#yesterday at work one of my coworkers commented on my elsewhere sticker on my water bottle

[mikuplushes]

in 2021, i made a post promoting the band set it off that i have since deleted, praising them for being kindhearted individuals who cared deeply about their fans without an ounce of toxic masculinity involved. so how the hell did they lose the core of their diehard fans in the past 2 years? as someone who would have done anything for them at some point in time, allow me to explain.

midnight era was set it off’s peak as a band. they had come back after their last album flopped a bit and were bigger than ever. they also won a fan power award from rock sound magazine, praising them for having such a dedicated fanbase. they’d already kicked sexual misconduct-ers out of their band and off of tours — they felt safe. and when the pandemic hit, this brought another golden era i was involved in — maxx and cody’s twitch era. i was a moderator for cody and i’m close friends with maxx’s former mods (and am dating one of them). with this, many of the band’s most diehard fans felt rewarded.

the beginning of the end started with maxx. maxx did not pay his emote artist, taking advantage of a minor who was just dazzled to do work for ✨maxx danziger✨ and when the artist eventually realized their error and asked for either payment or to take the emotes down, maxx took the emotes down. my partner also did free videos for maxx for a while, but eventually asked for an extremely low payment per video. when they realized how badly they were underselling themself, they asked for more or for the paid videos to be taken down, and maxx took down all of them.

the asking for payment was happening amidst it coming out that maxx had been cheating on his ex, lindsay, for almost the entirety of their relationship. maxx refused to reach out to anyone about it, including lindsay, and has not said a word to this day. it also came out that he had cheated on his current girlfriend, who has shown forgiveness.

this is when i started losing hope in the band. at first it was kind of funny seeing maxx look miserable in all of the promotional stuff coming out since their album elsewhere was releasing. it was funny thinking about how many of sio’s songs were about being cheated on and kind of infuriating at the same time. i hoped he would feel embarrassed every time he had to perform bad guy. but no. he was smug.

at some point in time maxx tried to start up his discord and twitch again after his previous mods left, but boy oh boy. anyone who tried to call out any of his actions or criticize him at all was banned from his server! i remember all i said was it was kind of pathetic of him to delete the mods’ very sweet goodbye message to the community, and i was banned just for that.

my own personal problems with cody aside (a whole other story), i started feeling truly bad about the band as a whole when they revealed their paid fanclub with exclusive content. things went exactly as it seemed they would — the club was overpriced and updated sparsely. it was, in short, a money-grab.

back in october, they released a few parody merch designs based on horror franchises, including a fnaf design made by an artist that did not give them permission to use the artwork. i don’t know what ended up happening to the artist/the merch design.

not long after the elections in november, cody made a really awful tweet. that’s when it was revealed that he was registered as a republican, and all of the remaining faith i had in the man shattered. sorry, this is the only screenshot i could find of it.

when he received backlash on the post, he doubled down on it. it’s pretty clear at this point he’s socially liberal and fiscally republican but it hurts to see him support such a harmful political view. he deleted his tweets but he hasn’t been back on twitter since. he also eventually took the republican view off of his facebook.

as if to double down on losing fans, sio announced a show with machine gun kelly, known for sexualizing minors, and then recently a tour with all time low, known abusers. the mgk show felt a bit “well, do they know?” at first, but all comments of concern were ignored. the tour with all time low being announced felt like a slap in the face. what happened to the band that cared about their fans more than anything else? what happened to that fan power award? this feels malicious. it feels like they’re alienating fans on purpose. they deleted comments calling atl abusers. i’m sure they took this tour for the money, and it hurts knowing they value that more than the safety of their fans.

in short, we can’t trust these guys anymore. they’re not here for their fans, they’re against them. so much for the fan power award!