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flippinwhippen · 10 months

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@clownattack

You already know who this is, so I’m not going to bother and introduce myself.

I’m going to say this one more time and see if it gets through to you, because honestly the spectacle of this last stunt was… well. I always thought the username clownattack was a joke, but you do seem very determined to prove me wrong.

Also you and NJ need to have a genuine conversation, because, might I remind you, she doesn’t like her conversations being posted in public areas. This was a whole conversation that the two of you had, I should know I facilitated it and helped her gather up the courage to tell you her damn feelings on it.

I really don’t give a shit about the rest of what was in that folder. I looked through it, and I’m not sure it’s nearly as damning as you think it is. It’s also, as K would say, cherry picked to hell but that at least I expected.

That is what I’ve come to expect from you.

I mostly just care that you put NJ’s words up somewhere were she doesn’t want them, so take them down. The rest, fine, do what you will. It’s a shitty thing to do, but once again, it would be very onbrand for you to take an argument taken out of context and pass it around for outside parties to look at so… I won’t lie to you and say I’m surprised.

But that’s not what I’ve come here to say.

Here it is, one more time – the thing that I have already said repeatedly to you, the thing you have made sure didn’t surface in any of those DM’s that you have tucked away nice and tidy in your Google Drive Doc.

I never said I was innocent in this, I just said I was hurt, and there is a difference.

So let’s start with what I did, because yes, yes I did do things that I shouldn’t have and I have already made abundantly clear to you I regret.

Yes, I got passive aggressive with you and yes, it wasn’t fair and I should have told you from the beginning you were making me uncomfortable. This was, and remains, my biggest mistake – failing to communicate my feelings in a timely manner before I found myself trapped by circumstance and general anxiety about how everything might crumble if I said something.

Believe it or not, I subscribe pretty heavily to the motto, just let people have fun. The trouble is, when it’s my things they’re having fun with that no longer fully stands. I made a bad assumption here, I assumed that you would know when you’d taken it too far.

I was wrong, because you took it too far so many times. My normal tricks to try and shift the conversation never worked with you, and we’d always end up back where we started and right back in my discomfort zone no matter how many times I did this. Normally, I would have ghosted you a lot earlier, as I tend to do when I am no longer vibing with a conversation, but this wasn’t just a simple one on one chat, this was a server.

A server that you’d built for me… kinda.

And I felt bad, I felt like I owed you for that, cause it was such a nice gesture and so sweet – and so I just kept letting myself get pushed further and further back into discomfort, attempting to keep the conversations civil as my own mental state degraded.

When this finally all blew up, I was not at my best. I was unmedicated, and already stressed due to other circumstances, and all I’d known was you’d been gone from the server for a long time, and when I’d asked N about you were staying away from it to ‘discipline me’, something I took exception to considering the reason I’d wanted to check up on you was because I was worried.

At that point, for all my frustrations with you, I still very much considered you a friend.

Then everything hit the roof. The first conversation we had, me unmedicated, you fresh off the hurt train – it was nothing more than a whole lot of furious words tossed back and forth. Everyone was angry, everyone was stressed, and everyone felt like they had been wronged. I, at that point, was in my full defensive curl, and mostly just needed people to get away from me so I could properly blow up on my own time.

Also, I feel it pertinent to note, that regardless of what you think happened between me and K, K was dedicated to peace on the server. They do not simp for me, they rightfully called out some of my actions as being explosive and my language instigatory.

And on top of the months of stress, and the angry, and the lack of medicine there was so, so much more going on behind the scenes in my own personal life at that point. I don’t know how much N has told you about this year, but I suppose, as you would say, iykyk.

All and all, I could have handled this better and I know that, I never said I handled this perfectly, or hell, even well. This is not something I have a lot of experience in, my writing especially was something that used to be only for myself.

I have years of built up feelings about this, and they are temperamental and unpredictable, and I know that on average I can be a lot more sensitive then some people. It is something that I have had to work through over the years, and will continue to have to work through over the coming ones. I have a lot of attachment to what I make, as do a lot of creators – and it can be hard seeing said characters taken and used in ways I don’t necessarily vibe with.

However, I’ve gotten better about it, even find it amusing and kinda fun – when it’s fans who are doing it. But you were never a fan, and that’s were the main problem lies. You were supposed to be a friend.

Now let’s examine you for a second here. You claim your innocent in all of this, you’re very much not. Obvious, yes – tending towards misunderstanding, very much so. I can safely say that before this argument spiraled into something so pathetically public, you probably were genuinely unaware of your actions and how they affected others.

You were unaware you were hurting me.

Except no, you weren’t were you?

First thing I want to establish out of the gate, we were never best friends. I don’t know why you think this, or where you got this from, but you were always NJ’s best friend, not mine. You were a friend, sure, but you and I had a more casual relationship before you took an ‘interest’ in my fic.

We barely talked, and I mostly just got involved when one drama or another in your life reared it’s ugly head and you needed comforting, and potentially retribution in the form of silly fics featuring your OCs. Sidenote, I have written you a lot of a free work and honesty it is staggering to look back on all the little things I made for you, some of it requested some of it not. It was a fine relationship – you were always a bit much for me. You infodump pretty hard, and I never really felt a spark with you as an online friend. We didn’t vibe, but that was fine, because you and NJ vibed and that’s what I cared about.

You and her had a good relationship, kinda. I’m not going to get into E, that entire thing is on yours and NJ’s plate now – I will not associate myself with that. Needless to say though, I’d known for a long time that E was a bad influence on you, but figured it was your right to pick who you were friends with. So I let it go, and let you live your life.

The K drew a picture, and you were very into it. You started reading my fics, first from the middle, then eventually looping back to the beginning. You were very confused for awhile because you read ahead and you didn’t quite get what was going on. You told me that you wanted to avoid the Dead Dove stuff, and I respected that.

My work is not everyone’s cup of fetid tea.

You did read through them eventually though, and oddly enough you latched onto a rather disgusting example of humanity from them. I was confused, but figured hey, N likes questionable characters, so why not? Along with that, there was a certain understanding that even though it made me uncomfortable to a degree, you were having fun and so I decided that’s okay – N can have fun. She’s not hurting anyone.

And that’s where the real trouble began, right there. Boundaries, and your lack of understanding of them. There are no invisible lines in the sand, but there are instances when someone has been repeatedly made uncomfortable, and the other person just keeps pushing.

For an example, let me bring up the fish videos you have sent me or posted in chats with me on more then one occasion. You have expressed remorse for this, and I’m sure you did feel it, but the fact that it happened more then once after I made it clear that fish hurting was something that I can’t handle due to certain things I saw when I was young makes me think that you did not really register that boundary.

Your drawings made me uncomfortable from the get go, but they were also pretty funny sometimes, and also I saw no real reason to start snipping at you for something like that. I figured I was being petty, and had this notion that if it just stayed at this level, everything would be fine. I could live with a little discomfort, that was fine, it wasn’t as though you knew what you were doing.

I even made you a couple AU fics, just because I saw how much you were enjoying all of it. I was happy that you were having fun, which is why in the beginning I encouraged it. However as time went on, things began to get harder.

You claim I don’t like Rowan because I’m biphobic, which would be a very weird thing to be because I do happen to be bi as you well know. I didn’t like your OC for a multitude of reasons, but in the end the plain in simple fact is I was never obligated to like your OC. You flung her into the chat, and then you never stopped talking about her – inserting her places where she wasn’t wanted.

And in the beginning, I did try to be encouraging, I did. I never liked her, but you were having fun with her so once more I gritted me teeth and went along with it. It was around now though that I began to bitch a little bit to NJ. Trouble was, I fake bitch all the time, and she didn’t realize I was actually growing upset until it was far too late.

This is the part where you failed to understand boundaries. You’d hit me with text wall after text wall of questions, most of them about world building, or characters that I didn’t care about. You were curious in a bunch of elements of the world that I hadn’t really bothered to think about and for a time I tried to keep up with you.

But as your character began to expand, her backstory actively colliding with several parts of my world, it felt more like you wanted to do your own thing then actually build something within the story I’d created. Which would have been fine, had you not been a friend, and actively in my DM’s both day and night.

It was not something I wanted to see.

I was always more friendly with K, you are correct about that. It’s plain and simple, I liked K more. I liked K’s ideas more, I liked their stories more, I liked their characters more. K made and effort to fit into my worlds boundaries and when they broke one there was always a reason for it.

They let loose their own established characters whose world building directly conflicted with mine, and it was funny to watch the sparks fly off of it. We were having fun with one another, and I enjoyed conversations with them.

I did not enjoy conversations with you, a delude of questions, songs and memes that always made me wonder just what fic you were reading. Because whatever it was you were reading, it couldn’t have been mine. The ideas you were taking away from it were so alien to me, I didn’t recognize them as my own half the time.

I began to pull away from you, to ghost you. I spent more and more time with K because talking to them was actually enjoyable, and from my perspective I figured there was no real harm in it. After all, you were NJ’s friend, not mine. You and her had had a dialogue going for over two years, you were buddies.

I was just a supplemental friend, and was comfortable in that position. For me, the server was broken up into two groups – Me and K, and you and NJ. We were all friends, but we were mostly friends with one another, and that only became truer as your fanart became more and more based strictly around your OC and her actions, and less around anything that really related to me.

So I started to simply interact with K, because I wanted to enjoy my life. We were having fun, a fun that would end up later causing drama of a different sort, but something that I will firmly state here has nothing to do with you. It has to do with me and NJ, it is our relationship after all – and on a side note, I do not appreciate the fact you seem to think it is okay to insert yourself into it the way you have.

I understand that friends complain to one another, that is what friends are for – but you need to keep that shit to yourself. Those were NJ’s thoughts that were meant to be shared with just you, and you don’t have any right to go parading them around like you did earlier.

You were getting quieter, which quite frankly was a relief to me. I wasn’t so stressed out anymore, I figured you and NJ were off doing your own things, or you’d gotten distracted by something else. I checked up sometimes, answered when I could stomach it, but at that point the discomfort had grown to a boiling point.

I was unhappy, uncomfortable, and felt that my boundaries had been very thoroughly violated. However, I didn’t have the words then to say that – wasn’t even fully sure what I should be feeling. It was simply too much. You had continued on for ages, even as my responses grew more scattered, even as you saw me pulling away.

And here’s where I really begin to take issue with some of your actions. You clearly knew that I was pulling away, trying to get away, but you never asked me why. You simply asked to see K and my Rp logs – you expressed curiosity in them that I in no way wanted to entertain at that point and would find out later you had no real interest in.

Just another way to try and grab my attention.

I was anxious, sickeningly anxious actually about what you might do with those logs, as it turned out I should have been though that came later. I didn’t want K to upload them, but that’s not what I told them.

I told them to go ahead and decide, and they, oblivious to the situation happily uploaded them. It was somewhat of a relief when you didn’t seem to have any real interest in the rp logs, though left me confused as to why you’d want to see them anyways.

Back and forth and back and forth, answers slowly petering out to questions posed to me. I mostly just popped on to upload new chapters, chapters I feel the need to say that I was giving you, NJ and K exclusive access to. I didn’t have to do that, but I was sharing it with the group of you for fun – so we could go over them before they were released to the public.

So you could all go wild in the Thunderdome

At this point, there were many things that could have happened. An earnest conversation maybe about boundaries and how I was feeling, or just a dialogue opened between the pair of us. I felt my hands were tied, and I couldn’t open said dialogue, so regardless of whether it was fair or not, it would have fallen on you to open it.

Not that I necessarily think an open dialogue would have saved any of this, not after everything you’ve said and done now.

Finally, after a long span of silence, we got into it on the server. You changed the name to something that directly insulted something of mine and I left. It hadn’t been a good time, N and I were I believe fighting at that point – though I can’t quite remember. No one was happy, K had been in a bad way, and everyone was just trying to get things back on the up and steady.

I left the server, and I genuinely had no intention of ever coming back to it. It had become such a toxic brew of emotions for me at that point that I couldn’t stand it. And still, even at this point, as frustrated as I had assumed somewhere deep down that this was all something as simple as a little misunderstanding.

Then we talked, and I learned that was not the case.

I still don’t fully understand your view on creative freedom I guess. It seems you firmly back the stance of creativity is good, and freedom is good, no matter what it creates and who it hurts when it’s created? That was all I ever got from our conversations at least. The funny part was, that even during that first, off the rails, unmedicated conversation I was still worried about you.

I didn’t want you to feel like your headcannons or Au’s were something you had to hide from the world at large, but I needed to communicate they were something you couldn’t share with me. I didn’t like them, and they were stressing me out.

But I was also so mad, and so tired, and felt so backed into a corner at this point. All I wanted to do was run, and not just from you, but from everything. I did run, a pathetic little trot outside into the blazing heat without shoes so I could hide without my phone away from everyone. It felt wretched and exhausting, and far worse was that people eventually came to find me.

After the first freakout, our conversation ended a bit more smoothly, though there was no real resolution that was reached. Neither of us were happy with the other, though there was the hope, at least for me, that maybe after I’d had some time to cool off and things didn’t hurt quite as much I could possibly try this all again.

A month later, I got my answer. I case you missed it, that message I sent you when I got back wasn’t supposed to be inciting a war. It was supposed to be ending one. I had thought it over, and decided that I simply wasn’t ever going to be comfortable seeing your interpretations of my world again, and figured that it was easier if I just stayed back from the server for the rest of its existence. This here, was my attempt at getting things back to normal.

Bury it was my recommendation. You got hurt, I got hurt so we should just leave it and not speak on it. We could be more hands off, I even sent you a gift, in an effort to try and smooth things over a little bit. A sort of, I’m still upset, but let’s try and make things work.

It was then that you went nuclear. I do not have the conversation anymore, and I do not feel like unblocking you on discord to find it. It was a little like being back with you on the server, you called me all the names under the sun, insisted I was a narssict and furiously rebuffed any efforts I made to rebuild the bridge.

And eventually, I gave up and just started shouting back. At a certain point I realized that this should be the last conversation the pair of us ever had, and realistically it should have been. A lot of nasty words were exchanged, though you had an amazing amount of venom to spew. You have some of these words in your text document that you published – but you’ve chopped it up.

You’ve left only the ending notes, and you’ve stripped it of all meaning and repurposed it kind of like what you did with my characters. It seems that that’s just how you do things, and once more I find that it is kind of hard to be surprised.

That fight caused a lot of things to happen, things that I will not put here on a public site. You do not have the right to know, and I refuse to arm you with the knowledge of just how much power you had over me with those last few barbs, even if I have shaken off the worst of it by now.

I have never, after all, had a friend turn on me quite the way you turned on me. Arguments, disagreements, petty fights, yes… but this was something else. NJ and I continued to fight, as you are aware, our relationship is less stable than it could be. That is neither here nor there, and I will repeat in case you missed it the first time.

Stop trying to insert yourself into our relationship, maybe focus on your own.

I blocked you on discord, but the damage was thoroughly done. Because, NJ still decided you were her best friend, and I didn’t feel like I had any right to say otherwise. This conflict was between you and me after all, and who was I to tell her who she could and couldn’t be friends with?

Along with that, her and I were already fighting as you are aware – boundaries had been crossed without being recognized, and in doing so a whole stewpot of problems had been uncovered. Our relationship was on the rocks, and it still is if I’m fully honest. I was angry with her, she was angry with me.

The point here, is I left you alone. I did not drag you publicly, kept my frustration locked within the circle that it had spawned in. I considered it classless to have a meltdown in front of the internet, and also possibly damaging to both our reputations.

You are, after all, a highly talented artist who I have no doubt will go on to do some amazing things once you graduate, and I am an author with a small internet fanbase. I figured that at least we both had the understanding that we’d leave each other alone and simply complain about one another to the respective parties.

Then I saw your edit.

I forgot what compelled me to look it up – I’ve never been all that good at letting go though. My mind still saw you as a friend somewhat, and as stupid as that was I was curious to look back on memories, see what you were up to.

That incredibly stupid thought was quickly removed simply by going to your main account. The gripe that I owed you money, that was fair. I did not deliver you the commission you paid for, and I did need to give you that money back. I’d actually tried before, but I still maintain that the link was broken, or maybe my phone and computer just didn’t like it.

Needless to say, at this point you were no longer a friend. I snapped back at you, not bothering to be nice now and demanded your KoFi. You told me you’d never taken it down, and it turns out you hadn’t. I left a salty little note for you, and sent you your money back both extra for all money sent before, and then we spat venom at each other for a little bit.

Then I realized that you’d been vagueposting about me more then I thought, accept the vagueposting wasn’t vague at all. My username was in it. I didn’t really know what to feel at that point, just tired as I scrolled through rambling assumptions about who I was as a person. It felt bad of course, seeing all these horrible things you thought about me, but honestly what could I do?

I complained to NJ and she told you to take the username off, and stop posting on tumblr. She did this several times, which is very telling as far as I’m concerned. You get presented with a boundary, and you heed it for a while, before you decide it is once more time to cross it. You have, after all, posted more stuff up on tumblr, though at this point you’ve done far worse then that.

For my own sanity, I forced myself not to go and lurk. I knew what I’d see would upset me, and while comparing a trans person to JK Rowling is quite tasteless, it was the fact that you were still using my characters while you were doing this that really got me.

On one hand, you describe the author as emotionally disturbed, and horrible, and a narssict. On the other hand, you still tag my characters in your posts. You willfully interacted with my content, but at the same time smeared my character.

So I just left, and K should have done the same though they were deeply affronted by all the things they’d witnessed. They were never lurking on you tumblr you see, they still followed you – that’s why it kept popping up in their feed. Because before you started going ballistic on them, they were under the assumption this fight was between you and me.

K had after all attempted to play peacemaker while in the chat, had attempted to mend bridges and salvage a friendship they thought was salvageable. They were hurt and furious when they saw that now that NJ had told you not to aim your venom at me, you were aiming it at them.

In the end, instead of responding, they did the right thing and just blocked you. I figured that finally, finally we’d come to the end of it. Both K and I were prepared in case we got any random commenters wandering him with misinformation you’d given them, but we figured we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

And then E, your very own E showed up on my user page, harassing one of my commentors with this long winded ill informed bullshit. I wasn’t that stunned to see them, I’d recently restricted all of my posts, wondering if they are you would turn up there eventually. I didn’t want to write for you after all, didn’t want you seeing my creative works.

At this point, I didn’t want you near anything I’d made – even though realistically I knew that this was an unreasonable expectation seeing as how the internet was. K also came to snap, and then I left it there, not caring to touch it anymore.

Then you showed up, and so went any last shred of respect I had for you. I woke up to a message from K, telling me that I better get over to my page. I did, what do you know, N has made a new account, and also linked to a google drive, all smack dab in the middle of my public page.

I of course delete all of it and turn on comment moderation – I had no desire for that drama to go any more public than it already has gotten on that site. I also blocked you, though no surprise there, you no doubt saw that coming.

So let’s review the facts:

We had a fight in which neither of us were fully innocent, and both of us did damage. I hurt you, you hurt me, we were both angry.

We split ways under fiery circumstances, nobody left the conversation satisfied with how it ended but that’s life.

You continued to post about me on tumblr, continued to wrap my user name up in things along with threats to spill the beans on me, to spill the receipts on a server that only you have access to now. A server you can very easily cherry pick from.

When NJ tells you to knock it off, you switch your posting over to K, the other person in the situation.

When K blocks you, you send E to my page and have them post a long-winded vague post about how I am petty, and shallow and essentially the worst.

When I block E, you come yourself, along with a Google Drive of carefully curated conversations that you’d been creating since October, long past when this conflict was supposed to have boiled out and grown tepid.

Summary: No one is attacking you N, you are attacking me and K, repeatedly. You are not some poor sad victim here, at this point you are truly and fully the instigator. Everyone else doesn’t want anything more to do with this, we did the adult thing and left – we accepted that some situations cannot be saved and just walked away.

Ask yourself this, what do you hope to gain from this? Do you want the world to see that me as the horrible person you see me as? Is that your end goal? Or is your goal just to continuously to scream at me till the end of days? Because I’ve already said my peace here, I really have. I hate you at this point, and I’ll never not hate you – you’ve just done too much damage.

And even with all this, and honestly I hate myself for it but I feel the need to repeat it one more time just so you hear it.

I am sorry for my part in this, and for what I did that hurt you. I never meant to make you feel horrible about yourself, or your work, or any of that – I never meant to make you feel abandoned. I figured we had an understanding that we did not. You are a talented artist N, I’ve always maintained that.

But as a person N, you have proven to be a real piece of fucking work.

So just fuck off already.

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