in-a-mountain-pool - Tumblr blog

in-a-mountain-pool · 9 days

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One of the reasons I stopped writing. Do better people, high school is over and your childish behaviour sucks. 🤷

You should post the full screenshots, in light of everything that has happened. Not to start drama, but people should know who not to continue having a relationship with on here and block. The community feels so unsafe now that we know anyone you are talking to could be laughing at you on discord or doxxing you on social media. I only come to tumblr for the hotd fandom and it just seems to get worse here every month.

Hello, anon.

I was going to let this lie, truly I was. I was reached out to by the person behind the comments made approximately half an hour after posting, an exchange in which I was gaslighted and levied with implied threats in a style I am very much familiar with from this person. I did, however, state that I would not escalate matters without provocation. Learning about past events, while upsetting, is not a new provocation.

That has changed upon learning that my good friend Ange, @ewanmitchellcrumbs, has been receiving screenshots of specific things these users have been saying in a group chat with originally six members, now five, via burner accounts. Presumably, this is the efforts of one/two members trying to deflect from what Ange has learned about @rafeism's doxxing efforts by suggesting it was another member in the group responsible. And in the last hour, burner accounts have been attempting to share very obviously doctored screenshots attempting to assign mean-spirited comments about other writers in the community to Ange. I believe this is the work of one or both of the original two people I called out in this post, and I strongly suspect that my answering this ask will invite continued instances of this behaviour or even a direct public post incorporating edited screenshots to defame us and divert from accountability. And finally, I was informed via anon that a lawyer would come after me on the basis of lies and misrepresentation, which is a direct threat and something I will not abide.

I said I was going to expose it all if I learned of any fresh fuckery. And alas, I have. This was asked for, and now my hands are tied.

My original post was about Bel, otherwise known as @succnfuccubus or @valeskafics, and Fae, @eyelinerandcigarettes or @barbiedragon, both of whom have been historically prominent figures in the House of the Dragon fanfiction community on Tumblr.

In July of last year, Bel made a commentary post criticising fanfiction writers who did not write anal intercourse with an appropriate amount of attention paid to preparation. This was perceived to be an attack against another fanfiction writer with whom she had noted enmity at the time, @arcielee, who had written a fanfiction work that arguably did or did not meet this criteria. I do not know and cannot claim expertise on this, as @arcielee and I have mutually blocked each other some time ago. What I do know is that several of @arcielee's mutuals observed the possibility that Bel's post was about this fic; the user Cal, @bucknastysbabe or @bnb-atnite, despite having had absolutely no prior connection to Bel, decided to call her out in a public post for it. Ange, with no context other than thinking a mutual of hers (Bel) had been targeted by this user, defended Bel, believing at the time that the post was not aimed at this writer or at any specific writer she was aware of.

This prompted Cal to divert her attention from Bel and turn it toward Ange, claiming that she had been told by "dozens of people" that Ange was quote-unquote toxic and abusive, claiming to have screenshots of this though she never shared proof, and essentially spending a good several hours (the specificity of which I can no longer recall, though it was certainly over the span of 24+ hours) responding to asks that 'came forward' with incredibly inappropriate commentary about Ange's personal life and friendships under the guise of "exposing her", without however actually committing to concrete proof beyond this. I will note that several of these posts discussed the nature of Ange's marriage to her husband and outright stated that Ange was parasocially fixated on Ewan Mitchell, without proof of this. I was a peripheral target of this, though it was clear the issue was with Ange specifically. This seemed to be the efforts of a few isolated users with personal grudges against her, masquerading as anonymous users to create the perception that this toxicity was widespread. I still do not know what prompted this explosive behaviour, and have absolutely no interest in hearing from this user directly to find out.

All in all, this served to bring Bel, Ange and I together, and we created a group chat on Discord on the 26th of July 2023 so that we could discuss the effects of this effort.

Fae was added a day later, as a close friend of Bel's and an ongoing mutual of both mine and Ange. Fae had previously had a conflict with another user named Shruie over her perception that Shruie had borrowed elements of her story writing to create her own works. Shruie received hate over this, which Fae had previously stated to me was not her work. Shruie went to Cal's blog, submitted an ask publicly slandering her and us by association, and thus it was decided that Fae would join the group too.

This group originally revolved around venting over the ongoing effects of Cal's decision to publicly slander us, and the fallout of this. We received a few hate anons and several people unfollowed or distanced themselves from us all because of it, and we were all understandably angry and upset about this. This anger is justified, and I absolutely still maintain that.

However, I and others in the writing community learned that Shruie had received a number of anons with racist connotations, specifically that she had been called a 'paki' and sent rat emojis. I still am not aware of the culprit behind the 'paki' anon, but Bel herself admitted to sending the rat emojis to Shruie:

I would like to note that Fae reacted to this with the react.

I did not call this out. I should have. But given that Bel was capable of this, the idea of addressing her behaviour directly made me nervous, and so I ignored this revelation and tried to cling to the hope that if I concentrated on building closer friendships with these two women, the hate Cal was levying would die down. Eventually, it did.

However, the vitriol these two women would participate in over the course of the months we identified as 'friends' was nothing short of ugly. They did not want to speak about writing-related topics at all; the entirety of their conversation revolved around making inappropriate and at times downright nasty comments about other writers in the community, many of whom I was completely unaware of. A great deal of the time, I would ask who someone was, as I did not know them at all. Other times, I would 'lol' at a comment to further the conversation along, and I will admit to also participating in some unkind venting about people I feel had been unfair to myself or to Ange. I have already reached out to these people specifically and apologised for this behaviour, as it does not reflect who I am as a person.

Further complicating things, Bel shared the private details of a user whom we had all blocked due to her association with Cal, including the sharing of her full legal name and her private social media account. I have screenshotted this and redacted heavily as evidence it exists, but I do not wish for this information to be known public. I have already initiated conversations privately with this person to provide them evidence.

I need to be clear. This is a crime. The ONLY fortunate thing about this matter is that this information was shared specifically to Ange, Fae and I, and Ange nor I are the type of person to have acted upon the sharing of this information. To this user, I am sorry I did not reach out before now. I am sorry that I allowed our previous longstanding enmity to fuel my inaction. To this user, I promise that my knowledge of your real name or social media presence will not be revealed to anyone. I have not shared this information in any way whatsoever, though you are already aware I have spoken to a close friend of yours and asked them to pass the bare facts forward to you.

Even worse, Bel has also shared this person's image and mocked her physical appearance, which again I have a redacted screenshot of:

During the months in which I was friends with Bel and Fae, I was influenced to believe in several untruths. First of all, Ange and I were informed by Bel that a user we shall call E had deliberately chosen to speed-write a fanfiction work about Ettore in order to post it before Ange could finish her Ettore series as a means to 'drown out' her update. This fact had originally made Ange upset enough to complain without naming E directly in my public Discord server, something which spurred E to receive numerous hate anons and spark the conflict that I currently believe eventually spiralled into Cal's decision to publicly slander us. I requested evidence of this from Bel while I was writing a public post about it, so I could attach evidence. I should have known that her inability to provide it was a problem.

I was influenced to believe that another user, @targaryen-dynasty, had created her server as a means to spread inappropriate rumours about me and Ange to her mutuals. I created a falsified Discord account and joined her server to see if this fact was true; when I failed to find evidence of this after a period of time, I exited the server. I have already apologised to Laura for this, and freely admit it was stupid of me to do so. She has not engaged in inappropriate commentary about me on her server and I am happy to publicly share this. We have mended bridges, and moved on. I have also apologised to Sam, @randomdragonfires, for being unkind about her in response to Fae's upset that she had written a Daemon fanfiction work. There are many people I have been unkind about that I earnestly wish I had not been, and I have done my best to apologise for these things.

What I have not done is engage in the following.

I have a number of screenshots wherein these two women admit to sending anonymous hate messages to various users. I have reached out to who I can to provide them unredacted versions, but I will be redacting names for privacy reasons. These are throughout and as I have a photo limit, I cannot provide every single one. Here is an example:

I wish to also share the further evidence I have of racial escalations from these two women against a writer of German heritage. I have reached out to this user to share directly, but will redact the name for privacy reasons.

There are numerous instances of further hate to many, many writers. To those of you who suspect you may have had comments made about you, I invite you to reach out to me in private if you wish to know exactly what has been said. To those of you who I have already informed, I am deeply sorry I allowed myself to be silent.

Over the course of this 'friendship', I began to pull away from the internet. I barely interacted online, even with Ange, who is one of my absolute best friends on here. I did not write at all. I couldn't. I was paranoid, anxious, full of anger and fear. I was ruined. Fandom was ruined. These women ruined me. I watched on from a distance as Ange began to grow distant with Fae and Bel in the group chat, as it had been MONTHS and they were still behaving in the exact same angry, bitter way they had when they first joined the group chat. Ange grew increasingly frustrated because Bel had commenced a pattern of using Ange's content to heavily inspire her own.

It all came to a head when Bel learned that her 'enemies', Jo and Karina, had unblocked E and @arcielee and mended bridges. She decided to do the same, and in doing so apparently informed E that Ange was at fault for any and all conflict that had occurred, and I presume any and all hate anons that had been sent to E. Ange learned this because E reached out to her and sent a barrage of furious messages telling her that Bel had 'told her the truth', which Ange was completely bewildered by. Here is the exchange that effectively ended the group chat:

You will note that Bel's story is different here. I do not have screenshots verifying what Bel specifically told Ange the conversation was about, as it was a private conversation. If Ange wishes to add to this and bring this conversation up specifically, she is invited to do so.

Not long after this, seeing little point, I ejected Fae from the group and decided to leave it for the time being. You see, after learning this last fact as above, I had a very unfortunate suspicion that things were going to turn sour for us. I was right, and boy am I glad I have the evidence to dismantle the lies that have been told about us.

For a time, we existed in limbo. Bel and Fae and Ange and I had a series of lukewarm interactions that were largely brief in nature. I think we all knew that the friendship was about to come to an end.

Then, Ange reblogged an opinion post about her dislike of the bimbo trope being used for Michael Gavey fics, believing many examples of this to be an incorrect and wildly offensive representation of what writers thought was the ‘bimbo’ trope. This prompted Cal to go on another rampage, ugly and public, and one I will not post screenshots of because let’s face it, everyone is aware that it occurred. I do have them, though. I can provide them if anyone insists. She spent further time calling Ange out for being ‘toxic’, eventually having it die down when her posts failed to gain much attention. I did hit out at a few of her mutuals who tried to claim for some reason that Ange was a racist (?) because she expressed worry about Ewan attending a Con, and hoped his fans wouldn’t behave inappropriately to him. I digress. Irrelevant. The result of this all was that Bel, without warning or notice, reached out to Cal to ‘make amends’, despite having gone through all the above. Despite the fact that she was supposedly friends with Ange, who had had her marriage, her life mocked and insulted by this woman. Over what? A perception that Ange was insulting her for her love of the bimbo trope.

Ange told Bel directly that she wasn’t a fan of it but that she didn’t care either way that Bel wrote it if it made her happy, and Bel told her this was fine. Bel choosing to befriend Cal was something Ange and I felt was a massive, massive betrayal. We blocked Bel, and we moved on.

This was one of my final interactions with Fae:

I ended up blocking Fae because I learned she unfollowed me, and I presumed it was because of her friendship with Bel. I knew what Fae was like, didn’t want her to have access to my anon inbox, and so I blocked. For a very brief time, things were somewhat approaching peaceful. Until I started learning that people I barely associated with were being targeted. I learned that @marthawrites had been blocked by Chris and from her, that Bel/Fae/Cal/Chris had made reference to a quote-unquote “frightening degree of hatred” for me and Ange. From her, I also learned that Bel evidently had a burner she used to “camp out” on my blog and make screenshots of everything I said so she could mock it in her group chat. She did the same to Ange. I received a number of strange or unkind anons during this period, and so I can only speculate as to the person involved. I also learned that Bel has a habit of calling me “pedo” or “Pedo Em”, which I can only assume has something to do with the fact that my main character in my fanfiction is 17 when she is married. In A Song of Ice and Fire, this is tame.

I was deeply upset to learn this, and I made a vague-post. Within hours, I received the anon from this post, prompting me to respond in the manner I did. See, me being called a pedo is not a widely-circulated insult from my knowledge. It had to have been Bel to send it. Interestingly enough, she reached out to me not even an hour after my post went up, claiming she’d been sent a screenshot of it. I don’t believe this. Here is the exchange:

What surprised me most was when a formerly incredibly staunch friend of Cal and Chris, and Bel and Fae by association, reached out to me via her a different account before completely deactivating. She grew tired of the relentless hatred circulated in the group chat she previously shared with them, and left. This prompted the entire group to block her, only after Chris called her names and Cal had what was described to me as an “absolutely psychotic” rant at her. She is struggling. She was very close friends with them, and despite having engaged peripherally in the commentary they have circulated against me and Ange for a while, I cannot hold it in my heart to be angry with her for believing lies her friends have told her. She has told me that they would repeatedly mock me and Ange, constantly trash-talked about us for months, make claims of all manner of insane things, and yet never provide a SINGLE instance of proof for this.

I would like to now provide clarification for some of the specific rumours that this former mutual informed me have been spread around about me and Ange.

Ange and I are racists who told Bel off for wanting to write Bollywood HOTD fanfiction. This is categorically untrue: see this screenshot for proof that this was never mentioned.

Ange and I bullied Fae whenever she mentioned getting her treatments for her condition (which, by the way, she has discussed online and is therefore ALSO not doxxing). See the screenshots for proof that Fae has never once mentioned it. There are specific phrases that can be searched for also, but because she has not been specific about her illness online I will not disclose the nature of this.

I have made nasty comments about Chris’s child. See the screenshot below for evidence that it is in fact Bel who called the child “a little fucker”, among other things.

Ange and I have doxxed people. See…… all the above as proof we have not. This was likely a pre-emptive deflection, and I am disappointed but not surprised by it.

That I have sent hate anons to the group, which they claimed was verifiable through their 'hacker' mutual. However, the former mutual of theirs that reached out to me has sought professional feedback about this claim, and it has been concluded that the so-called hacker was "right-clicking on page analytics" in a manner that cannot possibly reveal the identity of the anon-er. Furthermore, I didn't. They have been blocked by me.

I am responsible for @emilykaldwen blocking Cal and others. See this exchange wherein Nat informs me she already had Cal blocked. As for the accusations of a block list, this is categorically untrue. I have no screenshots to share because there ar1e no screenshots at all. Because I did not do this.

I don’t know at this stage what else has been said. If anyone has anything further they’d want clarification for, I’m sure I could find evidence to disprove it.

None of this should have happened. None of this should have happened. How DARE you all. You have spent FAR too long abusing this fandom for your own sick, selfish amusement, and I am done. Nothing that has ever happened here was begun by either myself or Ange, and the fact that even NOW you are all attempting to redirect the blame on us or even on each OTHER is truly, truly shameful.

What was the purpose, ladies? What is possibly going on in your life that being so angry, so hateful filled you with so much joy? Now, you’ve gone past the point of no return. You cannot come back from this. You cannot deflect from this. I’m sure you’re going to try to, maybe even to come up with “evidence” that none of this is true. You’ll lie, you’ll scramble, and you will not apologise, I’m sure. You should. Do you understand how far past the line you have crossed? Do you understand that we are actual, real people? This isn’t a game where you’re making sport out of upsetting a bunch of pixels. Ange is a journalist. I am a teacher. We are adults with full time jobs and full time lives and full time human experiences, and you have done your absolute level best to destroy us. I don’t understand why. I don’t understand how you could do this to another person. I don’t know what to do to make you stop. Do I need to deactivate? What do I need to do? You have terrified me beyond belief. I am so, so afraid of you. Does that make you happy?

I’m just speechless.

And to those of you still—STILL—clinging to supporting these women… You’re either stupid or just as horrible. I really don’t know what your problem is with us. With me. We’ve been holed up doing nothing for months, and that STILL wasn’t enough for you. This isn’t a game. This isn’t something you can win. This is real life, and you are making people suffer. For fucking fanfiction.

I am open to letting bygones be bygones if you genuinely didn’t know any of the above information. However, to the four of you—Bel, Fae, Chris, Cal—I do not wish you kindness. I do not wish you empathy. I do not wish for anything at all but for you to leave us alone, finally. You have burned just about every bridge possible, and the only people at fault are you. If you attempt to ‘reconcile’, your burners will be reported. If you attempt to further slander us, your posts will be reported. We are in the process of figuring out what legal recourse there is, because this has gone beyond ‘mean’ and straight to cyberstalking and criminal offence. I want you to take a good, long think about why on earth you ever thought any of this behaviour was okay. And then, I want you to stop. Stop. No one’s safety is worth your ego on Tumblr.com.

To everyone else. Please don’t get involved. Do not send any anons, any messages, any vitriol to these women. Let them reflect in peace and silence. Or let them bang at the walls of the prison of their own making. Let them lie to themselves as much as they wish.

I don’t know what to do anymore. But if anyone does have a similar story to tell about these women, please reblog this and share it. It'd be nice to know I'm not alone.

#it's all out then huh #hotd fandom drama

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