#had someone be like “you may be autistic” on our first interaction online. put me off immediately. hello? boundaries?

[malaierba]

Feels weird to see people diagnosing Ryoko Kui ngl. You guys don't know her.

[sandpaperdaisy]

Autism Masking and (Unintended) Parasocial Relationships

CW: masking, tangential mention of adult themes (incest, drugs) without either being a topic of this essay

By “masking” I mean the ways in which an autistic person tries to navigate the neurotypical world, generally by putting on a persona or using a different social language in order to communicate with non-autistic folks more effectively.

By “parasocial” I mean a relationship that is real to the person who experiences it, but which does not exist outside their head and therefore is not an actual back-and-forth interaction between them and the other party with equal participation.

ONWARD TO THE BLATHERING:

So yesterday, I realized something. The way in which I mask causes me to experience parasocial relationships, or lend a parasocial aspect to real life relationships, even solid ones.

Keep in mind, everything I describe below may just be me. But if you recognize yourself anywhere in there, here's proof that you're not alone!

I mask by internally imagining every single interaction I am likely to experience with any person, ever. This allows me to test out several scenarios that may result from the various things I say and do, and select what I think will be the most successful one.

I do this because otherwise, I run the risk of seeming “cold” or inconsiderate to the other person, and I would much prefer to be a good friend or associate to them. So I try very much to do the prep-work of thinking about their needs and motives BEFORE the interaction, so I won’t freeze up and ignore the other person’s needs and feelings DURING the interaction.

Generally, this has worked out satisfactorily for me and my associates, but it has its problems.

Problem 1: Friends feel analyzed.

First off, while most of my close friends and family are cool with it, at least one of them spent years chafing under the feeling of being analyzed relentlessly by me. She expressed her frustration with me “thinking so much” and looking at her like “a bug under a glass.” She also felt very judged by me. It truly hurt her to be studied so much, and that is valid and unfortunate.

Problem 2: Strangers feel uncomfortable!

Secondly, all of this pre-gaming on my part results in me living hundreds of years’ worth of lives and interactions in my head before they even occur, and frequently these interactions never occur. So if I carefully considered what to say to an artist I admire on the internet, who is not my friend or personal acquaintance, in the course of practicing how best to potentially converse with them I may have a parasocial relationship with them of several years’ standing. This is definitely the case with a couple of talented artists I admire.

When I have spent that much time observing them and approving of them in my head, if I DO eventually meet them or speak with them online I already have an extremely familiar manner with them. I am much too informal and intimate for someone who hasn't done anything to earn their trust in the real world, and who incidentally has no reason to trust them either.

This results in very understandable annoyance or discomfort for the person! It is also worth noting, that I am somewhat fortunate to be a female with this trait. Generally speaking, the recipients of my esteem feel no MORE than annoyance, because they have the sense (justified in my case) that I cannot physically harm them. If I were male, strangers I am overly friendly with might perceive more danger from my attention and feel genuine fear.

Problem 3: Emotional impact of fast-tracked friendships

There have been many times when people rejoiced from my putting in all that mental "work" ahead of time and immediately met me where I was in our parasocial relationship, instantly becoming my close friends. When this stuck, it resulted in deeply enriching and lifelong friendships (and a marriage) that persist to this day.

But it does not always stick.

From my end, this is because I can't anticipate everything. Many years ago, I had one very close friendship that began in this instantaneous (for them) manner and lasted for many blissful months. Then, one day, I discovered they enjoyed writing fiction that dealt with incest and serious psychological conflicts and suffering resulting from incestuous desires. They had a very large body of work dedicated to these themes and the incest was frequently treated in an approving manner. I did my best to approach their interests with an open mind, but I ended up failing to get past it.

Back then, I didn't see a good path forward other than to end our friendship since it was causing me to have nightmares and experience significant emotional distress. But you can imagine the pain and shock felt by my friend, whose real world experience was that I had instantly loved and befriended them and become a confidante, and now I was instantly withdrawing all love. Terrible, right?

This is the kind of thing that presumably could have been avoided if I had taken as many weeks and months to get to know them *with their participation* as I had already spent with them in my head.

Problem 4: Boys

This problem will likely apply to whomever would consider you to be a possible romantic partner. For me, it's usually been males. And considering the rigid constraints frequently placed on male emotional intimacy, it might lend itself most heavily to relationships with men.

When I've made one of these instantly emotionally intimate close friendships with a MALE, he has very often then experienced significant confusion and distress because generally, in his life experiences that would indicate I'm romantically interested in him.

This can lead to some real disappointment, and in one case possibly contributed to a close male friend's depression. To him, my freely given emotional intimacy and friendship indicated romantic love, so when I began dating, he was extremely surprised, confused, and deeply disappointed. That is not a pain I ever wished on him and it remains one of the deepest regrets of my life.

With all these pitfalls, why would you ever keep masking???

I do it because I've been doing it for over 4 decades and it's simply a part of me. If I were born without hearing, sight, or another sense there are many techniques and skills I would develop in order to still experience the life I want. As a gal who was born without a social sense, I mask! It's kind of like learning a second language on steroids (and meth and perhaps adderall).

This doesn't mean I don't believe in patience and accommodation, though. The ideal circumstance is when you've developed healthy skills to navigate the wide world AND folks are patient and open-minded when you need more help. And then you turn around and show people patience too!

Some of my masking is maladaptive and causes problems, as I've said above. For me the way forward is to know myself and know what I'm facing, and then just to keep trying my best to be a considerate mom, partner, friend, employee, and associate.

But if I've ever done any of this stuff to you, or if I ever do...know I'm genuinely sorry if you were hurt, I'd prefer to find a way that works better for us both, and you can always talk to me about it.

~Heather

[aroworlds]

Aro-Spec Artist Profile: Shell

Our next aro-spec creator is Shell, already known to the aro-spec community as @arosnowflake and the author of the awesome short story Seducing Trouble!

Shell is an autistic, ADHD, non-binary aro-ace person who writes short stories, original fiction, fanfiction and essays. You can find eir fanworks on AO3 under the username spitecentral, writing for the Voltron: Legendary Defender, Fullmetal Alchemist, DC Universe, Batman and Batgirl fandoms, and we’ll hope ey posts more pieces from eir original Coffeeshop Project!

With us Shell talks about how ey writes romance as an aro-ace, depicting relationships in fiction, the impact of amatonormativity on creativity and eir alienation from current aro-spec community conversations. Eir words bound with enthusiasm on authentic creativity and the growth of the aro-spec community, so please let’s give em all our love, encouragement, gratitude, kudos and follows for taking the time to explore what it is to be aromantic and creative.

Can you share with us your story in being aro-spec?

I never thought I was anything other than straight, although I did start noticing that I was different from other people when I was as young as twelve (for example, I remember being asked to pick the handsomest guy in a boy band, but to me, they all looked the same). However, I simply put this down to my autism, and since I was already desensitized to differences with peers, I pretty much ignored it. That is, until I repeatedly saw the word ‘asexual’ used online, and I began to wonder what it was, so I googled it. After reading the first paragraph on the Wikipedia page, I basically slammed my computer shut and did my very best to convince myself that no, I was overreacting, and also straight; after all, I was already autistic and ADHD, so any more diversity would be implausible.

Past me was so naive.

Anyway, I came to terms with being asexual at sixteen, and openly started identifying with it without adding ‘I think’ when I was seventeen. When I learned about the SAM, I initially dismissed the idea of being aro because I had a couple of crushes when I was a kid. However, after learning more about aromanticism and after some conversations with aromantic people, I decided to adopt the label since it really fit me. I mean, I was like nine when I had those crushes, and I don’t feel like they counted. I’m fairly sure now that I was just having them because it seemed like the Thing To Do, and, even then, all of my fantasies involved a more platonic ‘best friends forever but with shared pets’ lifestyle than a romantic thing. So while I may or may not have had crushes before, I don’t think I ever will again, and I don’t want to either, so I’ve adopted the aromantic label. I know it sounds weird, but oh well!

Can you share with us the story behind your creativity?

I don’t remember exactly why or when I began to write. I know it happened when I was around twelve, but that’s kind of it? It’s not really a spectacular story. As for how I began to create the things I do now, that’s slightly more interesting. Really, everything centers around one thing: spite. No one writes autistic characters, and no one writes stories with no romantic plotlines, so I guess I’ll have to do it myself! That’s my literal thought process behind my writing at any given moment, honestly. Even when I’m not writing about autism or other marginalized identities, I write obscure and sometimes absurdist fantasy with magic types or settings that I haven’t seen used before, because I find writing that fascinating, or because I’m annoyed that no one else has used that particular idea. I’m fairly sure that was the reason I began writing originally, too: I had stories I wanted to read, and no one was writing them, so I guess I’ll have to do it.

Are there any particular ways your aro-spec experience is expressed in your art?

Well, first and foremost, I never focus on romantic relationships. Even when they appear in the story, they are not the focus. I’m so sick and tired of reading romantic plotlines, and I am not planning on ever contributing to that trend, thank you very much. So platonic relationships, worldbuilding or character development are often central to the story, instead of romance.

Second, I have this habit of interpreting tropes differently than allos because of my aromanticism. Name soulmates, for example. I know they aren’t a very popular trope in the aro community, but I love them. However, I have a different definition of them than most: I’ve always interpreted a ‘soulmate’ as someone who changes your life (for better or for worse), not your ‘other half’ or whatever nonsense we’re on today. I didn’t even realize that wasn’t a widespread thing until I heard aros complain about soulmate tropes! Stuff like that happens on a fairly regular basis, so I think my aromanticism definitely affects how I write certain settings/tropes, too.

Third, if I do write romance, I feel like I do it in a different way than allo creators. First, I suck at it. Badly. I used to try and write it in the same way that I always heard about it, bold and dramatic and mushy, and my mom (my loyal proofreader when I was a kid), always looked at me awkwardly and was like, ‘No, that’s not how it’s done.’ Since I don’t experience it, I honest to god don’t get why people insist that it’s the best or most important feeling in the world. The way characters in fiction always put their friendships or anything else on hold when that person walks by just … baffles me. I can’t write romance that way. I just can’t.

Instead, I tend to write romance in a much quieter way. If two of my characters are in an established relationship (and it’s always established because I still can’t write ‘coming together’ stories for the life of me), they are casual and comfortable with each other. In any relationship I write, platonic or romantic, I find open communication and trust to be very important. I kind of give all my relationships that same base, and then I add little flavours that I think are unique to that type of relationship. For romance, this is soft love and PDA. PDA is usually quick kisses on the cheek, holding hands, etc. The love is the type of thing where they fondly smile whenever the other does anything, really. I think that more subtle way of writing romance works decently, although I have gotten a lot of people telling me that I often also write friendships as romance, which is weird because I don’t think I do? I add a louder sort of love to friends, generally, and when they do have a quiet moment, it’s usually more serious rather than fond, and I think that’s different. But maybe I do write friendships as romance but I haven’t noticed it? Or maybe it’s amatonormativity making people read it like that?

I don’t know. I have no clue what I’m doing. Save me.

What challenges do you face as an aro-spec artist?

I can only talk about what I face as a fanfic writer, as I don’t really post my original works because I lack the platform for them. (I sometimes post stuff when there are events going on over on larger blogs than lil’ old me, but that doesn’t happen consistently enough to really be talked about.)

As a fanfic writer, well. I’m sure you’ve all heard it before: no one reads gen fic. Although I tend to have a pretty high kudos-to-hits ratio, that means nothing if you get less than 100 hits. In my case especially, as I tend to write for niche audiences, usually picking unpopular characters or friendships to write for, or writing specifically about autistic experiences. Not having the added hook of romance really hurts me in my exposure. Almost always when a story becomes kind of popular (as in it has 40+ kudos), it’s because it’s been recommended by someone with a bigger platform than me, or when I write about popular characters.

(There’s other reasons my stories don’t get popular, of course, like not knowing how to self-advertise and the fact that I have the charisma of a rock, but that’s not what this section is about.)

How do you connect to the aro-spec and a-spec communities as an aro-spec person?

Not at all, honestly? I said before I talked to some aromantic people, but that was mostly by anon asks, and the few I did actually message, well, I remade my blog so now I don’t have any contact. On top of that, the aro community (to my knowledge) doesn’t really have a central tag? Like, the autistic community has the #actuallyautistic tag, but I think the closest we have is #safeforaro, which (to my understanding) is more a reaction to discourse than anything else.

Aside from that, the aro community is really small, and mostly focused on making younger aros accept their identity. While that’s great, as someone who already has accepted their identity, it distances me a bit. And the few blogs that don’t focus on this, while absolutely lovely, are always so … sad? A large part of the aro community is depressed and bitter, worrying about losing their friends, worrying about their future. While that’s absolutely valid, I’d already moved on from that when I was younger, when I accepted the fact that because I was autistic, I would have trouble connecting and staying connected to people. It’s disheartening, sure, but I’ve accepted it and moved past it, so seeing the aro community still hung up on it saddens me. I can’t really give advice because, well, their worries are legit and they just need to come to terms with it at their own pace, and I’m bad at comforting without advice, so I’m just kind of stuck listening to it. It drains me a lot, so I distance myself.

I feel like we, as a community, can do a lot to dismantle amatonormativity, but since we still haven’t figured out what it is exactly, and we’re still grieving over the way we’re impacted by it, we’re not getting anything done. I’m bad at connecting with communities when I don’t know how to contribute to them, so I don’t really interact with it. And outside of the internet, there seems to be no aro community at all (or at least I haven’t found it), so I feel very isolated.

Wow that got real dark real fast. Sorry for being such a downer, but I did feel like it needed to be said.

How do you connect to your creative community as an aro-spec person?

…speaking of being a downer.

It’s well known that fandom isn’t a safe space for aro/ace people. It’s a very ship-centric place, to the point where it’s almost impossible to escape romance, and I hate it. I’m here because I like expanding on stories and characters and playing with established narratives, not because I want to see two people kiss. Because my wants and needs are different from most of the fandom, I tend to be isolated and unpopular, and while that’s mostly fine with me (it creates less drama), I really wish I had people to talk to.

As for being an original writer, I’ve already mentioned that I don’t post my work because I don’t have a platform. Now, granted, it’s rather difficult to create a platform as a writer, especially if you’re not that social and don’t know how to market yourself (hi), but I feel like being aro also helps to distance me. Romance is a rather large hook to any work of fiction in the publishing industry, to the point where some publishers will demand a romance subplot in your book. I write obscure things that I myself enjoy, and as a result, my stories aren’t very marketable. I doubt that I’ll ever get published, simply because I’m, well, weird.

I totally understand the publisher’s perspective of not wanting to pick up books or stories that simply won’t sell (and experience has told me that my stories will indeed never be popular), but it still saddens me. I could probably learn to write more popular stories, but I don’t want to do that, since writing for me really is about expressing myself (though I’m not judging anyone who writes popular stuff for money; we all need to eat).

So, to summarize, I’m not marketable or interesting either as a writer or as a fandom member to either communities, which isolates me, which sucks, but it also enables me to really stop giving a shit. Sounds weird, but once I figured out that I’m not gonna get published or be popular, I really felt free to do whatever I want. Because ultimately the only person that really likes my writing is me, I’ll make myself happy first and foremost. While this sounds kind of depressing, it’s actually motivated me to keep writing, and it stops me from getting too depressed or anxious when a story I post only gets a dozen or so kudos/notes, so I think that’s a positive thing. Because ultimately, to me, the most important thing about writing isn’t the community, it’s having fun and creating something new, and as long as I can do that, I’ll be happy.

How can the aro-spec community best help you as a creative?

The obvious answer is read my stories and reblog/leave kudos/comment, which is also true for every other writer, but I feel like that’s ignoring the underlying reason romance-free stuff just doesn’t get popular. The reason my stuff is unpopular isn’t because of the aro community, but because of the alloro people being more numerous and not caring.

Instead, I’m going to say that I would be helped if the aro community started focusing more on what it means to be aro, expanding on the meaning of amatonormativity, and spreading the word to allo communities. Amatonormativity is something that hurts all of us, especially fellow LGBT+ members, and I think that once more people start to realize what it is and how it’s harmful, they would try to examine their own biases and help us dismantle it. That way, gen stories will get more popular in fandom spaces, and stories without a focus on romance will have more chance of thriving in the publishing industry. It’s not a foolproof plan, and maybe I’m just too optimistic about my fellow humans, but it’s worth a shot and better than doing nothing.

Can you share with us something about your current project?

I have several current projects! My ADHD always makes me bounce dozens of ideas around in my head and start even more works, but very few of them ever get finished. However! One story I’m fairly sure I’m getting finished is an original piece about a universe in which everyone needs to buy a heart on a necklace in order to feel love. It’s an old story that I’m reworking to contain less aromisia, since I was still rather ignorant when I wrote the first draft, but I think it has a lot of potential to examine love in its entirety, and I’m super excited about it!

The only thing I don’t like about it is the incredibly melodramatic writing style I’m using; unfortunately, my writing always seems to be needlessly dramatic and I cry every time I read it because I just hate it so much. Since this is a fairly serious piece, it’s even worse than usual. I’m toying with the idea of starting a humorous and light piece to offset it, probably about an aromantic witch and her familiar who con people into buying fake love potions.

And of course, my Coffeeshop Project is always ongoing!

The Coffeeshop Project is a project I started when I badly needed to de-stress. It’s been my go-to comfort project ever since, meaning that I try not to put pressure on myself over the quality of it, and that I don’t do any research specifically for the project (although I often incorporate research that I did for other things).

The Coffeeshop Project is a series of stand-alone short stories in the same universe centred around the shenanigans of the crew of Café Nowhere, a café with a supernatural clientele. (I’m afraid I have a soft spot for supernatural shops.)

The story I wrote for the aro prompt on this blog was actually part of it! It was set a couple of years prior to the current ‘canon’, and introduces Ethan, who is now 22 and is infamous for taking down an intergalactic smuggling ring. There are more crew members, but listing them would take forever, so if anyone is interested, feel free to just ask!

Have you any forthcoming works we should look forward to? 

I have several ideas about forthcoming works that may or may not get written, including the above, a role reversal AU for Fullmetal Alchemist (for which I have to research a lot about blindness, and since I hate research but don’t want to compromise on an accurate betrayal of disability, that might never get finished – I’m sorry y’all, but I’m doing this for free and only have so many spoons), an in-progress work for Batman about magic that I just cannot seem to pace correctly, a fic with a respectful portrayal of an autistic Black Manta as a passive-aggressive middle finger to DC comics, an analysis of FMA and/or Harry Potter from an aromantic perspective, etc. But with my ADHD and my gazillion ideas it’s always a 50/50 chance that something actually gets finished, so I don’t like to promise anything.

[lexyeevee]

Correcting the record

Some people are saying some things again, and I don't really have a masterpost of why those things are off the mark, so here is one. I guess I'll update this if anything else spicy crosses my radar, for ease of linking.

(That doesn't mean to send me new things; I don't need to be kept constantly up to date on the latest hot takes from Breitbart Jr.)

I know this is long, which means most people won't bother to read it. But hey, that means it must be true, right? That's how it works for callouts, so surely it works the same way here.

Foreword

KiwiFarms is a forum that grew out of a wiki dedicated to the sustained stalking and harassment of an autistic trans woman. Their biggest subforum is called "lolcows", referring to the idea that certain people are valued only for the forum's ability to squeeze mockery out of them.

This is the source of much of the scandalous "truth" about glip and myself.

They don't lie, not exactly. Instead, they find a single tweet or sentence somewhere, then concoct a story that fills in the details. That way, they can present the original source as "proof". A casual reader will notice that the source matches their story, and take the story as true. The source doesn't prove the story, but that's a subtle distinction.

Sometimes they'll even claim that the source says something slightly different than it actually does, and still most people won't notice. Maybe the order of sentences gets reversed. Maybe "this will happen" is spun into "I want this to happen". Close enough.

Once they have one reason we're horrible, they can take for granted that we're horrible, which justifies interpreting the next snippet as proving that we're horrible. The more horrible we appear to be, the easier it is to justify digging ever deeper.

They collect mountains of these stories, which makes it very difficult to push back. No matter how many individual tales we respond to, there will always be more. It's actually a well-known poor debating tactic, but it works.

A huge post about how awful someone is looks like a documentary, even though it's carefully constructed to only "report" on things to make the subject look bad. Things we've disproven or apologized for years ago still show up in callouts. Just a few days ago, I saw someone link a post that didn't even exist any more; it had been replaced by an apology. Neither the person who linked it nor the person they linked it to seemed to notice this.

Juicy gossip spreads very quickly, both among people who love gossip and people who genuinely want to do the right thing. Retractions and corrections are boring; nobody spreads those. Besides, if you spread something awful about someone, and it turns out to be false, what does that say about you? Once you've spread gossip, if you want to save face, it's in your best interest to insist the gossip is true — whether it really is or not.

Other people are discouraged from pushing back on our behalf, since that risks attracting the same scrutiny. Besides, if you try to say someone isn't abusive, you may get called an abuse apologist. That makes no sense at all, but it doesn't matter.

And there's no downside to doing any of this. If something false spreads to thousands of people, who's accountable for it? Nobody. You can outright make things up about people and nothing bad will happen to you — but if it's just a misunderstanding, all the better.

Keep all that in mind as you read this.

glip did not refer to autistic people as emotionless robots

Let's start out with a particularly great example of callouts in action. The log screenshot used as "proof" that glip said this about autistic people actually proves it false, because the conversation was:

pk: know what also pk: the section on sociopaths was creepy pk: they’re like emotionless robots

glip/eevee didn't really self-diagnose as autistic

It's weird to be accused both of thinking we're autistic and of insulting autistic people.

But no, not really? We've both observed that lists of symptoms are conspicuously familiar. We don't make any effort to call ourselves autistic, we don't claim to know anything about autism, and our lives haven't changed as a result of this observation.

I don't really get why people care about self-diagnosis anyway. I "self-diagnosed" with ADD before going to a psych who then regular-diagnosed me with ADD and gave me magic brain pills for it.

eevee did not put glip's boobs online

Another good example, though I don't think this ever spread beyond the confines of the forum thread.

I have a public filedump, full of files. One file is called "bewbs.jpg", and unsurprisingly is a photo of some boobs. Someone assumed the photo was of glip's boobs, and so it became truth.

Surprise! It's not. I don't know who's in the photo. It's some image I found online, probably over a decade ago. I don't have the slightest idea why I uploaded it. You can even check out the metadata and see that it was saved from Photoshop 4, which I've never used. Also, Photoshop 5 came out in 1998, when glip was 8, so... prooobably not them.

our cats poop a lot i guess

No, seriously, I've heard this complaint. Our cats do poop a lot, but I'm not really sure what it's supposed to say about us, or what we're supposed to do about it. Corks?

glip is not abusive

The "abusive" label is usually ascribed to a massive callout post by PengoSolvent, but he never said that. He did say "potentially abusive", but left the conclusion up in the air. The difference seems significant.

Oh, and he later recanted, and he's now on good terms with glip. Turns out it was all a series of misunderstandings.

Also, I've been dating glip for nearly a decade now and I'm pretty happy with them, but for some reason, nobody seems to think that counts for anything.

fieldoftheother's level 100 post is bad

Previously.

glip is not trying to get kids to see their porn

I've seen a couple people cite this line from the Discord, claiming it means glip wants 13-year-olds to read forflor:

my legacy will be 13 year olds secretly reading forbiddenflora and realizing they're gay and/or trans

But this was said because people were talking about having themselves been young teenagers who secretly looked at porn and realized they were gay or trans. It was a tongue-in-cheek observation: teenagers will look at porn one way or another, and if they read forflor, its themes may very well jostle some realizations.

I've also been told that glip must want everyone who reads the main comic to also read the porn, because they put character development in the porn. But if that were the case, why would they have the sites separate in the first place? How would anyone even know there's porn, just from reading the main site? The only place that even comes close to linking is in a heavily-disclaimered blurb at the bottom of a few character profiles, on the volunteer-edited wiki, which neither of us even knew about until someone told me in response to this very post. This makes no sense as a master scheme.

The truth is much more mundane: glip feels attached to their characters and likes to make comics with character development.

It is true that glip doesn't care if teenagers seek out their porn. I don't care either? We're not your parents, and we have no way of stopping determined horny teens anyway. It's tagged and separated so people who don't want to see it don't have to, but if you're trying to seek out porn then that's your own business. Just, uh, please don't try to talk to us about it, that's super weird.

glip drew a porn comic with an underage character, but...

This is true. They later took the comic down, and they've since talked about how it was a way of wrangling with their own experiences with CSA.

glip is not transphobic

I think people say glip is transphobic because their comic has a girl with a dick who doesn't hate her dick?

Well, er, newsflash: not all trans girls hate their dicks? It seems like this complaint is implying glip should only depict stereotypical self-hating trans characters, and I don't really understand how that's any kind of improvement.

Ironically, I've seen this claimed multiple times by people who refer to glip with the wrong pronoun.

glip's irc does not prey on children

Someone we knew as spaggledagger claimed that people hit strongly on her on our IRC, despite knowing that she was only 13 and had never had any kind of sexual interaction. She also claimed to have gone to the police and asked them some details.

I've been over this before, but the short version is:

She never mentioned she was 13 until the day she left the IRC for good (because of alleged ageism on our part — she'd invited a friend and the two of them were being incredibly disruptive). On the contrary, she made frequent reference to drinking and having had sex, so by all accounts she presented herself as an adult.

The thing she says the police told her is technobabble. It makes no sense at all.

We cannot find any shred of evidence of the conversations she says she had. However, we did find one thing she claimed was said to her — it was in public, and wasn't directed at her at all.

She mentioned having lied to get an ex-boyfriend in trouble. We also got a message from the moderator of another small community who'd interacted with her before, warning us that she tried to get back at them for banning her by claiming elsewhere that she'd been abused.

She claimed to be paranoid because we mentioned living near her, but she told us where she lived, after someone else in the channel mentioned living in the same area. We've never lived anywhere near either of them.

So this was someone with (by her own admission!) a history of lying to screw over older people, who never told us her age, who supposedly got incomprehensible advice from police, and whose few concrete details were completely wrong.

This particular claim appears to be a total fabrication. To get back at us for not wanting her friend around, I guess?

eevee does not support legalizing child porn

I once read an article that argued for it, and I said "I'm not sure I disagree" — referring to the argument, which was that outlawing a photo of one particular kind of crime was inconsistent. I'm bothered by inconsistency, but obviously it wasn't right to just legalize child porn, therefore the argument must be wrong. So I thought about it out loud.

That's why I also asked someone why a photo of a particular type of crime should be illegal. It wasn't rhetorical; I genuinely wanted to know what the other person thought about the inconsistency.

I wasn't especially clear about this at the time, and it didn't occur to me that my lazy phrasing could be taken as active support for abolishing the law. It was also pretty insensitive to treat a serious topic like debate club — especially one that almost certainly had impacted some of my audience. I know I upset a couple people, and I'm sorry for that.

The tweets have since been dug up and transformed via a game of telephone to "supports legalizing child porn", "has talked extensively about legalizing child porn", and straight up "is a pedophile". Sorry, no. I just like nitpicking, and I made a very poor choice of thing to nitpick.

I've also tweeted about this before.

eevee is not trying to help kids to look at porn

In a FurAffinity journal from 2009, I played armchair lawyer over FA's handling of minors and their access to porn. FA had (and, I assume, still has?) a policy that if an admin finds out a user is underage, their account will be prevented from seeing porn — "agelocked" — until they turn 18. This was usually said to be for legal reasons. I was saying there weren't any legal reasons.

The claim is thus that I wanted teenagers to look at porn for some kind of nefarious reasons. I don't know what those reasons could be? I didn't even draw porn at the time, so it's not like I was trying to lure anybody in or whatever. My actual motives were much more mundane:

I like nitpicking. See above.

I'd seen a few cases where people had done some very invasive snooping to find someone's age. I thought that kind of near-stalking — especially targeted at someone already suspected to be underage — was pretty creepy, and I saw the policy as encouraging it.

glip had been drawing porn since they were 16, mostly in the form of commissions, and at one point had been agelocked. They were 19 when I made the post, so it was still relatively fresh in my mind, and I was annoyed that the policy had landed squarely on glip's main source of income.

(That said, FA is a rickety thing, and I don't think they'd ever tried to agelock a porn artist before. I believe the result was that glip could still post porn, but then not see their own work. I don't know if that was ever fixed.)

eevee did not let her cat die rather than give him medicine

I heard this one second-hand so I don't know exactly what's being said, but regardless I am fucking livid about it. It boils down to a sentence from my old tumblr:

given that atenolol’s most common side effect is lethargy and styx already spends most of his time asleep i don’t think i’m going to do this

My cat, Styx, started rapidly losing weight around the beginning of April. I spent the next month and several thousand dollars being shuttled between vets, trying to find a cause. At one point I was sent to a cardiologist, who — shockingly — diagnosed him with a heart condition.

He was prescribed atenolol, a beta blocker and the usual treatment for the heart condition. I was hesitant to give it to him, since also on the table was FIP — a disease with no cure and a life expectancy measured in days. Beta blockers can cause lethargy, Styx was already sleeping most of the time, and I didn't want to cost him his last few waking hours for no reason.

I decided to wait a few days for the vet's formal diagnosis. What I got was the post linked above, saying the most likely cause was FIP; the heart condition wasn't even on the list. So, yes, I decided against the vet's recommendation, and did not give him the medication for the condition he probably didn't have that wouldn't have affected him until years later anyway. There was never any indication that the atenolol would've helped his FIP in any way; I interpreted the vet's advice as being just in case he had the heart condition instead.

A week later, the vet finally started talking about looking into experimental treatments for FIP — a full ten days after the first mention of a disease that can kill cats in as much time.

Four days after that, we buried the cat I loved. He'd just been sitting in pools of his own diarrhea — the same thing that had ultimately led a vet to recommend we put down our elderly cat.

That month was by far the worst thing I've ever been through. I did everything I could think to do, burned through cash, spent every waking moment with him, and it wasn't enough. I still can't reread his eulogy; it's the only thing that makes me cry.

Extremely cool that some jerks who are desperate for a reason to hate me are now trying to use my dead cat against me.

eevee/glip are not... usually... mean online

It's not uncommon to see people calling us super mean based on a tweet thread that they've carefully cropped to remove the part where the other person was being an asshole. Maybe check for that first.

We get enough assholery that we have fairly low bars for who qualifies as an asshole, too, so there might be false positives. If that's you, ah, sorry. We try our best!

But also, it's common for someone to be a dick while feigning politeness, and we tend to have little patience for that, whereas other people have seemingly infinite patience for it. If you see us snapping for seemingly no reason, we probably got a very different read off of someone.

Final thoughts

I'm sure there's more, but hopefully this is enough that you're starting to suspect a pattern. Most of what we're called out for is wildly misinterpreted or misreported just enough to be damning.

These are people who misgender us and use glip's old name, then call us transphobic in the same breath. They follow our every public move with bated breath, while being largely anonymous or sockpuppets themselves. They show up as one of the top referrers every time I publish a game on itch. They've dug up a comment I made on a friend's LiveJournal from 2004 and implied nefarious explanations. They archived the entire "styx" tag on my old Tumblr, meaning they read everything I went through and their only takeaway was some new "dirt". They've taken the worst things that have ever happened to both glip and I, and used them as blunt weapons to say we're awful. They put this crap in the Tumblr floraverse tag, inflicting it on people who just want to share fanart. They hide in our IRC and our Discord, waiting for new logs they can post and reinterpret. Only completely locked-down spaces are safe from their obsessive eyes, and they openly speculate about what happens behind closed doors as well.

Does this sound like a reasonable way to behave? If a single person acted this way towards someone else, anyone would be rightly horrified — this is straight up stalking. But people reblog their callouts and never question their tactics. I guess stalking is okay if we "deserve" it, and we deserve it because we're awful, and you know we're awful thanks to the stalking.

Here's my question: if they know all their existing stuff is true, why do they keep looking? Ostensibly they believe that we're both proven to be complete monsters, so what else are they hoping to find? Do you think I accidentally tweeted a confession to a murder? Does my old MySpace contain the plans for an orbital superlaser?

Or look at it this way: who have we hurt in the however many years this has been going on? Where are all the actual victims of our cruelty? Who has been protected by this muckraking, and from what?

They have no interest in what's true, only in what's titillating. It's right there in the name of the forum: "lolcows", not "investigative journalism".

And, hey. If you want to hate us for actual reasons, please go ahead. I'm thoughtless and insensitive at times, and I'm bad at maintaining friendships. glip is short with anyone who appears to be acting in bad faith. We both fuck up sometimes. If any of that has put you off, fine. If you think we're insufficiently horrified by the idea of a 17-year-old somewhere sneakily looking at a drawing of a boob, sure, hate us for that too.

But don't make stuff up to fulfill your power fantasy of defending the world from a cartoon villain. Yeah, you — I'm sure a bunch of Kiwi folks are eating up every word of this post simply because I've written it. Hot tip: the first thing to enter your brain is not automatically the truth. How cruel are you being if you're wrong?