#unfortunately that's why i've been pretty inactive on tumblr for the past few weeks as well... | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lilshotgun · 4 years ago

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So here's why i've been inactive for the past couple months on tumblr:

As many of you know, I've been a fairly avid content creator for the warrior nun fandom creating a ton of content for free. I joined a Warrior Nun discord server named Future Warrior Nuns (which is a ridiculous name considering in the show Ava says there will be no more warrior nuns but that's besides the point) and the treatment I received there was amazing. At the beginning. I spoke up about racism and injustices within the community because you cannot escape it anywhere unfortunately and I believed I'd found a community that would protect me and be there for me if i was ever faced with racism or hate.

For clarity, anyone in blue is a moderator. As you go on to read this their usernames and profile images might change so I’ll clarify who is who. I’ll only be using the names I’ve been presented with and only the ones that are most relevant to the situation.

Fiesta (white American cis woman) aka Doesn't Kelly, Witch Rhyme

Taz (white Australian cis woman)

Milan (a very sheltered American transmasculine poc whos uncomfortable talking about racism because they've never had to deal with it) aka Who The Fuck Is Kelly

Rory (white Australian cis woman) aka Stronger Kelly

But after a while, things slowly started to change. It was subtle and if you hadn't been there from the beginning, you wouldn't have noticed. It started with the moderators spending less time in the server because they had made many of their own servers and spent far more time over there. Which is understandable when you’re a group of friends that all have a common purpose. But the lack of leadership was palpable. I had to sometimes direct fellow server members to proper channels or do a few other things that were supposed to be things that the moderators were supposed to take care of and their lack of care for the server was becoming more relevant. If you were in their little group of friends or kissed their ass then they wouldn't target you unnecessarily.

Exactly three weeks later, (and only one week after my birthday in which everyone was super sweet and nice to me) the love and friendship they claimed to have for me vanished completely. For context, people in positions of power, especially in a server, should be people you can come to if you ever have an issue with anything or anyone. They should also be people that can come to terms with admitting their behavior was incorrect when being told so. So here is what happened:

I have always been open about being a transmasculine person of color on all my platforms, and if you know me on any platform you know that. The behavior shown here between me and the moderators was absolutely appalling to me. They pushed my voice aside and only acknowledged Narcissa, a cis white woman, who was agreeing and saying the same things i had because i had asked her in private to help me out because i felt it was unfair that two server moderators were coming at me so aggressively.

As you can see from the screenshots, they claimed that I attacked Fiesta when i was simply pointing out that her behavior was hypocritical and unfair especially because she is in a position of power and that's something people of power should be aware of.

I was the only one brave enough to say what everyone was thinking. And that's something I have always taken pride in. Speaking up for others when they are too scared to do so themselves. And that was shown through multiple people coming into my dms to tell me they either felt the same way I did or they felt the way I was treated in the conversation above was unfair. This next screenshot is from a private message from a former manager.

Narcissa (white cis woman) received a few apologies from the server managers privately, yet my dms stayed vacant. At this point, they made a “public apology” towards everyone in the server which I forgot to screenshot, and not a single server manager reached out to me in private. But they did share these in the server for everyone to see:

They then opened an anonymous feedback form for us to share if we had any issues privately, which of course, I did, and so I filled it out saying “wheres my fucking apology ~king” so they would know exactly who the response was coming from. I was angry and hurt that they treated me the way they did. I regretted wording it like that almost instantly after sending it. But the deed was done and it was unchangeable. And not too long after, this was posted publicly in the server feedback channel so that everyone in the server could see:

Whether I shared that it was from me or not, she violated the server moderators unanimous statement saying that everything posted in the feedback form would stay anonymous and made my response public using the excuse that me sharing my name made it okay for her to show it to everyone. I was also being informed by other people I’m friends with that the forms that were being submitted were not staying anonymous and that they were being shared from other moderators privately in other peoples' dms.

I stuck around in the server because the people that I had formed friendships with were there and they were special to me and I wanted to be able to talk to them still in spite of everything that had happened to me up until this point. I was much more subdued at this point, I was posting less art and as you noticed I practically disappeared from twitter as well.

My love for Warrior Nun was decreasing rapidly because the environment had become so toxic and unwelcoming that I felt scared to say much in the server in fear of being banned after seeing one of my trans poc friends banned for saying hi to another member. They had been looking for a reason to ban him for being on my side instead of theirs and apparently found the “perfect” excuse. They deleted his messages and claimed in their private admin channel that he had harassed someone in the server without screenshotting the false evidence first. How do I know this? Because I had a person on the team that valued me as a person instead of as a content creator and what I could give to the server.

I proceeded to curate the server for what fit me best, considering the ridiculous number of channels they created that had nothing to do with the show at this point. And there was an option for members to do that so I used the tools they had provided with and opted out of channels I no longer wanted to see. I consolidated it down to 35 out of 66 channels because some of them had no opt out option. And still, it was way more channels than I'd prefer to be in. I narrowed it down to only ships I actually cared about instead of having a bunch of channels I was never gonna read or say things in. And that's when the manager that cared about us provided me with these telling screenshots.

Why put me in “jail” over removing some roles? It may not have been explicit, but the internalized racism of putting a person of color in “jail” for curating what they wanted from a server is frankly off putting to say the least. "Implicit racism includes unconscious biases, expectations, or tendencies that exist within an individual, regardless of ill-will or any self-aware prejudices."

And what does carl bot do exactly? It logs EVERYTHING. But only if that feature is enabled. And clearly, in Future Warrior Nuns, it is.

They didn’t care about me and didn’t care that I was a consistent content creator. For lack of better words, I was one of the biggest reasons the actual part of the server that was dedicated to the show was constantly active and once I became quiet, along with a few other content creators I talked with, the activity decreased immensely. I said things here and there but that was about it. Until I was looking through their emotes. I noticed that they had trans, gay, demi, bi, aro, and ace heart emotes but the lesbian one wasnt there. Which was honestly surprising considering how much of the fandom identifies as lesbian. So I asked for it to be added and after it was, so many people were super happy because of it.

One day later i asked for more Mary emotes because they hadn’t completely brushed me off after requesting for the lesbian pride one. I noticed that Ava, the white character, had 72 animated and still emotes at the time while Mary, the black character, only had 18. And only 4 out of those were positive emotes. Here's that conversation:

I offered up my services to create Mary emotes for them considering I was an artist and content creator and it would be no issue for me at all to contribute but they declined, saying they were working on some themselves and that they would eventually add them to the server. The ones that they had created all looked terrible. They didn't know how to color correct her skin so that it wouldn't look ashy because of the filters used in the show and instead of asking for help from me, an artist of color, they simply did their own thing. And from 18 emotes, it went up to a dazzling 24.

Needless to say, the racism they claimed not to have was pretty evident at this point. It was shockingly clear that they didn’t care as much about the characters of color than they did for the white and white passing ones. After this entire debacle I didn't even bother trying to ask for more emotes for Lilith considering how warmly I was welcomed with asking for more Mary emotes.

A little less than two months after the initial incident, I still hadn’t been contacted by anyone on the admin team about absolutely anything in private. It wasn’t until people asked Fiesta if she had reached out to me or even bothered with an apology before she sent me this:

The “apology” was worthless. Too much time had passed since I was publicly humiliated and portrayed as the evil transmasculine person of color to them, and only a select few people interacted with me. I felt completely shut out because of how the admin team handled a difference of opinion. Instead of correcting themselves and admitting they were wrong, they doubled down on the intimidation and bullying by changing their rules so that they could find excuses to ban or punish anyone they felt was not on their side.

At this point, my grades were heavily declining. I was already struggling with keeping up with everything on my own due to covid and my mental disabilities. Being a victim of this racist behavior made everything worse. I couldn’t get out of bed, I was barely eating a meal a day because I had no motivation to work so I had little to no money to buy myself food. I was starving most days. And I didn’t ask my mom for help because I felt everything was my fault and that I really was in the wrong and shouldn't have said anything even though looking back at it I wasn't wrong for what I said. I had also been informed that my dad died because of covid and because of all of this stress and depression I had officially failed my classes.

This is really difficult for me to say because I’m a very private person and I hate asking for help or sharing anything about my private life, but for you to understand everything that was happening to me at the time, this is stuff you unfortunately need to know.

There’s many more things that I could say about this server but this thread is already long enough as it is and it was hard enough to write this all down. But behind closed doors, the admin team had some of the nastiest attitudes and behaviors you could’ve seen. Had they realized we had someone on their team that actually valued us and others as people, they probably would have kept their blatant ignorance and dislike towards server members hidden better. But white people like oppressing others when they know they can get away with it and this is just another sad unfortunate example that cost me and my fellow friends of color some heavy emotional and psychological damage. They did wrong and refused to acknowledge it and instead tried to find a way to ban us for not having the hivemind that they so desperately want to control everyone with. If you want to see for yourself, feel free to find a link to a discord server named Future Warrior Nuns. If you look back through their channels, you’ll find most of these conversations either gone or have many messages missing. I hope my story will help understand why I’ve been gone from tumblr for so long and i hope something like this never happens to you.

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