Hi everyone. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to have this be my first foray back into Tumblr RP after my inadvertent hiatus, but as someone who has watched their friends be harassed and stalked by Valentine, I can no longer in good conscience stay silent. I stayed quiet because I didn’t want to make things worse for anyone, but at this point, I feel it’s better for everything to be out in the open. I unfortunately do not have screenshots for a lot of what I’m about to talk about because it was five years ago andI didn’t think to hoard evidence on people I considered my friends. Frankly, I had no idea that things with Valentine (who I knew as Laurel) would have progressed as they did and hopefully, my account of my experience with them will shed some light on the subject.
I first met Valentine through Merc shortly after I entered the DA Tumblr RPC in late June/early July of 2017 playing The Iron Bull. My URL at the time was afirmbelieverinnopantsfridays and I was one of the only Iron Bulls at the time in the Tumblr RPC. Merc and I had taken a chance on each other because she was attempting to start up a roleplay exchange and I joined her Discord along with a few other roleplayers who would become some of my best friends. Valentine was not in this Discord, but I had seen them interacting with her and decided to give them a follow, even though I was lukewarm on their character, Astor Hawke. We hit it off fairly quickly and had been friends for probably about the space of a month when they asked if I was interested in shipping Astor and Bull together.
Initially, I said we could try it out and asked them about the dynamic they had in mind. They told me what they envisioned was that Astor and Bull would meet during Inquisition at some point and Astor’s interest would initially be piqued by his fetish for Qunari, but would turn into a genuine relationship based on mutual respect and affection. I pointed out that Astor fetishizing Bull would make it substantially harder to do because he got that a lot in the South and keeping in mind the racial politics of the game setting, it would not make him feel positively towards Astor. They said they were committed to Astor doing the work on his own and I said okay, but to keep our discussion in mind. They sent me a couple of asks, which I did answer, but we never developed any threads.
Shortly after that, as my friendships with Merc and Valtielt developed, we joined Reese’s Discord server. Valentine asked if they could be an admin fairly early on and we all agreed because we didn’t foresee it being an issue. I had noticed their aggressive and persistent vaguing on the dash, sometimes directed at people I considered friends and mutuals, but fortunately, Valentine was too busy with their ships at the time to pay much attention to me.
As time went on, Merc had begun to talk to us in her own server about her interactions with Valentine and the person she chose to call Blue (who was also a victim but very much an enabler of Valentine’s behavior towards Merc and was her right hand on the dash). I had to be careful about what I said because it was clear that Merc was in a really rough place and that she needed a friend more than she needed me telling her to cut Valentine and Blue out of her life for being terrible friends. They were emotional vampires who would make fun of her for having a panic attack and dismiss her suicidal thoughts and feelings. They would tell her that she was a bad friend for being mentally ill and not supporting them in the way that they chose or get upset that she was having a normal reaction to negative and shitty things going on in her life.
I was there in Reese’s Discord for the Squid incident, which came after that, and I cannot stress enough that it was peacefully resolved. When Valentine blew up at Merc in private DMs, she told us in her private server that we shared because she was so blindsided. Naturally, we were all appalled and that was the point where I decided that I would start privately distancing myself from Valentine. It was not difficult to do because they weren't paying much attention to me and spent most of their time posting about their existing partners or vaguing angrily on the dash.
Sometime after that, I called out a roleplay musings blog for making a post using the translated slogan of the Auschwitz concentration camp, “Work will make you free”, as an aesthetic. This was not the first time I had called out a blog for antisemitism,and unfortunately, not the first time they reacted badly. Valentine came into my DMs to quietly support me and told me that they were Jewish. I thanked them for sharing that with me and said that I understood why they kept it quiet because racism in the American Jewish community against Jews of color. I do not doubt that Valentine is Jewish, but it is the fact that Valentine is Jewish that made the incident Merc described in Reese’s server with the Holocaust memorial photo absolutely fucking galling. I helped Merc write that part of her callout because I remembered that incident so clearly and I would have never known that Valentine, a fellow Jew, had given her shit for it because my non-Jewish friend Merc came to me privately in DMs because she felt I had a right to know what was happening.
I should not need to say to a fellow Jew that Holocaust memorial photos are never just “photos”. I should not need to say to a fellow Jew that it doesn’t need to be Auschwitz for me to get mad at people making our ancestors’ traumatic,unjust deaths into moodboard photos for their aesthetic. My blood boils to this day just thinking about it, but every word Merc wrote is true.
I thought about blocking Valentine in Reese’s server after that, but ultimately didn’t because my life outside roleplay got in the way. I was not sure how to disentangle myself because I had seen the way they reacted to others who cut them off or upset them and decided that muting them on my dash and not engaging was the path of least resistance. Then, it turned out I didn’t have to work too hard because I watched Valentine blow up Reese’s server for no reason and hold it hostage.
We were talking in the trigger warning chat about comedy and somehow, the subject of Bill Maher came up for the first time. My friend Tasmin noted that he was transphobic and a couple of other people chimed in. We were about to move on when Valentine came in there out of nowhere and said that with their authority as a mod, they were banning the topic of Bill Maher because “you guys get so fucking extra all the time”. All of us, who had watched Valentine vague and rant on the dash with impunity, were blindsided. I and a couple of other people pointed out that Valentine was the one who had made it a problem, the server had been drama free because we had resolved problems peacefully, and we were all adults who didn’t appreciate being treated like children. Valentine refused to apologize or step down as a mod, so we went to Reese.
Reese spoke with Valentine privately, then let us know that not only was Valentine refusing to apologize and step down as a mod, but that they had threatened to nuke the server if he tried to remove them. Valentine almost deleted that entire server and held it hostage from its rightful owner because they would have rather buried it than taken accountability for making a mistake and apologizing. We ended up leaving en masse after that because there was nothing that we could do and Reese understood why we didn’t want to stay.
I didn’t speak to Valentine for a long time after that, which is why I was so surprised when they approached me in DMs a couple of months later. I had quietly deleted every ask they had sent me because I knew blocking them would set them off, which wasn’t many and could easily be explained away by Tumblr eating it. I responded to what they said, but didn’t engage beyond that and we were talking about their character Astor and roleplay. Valentine mentioned a talent of his among many others and then went on to explain to me that he was incredibly good at so many things because “the autistics……their intelligence is amazing.”
That’s a verbatim quote. I remember it in perfect clarity because I was so angry. My high school best friend, who I loved like a brother, was autistic. Additionally, my mother was a psychology professor and while I was never a student in her classes, I had learned about the ableism in the savant model from her and why that was so particularly damaging and harmful to autistic people. I did not know whether Valentine was autistic or not and frankly, I did not care because you can be disabled and still uphold ableism that harms others.
I went silent and then never spoke to Valentine again. Frankly, I was waiting for them to ask me why because I was ready to tear them a new one. In retrospect, I’m glad they didn’t because I would have made things worse for Valtiel and Merc, and I don’t want this to happen to anyone else who reads this. Please block this person and don’t engage. It is not worth the cost of your mental health or your wellbeing.
And Valentine, yimakh sh’mo, since I know you’re reading this, gai kaken offen yom.
