#hstwt 2019

[dirkification]

So it's not that this exact discourse feels like hstwt 2019 all over again, but the vibes feel the same

Something bad happens to one or more popular trans fems and part of the wide outcry is to harness the increasing radfem hatred of queer men/mascs to have a marginalized scapegoat for transmisogyny

I can't go through this again y'all

Not on top of the irl stuff I'm dealing with

I'm blocking and unfollowing left and right to stop seeing it so sorry if any of y'all are caught in the crossfire

I can't sit here and watch my identity be blamed for the harm fellow trans people face and be mocked and derided as cringe and unimportant and unserious and whiny

Fellow queer people are not our opressors but individuals can be real fucking shitty to each other anyway, epsecially if radfem rhetoric is poisoning the well

[sociallyanxiousdragon]

omg you were in hstwt in 2019…. you Also witnessed The Horrors…. dude that’s crazy I always feel like everyone in homestuck fandom now just ignores that that all happened 😨 anyways cool to find another old homestuck twitter user in the wild. good day to ya

God I was *deep* in hstwt 2019 lol I guested on Kate's podcast (: (it did not go well is what I'm saying lol)

People do seem to ignore it, or just not know! There are some people who joined in 2020 who still Don't Get It it's wild. Sometimes I feel like an old man on a porch making his grandkids listen to war stories lol

Yes! Always nice to meet someone from The Horrors! Misery loves company and whatnot XD

Good day to you too!

[strawbnetwork]

homestuck toblerone discourse is what really did it for me in terms of "online queer discourse is quite frankly Never worth getting into"

[homestuckshipcesttournament]

Hey, why are you so against June? That feels pretty transphobic. People are allowed to have their own headcanons and use headcanoned names and pronouns for characters, you know, and not only is June a common headcanon, she's confirmed canon?

Oh buddy

Oh buddy buddy buddy

I don't want to get into the discourse on here more than absolutely necessary

But for one thing: I don't mind when people post content about June. I mind when people tag posts about John as June.

For two, anything after the og comic ended isn't real canon. It's all optional. Hussie and WP have said it.

For three, coming up to someone to suggest they're transphobic for not liking June is *so* 2019 and let me tell you I was on the front lines of that particular battlefield so I ain't having none of that here

If you want to learn more, you can ask me on @dirkification or go through my tags "June critical" or "hstwt 2019" or "hstwt discourse"

EDIT: Now updated with links to said tags

[darcyolsson]

i know how this might come across as like, gatekeep-y or whatever, but do you ever miss the days before heartstopper/alice got so popular? like obviously i’m so so glad more people are finding this story and are able to see themselves in the characters, but it’s still bittersweet at the same time. for example, i’m on hstwt (which is an honest to god mess every other day i’m so serious) and i kind of wish i could go back when it was maybe 50 people all just obsessing over stories that made us feel something

at risk of also sounding gatekeep-y, sometimes!

i think it's hard to put it into words exacly but i know exactly what you mean. i think i miss the sense of community that small fanbases have- virtually everyone who read heartstopper knew each other back in the day so the general feel was very respectful and kind to each other. the fact that you both knew this tiny obscure webcomic on tumblr was enough to connect you. right now, the group of people who like heartstopper is so huge it doesn't really mean anything to like heartstopper anymore in the same way it did before.

in general, the way fans behave is just very very different when a fanbase is as huge as heartstopper's. i think the best way to describe it is that back when it was impossible to post about heartstopper without alice herself seeing it, and people knew this, and acted accordingly. people don't act like this anymore. (imo, it wasn't the show that caused this though, it was a gradual change after the traditional publishing that became very noticable around 2019-2020). in general, reading a story on it's own vs reading it as the creation of someone you at least somewhat know via tumblr is very different.

i think it always feels this way when you like things before they blow up, it IS very bittersweet!! i don't think this is shunning new fans as much as it is missing an old dynamic you once had. it's like when you miss an old friendship that doesn't mean you loathe their new friends, it just means you miss that old friend.

in general i'm very very glad heartstopper is getting the recognition it deserves (and with that her books!!! loveless getting the attention it deserves at last has literally added 45 years to my lifespan!!!) but seeing something that was once so very personal to me be shared with literal millions of people will never not be odd i think :')

[voidcoretxt]

going back in time to stop myself from going on hstwt in 2019

[alienssstufff]

The Trollsona Clownsona,,,

[ 2018 - 2019 ]

Jumped on the old hstwt bandwagon and made a clownsona / trollsona as well ><

not very creative near exact same occupation as my regular trollsona except they run an underground thrift market in the sewers BPPP

last is a trickster design for her - her design is inspired by grape fanta whilst my normal trollsona if they ever got a trickster design [they didnt] wouldve been inspired by coke [all bloodswaps of my trollsona in my mind would be inspired by different soda flavours - i like soda uvu]

[dirkification]

I feel like I've written this exact post before but I don't think that people who weren't there get that like

John disappeared overnight

Once it was clear that June was the "superior" hc and people started getting made fun of for preferring John, right before harassment became the more common reaction, people stopped posting about John

A lot of the times he got replaced with June but a lot of people just stopped drawing or talking about Egbert entirely, even or maybe especially the John centric accounts

And after that, after we accepted that John was socially unacceptable to discuss unless it was specifically under a June lens or why he sucked compared to June or how dumb trans masc John fans were, that's when the harassment really took hold. Not that it was the only reason, just helped

People were afraid of being blacklisted as commissioners or merch sellers if they posted any John

He got fucking wiped from "mainstream" Homestuck Twitter

And it was primarily out of fear

It's so frustrating that no one gets that, they just think since June was "made canon", it was only natural we switched (even though this happened months before that Hussie tweet) when you can clearly look at how people treat Roxy and see that's not true

Even shortly after the Epilogues, you could still see trans fem and cis Roxy right alongside trans masc Roxy (I am told there were places where this was not the case, where it was trans masc Roxy or bust, but this is from my experience in the part of Twitter where WP and bnfs primarily hung out). Fem Roxy did not disappear. No one was afraid to post fem Roxy even though trans masc Roxy appeared in the actual text of Beyond Canon and June, as of this writing, has still only existed in a tweet.

I guess this is just another vent post about almost 5 year old fandom bullshit. I just wish more people remembered or understood what it was like back then and how it shaped current fandom

[dirkification]

I talk about this a lot, but I really think it's hard to imagine what a section of huge Dirk fans were going through when the Epilogues dropped

One of our favorite characters comitted suicide in one half of the Epilogues. This was not something that happened off screen. It was not implied. It was described in extreme detail. And, because he didn't come back like he should as a god tier, on some level Sburb or he himself decided it was a Just death. (I feel arguing for it being heroic just gets into the same loop as it being Just -- it's an ouroborus. He is Heroic for dying to stop himself from existing. His death is Just.)

In the other side of the Epilogues, he portrays himself as a villain, and does shitty things as a result, some of which for his end goal to keep he and his friends Relavent to the narrative, and some just petty shit. Importantly, though, he outright states he would never kill any of his friends.

Then we went on Twitter to talk about the Epilogues and what do we see? People saying it's good Dirk killed himself. It's our own fault for being triggered because suicide was tagged at the beginning. That they hope someone kills the Meat version of him. Making fun of Dirk fans themselves, which quickly got into transandrophobic, biphobic, and homophobic territory. Very very few people outside of big Dirk fans took our reactions to Dirk's suicide seriously, saying we saw him decapitated multiple times in the comic, so how is this different? Why are we so affected? Don't we get Dirk's bad anyway? Even making fun of Dirk for dying rather than not existing in the Meat!Epilogue, like he did it as a tantrum for not getting his way.

Maybe there were smaller circles that didn't act like this, but I was in the main section of the Homestuck Twitter fandom when this dropped. I followed all the bnfs and the WP staff and contractors. And this is what was there.

To be clear: I'm not saying the writers shouldn't have written this. I think their excuse that it was tagged is shitty, and they should just own up to not having any real warnings on this content because Homestuck didn't have warnings on its content. This is all about everything that happened in the community, and how it helped set the tone for what it would devolve into.

You thought the occasional vaguely biphobic/transandrophobic/etc. posts were bad? Now we get to hurt trans mascs and "boy likers" through the lens of hating on Dirk. Now we get to not care about your suffering (in general) because you're sad about Dirk (a "misogynistic" fictional character).

This was originally just going to be about how it sucked that our negative reaction to a graphic suicide was treated as a joke by the fandom but so much of the fandom at the time just boils down to how much it was drowning in TIRF bullshit in the end.

[dirkification]

June really could have been a happy, cool thing, you know? There would be discourse, there always is, but she could have been a thing that, years down the line, the discourse faded and didn't have a huge lasting impact on the fandom

Instead, bad actors and people who drank the radfem Kool aid turned it into a terrible thing that ripped the fandom apart for *years*, ousting and alienating trans mascs, other queer men, and queer people attracted to men, especially if they put a toe out of line

June could have been great

It's kinda tragic reakly

[dirkification]

Okay listen

Here's why the majority of What Pumpkin fucking sucked and I don't know why I constantly have a hard time figuring out how to explain this:

They got into fandom fights

Not just discussions, not just clarifying something, not just talking about things they directly contributed to or only theorizing about things they *didn't* contribute to

They got into full blown dog piling fights about anything and everything

Not every single one of them and not about every single thing

But imagine if one of the writers for your favorite TV show qrt'd you to call you a dumbass or maybe even some flavor of bigot because you posted some meta to your fifty followers the writer disagreed with

What if you had a mild take about an ongoing controversy that led to dozens of people mocking you and calling you a piece of shit and oh look at that one of them is the lead artist for the thing

Alternatively maybe you haven't posted anything in a while but suddenly you get hate or ghosted out of nowhere and manage to find out you got shit talked in a discord server by some of the staff or, hell, maybe just *in front of* them and they agreed

Maybe this shit is already common and I just don't pay enough attention but the most I know about is Bryan Fuller posting some proship stuff on Twitter but I don't think he's ever dunked on specific accounts? Could be wrong

It was such a wild time to worry about what you post because you might check Twitter and find out the people creating your favorite thing hate you, yes you, personally, by name

[dirkification]

Follow up to previous post about homestuck twitter 2019

Tags from @mylifeas-iseeit from THIS post about the anxiety felt in hstwt2019 homestuck fandom especially around Egbert

#damn i didnt even know this happened#i thought june was a completely separate character from hiveswap#the only thing i know about this era is that kate person who was a shitty transandrophobe and harrassing/shitting on fans#idk if she was also a part of thr what pumpkin staff op has talked about in other posts on this subject#but god thats shitty

Reaching out and deciding to follow up:

I think I will begin by adding context to a post I made on Medium detailing my experiences with transandophobia in the fandom at the time. You might want to read it first, but that's up to you.

What's important to note, is while I will be adding names, this is not meant as a callout post. I'm not trying to list sins, I'm trying to talk about what happened from my personal perspective.

This is fucking long and I'm not even done with the first point as of typing this so under a cut it goes lol

Also heads up: There are screenshots in here I do not have the energy to caption right now. I'll try to do it in the future, and feel free to poke me to do it more quickly.

First:

A few disclaimers: Because of the nature of Twitter, I have little to no receipts of what happened as of this posting. Ideally I would have images of or links to tweets or discord chats or anything else, but I know at least one person I will be referencing mass deleted their tweets on a regular basis. 

That's Kate Mitchell. I don't know why I bother being vague about her so much, since she's infamous enough even to people who weren't around at the time.

Okay, well, I do know. I'm still afraid. And I don't mean to build her up as some big scary evil trans fem, but as many of you know, she was responsible for a lot of harassment, and a lot of my harrassment specifically.

But also she is a trans fem on the internet and was Known before she got big in the Homestuck fandom (she was a team manager of some Overwatch League -- you can google it, I don't know enough about esports to explain, but suffice to say, she left that community with some bad accusations there as well). As such, she had her own page or thread or whatever on kiwifarms, and people used that thread of "evidence" against her when trying to criticize her.

Note: Do not fucking do that. I don't care what a queer person has done, never trust much less spread "evidence" you find on kiwifarms. They're lying transphobic assholes to put it mildly. If anything on any of those threads are true, you'll find it elsewhere. There's a reason Kate supporters called her critics "useful idiots" (outside of just wanting to call us idiots and then laugh because we didn't understand what the term meant in some real "I'm more woke/educated/better than you bullshit"). (From Wikipedia: In political jargon, a useful idiot is a term currently used to reference a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause—particularly a bad cause originating from a devious, ruthless source—without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically being used by the cause's leaders.[1][2] The term was often used during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation.[1])

In a similar vein, I've seen some of the callout posts and image receipts made for Kate and I just can't sign off on most of them. Some of them lack context, some of them are fearmongering about fictional content, some of them aren't actually that serious but treated as just as bad as everything else. At the same time, I'd be a hypocrit if I didn't mention that I used to agree with some of those points and it took many discussions and personal growth to figure my shit out. (What is funny to me personally, is at least one features Kate being an ass to one of my trans fem friends, so I do that point at screen meme each time I see it. If you see an icon of Ardata with a clown nose, that's my friend.)

This is all to say: I have complicated feelings about talking about Kate publicly. My dislike of her has gotten me accused of transmisogyny, and I do my absolute best to check my feelings and biases before I say anything to avoid perpetuating any transmisogyny. However, it was also often used as a bludgeon to prevent people from talking about their experiences, whether or not they were also trans fem. My problem with Kate is that she was a bully, and one of the tools she used was her identity as a trans lesbian. That does not say anything about any other trans lesbian or the concept of being a trans lesbian. Just her.

You see? Paragraphs of me making sure everyone knows where I come from with Kate. It's important, but the fear of being misinterpreted has made it hard for me to name her specifically. As recently as a year or two ago, I had an ex-friend accuse me of "still crying about a trans woman disagreeing with [me] on a podcast" (paraphrased) when I vague posted about it. The fear is not unfounded.

This is all to say -- Kate was known to mass delete her tweets, even before she left Twitter for good. I only have one or two tweets of hers saved (the one I'm certain about is in the Medium post, so I'll get to it).

Kate was not the only one who deleted Tweets, as documented by Homestuck.net (which is a great resource for Homestuck archival stuff, despite the discourse surrounding it (which I might get into on another post down the road)).

@andrewhussie: Andrew Hussie’s personal twitter, historically used to troll people and directly communicate with the fanbase. Deleted all tweets in 2022, before that the last activity was in late 2021.

Last activity: November 6, 2022, all tweets deleted.

@d-clussie.tumblr: Formerly @mspandrew, this is Andrew Hussie’s personal tumblr, nigh identical in use to his Twitter. Deleted all posts in 2022, before that the last activity was in early 2021.

Last activity: November 27, 2022, all posts deleted.

No WP staff's accounts are included in this, so I don't know who all deleted all their content or large sections of it, but it wasn't rare.

Moving on...

-------

I link a twitter thread of mine that is my immediate reaction to the Toblerone June "canonization"

This, I think, is what got me on Kate and Aysha's radars (I think it was this thread or a similar one that got quote retweeted to Aysha's locked twitter and then got noticed by Kate, putting me more on her radar) outside of "another Homestuck podcaster rubbing elbows with people we know better." This is the tweet that leads to the most uncomfortable and ultimately traumatic podcast interview of my life (I say as though I have guested on more than that podcast lmao). I can dig more into it later.

Shoving this here, as I'm writing this and have mentioned Aysha several times (down below) but have not figured out a good place to talk about who she is. Also I'm not sure if her pronouns are she/her or they/them. I think people refer to her using she/her, so that's what I will do, and I'll correct it if I find out I'm wrong.

Aysha is the lead writer at What Pumpkin. She wrote several volumes of Friendsim, helped with the Epilogues, wrote for and has her own self insert in Pesterquest, co-founded Snake Solutions with Kate, etc. You can look up all her contributions pretty easily. She is often considered "one of the good ones" at WP, but she was just better at keeping things on the down low until the whole Sarah Z/Gio situation, which I'll link to later. Probably in a reblog or at the very end.

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“Sorry, transmascs, you have to deal with June being canon the same way we have to deal with transmasc Roxy being canon, get used to it,” was about the kindest sentiment bnfs and hardcore June-stans had about the announcement.

This is almost word for word a tweet Kate made, in one of her "kinder" moments. Again, no receipts. Maybe someone has it out there somewhere, but I think if anyone had been diligently archiving Kate's tweets, we would have seen more of them by now.

---------

 I was personally publicly ridiculed on an “unofficial” Homestuck podcast (that regularly had WP staff on it and even got an exclusive statement from Hussie to be read aloud on it) as a “June skeptic” simply for not having anything to add when the topic turned to transfem readings for Egbert in the comic and my previous twitter statements about not being a huge fan of Toblerone canon (my Twitter thread about it below).

That podcast was Perfectly Generic Podcast. It was created and run by Kate, and, from my understanding, launched her popularity. I'm not sure if she already had connections, because she was able to get What Pumpkin staff on pretty early on. As such, a lot of people listened to it.

I go into depth on how I got on the podcast and my feelings about it in the linked thread, but I'd like to add a little more.

I was kind of frozen once the episode ended. That was... fine, right? I tried to justify it to myself. It wasn't until my friend (the one whose favor got me on the podcast) talked to me and, after I was kinda weird about it, mentioned they felt weird about it, did I realize how terrible I felt. I had been given the file to upload onto my own feed since it was a crossover, but I never uploaded it. The episode is still out there, along with a transcript, if anyone cares to search it out, but I'm not going to link it.

More people came forward admitting it was an uncomfortable episode. I blocked Kate and kind of... shut down? I still had episodes to record and publish, and I didn't publicly talk about my feelings until the linked thread months later.

Speaking of the block:

So the above is from one of Kate's locked accounts. I was (obviously) not privvy to this one, and thus I've been hesitant to post it. But it's been years, and I'm tired of sitting on shit that was shown to me and made me feel worse about everything without being able to provide the context. None of y'all know how I got this screenshot, anyway. Also, it's clear that before I blocked her (or before she noticed) she had been saying some shit about me. (I ended up having someone tell her to keep the money.)

One of my friends vagued about the episode on my behalf, and Kate, in turn, also vague posted about it on main.

In the line of sharing screenshots that were from places I didn't have access to, but none of y'all know who shared them with me... "Jax Does Homestuck" is the old name for my podcast "Live Laugh Stuck." This was the episode that came out after my episode on PGenPod. I'm blacking out the people I don't know are for sure part of WP staff or otherwise someone to naturally come up in this discussion

Note: I had not said anything publicly about this until January, and these posts are from October.

Christ

This got a lot more in depth on my personal traumas around this than I initially intended, but here we are.

And yes, I'm sticking with calling them traumas. I have psychiatric permission and everything, if that even matters. I don't know if I'll touch on this again elsewhere in this post, but in case I don't, I guess I want to end this section saying that this whole thing caused me to lose friends, before I even started accepting and opening up about "proship" views, which lost me more. I was invited to then wordlessly kicked out of a Dirkkat zine because I got on Kate's bad side, and attracted the ire of others in her circle like Dani/lalonders, who might be mentioned later. I don't know. This is already so long and I don't think they get vagued in my Medium post and one of the things I want to bring up in regards to them is antisemitism which I simply don't feel qualified to do off the cuff, as a white gentile.

Continuing on

--------

I also think it’s important to note that around this time, most if not all bnfs were now associated with WP either on a contract basis (like writing one or more routes for Pesterquest) or new employees, even the ones causing the most visible and purposeful harassment in the fandom.

Kate started out as a bnf (big name fan) and got hired on as a writer for Pesterquest, then for Homestuck 2, and I think just as official staff? I don't know how What Pumpkin staffing worked. She also co-founded a company, Snake Solutions, with Aysha. Honestly, I can't remember everyone else who turned from bnf to official staff or contracter for PQ. There were several. Sarah Zedig. Pip? Greiver? KC? Dani was a big one (how I first heard about it pictured below), but I don't think this ended up amounting to anything. Could be wrong.

As I mentioned before, I feel ill-equipped to go into depth on them. The most I can say is they rivaled Kate in both popularity and shittiness and, in my opinion, were often used as a shield against transandrophobic/racist criticisms, since they're a black trans masc (correct me if I'm wrong about their specific identity), and the main target for Kate and co's harrassment was a black trans masc. If you know who I'm referencing, you know, but as of now I think I'll stick to vague references for them.

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Vriska: I have one million and three problems with Vriska’s route, but keeping on the topic of trans rep and discourse from Pesterquest, Vriska is very heavily coded as a trans girl. Or, at least, she is if you know anything about who wrote her or any of the discourse surrounding Vriska at the time.

Kate wrote Vriska's PQ route. Hussie was going to, but she convinced them to let her do it. This is also I think Kate's first official work for WP. Just for like, idk, timeline context? lol

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It being said that it’s fine to change canon bisexuals to lesbians because there are so many bisexuals in homestuck that it doesn’t matter if you take some away. .... (I don’t have the referenced tweet, unfortuantely, but here’s a similar one, which may seem innocuous but is coming from a person who had harassed people for hc’ing a character with no canon sexuality bi instead of a lesbian)

The tweet I included had the name blacked out, but it was Kate.

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This was also Kate.

Bnfs, some of which, as I mentioned, later became WP staff and kept saying these same things, often said things like “It’s lesbophobic and transmisogynistic to expect a trans lesbian to be nice about men or include men in what we do” setting aside the fact that said people actively harassed trans mascs and “boy likers”, encouraged other people to do the same, and also were, as I said, bnfs and later WP staff who had a lot of influence over the fandom. There’s a difference between prioritizing trans lesbians and actively shitting on trans mascs and “boy likers” to your thousands of followers.

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Okay and now I just have some other screenshots I dug up that I don't know what to do with so they're going to go here and I am going to talk about them in whatever order I happened to put them in lol

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This tweet references Kate qrt'ing and mass harassing a black, newly turned 18, trans girl, who made a post on her twitter account with a tiny following that got maybe a handful of notes about racism she saw in Vast Error. Kate was, I think, the lead writer on Vast Error's visual novel, Snowbound Blood. A huge problem with VE is, at least back then, every fucking ounce of criticism would be found by the creator (I forgot his name tbh) and commented on, usually argued with. It's a big reason why I could never get into it.

The person in question also denies ban evading, and even then, it's not an excuse to put an extremely vulnerable person on blast for the crime of criticizing Vast Error.

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The formatting on this one is weird, but I had to get screenshots of the thread because I could only see the linked tweet in discord. Anyway, this is how seriously people treated June. She wasn't just a cool interpretation of a character. How you felt about her was directly linked to how much you cared about trans fems.

Also like, I doubt it was intentional, but the "14 characters" message is, at the very least a terrible coincidence, as references to "14 words" is a white supremecist dog whistle.

-------

This was in response to people saying "Hey maybe people hired by WP who talk about working for WP shouldn't be using their platforms to harass fans."

It was a popular sentiment at the time. Still is, probably.

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This.... Where do I start...

This is the thread that shared it

It's a "leaked" thread from one of Kate's private twitters. Why do I say "leaked"? Because I personally feel Kate was fucking mad that people enjoyed Trace's Tavros route, which had a better Vriska than what she wrote (in my, and others' opinions). You can see the discord message in question is from months prior, but only got released after Tavros's route came out, and I know she vented about it before then. Also, this private twitter, basically anyone could request to join. I followed it for a little while! But "leaking" it was another excuse to target a previously mentioned black trans masc fan, blaming them for the leak with no proof.

This is not me defending Trace. I don't know shit about him. I don't know if this was a one-off comment taken out of context, or proof of repeated violations. I just know Kate and the discourse she approved of benefited from this being leaked. This one is probably the most speculation vs actual fact I have here, so I guess fitting that it's last.

Anyway. Might reblog with the Gio links for context for Kickstarter/Sarah Z/Aysha shit, but other than that, let me know if there's stuff you want to be expanded on or other shit you want to know!

And thank you if anyone actually gets through all of this lmao

[dirkification]

I don't know why it's taken me so long to find a better way to think/talk about this

But June isn't upsetting to me because I hate trans fem Egbert

June is upsetting to me because people who didn't think or behave like the bnfs wanted you to, especially queer mascs/people attracted to men, hit you with metaphorical hammers with June taped on it

And then you feel like an idiot for getting upset over a fictional head canon and then you get hit with the "you're clearly a transmisogynist lesbophobe" metaphorical hammer with June taped on that too

It wasn't about trans fem Egbert it was a fucking pavlovian response -- June talk means someone is going to shit talk my Identity. June talk means I'm going to get harassed. June talk means I have to shut up and keep my head down

Anyway I have another therapy appt here in a few so maybe this framing will help explain it

Having to explain online fandom culture that traumatized you feels cringe as shit lmao

"you see, I didn't like a hc of a make believe person and that upset people enough to publicly humiliate me and kick me from projects and stop being my friend and eventually land me in php. Yes, that's right, a fictional character. From a webcomic."

[dirkification]

June was never just a fun headcanon for the primary people involved in her creation and promotion

I have this screenshot in my extremely long post about transandrophobia/biphobia/radfeminism in the Homestuck Twitter community in 2019/2020, but I think it deserves to be highlighted separately

As long time followers know, I spend a lot of time trying to reassure myself that what I and a lot of other people went through during the height of 2019 bullshit was real and we're not just misremembering, and the way June was treated is one of those big things. As such, I'm refraining from making yet another long post going into those feelings (check out the tags I'm tagging this with for more or send ask/message if you have specific questions).

This is just to show that, yes, June was treated as seriously as a real life trans woman. Preferring John over June was treated as though you were misgendering/deadnaming a real life trans woman. This is one example, and I don't know how many more actually exist since this account and many others were mass deleted on the regular or at least after the height of the bullshit

This is the attitude that caused some of us who were around before the June headcanon popped off have an extremely negative reaction to her as a concept -- it sparked harassment campaigns that lasted for years.

[dirkification]

tbh the weirdest part about june, besides the fandom being weird with/about it (see: the sudden 180 on grimdorks), was just how it was boasted about by the team/those adjacent. like it was used to boast about fandom empowerment for a while, and showcase the freedom of the postcanon age. but the second the fandom became disagreeable in general, it became "actually hussie planned this all along, the fandom had no power or sway at all", which is a loaded statement considering the conciet of postcanon was supposed to be doing thing beyond the author.

it just had this weird dishonest feeling to it, you know? and all this for a character change that someone could joke that it was the hs universe just trying to keep its 50/50 gender ratio.

It's because the people who popularized it didn't actually care about fan empowerment. They cared about their ideas being the only ones allowed, and they were connected to and eventually hired on by What Pumpkin

They were all wishy washy about everything. You didn't have to pay attention to Beyond Canon, it wasn't "really" canon. No wait you did and if you ignored it you were just being a baby. No wait actually you can cherry pick whatever you want because HS ended at act 7. No wait *this* stuff you have to accept in the epilogues or PQ or HS2 or Hussie tweets/discord messages but *this* stuff you should just ignore

There was no company line for them to uphold. They just said and did whatever the fuck they wanted, used their status as being staff or adjacent to staff as proof they're right, but then suddenly they were "just another fan" if anyone criticized how they weilded their power

And Hussie was completely out of touch. He believed what he was told without investigating for themselves, and you can see that so clearly in the email correspondence with the Homestuck Discord people and with Sarah Z in her follow up Homestuck video after the legal threats. Unfortunately, a lot of the people they surrounded themselves with were shitheads who either exaggerated or straight up lied about stuff or left out what wasn't convenient.

Like I said before, I do believe Hussie thought June was a cool idea for a while. Why wouldn't they? But Hussie was also backing off from HS and relinquishing their control, and so them "planning to make June canon" doesn't mean a whole lot, especially with the way they went about it.

Sorry to go off on a rant, hopefully it still feels on topic to your ask. It feels dishonest because WP and those around them by and large *were* dishonest. And caught up in fandom drama. And creating fandom drama. And adding gas to the fire of fandom drama.

[dirkification]

Hi, it's the anon you called buddy.

I've read some of your posts here and I think that makes sense. You've got a very legitimate reason not to want to see or be bombarded with June mentions, and I don't think it stems from a place of transmisogyny at all. Sorry for making assumptions, I'm a 2020s homestuck reader who's tried to steer clear of past discourse stuff as much as possible.

I don't fully agree with all of your takes (John definitely hasn't "disappeared") but I'm just going to block that discourse tag and move on (although now I think about it I might not even be following this particular blog, just some of your others? Idk.)

I've always been of the opinion that John and June should be co-exisiting, similar to how CSAU does it (though not exactly the same) and they would both support each other (you know. because they're two versions of the same person. who aren't Light players or Dirk)

Anyway, peace, bye.

I appreciate your understanding and I do try to keep June discourse to this blog, but blocking the tag to be safe is always a good bet! (I do run several other blogs so who knows if you also follow those lol) and I do love how CSAU handled it (though gosh i need to catch up!!)

I do want to clarify that John disappeared overnight in 2019 on mainstream Homestuck Twitter and didn't start showing back up in any major way until at least mid 2020

Obviously he's still here now, and I can't say what it was like on Tumblr at that time, but I am not exaggerating when even the most hardcore John posters just Stopped if they had any big interaction with spaces WP staff and bnfs were in, and any who didn't were harassed into stopping or leaving

But I don't want that clarification to get in the way of my appreciation that you took the time to look at my side of things.