What happened with i-am-a-fish? A compilation:
A lot of people are confused about what happened with Tumblr user i-am-a-fish (who I’ll refer to as Fish from here on out for the sake of readability), and a lot of rumor, misinformation and hyperbole is circulating. With this post I hope to compile the claims and evidence against him, examine their validity, and hopefully bring everyone up to speed.
Let’s get the main thing out of the way first:
Veggiefact is a Twitter account with over 270k followers.
The callout post it references is this one: https://ratsofftoya.tumblr.com/post/189087352976/this-is-a-repost-since-just-making-an-addition-to. A second call-out is making the rounds too, from bubblegumlopunny, and it’s a Google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gv0ixX_jw9geWxFc07b9En–AGHcTqVBO1E6TLGLhHI/edit
Both callouts share about 90% of the same information. Bubblegum’s callout includes accusations of racism and lesbophobia as well, and more incendiary language and questionable charges than the Tumblr post, but in this post I’ll only focus on the accusations that Fish is a pedophile.
The child porn accounts on Twitter
The “child porn accounts” it refers to are @krskiii, @Karbuitt and @kamawanu__. The last one is actually safe for work, provided you work at a place that’s cool with you being on Twitter, and the second-to-last one sort-of is, depending how your boss feels about suggestive pin-ups and sex jokes.
Kamawanu posts fanart of various fandoms, but mostly fanart of Rick & Morty and Into the Spider-Verse. Kamawanu is an incest shipper, although they keep that content to a separate, adult-only and locked account. Karbuitt posts artwork of various Nintendo characters, but in particular Viridi from Kid Icarus. Neither of these accounts can be argued to be “dedicated to child porn” in any capacity.
Although some Tumblr users would argue in earnest this is child porn as well.
Krskiii is the only account to have posted questionable content. While the vast majority of their feed is cute, safe for work anime art, they posted lolicon back in januari this year. Both callouts include a second screenshot from a tweet made in 2016 as well.
Was this something Fish reasonably could’ve known about? According to the callout in the Google doc:
This is straight-up untrue.
Not only is it perfectly possible to follow Twitters without checking them first (and many follow-for-follow Twitters operate this way) but even if you do vet accounts, there is no archive or tags like Tumblr has to conveniently show you what kind of content you can expect. You have to manually scroll through a person’s timeline or media tab to see what they post.
You’d only see their most recent tweets, not ones they made almost a damn year ago.
Fish followed this account in a follow-spree that had him hit the follow limit for the day on November 12th, almost a whole year after it was made. Fish’s claim that he didn’t know about these pictures is not only perfectly believable; it’s unlikely that he would’ve even known about it unles he’d dug through this person’s media tab quite far.
This is not the behaviour of someone who curated their following list and carefully vetted everyone on it.
Was this irresponsible behaviour of him, towards both himself and his followers? Sure, you can make that argument. But it’s not evidence for anything more sinister than that.
The Pornhub joke
If you’re still on Tumblr in 2019, you were probably around for the porn purge of 2018, the one that had everyone scrambling for a new online home. With how few alternatives there are of social media sites that allow NSFW content, people started discussing, mostly as a joke, the possibility of moving to Pornhub. It was enough of a Thing that Pornhub’s social media department caught wind of it.
I-am-a-fish decided to get in on the joke and created a Pornhub account and posted about “relocating” on Twitter and Tumblr:
How zany! A goldfish on a porn site!
People voiced discomfort over it, so Fish deleted the links from Tumblr and the Twitter bio, but didn’t delete the tweet. The Pornhub account itself seems to have never been used.
The sex joke
Part of the callout post is the claim Fish “deliberately exposes minors to porn”, this + the Pornhub thing is what they’re referring to.
At some point in late 2018 or early 2019 Fish decided this wasn’t the direction he wanted to take his blog into, changed the original post, deleted the reblogs, and hasn’t posted nsfw content since.
Also this happened a year ago.
The Discord server
Fish briefly ran a Discord server with a strict no-bullying policy that applied to everyone. This is not a political stance, but it was turned into one. This counts as “believing in reverse oppression”:
Most of the mods were adults, which is supposedly creepy:
One of them thought shipping characters who have been aged-up into adulthood isn’t paedophilia:
Someone on the server thought “pedophilia” is a sexuality:
One thing to note here is that none of these actually involve Fish’s own thoughts or actions, just those of people he’s vaguely associated with (is Mother Allspite a close friend? An acquintance? Someone who volunteered to help moderate the chat?), as well as complete strangers. He’s being associated with statements people have made who have no connection to him whatsoever.
Here are the claims I’ve seen making the rounds about the Discord server of which I’ve seen no evidence:
That the mods supported pedophilia
That the mods themselves were pedophiles
That pedophilia was treated as a sexuality you could tag yourself with
That the server was full of pedophiles
The claim that the server mixed minors with adults and didn’t section off nsfw content/discussion is at least a believable one, so I’m not including it here. It’s not proof of anyone being a pedophile, however. It just means the Discord server was poorly managed.
What to make of this?
There is no proof that Fish is anything worse than a young adult (despite the callout posts all making a huge deal out of him being an adult, he’s still only 19 years old) who got too popular too fast and didn’t understand the responsibility that came with that. Even for his “worst” offenses there is no proof of ill intent behind them. At worst there is poor judgment, irresponsibility, and impulsiveness. There is certainly no proof that he is attracted to children, much less that he ever acted on it.
Nevertheless,
(I have no idea where the “20+ Twitters dedicated to child porn” claim comes from and found no evidence whatsoever to support it)
This whole situation is horrible and heartbreaking.
(Not included in this post: the “VeggieTales Facts” Twitter account also posts sex jokes. While using the image and title of a Christian cartoon for 5-year-olds. Mysteriously, this is totally fine, and not ironclad proof that they’re a child molester.)
Don’t gleefully rush in to attack someone because you heard a vague rumor started by an internet stranger!
Don’t use “pedophile” as a synonym for…well, a lot of things, but in this case, “teenager who has ever had any kind of interaction with a younger teenager”!
And on the other side: if you’re being attacked for nonsense reasons, you do not have an obligation to explain yourself or lay out the facts! Sometimes people don’t actually care about the facts. Sometimes people are not acting in good faith.
There’s an acronym for “things not to do with someone who is not interested in being reasonable.” JADE - Justify, Argue, Defend, Explain. You will be tempted to do these, because that’s how people solve conflicts…if they’re actually interested in solving them. Some people aren’t. With those people, JADEing will only make things worse.
You are allowed to decide not to engage. You are allowed to just block them.
(You are not obligated to go through and painstakingly filter for the reasonable ones, either. You’re allowed to look up mass-blocking tools – I know they’re a thing on Twitter – and make liberal use of them.)
By the way, one of the ways you can tell that this is in bad faith: several of the attacks are about a completely different person who posted a thing they don’t like, and instead of considering that person responsible, the attackers are steering all the vitriol toward…the most internet-famous account that person has ever interacted with in any way.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s the result of accusers who are deliberately trying to start the biggest internet firestorm they can get – because the bigger it is, the more of a rush it gives them.
(But don’t try to call them out on this or clap back at them, because that won’t work either. You can write things out in a real-world notebook if that helps, but keep it private. In public, take deep breaths and block, block, block.)
As usual, all I can think of is The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
We’ve gotten to the point where dumbasses calling people out for nonexistent crimes have so poisoned the word ‘pedophilia’ that your average tumblr user is going to–usually correctly–assume it means “They wrote the wrong middle-aged man taking the active role in anal sex” or “They might have once looked at fan art of a 17-year-old anime character” or something equally irrelevant.
@olderthannetfic: It’s something of a two-edged sword. On one hand you have Tumblr’s definition of “pedophile”, which is much broader than the definition most people work with, and encompasses behaviour that has little to nothing to do with pedophilia. And then you have people who are unaware of the Tumblr definition of the word, and when they hear “this person is a pedophile”, they (understandabily) think “This person has hurt or preyed on children, or has attempted to do those things”.
And so you end up with people who think, without really looking past the headline and looking at the evidence, that he actually molested children.
@problematicshipsproject: Yeah, Veggiefacts’ whole shtick is the juxtaposition of a wholesome and extremely Christian children’s cartoon and adult humor. Which is fine, and I’ve enjoyed some of their content in the past, but the sheer hypocrisy of posting things like this
... and then accusing someone else of horrible things because they used to post adult humor on their joke blog just boggles the mind.
There were other things I wanted to include in the original post too but left out for brevity’s (lol) sake, or because they were too off-topic (this is not about Veggiefacts, or anyone other than Fish, after all), like how it’s common courtesy on Twitter to give someone a head’s up if they follow a “problematic” account. Because contrary to what the callout posts imply, following people without really knowing who they are or what kind of content they post is actually really common.
Or how the content Fish would’ve seen from the “pedo account” after November 12th would just be this