#toxicposting

[mrmallard]

This is like 80% kidding but like

A couple months ago, a blog called tekkenjournalist - a niche shitpost blog that was A) small and B) layered in irony about the Tekken games - got terminated out of nowhere. There's no "deactivated" addition to their username - tekkenjournalist was purged by staff for some unknown, godforsaken reason, or it was the sideblog of a nuked account.

Then, earlier this week, a similar blog with a bit more attention got terminated too - pjackk. Again, no "deactivated" thing in the username; either it was a sideblog of a nuked user, or staff went and murked the account despite it being abandoned. pjackk hadn't posted in at least a year when the account got nuked, so there's really no fucking reason why the account should have been targeted.

Now there's another niche shitpost fighting game blog that's been wiped out - there's an account for the Mortal Kombat character Hsu Hao that was similar to pjackk in that the depicted character was a loveless loser who leaned into the hostile atmosphere that surrounded them. And I just don't get why these weird, semi-popular gimmick shitpost accounts are being taken down the way they are.

I will say that there were significant points of pjackk and hsu hao's popularity that I didn't really "get" or like, and hsu hao was genuinely the point where this trend was wearing out its welcome for me - but even so, it existed and it made its mark within a really specific slice of my Tumblr experience.

tekkenjournalist was significantly removed from this pjackk/hsu hao thing, but I associate them based on the similar way in which they were just unceremoniously murked one day, and through the sheer fucking trivia that they were all connected to fighting game franchises! tekkenjournalist is clearly tied to Tekken, as is pjackk, while hsu hao is tied to Mortal Kombat - and apropos of fucking NOTHING, they've all been wiped off of Tumblr for no fucking reason!

I'm not at all cooking with this one, and frankly there are more serious ramifications to the behavior of staff than my shitty rambling about semi-obscure fighting game themed shitpost accounts. It isn't necessarily that deep, hence the "80% joking" clarification at the top of this post.

But on top of this recent ban-wave that's predominantly been targeting trans women - which itself should be the serious focus in all of this - it feels really oddly, really specifically targeted for these two really similar gimmick blogs to have been targeted in such a short time frame. tekkenjournalist is less connected, but it really feels like an implementation of the same weirdly specific bias stretching back a couple months at this point.

So - my point is this. On top of all the serious targeted harassment that staff seems to be doing, it feels almost like one of the staff members handing out these unfair terminations is abusing their power to take out shitty semi-popular gimmick blogs about fighting game characters.

There's also a non-zero percent chance that all three accounts were sideblogs attached to the main blog of a trans user. Frankly that would make more sense than for staff's transphobic ban-wave to also include a specific, targeted hatred of... whatever the fuck pjackk and the hsu hao account had going on, and possibly including the brand of posting that tekkenjournalist was doing before they got murked. But even so, it's BIZARRE that on top of tumblr staff clearly throwing a transphobic tantrum about the awful notes redesign, we're also seeing some of the most esoteric, do-nothing gimmick blogs who've since stopped posting entirely... ALSO get caught up in staff's petty ban-wave!

Like does Matt Mullenweg hate fighting games? Does he LOVE fighting games, which is why he's bided his time to systemically crush two of the biggest fighting game related shitposts in the Tumblr zeitgeist? Does he hate trans women more than he loves fighting games? The answer to that last one is probably yes, but it's just like. UTTERLY BIZARRE. how specific these two murked blogs are in tone and in source material that they would both go down in the midst of a staff meltdown like the one we've been seeing.

Again, it's more likely that the accounts were sideblogs attached to the main blog of a trans user that these clowns have been arbitrarily shutting down like a pack of dogs. But it's just like - for both of these LONG-DORMANT ACCOUNTS to get nuked so close together almost feels like another layer to the overreach. It almost feels like a shithead moderator taking a break from the usual glut of queerphobic terminations to knock these two little blogs off. Almost like a side-wonk on top of everything else they've been doing. I dunno.

[coulsart]

how i look at people who think theyre closer to me than they actually are

[lord-radish]

It really does feel like the most prominent social media conglomerates are closing their fist around the throat of the internet and its users. like sorry to be dramatic but a combination of the over-sanitization of the internet, bad-faith actors actively dismantling the infrastructure of the platforms they run and the increased monetization of pretty much every digital platform and media service is making the internet less accessible.

Netflix's library has continued to shrink for years due to every media company under the sun pulling their catalogue to start their own dedicated streaming platform. They've disabled account sharing, they're introducing tiered subscriptions where the cheapest rate forces you to watch ads, and the price of all their tiers has sharply increased. And somehow that actually fucking worked for them, despite being a worse service for a worse price.

YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Twitch monitor what people say and remove content on the grounds of vulgarity, or they disincentivise it by making content harder to find and interact with. Efforts to control misinformation has resulted in topics like COVID affecting the visibility of what people publish, meaning that you can't even mention it casually as the fact of life that it's been for years without it getting flagged, which affects who can see it. Want to mention the two years you had to spend inside? That's deemed just as critical as COVID safety tips, and it's subject to the same scrutiny as COVID misinformation, which means less people will be able to see what you posted.

You have to pay more money to play console games online for absolutely arbitrary reasons. Platforms that are ostensibly free are either moving to paywall content, or they're slathering on monetization schemes and pushing them hard. You can't post NSFW or Google, Apple or fucking MASTERCARD will shut you down.

There is a white-knuckle grip on the throat of the internet, and it feels like it really fucking clamped down in the last six months, all at the same time from all sides. It's been there for a while, but it almost feels like it came to a head in one fell swoop and either no-one gives a fuck or they've accepted that every company ever is going to fuck us in the ass and get away with it.

[lilyvines]

i hope somewhere jk Rowling is in her evil little dungeon looking at her name next to an insanely accepting 18 year old twitch streamer on guardian person of the year and crying

[mrmallard]

I ended up scrolling the Amazing Digital Circus and Gooseworx tags for a while to get a rough idea, even an inkling of what people are saying about Gooseworx. And I'm going to be real, it seems to me that the criticism about her is being used as a fandom gotcha, at best.

There are posts about her being racist in the past, but no-one's bringing up any screenshots or even implying the sort of stuff she was saying - it's just "she's racist" as a gotcha. There IS discussion about how two of the VAs on the show have said bigoted things in the past, which people have adequately explained - and while those VAs are rightfully being condemned, I've seen people transfer the fault onto Gooseworx because "she should have given everyone full background checks".

To a point, sure - a degree of accountability comes from management. If someone has a known history of being shitty and they get hired anyway, a lot of the blame does fall on the management side of things. If a person does something shitty in the past, and it comes out AFTER they've been hired? And it's some real deep-dive stuff, like pulling old tweets? That's a case where management can reasonably have been in the dark too, so I'm not going to transfer an actor's issues onto the project they worked on - given that they haven't been using their position on a show or a project to be inappropriate y'know.

Then I saw people say that Gooseworx's self-insert is Jax, and that's a red flag because Jax is an abuser and a gaslighter and all that - and this one I can't quite take seriously. The Jax character being prickly and rude and Complicated isn't a 1:1 representation of who Gooseworx is. It's likely a complicated vessel for complicated feelings - liking a character, identifying with a character or WRITING a character who does complicated emotional shit can be an exploration of personal feelings and murky themes, but it doesn't make the worst accusations levelled against that character an abject reflection of who its creator or fans are.

I've seen people strongly implying that because Jax is an abusive character, Gooseworx herself must be abusive too - and that doesn't sound like it's coming from a place of concern or genuine criticism. It sounds like it comes from a place of fan discourse, and it sounds like it's being used extremely flippantly - using a serious topic to further bury a creator who's being attacked because of drama related to their show.

It seems to me that people are attacking Gooseworx because they either don't like the show, or they don't like recent developments of the show - and if the thing is Bad Now, the people making it must ALSO be Bad Now. So now there are people spamming "gooseworx is racist" based on a vague "trust me bro" vibe than any actual, serious discussion or discourse of her bigotry, and by transferring blame over recently unearthed bigoted actions BY OTHER PEOPLE to her. Now people are saying "gooseworx is abusive because her self insert is Jax and that's Spicy and Red Flag Vibes and Jax is an abuser so that Says Something about Gooseworx". And while I think people genuinely mean what they say, I don't think they're actually taking any of this particularly seriously. This is a game to the people engaging in this discourse. This is Something To Do.

And it's something I've seen multiple times in the past few years. When a creator or a show falls from grace - like it stops being popular, it reaches a point of saturation where engaging with it genuinely becomes unbearable, or a single individual person decides they don't like it any more - there has been a movement to cancel it. It's not enough that the thing just isn't very good - it has to be Bad Now. It has to be buried.

There was a musician I follow who befriended a younger guy, and that younger guy was a fan and began to feel like there was an expectation for him to be there whenever the musician wanted him to be there. I don't think it was the musician's intent to use that guy's fandom to exploit him, but this guy was put in a position where he felt very hard done by and he had to cut the friendship off because it was fucking with his emotions.

I have sympathy for the fan. He felt a degree of pressure to always be available that the musician might not have intended, but which was still a very real experience for him. It's a good study of how celebrity status does impact power dynamics in a relationship, even one that's intended by the celebrity to be benign. I also have sympathy for the musician - again, this isn't someone who's selling out arenas, it's someone who tours sometimes and goes to the bar in their hometown. I don't think any wrong was ever intended, and I think both of these people got hurt.

Where things get murky for me is when the younger guy tried to bolster his account by going "he met his wife on AOL when she was seventeen, and I'm a younger guy, so I think this musician has predatory characteristics". And while it's especially bad on paper - the person he's talking about has been married to that musician for over twenty years. They have like three kids. They're a functional family unit over the course of decades, and the musician and his band are relatively scandal-free so I don't think he's out here trying to bed groupies and assault people.

And it's hard, because again - I think this guy has valid grievances based on his experiences with this musician! The material harm that came from that relationship is very real, and I feel sorry that he got caught up in this emotional mindfuck that left him in a bad way. But I felt an acute sense of like. I am going to take this guy down No Matter What. And that soured the intent for me, because it's "this is my experience, ALSO he did this thing so he's a groomer" - when the person he's talking about is his wife who's been happily married to him since the 2000's. It didn't feel right.

A similar thing happened with a youtuber who got cancelled in the early 2020's, where a document was compiled that accused him of intentionally giving multiple women STDs and using his Internet fame to sleep with women. And the thing about this one is that I do believe he was using his minor celebrity status to hook up with women, and even to specifically have unprotected sex with them. It's a skeevy situation.

But the part that fucks me off the most about this situation is the part where people accused him of intentionally passing STDs to multiple people. That's a heinous fucking thing to do, and it's an extremely serious accusation to make.

I believe the women who say he leveraged their fandom of him into initiating sexual encounters with them in ways that made them feel pressured and gross. I saw a few initial accusations go up just as the controversy was beginning to get big. The part that fucks me off is that there were people PRESSURING THEM TO TAKE THEIR ACCUSATIONS DOWN, BECAUSE THEY WERE PUTTING A DOCUMENT TOGETHER THAT WOULD BURY HIM. AND THESE WOMEN DID TAKE THEIR ACCUSATIONS DOWN.

And when the document came out? A few of them were lies! Screenshots were doctored! Shit was edited and taken out of context, and there are people who outright accused this guy of sex crimes he didn't commit!

And BECAUSE THESE LEGITIMATE ACCUSATIONS WERE LUMPED TOGETHER WITH DISPROVABLE LIES, EVERYTHING GOT DISCREDITED - EVEN THE INITIAL ACCUSATIONS. And it bothers me so much because the real, actual accusations of wrongdoing here were impacted by people who were just Saying Shit to take a guy down that they didn't like. Not taking the shit seriously led to real material harm to people I believe did go through a shitty situation - they didn't get justice because people didn't take the gravity of what they were saying seriously.

My point being - the desire for people to Definitely Take Someone Down For Good is this sick behavior that they get in their head where they take their discomfort, their personal dissatisfaction with a person or a thing, and they turn it into a Serious Issue that Has To Be Addressed Now. A show gets bad? Well, the creators are problematic. A creator falls off? They said some irreverent banter about breasts eight years ago and it's tantamount to sexual harassment. In the case of that YouTuber, he DID do some material harm - but because people didn't take that shit seriously and they wanted to dogpile, that harm got swept under the rug.

And I'm seeing it happen now with The Amazing Digital Circus, where because the show's last episode leaked and people are divided on whether it was good or not - well, Gooseworx identifies with an abusive character and she hired bigots to voice characters and she herself is a racist who has to answer for her crimes - despite most of that last point boiling down to people just saying she's a bigot without discussing what she said. Fuck, an element to that last point is that people are peeved that she used a song written by a black person that was a cover sung by a white person, and the detractors didn't even get THAT right - the person singing the cover is an Asian man!

And it just reeks of petty fandom desperation, because they can't be sure that the time investment of their fandom was adequately rewarded - so now we have to Take Gooseworx Down.

Let me be real. I'm open to discussing bigoted statements or sentiments expressed by Gooseworx in the past if people want to bring them up and talk about them. My position on this is that I haven't seen anything - no screenshots, not even a light explanation of what she said - about Gooseworx being a bigot.

I do not think it's fair or appropriate to say that Gooseworx either IS an abuser, or is LIKELY TO be an abuser, based on her preference for the Jax character in her cartoon show.

I do not think a sheer majority of the white-hot vitriol around Gooseworx is justified, nor are the accusations levelled against her being made from a serious place - I do think the accusations come from a GENUINE place, I think people really do believe what they're saying, but I don't think people are actually taking the things that they're accusing her of seriously. I think people are more concerned with pithy gotchas than they are with the very real implications of what they're saying.

I think people are upset because they aren't satisfied with where the show has gone or how it ended, and I think this attitude of "burn it all down" has become an entrenched part of modern fandom. That's where I think the backlash is coming from.

And in saying all of this? I could easily be wrong about all of this. The point of talking about all of this - like really getting into the weeds and examining how this all makes me feel and how it reminds me of other situations - is to get my feelings out, take in other opinions and hopefully arrive at a less ignorant conclusion than I started at. I welcome discussion and discourse. I welcome criticism and new, more relevant information that conflicts with what I'm saying. I'm 100% open to being proven wrong.

But this is how I feel about this. I think people are saying a lot of serious things that they either don't fully grasp the gravity of, or they're using very heavy things as a fandom gotcha. I think people who go "oh well she's problematic so fuck her, I knew all along" are either A) lying or exaggerating to be with the in-group, B) speaking from a place where they've only just recently heard something and are taking it as gospel, or C) potentially truthful that they've known all along - but are only bringing it up now instead of when they first learned about it because it's popular now. And like how fucking cooked would it be to withhold that shit until it became popular to talk about it?

So that's my thoughts on it all.

[coulsart]

im starting to understand the poly thing, maybe. but only if im the centerpiece bc im selfish and want to feel important and also im the be

[mrmallard]

To this day, the most telling line from the entire Drake/Kendrick beef is from Drake's "Family Matters": Kendrick just opened his mouth / someone go give him a Grammy right now.

Like for a song where he's trying to build up all this bravado and like shit all over the competition, this line reeks. REEKS. of insecurity. This is the most bitch-made, schoolyard-ass thing Drake could have said. Like I don't know how anyone could have been hearing Drake's shit and seriously saying "yeah, he's cooking Kendrick alive, back to back him champagne papi!"

And there are a lot of bad lines from Drake, of course - bringing up Millie Bobby Brown unprompted when Kendrick just called him a blanket statutory rapist (speaking of which, that poor fucking girl having her name thrown around whenever Drake comes up is such a bummer for her), "you got your information from clowns/we fed you the information", all of that. But it really should have been over the second the Grammy line came up, because in this song where he's trying to clap back against Kendrick ripping him a new asshole, he explicitly proves Kendrick Lamar right in his assessment.

He's a petty, petulant, power-tripping clown. He always has been, and he'll probably continue to spiral into his basest, most unpleasant personal instincts as time goes on. And he doesn't even seem to realize in the moment just how badly he's telling on himself! That's the crazy part! Despite the self-centered contempt dripping from this line, you still had people glazing him pre-Not Like Us like he had a chance, when his showing was already tripping over its fucking feet!!!

It's like, everyone loves Not Like Us and Meet the Grahams, and they love shitting on The Heart pt 6 - and rightfully so. But for that entire stretch of time, I don't think I saw anyone bring up how pathetic it was that the #1 most streamed musician on Spotify - arguably the biggest music streaming platform ever made, which would make him one of the most quantifiably popular musicians in the world - was whining about being snubbed by the Grammys in a song that was meant to be disproving the notion that he's a conceited dickhead.

The Drake-glazing that went on during that beef was a dark fuckin day in music fandom imo. The fact that he can plain-facedly embody the exact issues that Kendrick was pointing out in his own diss, and then absolutely fizzle out after the world collectively called him a sex offender, and STILL have dudes try to say he won some sort of Moral Victory despite being an underhanded, backstabbing prick the entire fucking feud? There's no other way to phrase it. It was a dark day in music fandom. And it was clear from his second song that he didn't have the concrete foundation that Kendrick did for his own criticisms of Drake, and I feel like it isn't brought up enough. Drake's entire showing in that feud, from front to back, was clown shit. You could tell as early as Family Matters that he had nothing to go on, and you still have contrarians saying that Um Ackshually He Won The Beef.

Like no - let's be fucking real here. It was already over, even in those thirty minutes before Meet the Grahams dropped. Drake already showed his own ass. The whole go of it from Drake was just ass.

[coulsart]

i crave inconceivable violence