties and they didn't dispute it. they're cyber stalking an ungodly number of blogs. And there's something going on with them that makes it such that their chosen pass time is sending Anon hate. What I'm saying is that if I had to guess how the Anon is doing I'd say this person is probably the farthest thing from mentally well that I've personally interacted with, and I'm a head case who works in a field where I occasionally have to assist in a mental health crisis. (I'm a head case and that is my job those two things are unrelated)

I'm not saying any of this to get you to go "oh poor Anon". They are still the villain of this post. Nor am I saying it to justify the harassment. I'm saying it because it should sort of change how we interact with them. I'm being very frank about what's going on here. Another uncomfortable thing about this whole situation is that this person is beyond any of our help. They are semi anonymous and even if they weren't you kind of have to know a person irl to get that sort of help for them. The best way to deal with this situation is in fact to freeze them out. I tried reason. Many others have tried dunking. None of it is working. After a certain point this may be a sort of mutualistic digital self harm for some people. (I goad you into saying hurtful things about me, I say hurtful things about you, we continue making each other feel like shit forever) we really do have to be the ones to cut them off. Their only goal is misery. Don't let them make you miserable.

I don't usually make a call for someone to be the bigger person, because I like to get down and dirty. But this is different. It's not about the show or the fandom. It's about a vortex of suffering that we're only making worse by getting sucked into. That's not a moral judgement on anyone who has interacted in good faith or bad with this anon. It's practical. Block, maybe look up what reporting an anonymous message does and if it does anything lmk if you feel so inclined. I'm not telling you to take it lying down, but we've all gotten our shots in at this point there's no point in dragging it out unless you're trying to maintain the image of being persecuted, which is not worth the suffering it causes on your end.

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

I just want to recap this whole situation from my POV actually because I think it would be useful at this point. And I actually want to start in 2014 on instagram during the spam ig era. I was a homestuck cosplayer on spam insta when I was 13 and dealt with the 4 chan raids, if anyone remembers those. So that's my background, just so you know. I got called a retarded dyke by proto gamergaters during my formative years, and it effected the way I engage online.

Anyway, hard cut to when I watched OFMD in April. I deeply related to Ed as a character. Most of my fan engagement for the first month or so was on tiktok, but I got off of it and went back to my social media of choice, Tumblr. I saw a lot of fucking Takes TM that I hated from a certain contingent of the fandom and I was critical of them, and so I started posting my own reading. Here's where the situation starts

I start posting my own reading of the show and I tag the characters that are in the show, hoping to find people who agree with my reading so I could follow them. I got yelled at for """maintagging""" which is an issue I've only run into before once, and the people who got mad at me about the """maintagging""" I received some agressive anons which I promptly deleted. I posted my Ed is Izzy's abuser post (tagged Izzy critical), got more aggressive anons, which I deleted for the most part. Had to tell some people how to block the Izzy critical tag. Cemented myself firmly in the izzy critical camp. I continued to see Shit Takes, in fact since the Izzy is Ed's abuser meta I've only ever made my Izzy metas in response to Shit Takes. I got on Calico Jack twitter, which I don't go on twitter all that often, and there's a lot of overlap between Izzy twitter and CJ twitter unfortunately, so that made me less likely to use twitter at all. I was mostly on there for the porn, so it's cool. I didn't interact with discourse hardly at all so twitter didn't feed me anything related to this.

Now over this period of time the situation on tumblr was getting completely unhinged actually. You couldn't post anything at all in the Izzy tag without someone crawling out of the woodwork to tell you that you were terrible for it. People did slowly learn to block the Izzy critical tag, but jesus christ it was a slow learning process for yall. Every day I'd get on here and post silly little posts, and then one of mine or my mutuals posts would be a little bit too mean to Izzy, and by a little bit too mean it would be something objectively true. And then people would just descend on it and there would be another fucking drama. And it's impossible to predict what's gonna set you off.

Now one drama was completely unrelated to Izzy at all. Stede Anon as we've been calling them, L as they've been referred to in that document showed up in june, left a few nasty anons, and then fucked off because the people that they were bothering turned off anon. Then they came back in October to bother me I played with Stede Anon until I got tired. I wished them a Karkalicious 2009 and sent them on their way.

Another drama I want to recap, which I hesitate to call a drama because of the racist under ... well... overtones is the "documenting of the Izzy haters" a couple of people made a whole sideblog dedicated to documenting the worst of the "Izzy haters". Except they didn't start out with the twitter doxing, or L/Stede Anon. They started out with a mutual of mine who is a black woman and who talks about racism in fandom. She has never harassed anyone to my knowledge and has had quite a bit of nastiness directed at her. I had heard some whisperings of potential harassment being directed at Izzy stans, and I had remained firmly out of it. This blog was too much for me. If they were dedicated to documenting the nastiness they were receiving in fandom, and their third post was about someone who posts metas and minds their own business, then there must not be real problems, especially since I'm catching all this fucking flack for simply posting things that aren't even mean. It may just be that I grew up on the internet but I can be real fucking mean, and I haven't been.

One instance of this is the Izzy isn't canonically queer drama. A mutual of mine posted that Izzy isn't technically confirmed as queer, his queerness is all subtext, that might be an interesting thing to analyze. Things got heated on my dash for a while. Since may there's been a problem in the OFMD community where people get yelled at for posting Izzy critical. And after a long argument with a certain Izzy stan in regards to the post in question I posted this because I was genuinely curious. Basically the argument consisted of us talking past each other, where I said "No one is calling Izzy straight we're just trying to analyze another facet of his character" and they said "You're doing harm to x y z group of Izzy enjoyers by saying that he's straight, and you're doing harassment." On that post that I linked I got told by one person that that post was "Doing harm" and that "hurt people hurt people" which is frankly the most absurd application of that phrase I have seen to date. I got told by a different person that I shouldn't have posted that because "izzy stans are receiving a targeted harassment campaign, worse than anyone else in the fandom" This was the final straw for me. If they think that that post is doing harm, they cannot identify harm. I made a passive aggressive post about curating your experience, blocked anyone who got mad about it, and my tumblr experience has been a lot nicer since I did that, because people blocked me and I blocked them. Everybody's happy.

So anyway then Stede Anon returned with a vengeance. My working theory is that this person is in school and they're on winter break and have more time to be a huge bitch. They accused me of being an Izzy stan I said "nice try you fucking idiot" in a way that was sort of dry, and I said Izzy stans have paper thin skin, and I refuse to loose sleep over them getting mean anons, but you still shouldn't harass them. That response got screen shot and lied about. Because of course it did. I was an idiot for thinking it wouldn't. I stand by what I said but if I could go back I would have been nicer I guess just because it would have caused me less drama. Some Anons came into my inbox and said hey you're a fake ally and you don't care about harassment and I was confused where they were coming from but essentially I said. "Girl, it's an anon" and then someone directed me to uselessheretics blog. And so I go check out the anon harassment that's got yall so worked up. And do you know what I see there? It's fucking Stede Anon!

So for a couple weeks I've been getting these vague messages about harassment and when I finally get directed to the harassment I see an anon that I have been fighting with and have blocked because of how fucking annoying they were. This, Stede Anon of Stede Anon Gate fame, is the unique threat facing the Izzy stan community. So of course I had a fucking field day with it. All of our fandom problems originate with this one shithead and I am going to hold hands with T*zzy*zzy and sing Kumbaya as we all collectively banish Stede Anon to the shadow realm. Hit that block button babes

And then today someone posted the link to the google doc receipts. And I realize now that there's actually been some harassment unrelated to Stede anon happening on twitter, and Stede Anon has been a real terror on IG. So perhaps I jumped the gun on casting doubt, but I maintain that I would not have said anything if not for certain people behaving completely out of pocket and crying about harassment on posts that are not harassment.

And I do want to address that actually. The reason for this whole thing, is because certain people are dragging up the harassment to try to get us to stop criticizing them. The undertone to all of this is very clearly "we're being harassed so you have no right to criticize us or talk about our blorbo in a way we don't like," which doesn't feel related, does it. I've seen the arguments that "they're using your rhetoric" but the thing is you're pointing me to a couple deeply mentally unwell people who I have no control over and you're saying "you should feel bad about this because you made a meta post about your reading of fictional characters that I didn't like" and getting mad when I'm confused that has to do with anything

So basically i retract my assertion that you're not being harassed, but you can clearly see how I got here, and also you keep bringing this harassment up to me in situations that have nothing to do with the harassment. And if you had fewer shitty takes I would make fewer metas.

I also do maintain that L/Stede anon is the source of most of our problems and we should be using the block button prodigiously

Here's how: