#hobby drama
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Horse Isle 3: The Yandere Sim of Horse Games
(or, an extended study in how to hate your own playerbase as much as humanly possible)
(or, or, tldr there's pretty much no updated information on just how ridiculously bad this game is so here's a writeup on how I got banned and all the subsequent information I found during my time playing for documentation's sake)
Part I. The Backstory
My beloved followers will know that a few months ago I began playing Horse Isle 3, a horse-raising MMO surprisingly released in the year of our horse 2019 despite its 1997-era website and Runescape-esque graphics. Some of my play through (mostly just horse pictures) is chronicled in my tag #homophobic scum horse chronicles ¹ if you want to see how drippy my horses were before they killed me.
Now, don't get me wrong. I have endless respect for small teams of game devs that manage to create insanely impressive products-- which HI3's elaborate real-genetics breeding system, its main draw, certainly is. Coding is hard, modeling is hard, moderation is hard. Tip a coin to your local small indie teams that work hard to make incredible art.
However, HI3 is far from an admirable success story about a small dev team that triumphed over its obstacles.
The game is known for a variety of things, chief among them being the staff's rampant homophobia (which has earned it the moniker "the homophobic horse game"), hilariously uncharismatic mods (to the point where one of the main moderators, Connie, is mentioned by NAME in the majority of poor reviews of the game), the dev team's unrepentant rejection of criticism, and racism with a side of downplaying war crimes.
(Screenshots taken from Sitejabber, here)
Now, it's marketed as a game for ages 8+, which, as I've briefly talked about before, is unfortunately a rarity in today's hostile internet climate. I grew up on a variety of typical child friendly MMOs like ye olde Pixie Hollow and PetPet Park, and truly lament that so many of these have been shut down over the years. As such, I have no issue with strict rules or word filters in games, with the caveat that they are effective and genuinely intended to keep people safe. Kids are naive, and can and will say things that they shouldn't (I, for example, got kicked from a Minecraft server when I was 8 because I posted in chat that my mom told me sex wasn't a bad word. things happen). Filters are a very appropriate tool to aid manual moderation of chat features, especially in an environment where mistakes will be made.
However, HI3's, as shown below (words that are forbidden from chat are marked in red), are... questionably selective.
(Screenshot taken by Alice Ruppert, from here)
This appears to be attributed to the fact that along with having horrible moderators, HI3 also seems to have a remarkably horrible developer backend, which is a trend that you'll see pop up quite a lot in this post. Taken straight from the horse's (haha) mouth, the lead developer is the only person who seems to be able or willing to add to the filter list, and for whatever reason only wants to block the "most common inappropriate words"- because saying transgender is more of an issue than nazi and gulag I guess.
(Screenshot taken from Top R.'s Sitejabber review, here)
¹ I'm not sure how far this will reach out of my audience, and since people have already assumed weird stuff about me I thought I should probably clarify-- I'm not calling the game "homophobic scum" ghghg, my play through was focused on making horse versions of characters from a novel called "scum villain", so I took the scum and added horse (I actually have another tag for a different horse breeding game called "scum horse chronicles" so I needed to distinguish them easily but am not very good at tagging). That's it.
Part II. The Game
The game itself is, putting it simply, a mess at best and openly hostile towards newcomers at worst. The game's UI is comparable to your average petsite with 20 thousand things to click on but if you tried to navigate that while also watching the Pilgrim's Progress movie by Scott Cawthorn on 90% of your screen. This is a very good overview of what your experience first logging in will be like, with the added caveat that talking in global chat costs in game currency and that the game doesn't tell you this at ALL until you try to type in chat, and that depending when you log on it's entirely possible that you'll spawn into a completely dead town miles away from anyone who can help you, wilderness survivor-style.
To make things more complicated, information about the game is split between the game itself and the laughably horrible website/forums. Spectacularly enough, the forums, which provide vital game information and rule elaborations, cannot be searched in any way (not via Google or any hard-baked search bar) and are regularly purged by admins to erase evidence of scandals and poor moderation complaints.
Now, something you will find to be generally people's biggest issue with HI3 is their strict no "date-speak" rule, which sounds ok on paper but is worded *just* vaguely enough to give the moderators full jurisdiction over whether or not they think you're breaking the rules. Selective moderation is a major theme in the HI3 chronicle, but it is perhaps most documented with regards to this rule, because what the hell does "boyfriend/girlfriend talk" even mean?? Outside of vagueness, this rule has also been scrutinized extensively by others due to the fact that a pair of previous moderators were openly married with the igns "FrogLips" and "MrsFrogLips". I don't personally think this is super condemning, since kids usually address adults by Mr/Ms etc whether or not they know they're in a relationship, but regardless it's clear that the complete lack of elaboration on what this rule means can be easily manipulated to lodge any number of complaints against people.
(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website rules page, here)
What I will say, however, is that this rule would probably hold more water if the game wasn't literally about breeding horses.
You can pimp out your horses, you can pay others to breed your mares, you can put any number of special (real life currency-bought) amulets on your horses to make them more fertile/have twins/give birth faster. I paid $1000 to castrate Jiang Cheng. The word "stud" (which btw, is another word for a black butch lesbian) is used constantly. Perhaps most shockingly, horse inbreeding is very common and accepted among the community, to the point that it is explicitly mentioned and EXPLAINED in the game guide; the only penalization for it is that your incest product foal will have a lower intelligence stat. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel as though implementing and acknowledging that horses can breed with their own relatives is hmm perhaps more harmful than another player saying the word gay, but what do I know.
(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website game guide page, here (only accessible with an account))
Well, you might ask, after you breed and sell a horse, is there any way to put a brand on it so you know it's from your ranch? That's where the "prefix" system comes in. Prefixes are bolded titles that appear in front of a horses name in lists and in the overworld, and are described in the official game guide as follows:
(Screenshot from the same Horse Isle website game guide page as linked previously)
I think you can toggle them off if you don't want to see them, though I could be wrong. They're basically just 1-5 letter titles you can put on your own horses (nobody else's, importantly). There's no way to search prefixes, and you won't see them in game unless either a horse with a prefix is listed in auctions or you actually encounter someone in-game and see their horse.
In fact, I would learn later that not even the moderators monitor the prefixes, and apparently have no way to mass-delete them. At all.
(Image taken from an anonymous friend)
Now, it's not unusual that a game as complicated as HI3 would inevitably have a pretty taxing server-side code. Millions of multifaceted assets and features is really nothing to scoff at. However, the notion that your lead developer has to perform a manual search in the game's code to delete the equivalent of a stamp from every instance individually is hilarious. I'm not going to pretend to be a game developer, but there HAS to be a better way of coding a feature that intakes user-generated content that should probably be monitored regularly than that, right? Or, at least, there should be a robust filter system that could prevent any issues from occurring before they would need to be fixed so tediously. You might think.
On December 29th, 2022, I discovered how to register a prefix. It's very common to headcanon the characters I was naming my horses after as transgender, and I thought it would be cute to attach "TRANS" to my horses as a nod to this. However, a filter blocked the word. I was disappointed, but not surprised², and then tried to think of another word that was under 5 letters. To my complete and gay surprise, "GAY" was not filtered out, and henceforth, this worked as my prefix.
As you can see on the popup here, there are scant guidelines for what the requirements for a prefix should be. And, in this moment of apparently utter foolishness, I was under the impression that since "GAY" was NOT filtered out despite there clearly being a filter on this function, it was ok to register. Possibly it's not filtered because it's a synonym for "happy", I thought, which is also cute because I do like when horses are happy. Perhaps the staff had learned from their past criticism and had loosened the restrictions slightly because they felt restructuring was appropriate now that gay marriage is legal in the US, I imagined.
(My original post)³
What I could not imagine, however, was that the only reason the word wasn't filtered out, despite being possibly the most common sexuality-related word, was just because the lead dev couldn't be assed to add it to the filter list. And that apparently I was supposed to know this because it would lead to a permanent ban on my second offense with no warning.
² Hence typing "eat shit lol". Admittedly childish of me, but I didn't put a lot of thought into the post because it was just part of a casual silly live blog I was doing to blow off steam. The "if I get banned" tag surprisingly was not referencing "GAY", as I genuinely thought I was in the clear for that for reasons stated above, but because I tried to register "TRANS" and then posted about it online. You don't have to believe me, but I feel the need to defend myself since some people have wildly extrapolated that my actions were malicious instead of just a split second decision I made because I was bored one morning.
³ Despite the pop-up box saying that prefixes cannot be removed, they actually can at any time, given only that the person that owns the prefix unregisters the horse from it. The unregistering mechanic is for whatever reason not told to the player upon registering the prefix, but is mentioned in the official game guide linked above.
Part III. The Ban, The Report
I will preface this section by saying that I played the game normally. I do like being outrageous sometimes for my followers' entertainment, but I really don't like dragging random people into my antics if they aren't interested. Because of this, I really didn't interact with other players unless we were mutuals on some other platform. I rarely used the chat feature except to participate in server-wide events that required team participation, and I typically just explored on my own for fun. In general I think I was a pretty ok player, objectively, which lines up with my user trust score.
You see, the way moderators of HI3 allegedly keep track of rule breaking is through a "user trust score" with points added if you use features in the game, help people, etc, and points deducted if you violate rules. Anecdotally I've heard that around the -10 total points mark is when moderators put you on a sort of list to be monitored for suspension or punishment, which is pretty reasonable.
By the time I was banned, I had a score of +31. The -10 offset was a part of this debacle. The only thing I had ever done in the game which warranted any kind of violation was, as you will soon see, literally just naming about 30 of my own horses "GAY", a sin egregious enough to apparently offset about 200 hours worth of playtime with no issues.
Because of this, I was a little bit confused on multiple levels. For one, I had never even seen a moderator in game, nor been informed of discipline at any time before. On top of that, their permanent ban notification is extremely strange and vague. The text pop up when you try to log in just reads "Account currently banned -1 minutes ().", which is probably just copied straight from the server-side code for things and just wasn't translated into user-side comprehensibility. You'll also notice there is a "()" section in the notification, which I would assume is where they put the reason for bans, except for the fact that mine was completely blank.
The website which allegedly would hold more info just repeated a near identical code: "BANNED! -1min. Reason:".
So, with nothing else to go off of, I messaged support on the jankiest help center submissions I've ever seen on a website with this:
"Insisting" and "total disregard" are very strong words to use for a situation in which I just typed a word into a textbox because the game let me, I'd think, which is why I tried to reason with her. The prefixes mentioned in my message are well-known amongst the userbase and are much older and wider-spread than mine, so I would think that there would be at least some sort of precedent for this. The "geldings and yearlings" reasoning was mostly a joke, but also intended to express that the nature of an acronym (as the majority of prefixes seemed to be) is that it can be interpreted in many ways. Intent was thrown around a lot when I was discussing the issues of prefixes with other users, and it seemed to have been used to excuse previous behavior in situations where mods liked the users in question better.
I also cannot emphasize enough how much they did not warn me about my prefix being removed. When I logged in and saw my horses' names did not include it, I was suspicious that the moderators removed it just because of the history of their behavior. However, I had no hard evidence because they did not inform me at ALL. Not through in-game mail systems, not through server messages, not through the website. Complete radio silence except for the addition of an unexplained "-10" to my user score. I did complain to some people that I thought it was removed, but a combination of things suggested that it wasn't a huge deal, so I mostly let it lie. For one, I had over 100 hours of playtime and was mildly worried that one of my chat messages had been flagged without my knowledge. For another, my profile text had also mysteriously disappeared, probably because of a glitch, so who knows what could happen in this game. Lastly, I went to the prefix registry again just to check and hilariously enough, they didn't actually block "GAY" from the database. Yeah, they apparently individually deleted it from all of my horses, but couldn't be assed to add such an "inappropriate" word to their filter system.
So I just registered it again and publicly told people that I would do it again if the mods didn't actually tell me to stop. I didn't really care about the prefix because to me, the feature was purely cosmetic. All I wanted was transparency from the staff.
Well, anyway, I assume Connie couldn't think of a comeback, so she just closed my report. I was annoyed because quite literally none of my questions were answered and she didn't even refer to anything in specifics. It would take less than 1 second to type the number of the rule I violated, but I guess that was too much work for her.
I tried to give them as many outs as possible to just apologize about poor communication, but they didn't even take the bare minimum. I would also like to mention that this support ticket process is the ONLY way to directly communicate with any staff. There's no ability to upload files or images on this system, and no email listed that you could contact. So essentially, there's no way to give actual evidence for anything you say even if you want to.
Kat, who is known as the slightly-more-reasonable-but-still-pretty-bad mod then picked up the case. Her response actually provided specific information, which made it leagues above Connie's, but still included some very strange elements for sure.
The notion that this game is intended for a worldwide audience is especially funny to me because you would really think if they cared about other countries they wouldn't violate their own rule one by using a slur for Europe's largest ethnic minority, but ok. It's a weird hill to die on considering how USA-dominated the staff's opinions towards rules are (Connie justifies the usage of a slur for Rromani people based off the opinion of a single roommate she had who reclaimed it, Joe defends a store in-game being called "The Gulag" because Americans don't think gulags are that bad (discussed and cited in the conclusions section)). But then again, picking and choosing what parts of other countries' customs you want to respect is very American, which is why I think they should add an extra star rating for its patrioticness on the website.
As I mentioned before, the prefixes I included in my response are definitely older and more commonly-used than mine, so I'm not sure how they wouldn't have seen them before. This comment also ties back to the suggestion that the moderators have very little control or insight over a distinct feature of their game, which is not a great thing to admit so casually.
Kat has a strange habit of immediately contradicting herself in the same paragraph, as can be seen here. "The glitches never happen and bugs were quickly fixed, but games still have bugs". "People that break the rules usually write in to ask what was wrong, but most people usually never ask". At this point I think we can confidently say that they don't even make an attempt to proofread any of their responses, to be honest.
Her 7th paragraph has one of my favorite lines in this exchange. "If we had to notify players every time we made moderator changes to their account we would spend 24 hours a day" is giving huge Yandere Dev "stop emailing me because I have to spend 24 hours a day reading all my emails instead of coding" energy. You really have to wonder why these people that seem to hate moderating so much are moderators.
You can tell by my response, but I do not like the use of "most" and "usually" in this at all. What's your standard isn't others' standards, and this is a topic which needs to be navigated gently, especially when kids are concerned. I never played the previous Horse Isles. I had no experience with the mod team, or with violations, or with anything because no one bothered to take five seconds to send me a message. No, I did not know that you would permaban me for typing a word that's in one of the most popular traditional Christmas songs in a place were only people who interacted with me would be able to see it. Most games would not do this. To take a lackadaisical approach to your literal job of community management because you want people to moderate themselves is contradictory to your claims of keeping children safe.
I will admit I was being a bit cheeky here as a subtle hint that perhaps they should take feedback, but I also would have taken a genuine response. I try my best to be as polite as possible to tech support staff because not everyone is! But they're people too and a simple thank you is worth a lot in customer service, even virtual. But Kat... you're not really giving me anything to work with here! If anyone reading this has feedback for how I could've rephrased things, feel free to comment them honestly. I actually ran drafts of these messages through a few people before sending them to make sure I was as concise and polite as possible, even if support clearly wasn't interested in reciprocating the effort ("following out rules using the the GAY to begin with"...?).
Part IV. The Backlash
I won't go too into depth in this section because it's more personal than documentarian, so feel free to skip to the next section if you want!
After this, the girlies were not happy with me. The one saving grace of HI3 that I've heard pop up over and over again is that the community is great. And a lot of users are! Don't think I'm disparaging people who play the game because I'm not-- it's a really fun experience with the right people. I was in a Discord server with a lot of people who were extremely helpful and kind.
However, within the community, there's also a pervasive culture of silence. According to Alice Ruppert of The Mane Quest, a lot of people will refuse to go public with their complaints about the staff due to fear of retribution, which I feel is unfortunate but understandable. There's a pressure to shut up and eat your food lest you be seen as someone causing controversy for the sake of it and ruining the sanctity of the game, which is an attitude explicitly encouraged by the staff (discussed more in the next section).
I liveblogged my entire correspondence with the support team to a group of other players for the 2 days I talked to them, and did have a lot of acceptance from people who appreciated someone speaking out. After the 2020 Mane Quest article, public information had sort of just gone dark as the community was pushed further into niche seclusion, despite things not improving at all. However, towards the end of my messaging, a group of people that I had never even spoken to or seen online before accused me of a variety of things ranging from "displaying my sexuality to children" (note: all I ever did was name my horses "GAY". I never once talked about my own sexuality in-game, nor did I say the word in chat ever) to "joining the server to cause drama" to "mocking the lgbt community by throwing around the word gay" (actually I'll attach a picture of this one even though I don't want to put people on blast in this section just because its so funny).
I think most of this can be attributed to the game having gained such a notoriety that longtime players, especially those with strong nostalgic feelings, have become completely desensitized to it. And this compounds with the fact that the game is so niche it doesn't yet have a good alternative to turn to to create a toxic cocktail where people tell themselves that they have to be loyal to the staff to play this one of a kind game-- and that anyone who doesn't follow them just doesn't understand. It's really sad, honestly.
Part V. Conclusions
I don't necessarily think the devs of HI3 are legitimately consciously homophobic-- unfortunately LGBT rights are still controversial amongst the largely southern and rural population of horse enthusiasts, and I could understand if they felt it necessary to skim the line towards conservatism to maintain a userbase. It's cowardly and dumb but it's not a sin to do what you have to do to survive in a capitalistic hellscape as cutthroat as the game industry.
However, what I do think the devs are is power-hungry and hypocritical. They have failed at every turn at community management because they're unwilling to admit they make mistakes, instead choosing to issue non-apologies like "[we] regret you guys got so upset and did not realize neither our true intentions nor motivations nor the whole situation [that we said it's ok that a player has a shop called The Gulag because it's 'not direct or violent']". To respond this way to a userbase filled allegedly with young children as a fully grown adult with a wife and kids is laughably out of touch. 'Sorry your fee-fees were hurt by our adult moderator responding to a serious complaint about inappropriate user-generated content with "lol", but actually you just misunderstood us and we're going to ban anyone who brings this up again' is the sort of response you'd see from the teenage mod team of an Undertale amino, not the supposedly responsible head dev of a 'rare oasis of kid friendly content'.
Telling an audience of impressionable kids that the fact that their feelings are hurt is their fault for not intuiting the intentions of 40+ year old adults is unbelievably toxic, and it's no wonder why people are so nostalgia-bound to feverishly shut down criticism about the games. They've been guilt-tripped into believing the mod team can do no wrong and any controversy, even if valid, that springs up is just extrapolated by people that haven't been laboriously groomed to know what the mod team wants to hear.
Countless times throughout my time researching and playing the game, the number one advice I've heard has always been "suck up to the mods or they won't do anything for you". It's crystal clear that the moderators care more about the joy they get from having power over some 200 users who will kiss their ass if they say a buzzword more than they care about you, your child, or the game itself.
It's essentially a model scam Kickstarter's wet dream, a game propelled to release and popularity by its singular defining feature and left to fester on the shelf as the only game in its niche market. Because of this, I believe there's truly no better way to describe HI3, with its messy backend, refusal to improve, narcissistic moderators, broken features, poor visuals, and inefficiency than as the Yandere Simulator of horse games.
#img descriptions in alt text!#lmk if there's any way I can make this more accessible! It's my first time writing something this long on tumblr :)#long post#really long posts#long posts#really long post#essay#hi3#horse isle 3#horse isle#fandom drama#hobby drama#discourse#homophobic scum horse chronicles
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Re: the tags in your answer for nibs. Is there noodlers drama???
the noodlers guy has always been a shithead but for over a decade i have watched pen enthusiasts shrug and say "haha, that wacky libertarian noodlers guy!" and ignore that he made inks like
this isn't a new thing, the whole reason he built up a following was that he sold american-made artisanal inks with properties like being waterproof or making it impossible to forge checks. he had a real fixation on check forgery. there was a lot of libertarian, borderline sovcit shit going on with him from the beginning.
whenever anyone brought it up it was like "let's not talk about politics, agree to disagree, stay on topic everyone" because fountain pen enthusiasts are sometimes artists but also sometimes rich assholes spending thousands of dollars on a pen that looks like garbage. reddit mods on the most popular pen subreddits would immediately lock any attempt at a discussion about this guy's politics. also everyone just shrugged about noodlers absolutely abysmal quality control. fucking mess all around.
anyway someone finally made a post on reddit while the mods were asleep or something to say "hey what's up with the antisemitic ink" and a bunch of people were SHOCKED and HORRIFIED to learn that the noodlers guy was a nightmare. in fairness there was definitely a large swathe of people who never actually bought his shit and had no idea about it because of how quickly discussions would get squashed. it blew up enough that it couldn't really get swept under any rugs and got to the point that different sellers had to make announcements that they wouldn't carry his ink anymore, noodlers guy apologized and insisted he had no idea that bad things were bad and gave money to the adl, etc etc he literally made an ink label complaining about hr department tyranny and the decline of """western civilization""" why would anyone believe this man.
part of the blowup was that the goulet family, owner of goulet pens, said they were very saddened but also he was their friend and they knew him and he definitely didn't have any hate in his heart because he just cares a lot about the free market and freedom of speech and fiscal responsibility. just a profound density of conservative dogwhistles favored by people who know better than to say the quiet part loud. which is why i don't buy from goulet anymore.
these days i do my pen ogling on anderson pens because they dropped noodlers like a hot potato and i like their vibe
#original#hobby drama#anyone who follows me on mastodon can attest that i have been bitching about this guy for a LONG time#and i was stunned when it finally blew up after being tolerated for so long#i was not aware the goulets knew him personally and were definitely aware he was a shithead#and it's a shame because i've bought their replacement nibs before and some really good pens
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Discords, forums and a decade’s worth of allegations: how Nanowrimo started a revolution against it.
I’m just gonna copy paste the Reddit post since. I cannot figure Tumblr out. So I apologise for the weird formatting.
If you’d rather read the Reddit posts:
Trigger warnings: child abuse, assault, predators, racism, fetishes, ableism, terrorism, bombings, and just plain abuse.
This will also include brief mentions of religion.
**Terms used in the Nanowrimo community:**
Nanowrimo: national novel writing month: a writing challenge to write 50k words in November. This is also used to refer to the organisation, a Californian 501c3 that the challenge originates from, with a website and a forum. However the challenge can be done without the organisation. Often called ‘nano’ for short.
Young Writers’ Program: a Nanowrimo run platform aimed at people under 18. A separate site with classrooms and its own separate forum. The forum is for people aged 13-18. Often called ‘YWP’ for short.
Municipal Liasions: community organisers responsible for one region. This could be a city or a country depending on size and population. They help organise local events and mod their regional forums. Municipal Liasions are not paid. There are several hundreds of them. Often called ‘MLs’ for short.
Christian Teens Together: a group on the main Nanowrimo forums, and the largest group on the forums. Despite the name the group is not entirely composed of Christians or teens, however that is where the group originates. The majority of the group are minors. Often called ‘CTT’ for short.
Random Thoughts and Exclamations: the main thread of the YWP forums, basically a general. Often called ‘RTAE’ for short.
Prior to the meltdown, Nanowrimo had around 15 salaried staff. These are collectively referred to as HQ. However, they also have several forum moderators. These receive a $100 check at the end of the year, but are mostly considered volunteers. These mods have no involvement in the main site. However, some staff that worked on the forums were salaried and had main site involvement and so will be considered part of HQ unless stated later on.
**Scam sponsorships.**
In December 2022, a group of Nanowrimo users raised concerns about a pair of vanity publishers that had sponsored the Nanowrimo challenge. (A vanity publisher or vanity press is a publisher where the author pays the costs and surrenders a large portion of the rights to their work.) Nanowrimo had promoted discounts for these publishers, Inkitt and Manuscripts, to winners of its challenge. Staff and mods suspended and muted multiple accounts who raised the initial concerns, but eventually allowed a forum thread discussing concerns to remain. One of the affected users explained the concerns as follows:
> Now that I’ve been unbanned, I will try to keep the last 24 hours of thoughts…concise. Inkitt should NEVER have been accepted as a NaNoWriMo sponsor. They have changed business models every few years, and every business model has involved using up the first pub rights of any author who submits, WHICH IS A BIG DEAL, and promising them sketchy ‘prizes’ or ‘contracts’ in return. People who have given them a try also say that getting their content removed is a nightmare and they had to threaten legal action. These are just the starting points.
> There are blog posts about them from many authors dating back to at least 2016, [including my own](https://wrrrdnrrrdgrrrl.com/2016/05/23/inkitt-scam-spam-no-thank-you-maam/), that are easily discoverable by searching “Inkitt scam.” None of this should ever have happened.
> That said, it happened. And the mods panicked, and I went and wrote a [whole new blog](https://wrrrdnrrrdgrrrl.com/2022/11/30/on-nanowrimo-inkitt-and-being-an-author/ ) (which I will update soon to reflect NaNo’s better handling of things today) to warn people away from Inkitt because I wasn’t allowed to do so on the forums. And because I have some audience and writer friends, that got around, and [Victoria Strauss](https://twitter.com/victoriastrauss/status/1598114401818902529) got involved, and eventually we got here.
The following day, the Executive Director responded to the concerns with this message:
> I appreciate everyone’s thoughts and feedback, and want to start with an apology that our vetting process hasn’t met the high values we place on our community care. It shouldn’t have come to this (like so many of you said), but now that it has, we’re taking it as a learning moment to improve our sponsorship processes and find ways to dig deeper into an evaluation of a company.
> We’ve also ended the sponsorship with Inkitt and Manuscripts.
> Currently, the vetting process involves talking to writers, editors, or those working in the writing/publishing “ecosystem,” and then interviewing the potential companies. We often have a long-term relationship with a company and work with them year-over-year, but as the writing/publishing landscape changes so dramatically every year, we often find out about new companies and reach out to them or they reach out to us. We will do a more thorough evaluation of these processes and policies as part of our 2023 planning process to see what changes we need to make. Our goal will be to ensure our policies are in line with our organizational values, and to make sure the process is more transparent. For example, we’re discussing how we can ensure that a wider range of community and trusted industry voices are heard in this process, and on that note, we have already asked Victoria Strauss from Writer Beware to act as a consultant. We’re really pleased that she’s generously agreed to this, as this is her area of expertise and her ethical standards are admirably high. Also, she’s been passionately committed to analyzing products and services for writers for so long.
> We’ll also be sure to consult the resources you’ve already named, such as the various forum threads where you all have been sharing your experiences with companies.
> Thank you again for raising your concerns. We take your feedback very seriously and center it in our plans to care for the community. I’m not just saying that—this has been a valuable learning moment to help us do a better job of vetting sponsors more thoroughly. Your voices are the most important thing we consider when making decisions—not sponsors, but you. I’m sorry that it hasn’t always felt like that in the past, and hope that we can make sure it does in the future. Like you, we think NaNoWriMo should be a place where writers can come for trusted resources. We’re disappointed in ourselves that we lost that trust, and we hope to regain it. I invite you to send on feedback at any time to [email protected].
While Inkitt and Manuscripts were removed as sponsors, it recently emerged that Inkitt was a major donor for Nanowrimo. Some users were beginning to feel that Nanowrimo was protecting their own interests over the interests of their users, which only got worse when new allegations came out the following year.
**Inaction against predators.**
In May 2023, a group of users raised allegations about a moderator of Christian Teens Together. The [allegations](https://nitter.net/Arumi_kai/status/1722007756058574916#m) were that this moderator was luring minors onto a fetish site they ran. The allegations were sent to the Executive Director and the Director of Programs, but no actions were taken after a month. An FBI report had already been filed, but the fetish site was being scrubbed, suggesting that the staff there had been tipped off after the allegations. The group built a new case and after public pressure, got the moderator removed for violations of the forum Code of Conduct after they started threatening the group and the Nanowrimo organisation offsite. This moderator could be a whole post on their own, and has used sockpuppet accounts to lurk on the forums and has commented on the situation on their tumblr. They are often referred to as Mod X, and will be referred to as such in this essay.
In June, a thread on moderation was opened, and a discussion began about the culture of CTT, where it became clear that Mod X had isolated the group and emotionally abused them. It was also revealed that the CTT had a ‘three strikes and shutdown’ system for a group with over a thousand members. One user explained the problem as follows:
> How the CTT members were given only three strikes for over one thousand people is, frankly, appalling and obscene. I can understand treating them as a group; if you give them all three strikes, that’s over three thousand strikes. But they need more than three. But even with that, hanging that last strike over their head for over six months is unacceptable, and yes, I said it before and I’ll say it again, it is emotionally abusive to tell them that one more strike and they’re getting shut down for over six months. Never knowing who’s going to make the mistake that gets them shut down or when, and worrying about when someone messes up. Worrying that they’re going to be one that messes up and is blamed by the group. Terrified of reporting things because what if that report is the reason their community is shut down?
More users came forward with grooming allegations, but these posts were frozen and hidden. However, the cat was out of bag, at least on the main forums. And in a retrospective thread on the 10th of November, a former YWP user spoke up about a similar situation that had happened the month before.
> They did this to the YWP too. When a message was sent outlining evidence of a predator it was ignored for 3 days (iirc) and initially responded with ‘we reviewed this account and found nothing that broke our rules’ only after it was posted publicly on the forums. They did take the account down, but only hours later (once we had made a major fuss with pretty much everyone who knew the situation calling the mods out) and with no further communication for two days, which sent us into a spiral of panic and teens leaving as they didn’t feel safe on the platform.
The following day, the COO responded to this post with:
> Hi there, I wanted to speak to this directly since it relates to a lot of the youth safety issues people are bringing up, and YWP has different systems. First off, we did indeed look into the participant that was flagged on YWP. [YWP lead] and [Director of Programs] discussed and investigated on Oct. 3; they responded on Oct. 4. Our search into their history and their other social media accounts did not find evidence that they were a predator or someone else than the person they claimed to be. We were wrong to say that nothing crossed the lines set by our codes of conduct, and we should have issued a reminder about those codes. However, no violation crossed the line that would require banning. We kept a close eye on this account following the reports and encouraged participants to follow their guts and keep a wide berth. After the account was suspended due to user flags, we agreed their account should not be reinstated.
> In the long term, we’re bringing in additional moderators in the YWP forums. Role plays occasionally skirt the codes around keeping it PG and partly in response to this situation we’re adding a volunteer mod next week who will just be monitoring role plays and the forum for personal conversations, where the majority of these flags came from.
This response was immediately torn apart by the adults on the thread, while more members of the YWP started speaking out about what they had been dealing with for years.
**The Wild West of the YWP.**
The YWP had two or three mods, which changed across the years due to differing roles. These were members of HQ, and now have all been fired or quit. These were: a Lead Forums Moderator who resigned in October 2023 and had stopped working with the YWP a while before that, a Community Manager who was put on leave at the beginning of November 2023, and the aforementioned YWP lead and Director of Programs who were either fired or quit in December 2023.
There are three parts to the YWP: the individual users, which are under 18, the classrooms, which are controlled by a teacher and are meant for educational settings, and the forums, which are open to users aged 13-18 whether they’re writing individually or as part of a classroom.
However, investigation revealed that the security of these classrooms are remarkably lax. It only required an email, username and password for an ‘educator’ to set up a classroom, and student accounts didn’t even need an email. Multiple YWP users confirmed that they had used this to gain access to private messages, as the classrooms have a PM feature while the forums did not. On top of this, it was confirmed by a moderator that classrooms are basically unmoderated:
> it's almost impossible to moderate these. There was a rash a few years back of the kids themselves making classrooms and the only way I could track them was to manually go through the admin panel and look for the most recent ones and click. They're almost entirely disconnected from the moderation tools and are completely unmoderated unless someone in one reports something. I actually gave up even trying to patrol the classrooms in any form because there's too many and the admin tools suck.
And on the forums themselves, it only got worse. The moderation often ignored its users, and when they intervened, the intervention often worsened the situation. This got to the point that in August 2022, a group of users held a [strike](https://speak-out.carrd.co/) against the moderation due to neglect and incompetence. However, the problems only continued to grow, and in December 2022, there was a incident of a user faking a disorder and, when called out on it, sending death threats. This user also made accounts in order to impersonate and harass users on the sites. It was not uncommon for users to run others off the site, which, justified or not, was often fueled by lack of mod intervention.
This came to a head in October 2023, when a predator was found and the moderation response was once again inadequate. On the 1st of October, moderation was privately contacted by a group of YWP users about a predator that had been on the forums for two years. After three days with no response and no action taken, the group took the information public and a mass flagging campaign began in order to gain the attention of the mods. And five hours after it began, a response was finally posted by the YWP lead:
> Ні,
Thanks for writing to us with your concerns, and for being so thorough keeping track of the places that made you uncomfortable.
> First of all, I want to say: good on you for following your gut. If you ever run into something online that makes you feel scared or worried or unsafe or just seems a little bit off, it's always okay to back away. Trust yourself, and don't do something that makes you feel uncomfortable, no matter who is asking you.
> The other moderators and I looked (and are continuing to look) more into this person, and from what we can tell, it seems like they are who they say they are. Nothing in their posts crosses the lines set by our Codes of Conduct (though they do come right up to the line sometimes). Like I said before, you can absolutely draw a boundary and not interact with them anymore. It just means we can't take any action on site besides marking their profile such that we pay extra attention to their posts, as well as the other account you flagged as a potential alt.
> If we notice anything in the future we can follow up on it more directly.
> Thank you for being so passionate and thorough about trying to make sure the YWP forums are a safe space, and let me know if you have any questions or want to talk anything through more.
This response was torn apart by the users, and 12 hours later people noticed that the threads the predator created had been taken down. However, there was no comment in the public moderation thread on the situation, and the users had no idea whether the account had been banned or not. This caused a mass panic, and several users pulled back or left the platform due to safety concerns.
Early on the 6th of October, a user tried to goad the moderators into responding to the mess by posting a message to the mods in the official announcements forum, which was supposed to be mod-only:
> There is always an explosion of newbies in November, and you have children as young as 13 here. And your inaction is making the site dangerous. We are being forced to defend ourselves against something we should not be dealing with because you can't be bothered.
> This is more than inaction. This is dangerous incompetence. And don't respond to this with another 'we'll do better' apology, because they never last. I've seen this cycle too many times. Tell us that he's gone, that we don't have to worry about him, and tell us what you're doing to make sure this doesn't happen again. And stop forcing children to be the adults in your place.
However, this post remained up for around 12 hours. At that point, the moderation decided to close the forums for a week, giving the users only a day’s notice. And when they reopened, they threatened to make the forums for writing topics only. Although they walked this back due to user pressure and claimed it was due lack of staff, it came off to some users as a punishment for complaining.
There were more incidents over the next month, and these were mentioned in the retrospective thread, which came as a complete shock to the adults, who had been told that a large part of the funding was going to the YWP. Some began to call for the moderators to resign:
> I sincerely hope they are all drafting their resignation letters. we won’t even give them grief this time for writing it together and recycling the same wording.
> they had their chance to listen to their users, to develop action plans and timeline and to publicly respond. they chose not to do that and knowingly let abuse and harm continue on their watches. both here and on ywp.
> resign or get fired. either way this is no longer their house, they are being evicted.
**The Nanopocalypse.**
The Nanowrimo Board intervened in the evening of the 12th of the November, having been contacted by users in the retrospective thread. They immediately set the main forums to read only barring threads they made to discuss the many issues. However the YWP forums were not immediately closed, and so the users from the retrospective reported back on RTAE.
Two hours after the main forums were closed, a YWP user received a message from the Director of Programs threatening to ban the user. Moments later this user and two others were temporarily banned from the forums. And the forums exploded on both sides. On the main forums:
> Do something for these YWP kids being banned for speaking up about their abuse.
And on the YWP:
> no cause if you're so threatened by MINORS joking at your expense take a good long look in the mirror
The same user on commented on the main thread:
> Just so yall know, the ywp is honestly going to hell rn. People are getting banned, some of the people who talked to you yesterday got banned for saying enough. I got warnings for saying that adults shouldn’t be threatened by teens making jokes. It’s a really bad situation and a lot of people are stressed and overwhelmed
One user commented on how bad the YWP had gotten as follows:
>FOR REAL !!! i joined when i was 16?? THE FIRST FUCKING THING I DID WAS MODERATE. i had to skip the classic nano ywp cringe newbie stage because i had to swoop into an argument that was obvious a moderator wasn’t going to ever deal with. and i did that for like the year and a half i was on nano. and like i don’t give a shit in the sense it doesn’t hold a candle to being 14 and moderating for three years straight but. the amount of power hierarchies the ywp has because of us who. play mod. it’s stressful and not fun and i would not wish it upon my worst enemies. this might be petty but? i’d pay real money that none of the staff team remembers me despite me doing their jobs since the moment i clicked create account
> i have not seen a single case of
someone getting fairly banned, nor of someone problematic and upsetting having consequences for their
actions.
>nano is a weird place because a lot of shit happened offsite (ex; my connection to [redacted]. the nanoer who was lying and trauma dumping to me and some of my close friends. that all happened in “adult nano” dms. but we were open about it. and even with multiple call-out posts in places with chats that don’t bury posts often and theoretically ones mods should be checking? nothing was done.) but the guessing game on when mods finally arrive to a scene is awful. the brace for impact everyone collectively did when
someone finally showed up? was awful. these are teenagers. and when these teens can’t trust the moderators who’re supposed to be monitoring their website, who are they supposed to trust?
A few hours into the board thread, YWP users called out one of the accounts on the main forum for being a predator. The group confirmed that this person had been removed from the YWP but that they had been allowed to remain on the main site. Users confronted this account directly:
> correct me if i’m wrong (i’m not) but i do remember you being one of (if not the most) manipulative, spiteful, maliciously incompetent people i have ever encountered. do you, perchance, remember all the times you told that little 15 year old the sexual things you wanted to do to her? i remember. i remember everything you said. i might not be able to prove all of it but we know. we didn’t forget. playing dumb won’t save you now, boy.
> don’t you dare sit here and pretend this was an okay thing for you to do. you got suspended but you’re still here talking aren’t you ?? it’s two years old we still have the very same predator (most people active in the lounge in the last year or two [in the ywp] knows you. no one who knows you likes you.) roaming the adult site. how is this not an issue that needs to be addressed?
The account was suspended a few days later.
That night, the board confirmed that they were unaware that the YWP was a separate site, and the YWP forums were shut. With no read only mode on the YWP, it erupted into chaos. Users said their goodbyes, and some expressed their anger with the moderation for how they turned out. This led to the Director of Programs threatening to close the forums early, despite the users only having a few hours to say goodbye anyway. One user put it as simply as:
> me when my entire community of the last three years is being ripped away lol
And the last three posts?
> FUCK THE MODS FR
> im gonna miss this website so much. love you all and its not our fault this is happening, it’s the mods stay safe stay amazing and love you all, youre the best.
> Im so sorry the mods destroyed this. hate that we have to lose this beautiful thing because of them. I have one last
thing to say:
>FUCK. THE. MODS.
> Imao
And with that, the weekend from hell was over.
But the Nanopocalypse had barely begun.
**It wasn't just kids that were abused.**
The board threads went down a few rabbit holes, but it was a testimony on the 28th of November that started the next fire. This came from an ML, and spoke of a situation a decade before.
> In 2012 (might have been 2011) I had an adult participant explain the explicit omegaverse erotica that she was writing to a 14 year old. She then left her laptop open to go and get a drink, with the instruction “i’m not telling you to read it, but I’m not not telling you that, and if I just leave my laptop open and you happen to see it, there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”
> The teenager approached me before NaNo the next year and told me about this. She said that it made her extremely uncomfortable and that the adult participant had spent a lot of time telling her how clever she (the teen) was, how she was more mature than other teens, and how other adults just didn’t understand. Which is all classic grooming. The teen asked if this person was going to be at events that year, because she didn’t want to see her again.
> I contacted HQ with this, and asked if they would back me up if I told this person that they were no longer welcome at our events.
> The response I got was that not only would they not back me up, I was not allowed to ban this person from our events because they had to be held in a public space and be open to anyone who wanted to come and write.
> the teenager never came to another in-person event.
> The adult in question came back, and that year groomed and sexually assaulted a 17-year-old who she met at our events. I didn’t learn about this until several months afterwards. I once again contacted HQ, and was told that I still couldn’t ask her to stay away from our region because the incident took place after our event and we weren’t allowed to ban people based on behaviour outside the scope of our events
>I then posed the question: If the abusive ex of one of our wrimos turned up at an event, with the apparent intent to write with us, could I ask them to leave?
> Once again the answer was no, unless there was evidence of a police report, or the ex became abusive during the event. It was heavily implied that the victim ought to leave if they were uncomfortable.
> I had no training in how to handle this kind of thing, and I received the opposite of support.
> Having heard stories from other MLs I am convinced that the only reason I was not removed from the position is that I chose not to fight them.
The ML spoke more about trainings regarding racism.
>It’s been videos (I think 2 were workshops, but they were only run in US timezones so the rest of us just had to watch the videos and read transcripts) which have so far been exclusively on a US-centric approach to race and racism. One of the first 2 was run by a white person with a… questionable background… And [Director of Community Engagement]’s response to that being raised as an issue boiled down to “we have some MLs who won’t listen if it’s a black person”. Honestly, if you can’t handle being taught about racial issues by a person of that race, maybe you shouldn’t be in a position of power?
> We have the ML Agreement (which, until very recently, forbade MLs from criticising NaNoWriMo in any way. So recently that [Director of Community Engagement] used that clause to remove at least one ML in the last year without knowing/remembering that they took that out).
The discussion quickly pivoted to the treatment of MLs, and to the ML discord server. This was considered unofficial, but needed to get in touch with the Director of Community Engagement, who oversaw the MLs. The user who broke the news about Mod X gave a summary of the problems there:
> A ML was banned from the ML discord for suspicion of "leaking information shared in the ML discord with non-MLs".
> I've seen the (frankly a bit baffling) accusation by MLs (both on and off the main discord) that I have ulterior motives in bringing light to the issues facing the NaNoWriMo organization, so I'll reiterate - again - that l'm only one of a very large group of users over multiple offsite platforms who have been documenting these issues.
> The only reason I'm fairly visible in this situation is because it was decided my twitter platform was the best chance to bring wider attention to the issues in a way HQ would listen to (since efforts here on the forums were being shut down, silenced or obfuscated). I want to note that it's extremely concerning that the default in the ML discord is to focus on "someone leaking information or sneaking into our server" rather than address the systemic problems that have led to so many MLs feeling like they need to seek outside help for their treatment by the ML community. Not to mention the harm of indulging that paranoia when energy would be better focused on strategies to address the crisis facing the NaNo community.
> The main ML discord has obtained a list of users on NaNoWriMo discord servers that allow open criticism of HQ, and is kicking any ML who appears on the member list of the dissenting servers.
However, it seems that only two MLs were kicked for being in a dissenting server.
The kicked ML explained:
> I was kicked out for supposedly sharing screenshots from the ML discord with other people. I only know this, because when I said "hey, I can't find the ml discord any more" another ML went 'holy shit, that was you?' and told me what was being said about me.
> They also told me that what I had supposedly done was not against the rules at the time. [server admin] changed the rules after she kicked me out for "breaking" them.
There was another ML testimony that deserves its own section and we’ll get to in a second, but a response to it brought a new and horrifying light on the actions of the Director of Community Engagement.
> I’ve mentioned I was co-ML 2018, 2019, and 2020. My region had no ML for 2021 because my previous co-ML and I protested how [Director of Community Engagement] treated me.
> So. I am autistic as fuck. I am also physically disabled, and legally blind. We were promised access to the new 2019 forums months before NaNo, since we were MLs.
> I got access two weeks before NaNo.
> Two weeks, for my blind, autistic ass to figure out these very non-intuitive forums before time to kick things off.
> Clearly, this was not really a possibility for me. Because, again, autistic and blind.
> So my co-ML and I decided that I would handle all the online-but-offsite things (Facebook and the discord server I’d set up the year before) while he handled in-person and on-site things. This worked out great for us; our region was well taken care of between the two of us.
> I put so much love and care into my region’s discord server when I created it in 2018 (I had unexpectedly moved a few hours from my region in October, so the three of us co-MLs for that year worked out together what I would do to still hold my end of things up). I was cheering people on on the daily, running daily virtual write-ins for anyone who wanted to pop in and write with me. Any time my co-ML had a physical write-in, I scheduled a virtual one for the same time for anyone who couldn’t go in person
for whatever reason, and a co-ML would connect on their device so that the in-person and the virtual participants could talk to each other before time to write. For the 16th, I scheduled a full 24 hours virtual write-in that people could pop in and out of as they wanted to try to double up their word counts (I ran it the full 24 hours myself and then went to bed afterwards). I was even able to run some of the virtual write-ins from the hospital. I had so many people thank me for it, because they lived too far to make it in person easily, or they worked nights, or they were disabled, or they were immunocompromised so couldn’t go in person.
> Since that worked so well, I also did it for 2019, except even more because I loved my region and I love my people. I love cheering people on. I love helping them figure out a sticky problem in their project. I love just celebrating that they wrote, whether they wrote a full 50k or not, they tried this impossible thing and they did their best and that’s what NaNo is about. I worked my ass off in 2019 to make up for the fact that I couldn’t deal with the new site. Because, once again, I am autistic and blind.
> But also, before I move on to 2020, let’s talk about some of the gaslighting bullshit that HQ fed us. And yes, it was gaslighting I do not use that term lightly.
There was no validator. We were promised there would be a validator. We tell our regions “don’t worry, we’ve been promised there’ll be a validator, it should be ready in a few days”. Then HQ says “oh, sorry, it’ll be a little longer, you’ll have it by the end of the month, though, we super promise”. So we tell our regions, “sorry, it’s not going to be a couple days but they promise we’ll have it by the end of the month”. HQ was still telling us to tell our regions that the validator would be there by the end of the month even after HQ had decided there would be no fucking validator, not even by the end of the month, just never. When we were like “the fuck??? why would you tell us this, then???” we were told that we had just misunderstood what they meant. Gaslighting. That is actual fucking gaslighting.
> So now let’s go to 2020. Two successful years running my Region’s discord - and we added a Whole [country] discord, too! Go us!!!
> I re-apply to co-ML again. Don’t hear anything, assume that I didn’t hear anything because I was approved. In May, Sarah posts in the ML Facebook that if we re-applied and didn’t get an email from her to email her and let her know. So I emailed her. She had forgotten to email me. She had set my application aside because was I sure I could be a good ML since I had barely posted to the site in 2019. The year that the entire site changed and my blind autistic ass could not navigate it. I explained the situation, that I hadn’t been able to navigate the site so my co-ML and I had divvied things up so that I could run all the online-but-offsite things, etc. I told her about the region Discord and all the virtual write-ins.
> [Director of Community Engagement] says that all my efforts the previous years don’t count because it’s not on the site. That off-site can’t be moderated so it’s really discouraged that regions have anything online but offsite. She emailed my co-ML to tell them that she’d find a co-ML that could support them better. My co-ML responded along the lines
of “if you take [ML] away from me, I fucking quit”. So [Director of Community Engagement] tells them that I’m on probation but not to let me know. Which. They did anyway because they’re also one of my best friends and platonic life partners.
> I’m fine now, it’s been three years, I can deal. But when I say that being told that everything I’d set up didn’t count, that broke me. I had worked so hard, literally from the fucking hospital, to be told that it didn’t count. That the thing that I had set up as an accommodation for disabled or immunocompromised didn’t count.
> We MLed for 2020, because we finish our commitments. When 2021 rolled around and no one volunteered to ML, I still took care of my region. I still ran the discord, I still ran the virtual events, I still answered their questions and cheered them on. Because I’m not going to leave my people out to dry even if the person in charge doesn’t care.
> So. That was 2019 and the early parts of 2020. And it’s why I will never ML again while [Director of Community Engagement] is in charge.
> When I volunteered as a moderator, it’s because I genuinely wanted to help the community that I care so
much about. But I volunteered under [Community Manager]. [Community Manager] wasn’t perfect, but [Community Manager] cared. Whatever her
failings, she fucking cared about us. I told [Community Manager] when I disagreed with her, but I did it to her face and I tried to be kind. (Not necessarily nice, but kind. Because kind will tell you when you’re fucking up. Nice will not.)
> Right before NaNo started, I was no longer helping [Community Manager], I was now having to answer to [Director of Community Engagement]. So maybe I was more reactive than I would have been had [Director of Community Engagement] not broken me three years ago. Because of that, I tried to temper my reactions more, to make sure that I was reacting to the actual thing and not to who was saying it.
I have had it confirmed since I quit that [Director of Community Engagement] saw me as a problem and was trying to make me quit. And, well, she succeeded. Because I did quit when [Director of Community Engagement] said that mods would now be silencing any criticism of HQ.
> I love this community, or I would have left in 2020. I love the people, and I love the spirit of NaNo. I love that the spirit of NaNo lives in all of us, that we all have this little flame inside all of us that’s part of the bigger fire. I love that we come together to cheer each other on, and help each other when we’re stuck.
> But fuck the way MLs like me were treated. If I was treated this way, I bet there are others.
As of writing this, the Director of Community Engagement is still in her position and still oversees MLs.
So the MLs had to tolerate ableism and racism to do their jobs. And it only got worse. Let’s go back to that other testimony, which revealed:
**That time HQ made a game with a terrorist in it.**
Yep.
> In 2017 the staff decided to roll out an in-office game they had apparently played amongst themselves to the wider public.
> This game was a treasure hunt type activity, where one had to stop a terrorist called Ivan the Icy from blowing up NaNo and the world.
> This hunt included a now removed video of a very convincingly dressed man monologue at the camera about how he was going to bomb NaNo. So convincing in fact it took very long into the video before signs of it being fake emerged.
> Several faked emails sent to you, in that same vein that eventually led to a hidden page on the site where you had to disarm a bomb. Failing to do so would make it explode. Granted, upon exploding it filled your screen with penguins, but until then it was far too realistic.
> This was not communicated to MLs prior to sending out. Nothing had been mentioned. If it had we could have told them why this was a bad idea. The game might work in office where everyone knows each other’s sensitivities and humour (although even then one can wonder why this topic), but on a global scale this is tone deaf at best.
> MLs were the ones who raised the alarm and contacted HQ as quickly as we noticed. We had to explain in detail the potential ramifications, after which action was taken. We then helped NaNo cover this up.
> Note that at this point we had already lost so much faith in HQ that we were actively brainstorming how we could potentially flag it to youtube and facebook to get the video taken down if HQ would not respond to us as they often didn’t.
> To explain just how tone deaf this game was. The very convincing video was posted (not used) on 9/11. This was the year after the bombing in Brussels during NaNo. Two years after the bombing and shootings in Paris that had the Parisian Wrimos stuck in a write-in near the bomb site and active shooters for hours. And the same year a bomb had been detonated in the Manchester arena.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, a user who was on the YWP at the time confirmed that there was a YWP element:
> I didn’t find out that this came up in conversation yesterday until today but I feel like I need to add that the YWP had a dedicated forum thread to Ivan the Icy and was encouraged to participate and solve the terrorism scavenger hunt
> Yeah the terrorism scavenger hunt was a whole thing. I couldn’t even solve it because it was so heavily locked behind Facebook so I didn’t find out the full implications until the “apology” was sent out, but we on the YWP had an entire forum thread created by the mods (I want to say [YWP lead]) dedicated to solving it
So. That was a thing. Moving on.
**The board drank HQ’s kool-aid.**
The board was originally relatively helpful when they first intervened, but things soon took a turn. They took a break over American Thanksgiving [20th-26th November], and the responses soured following the break. The first clue of this was their defensive attitude towards the Executive Director’s $128K salary, when users figured out that since Nanowrimo ran a ‘salary first, operating budget second’ model, the operating budget was around $88K.
However, it was a comment about what Nanowrimo meant to the board member replying that started the anti-board attitude:
> Until two weeks ago, I had never used the forums; they just aren’t my thing. I mention all of this to say that not everybody who is part of this community hinges their experience, sense of belonging, or sense of value for NaNoWriMo on the forums. Part of my love for/experience of NaNo was doing a weekend writing retreat every November. I have very fond memories of these the years I did them. NaNo takes different forms for different people.
And when questioned about how this came across from an economic perspective, the elaboration was as follows:
> I am going on a writing retreat this weekend with my regular crew. It involves renting an AirBnB and each of us paying $200-$300 plus preparing one meal during the course of the weekend.
The fact that the first thing given as what nano meant to the board was a $200 writing retreat came off as inconsiderate in part due to reasons I’ll discuss later.
The next red flag was a reply in response to the idea having staff credentials in their account bios:
> Frankly, this isn’t a huge priority given that we’re asking staff to focus on other issues and since it’s pretty easy to look people up on LinkedIn. In a previous thread, someone posted the LinkedIn profiles of staffers.
> Again, we don’t view ourselves as concealing this information. Our staff bios are pretty standard and this information is available online.
However, users quickly pointed out that since the board member used their pen name, they couldn’t find their LinkedIn.
A few comments in a question and answer thread were also received poorly:
> The Board recognizes that people want answers now. After all, THEY ARE SHOUTING AT US IN ALL CAPS.
> We get that people ARE UPSET but we can’t do much about unrealistic expectations.
However, it was one of their last responses that really cemented their downfall:
> That is not what [other user] said. Please answer the actual question that was asked.
> And get better at reading comprehension, christ.
> Thank you for proving why the forums are so hard to moderate and for giving the Board reason to consider that we might never be able to make them safe. Because how can anybody feel safe when confronted with vicious sarcasm after committing the utterly human fallibility of misreading?
The board stopped responding that weekend and closed the remaining threads on the 4th of December.
Well. Almost all of them. A few hours later users noticed that the ‘about the Nanowrimo board category’ thread wasn’t locked. Users scrambled to post a final goodbye to the forums in a similar manner to the YWP shutdown a few weeks before.
> It has been an honour being in the trenches with so many of you. I’m sorry that it’s coming down to this, but here is where we are.
> So many of us did not deserve the way we were treated. So many of us were failed by a staff that should have done better.
> And I will never NOT be angry that protecting [Mod X] was more important than protecting children.
And with the battlefield closed, everyone retreated to their discords to discuss.
**The donation begging.**
Despite making between $1-$2 million a year, Nanowrimo always seemed desperate for more money. The first sign of this was the aforementioned Inkitt donor situation, but the second was ‘double-up donation weekend’, where donors got twice as much goodies for donating. This was during the 4th and 5th of November, and while the actual number of emails sent is disputed, one user simply said:
> too fucking many
However it was probably between 8-11. Over two days. And people have alleged that they sent more in other days.
Graphics from a recent presentation also revealed that they were trying to solicit donations from people in poverty. The graphic said to donate less if
> * Love NaNoWriMo and want to support us alongside 8,000 annual community donors!
> * Have little to no savings
> * Work more than one job to meet your basic needs
> * Have dependents (children, elderly loved ones, household partners, neighbors, etc.)
Another graphic suggested that people making $12K a year should donate $300 a year.
However, it was revealed after the forums were shut that Nanowrimo had been soliciting donations from users of the YWP since 2016, and that it had been a regular thing since 2018. And only once did they add a disclaimer:
> P.S. Today is #Giving Tuesday, and this year NaNoWriMo has received a $20,000 matching donation. So if you know someone who might want to support our organization, encourage them to donate today and double their impact!
The emails did in fact link to the Nanowrimo store.
**And then the memes attacked.**
When the forums were shut on December 4th, the some regional forums ran by MLs were allowed to remain. However, around the 11th of December, a lifeboat group received intel that the regional forums were soon to close. The day following, there was a rush of posts in the regional forums from members of this group alerting regional members of this. There were also allegations that the Director of Community Engagement had her own reasons for shutting the forums down.
> The decision to close the regional forums over the holidays was indisputably an "oh fuck" maneuver. It was NOT to shield MLs from emergency situations that they wouldn't be able to handle in Sarah's absence. It was NOT out of concern for the MLs.
> And I have proof.
> On November 30th, [Director of Community Engagement] reached out to the MLs who had chosen to keep their forums open. She asked if we still wanted to keep them open. **And she presented us with the following additional options:**
> * 1) Set it to "only MLs can start threads"
> * **2) Set it to "only MLs can post" (i.e. use it only for announcements or record keeping)**
> * 3) Set some or all existing open threads to "slow mode" so they can't be posted in as frequently
> * 4) Close some or all of the existing open threads
> **Option 2 would have eliminated this concern entirely.** My region is set to Announcements-only right now. No one else can post there. So, unless the MLs themselves were the concern, there would have been no need to close the forums *entirely*.
> Except... some MLs *are* giving HQ the migraine of their lives. **They need to silence ALL dissident voices, including those of MLs.**
> Hopefully you can view the form [Director of Community Engagement] sent MLs on November 30th here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdTbrRNrhfFV6HoXVUMWghomicP7xzvqWdLxC-R6cJ7Q8pfFA/viewform
And one member put it as:
> At this point I'm so confused, but what I see is HQ continuing to fuck up.
On the eve of the 15th of December, as the regional forums were taken down, the group discovered a thread on a regional forum, dedicated to memes about the Nanowrimo challenge. They flooded it with anti-HQ memes, in a last middle finger to HQ. A large amount of the memes consisted of promotional pictures of staff with humorous captions, such as The Good Place quote ‘I took the form of a 45 year old white man for a reason. I can only fail up.’, with the Executive Director photoshopped on. However, there was one that was purely text, from a YWP member:
> she nano on my wrimo till i shut down the forums
As the memes winded down, users settled in for a night of watching the forums go down. It was a long night, with users posting haikus to pass the time.
> Just a reminder
> The forums will shut down soon
> Save the threads you want
>Save the threads. You want
> Community, but darkness
>Prevails. Just for now.
However, some forums were never closed and are still open to this day.
**The smouldering remains.**
The entire YWP staff has gone, as has the social media manager. The Executive Director has been ‘demoted’ to Financial Stewardship Director. The current Executive Director is the board member that works under a pen name.
Nanowrimo has yet to reopen the forums, and besides disabling the ability to self-identify as an educator on the YWP, have yet to implement any of the changes that they promised.
More information can be found at r/nanowrimo, which is an unofficial Nano group without staff involvement.
#nanowrimo controversy#antinanowrimo#nano#nanopocalypse#nanowrimo#so fuck nanowrimo#Fuck this got long#Hobby drama
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I think hobby drama (as a concept) is like. the essence of humanity. people giving insights into things they’re obsessed with. shoving each other down rabbit holes. I love it so much.
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The /r/whatisthisbone subreddit is fun for numerous reasons, but I'm always entertained by the consistent mistakes made by people who don't know anything about bones.
People will post photos of a pelvis and ask what kind of skull it is. This happens regularly. I get it, it's got two holes in it that look like eyes, it's a reasonable mistake to make, but it will never stop being funny to me.
People always ask if a bone is human and often it's like a deer or something else that looks nothing whatsoever like human to the trained eye. That's a deer humerus, I promise you a human limb bone is not shaped like that.
Today it was "is this a chicken bone or a very small human?" Honey if you have to ask that question it's almost certainly not human. That's a chicken femur. Aside from being shaped way different, it's got epiphyses. Juvenile mammal bones don't have fused epiphyses.
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From an interesting hobby drama post by u/After_Comfortable324 :
Going purely by volume of anonymous asks, Tracy was the most popular storyteller in the community, responding to 5-10 asks per day. All anonymous. All written in exactly the same voice she herself used.
Hm.
The only other user whose ask volume was even comparable to Tracy's was one of her closest friends and collaborators, Wendy. Wendy is one of the most popular people in the space, and she and Tracy had a joint plot line centering on the romance between two of their characters. Wendy tended to get a lot of asks, a mix of anonymous and not, but once the romance plot line kicked off, she began receiving a truly unimaginable number of anonymous asks hyping up the crossover ship. Again, each and every single one of these anonymous asks coincidentally had the same mannerisms, phrases, and emoji use as Tracy.
During this time, Tracy was the undisputed Queen of Royal Simblr, and she was at the heart of a truly batshit amount of drama in the community. There were secret groupchats, even-more-secret groupchats with all the same people minus one, posts openly shit-talking other people in the community (but Google translated into a different language so it's okay!), not-at-all-suspicious anonymous hate campaigns, baseless accusations of plagiarism against people using similar tropes (despite being a documented plagiarist herself), the works.
Nice to see that the old msscribe gambit is still alive and well.
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Local indie publishing scene drama is crazy this week
A rough rundown (May not be super accurate but it gives you the idea) Also please bear with my grammar, it’s past 1am here as of writing.
Person A publishes under Company X in like 2014 or so, this was PA’s first novel. It doesn’t sell well.
Take note that part of the contract you sign under Company X states that you are responsible for your marketing (which is fair for an indie) and that you as the author have the final say on what version will be published even after their editors have done their own editing.
Eventually Person A offshoots and starts their own company, Company Y. It’s technically an imprint of the publishing company their parents run (why didn’t PA publish under there in the first place???)
During that time, Company X grew, getting more authors that succeed under them, and going as far as participating in international events like book fairs in Germany and the UK.
In the last week, Person A had been going on a tirade on Facebook over an alleged “scam publisher” that “doesn’t edit their books.” Meanwhile, many in the scene seeing the posts thought it was about an unrelated Company Z, who was outed for using AI art covers.
Just last weekend, Company X had an activity at a local chain bookstore that focused on a specific genre. It was a mini-convention with talks and signings and also the launch of an anthology of short stories of that genre.
The event wasn’t even bad, the only real complaint is that the venue was cramped for the unexpectedly sizable number of attendees.
Now back to Person A, they continues with their tirades online, all while bragging about an expensive deal they got with some TV network. Whatever, congrats I guess. (They were mentioning amounts of money that even a 4th grader would know not to post on social media as something you have, so it’s clear PA has piss poor social media skills)
The tirades continued in the past days and got more and more specific until she all but said the name. They still referred to Company X as a “scam”
Her claim seemed plausible as several other authors (Call them A1, A2) then began to come up with their own complaints about their works under Company X.
Turns out, upon the informal investigation done by some authors in our group chat, the commonality between the complainants was that their books didn’t sell well.
But remember, marketing was part of their obligations as Company X’s business model is less traditional and more collaborative between author and publisher.
Related to the last point, that was where A1’s complaint falls flat. It was his obligation to re-check the edited manuscript to check for any mis-corrections (such as editors removing intentional “mistakes”, amongst other things)
Person B, who started and runs Company X, had to address the private Facebook group of their authors and fans about the situation, giving us a clearer picture of what was going on and the likely reason how it began. (That’s where it was confirmed that Person A’s book really just didn’t sell well) It was a well-written statement and really helped ease our anxieties about the tensions, and also reminding us about how publishing under Company X was meant to be collaborative, which is something we willingly agreed to.
Person B also revealed that A2’s parent was stressing PB out in the middle of a busy book fair while they were nursing a mild fever all because A2’s mom was accusing PB of being connected to random politicians from the province PB came from, which PB denies vehemently in a professional manner.
A2 was also insistent on publishing once a month with different genres, which is, frankly, a stupid idea to begin with. So they shouldn’t have been surprised that many of those works undersold.
During that fair (and all fairs Company X participated in) there were authors who were present to promote their works, and even helping promote the works of those who weren’t there.
Bottom line: A1 and A2 didn’t due their due diligence in editing and marketing, respectively, and now Person A is using their “complaints” as part of a smear campaign against Company X.
It’s certainly been a wild few days of drama and honestly it takes a toll as someone with stake on the game. I am posting this here just to get it out of my system because frankly I’m still pissed about how Person A acted. I am saying this as someone who has met Person B in real life and even has mutual friends with her (one who knew PB long before she started Company X)
While we are generally happy about PA’s success with their company, it just leaves a sour taste in our mouths to see our feeds filled with their needless vitriol that could’ve easily been clarified with PB via email, rather than resorting to what is essentially slander(?) Also this situation really just caused a lot of anxiety to us, especially those of us who have works in progress under Company X.
Now, as a result of this, several authors who submitted stuff for Company Y’s calls for submissions are now rethinking the thoughts of signing a contract if they’re accepted.
Tried to be as vague as possible with the details to avoid further expansion of the issue.
Anyways here’s the dose of local hobby drama that I needed to get out of my system tonight before I go to sleep.
#hobby drama#hobby#books#book#publishing#publishing industry#writer#writers#writing#writeblr#indie publishing#literature#philippines#irl#vent
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HEY, QUESTION: any r/HobbyDrama people come over during the blackout? I'm the one who wrote the Happy Planner drama post years ago.
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Another barbie doll clothes haul from another "I totally didn't order it from china" grifter doll boutique 😶 (they scammed her RIP)
This is ruining the hobby for me because it's just nonstop scams
Also it screws over actual small creators because it drives down prices and pumps out volume no actual barbie clothes maker could ever keep up with, pretty easy selling a dress you didn't sew for cheap when all you do is click order
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I cannot believe the ignorance happily spewed forth on the runway forum on gaia lmfao
like jesus christ, show your whole ass
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[Hamilton Fandom] The HIV+ high school AU/cannibal mermaid Hamilton fanfiction incident self.HobbyDrama
submitted 3 years ago by iwasonceafangirl Best of 2019-20
I know I said I was going to do a writeup about YA Twitter drama next, but then I remembered that this is a thing that happened and I just had to post it here. I swear to god, I am not making any of this up.
This is one of those incidents that’s difficult to summarize because I honestly don’t even know where to begin. There’s so much to talk about that it’s almost overwhelming—sockpuppeting, medical fraud, false identities, and god-knows-what else all played a part in making this drama one of the biggest scandals in Tumblr history (or, at least, the biggest scandal that doesn’t involve illegally mailing body parts to people via the United States Postal Service. Don’t even ask.) Now, you may be thinking that the title probably makes more sense in context, but I can assure you that it absolutely does not. It’s just as insane as it sounds at first glance. To make it abundantly clear how nuts this whole debacle was, I should probably start by detailing Hamilton and its obsessive fandom.
Hamilton is a Broadway musical that came out a few years ago, and unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard someone at least mention it in passing. It’s one of the most successful shows in recent history, and it’s beloved by tumblr.com for a variety of reasons. The main, though not sole, reason is that it’s actually really good (and I say this as someone who isn’t a crazy theatre kid.) It focuses on the life of Alexander Hamilton from his arrival in the Thirteen Colonies to his death during a duel with Aaron Burr, and it’s all done surprisingly well for a musical that attempts to tell a story about the American Revolutionary War via rap battles. It’s one of the few shows in the world that can get away with including stage directions like “ELIZA BEATBOXES MATERNALLY” and still be taken completely seriously by both fans and critics.
Reason number two why Tumblr loves Hamilton is the same reason Tumblr loves the MCU and Superwholock and all the other franchises it obsesses over. There are lots of male characters and thus lots of potential slash ships (ships meaning relationships.) If you’re wondering why on Earth anyone would want to ship the Founding Fathers with one another… well, join the club. I have no idea. But some fans really liked the idea of Alexander Hamilton and [insert literally any other character] hooking up, so Hamilton the musical spawned an abundance of fan fiction and fan art featuring the signatories of the US Constitution. Keep in mind, though, that by Tumblr standards, this is not that weird. A little unusual, sure, and certainly less common than traditional fictional character shipping, but nobody’s really going to start a riot because people want John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton to have sex. This is Tumblr we’re talking about. Remember how I mentioned people mailing human body parts to one another? In comparison to those incidents, shipping the Founding Fathers is not that strange, so the rabid Hamilton fans were mostly ignored by the rest of the site. And this allowed their community to grow quite large. Nobody wanted to be the one to poke at the hornet’s nest that was the rapidly developing hive of Hamilton-obsessed fans, so they all just kind of let It be. And, in the complete absence of outside scrutiny, that community grew and grew and grew. By 2015, the amount of people who dedicated countless hours to writing Hamilton fic was far greater than anyone could have imagined.
One of the many Hamilton fics floating around on Tumblr was a piece entitled “To Scale the Blue Sky,” which was an alternate universe fanfic set in a high school. Again, taking the Founding Fathers and putting them in an American high school in the 1980s a la Clone High may sound bizarre, but that’s such a common fan fiction trope that people didn’t even question it. There are probably more high school AUs on Tumblr than there are stars in the sky at this point. The unique thing about “To Scale the Blue Sky,” though, was that it addressed an important issue affecting the LGBT community in the ‘80s: HIV and AIDS. This is a story in which Alexander Hamilton, the guy who appears on the $10 bill, gets HIV while in high school. And, ordinarily, this type of writing would have rung at least a few alarm bells; after all, fan fiction is generally not the best way to address the AIDS epidemic and the deaths resulting from its mismanagement. But “To Scale The Blue Sky” was cut some slack, partially because of who its authors were.
The main author of “To Scale The Blue Sky” was Israa, a nonbinary Chinese-Pakistani victim of sex trafficking. The other, mostly uncredited author was Israa’s wife Raj, a Catholic-Somali lesbian of color. Both were HIV+, and they ran a popular blog about how the disease impacted their lives, which was entitled hivliving. They used hivliving as a platform for activism, but also a way to share their personal experiences with various forms of trauma and discuss how being HIV+ has impacted them. They also occasionally used it to promote their fanfiction.
Unfortunately, just as hivliving was reaching the height of its popularity, Raj and/or Israa suffered some terrible, debilitating medical issue that left them in need of expensive medical treatment right away. A cash.me link was posted, and thousands of followers who credited the couple for educating them about HIV and helping them through their own diagnoses jumped at the chance to donate. And everything went exactly as planned, up until fellow Tumblr user digoxin-purpurpea noticed something was up with the cash.me.
Digoxin-purpurpea was another Hamilton fan, and she also went by the names digitalis, candiru, and cardiotoxin (this is less suspicious than it sounds; most Tumblr fanfic writers use different usernames for different fan fiction sites.) Under the blog name Cardiotoxin, digoxin-purpurpea messaged Israa and Raj shortly after the cash.me was posted, saying that she had a difficult time believing they were truly living in India, because the cash.me indicated they were within the United States. One thing led to another, and long story short, the mod of hivliving wound up making a huge confession: she didn’t live in India, and she didn’t have HIV. Israa and Raj don’t exist. The real person behind the blog, and behind “To Scale The Blue Sky,” was an American college student, Alix. That may not be her real name, but I’ll refer to her as such for the purpose of this post.
This, predictably, caused an uproar. Alix later tried to backtrack by saying that Israa and Raj were digital personas based on real people, but it later came out that not even that was true. Their lives and backstories were entirely made up just so Alix had an excuse to write HIV+ High School AU fan fiction about Alexander Hamilton without being judged too harshly for it. By pretending to be a woman with HIV+, she could deflect any questions about whether writing this type of thing is really okay by claiming that it was a coping mechanism to deal with her own disease. She also made up the additional sympathetic pieces of Israa and Raj’s tragic backstories because they made people more likely to feel bad for the couple and support them financially. Finally, their Somalian, Chinese, and Pakistani heritage allowed Alix, a white girl, to be put on lists of POC writers that she never would have been able to get onto had she not lied about her identity. Basically, Alix made up two entire people and started a HIV support blog exclusively to promote “To Scale the Blue Sky” and works like it.
Naturally, when it came out to everyone that Alix was a liar and Israa and Raj weren’t real people, a lot of fans were very upset, especially those who had donated to their bullshit cash.me. They demanded their money back, and Alix agreed to refund them, but that never actually happened. Meanwhile, other people started digging up dirt on Digoxin-purpurpea, as some people were concerned that she’d also been making things up in order to get rid of hivliving and boost her own popularity. What they found was, arguably, even stranger than a plot to reduce her competition by scrubbing hivliving from the internet—Digoxin-purpurpea was a relatively well-known author of real-person supernatural fanfiction. No, not Supernatural TV show fanfiction—I mean stories about ghosts, mermaids, and other mythical creatures, having sex with each other and real people.
At around the time Alix started asking for donations while posing as Israa and Raj, Digoxin-purpurpea was being criticized for various bizarre works she’d written, among them things like ghost!Hamilton erotica and at least one work in which Lin-Manuel Miranda, who plays Hamilton, is a cannibalistic mermaid. People quickly realized that Digoxin-purpurpea wasn’t dragging Alix for purely selfless reasons. Alix and her friends had made fun of Digoxin-purpurpea for her weird and “problematic” stories, so Digoxin-purpurpea exacted revenge by exposing Alix.
After this revelation, both Digoxin-purpurpea and Alix deleted the majority of their work, which was unsurprising, considering how much the rest of Tumblr was making fun of them. Hivliving shut down, which was to be expected, seeing as the people who ran the blog were actually one person who didn’t actually have HIV. And, finally, Tumblr learned a valuable lesson about donating to gofundmes and cash.mes without doing adequate research first. People continue to ask for money for various causes online, but Tumblr users are a lot more skeptical now, because you never know when that baby with cancer or that woman with cerebral palsy are actually just crazy Hamilton fans using medical conditions as an excuse to write stories about the Founding Fathers having unprotected sex in a high school.
#best of Reddit#Hamilton fandom#hobby drama#fanfiction drama#fandom drama#drama#a learning experience
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What's this disaster I'm somehow only just reading about where someone drew fanart of Sherlock topping Watson and some anti said Watson looked like a minor because of the height difference and because he was bottoming so it must have been CP
Lmfao jeebus crackers
#sherlock#sherlock holmes#antis#bullying#harassment#johnlock#hobby drama#csem ment cw#istg fancops could go to any country other than the usa where the average height is lower and they'd lose their dang minds
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Right. I’ve been digging for more knifemaker drama.
It seems the folks on Reddit don’t really like Knieforums. My screenshots do show some of the reasons, but I’m curious as to what exactly happened.
I am one step closer to making a Knifeforums account so I can stalk the site. So many mysteries.
Who is the Knifeforums antichrist, and how did he earn his title? Why was Mr. stamp banned? The rumors of abuse of power?
Stick with me to find out what the fuck kind of toxicity is happening behind the scenes. Never-before-seen drama! Hobbyist elitism, revenge, and suspense!
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Hobby drama: the number of days since I last saw someone posting human remains on /r/whatisthisbone is once again zero. Jesus Christ, how does this keep happening?
Every time I look at it and go 'surely not. Surely I'm just seeing what I expect to see because I know more about human bones than animal ones.' And then I see that the post has 200 comments and I know for sure I'm right.
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can you believe they kissed during the finale !?!?! (coping)
#total drama reboot#total drama island#total drama#total drama spoilers#td spoilers#td julia#td mk#mkulia#SO hot take i love mullet julia actually. girl just style it a little and itll look good trust me!!!#i wish that she won but wayne is a hilarious winner. love that guy!#mkulia-wise i loveee that they hugged.. theyre so cute#i am so glad that julia didnt get the bald treatment she doesnt deserve it#god forbid women have hobbies (being evil)#anyway heres to mk and julia kissing next season [raises a glass#i liked this season a lot though :) i hope if any more DO come out theyre good too!#enough ramblin outta me im probably gonna draw these 2 some more
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@incorrectskyrimquotes
#honestly no hate to the person who said this they just didn’t read the room#we’re all out here literally creating entire dramas with these characters as a HOBBY#watch me take an NPC with a single line of dialogue and give him an entire hero’s journey#that’s the fun! that’s the point!#Skyrim#tesblr
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