zeldasgard

[zeldasgard]

u kinda suck twin...

How brave of you to send this anonymously 💜

Care to develop?

[zeldasgard]

Hi ! I was thinking, do you want Nintendo release a remastered or maybe a remake of a Zelda game ? Imagine a Vaati more realistic, even in 3D, with current technology ! I hope someday Nintendo will think about it..

Btw I miss your lovely Vaati artworks :'(

Hi! First of all sorry for the delay and thank you for your ask!

Vaati would look gorgeous in my opinion in a more realistic 3D game and while I would love to see that I am sort of sitting on a fence here. This might get me crucified lol but I don’t really want him to be in a new game (then if it is a remaster my opinion might be more nuanced but honestly I don’t think Minish Cap needs a remaster).

My reasons for this is that I think his story arc is well completed with his three games and that a whole different story with a new format (3D here) might throw it off balance and out of its coherence. But also (and probably my main reason) I much prefer the fandom being smaller and tight knit. I have seen too much drama with such a small fandom already and I really do not want that to be multiplied.

However! To make up for this I have plenty of projects in mind and in my files.

It sort of surprises me but it is not the first time that someone say that they miss my art so this is directed at anyone else who might feel that way: I didn’t stop drawing nor did I stop drawing Vaati. In fact I am sort of battling in my mind on how to go on with my art online now.

I am thinking maybe of rebranding or starting new (I will let you guys know if I do). Maybe just making a new account and keeping that one strictly for Vaati stuff, who knows.

[zeldasgard]

Finally.

I spent more than a year (on and off) on that one. Enjoy 🔥

[zeldasgard]

Finally.

I spent more than a year (on and off) on that one. Enjoy 🔥

[zeldasgard]

I kept wondering whether I should make this post or not.

This is the truth about what really has been going on with me and my experience with someone else that you probably know.

Now that I have advanced enough in my healing and that the rose tainted glasses and the distorted filter of love are no more, I have no reason to protect that person anymore.

The images in this post are screenshots from things that were public. I do have further evidence in DMs proving it is indeed them behind the content in all of these screenshots but it wouldn’t feel right to share them publicly.

Backstory

I got bullied by them after having befriended them for around two months in summer of 2021. The whole cyber bullying and online stalking phase lasted for well more than 6 months (started in September 2021, ended in end of March 2022). It started on Instagram with their public stories about me (not naming me, but absolutely dropping my name everywhere in DMs to various people of the fandom) right after lying to my face in DM about how sad they were about the friendship ending. If you saw these stories back then, well yes: these were about me.

Now as a side note to retrospectively defend myself about these claims for people here who might not know me well:

- when visioning these for the first time I was multiple times having doubts if these were really about me with just how much things got twisted out of their context. When showing the stories to people close to me they pretty much had the same reaction and laughed at me when I asked them if I was manipulative (which I was really wondering back then as a result).

- Mind that I got all this treatment all because I was doing “delusional” things along the lines of what this person is currently doing with their yumeship. She got obsessed with self shipping culture and further to an unhealthy extent ever since she knew me.

- I had come across these stories because I wanted to check on them at first to see if they were doing okay, as they had told me in DMs before blocking me saying right before that they were soooo sad that this friendship ended. It was out of a place of concern and not whatever they had depicted here.

- The whole claim about me being a “stalker” and “obsessed” with them was due to me knowing they had a public online activity since around 2015 and checking their profile when they would post Vaati art. I had indeed personal issues back then but that weren’t relevant anymore around the time I started exchanging with that person.

- visibly I wasn’t that “toxic” in the end since afterwards we got into a 2 year long romantic relationship (I know).

Now for the context following these stories:

They couldn’t stop talking about me online for all these months. Among others they kept vague posting on Reddit for months about me, making a whole freaking website for me to find, joining multiple places they knew I was in.

The peak of it was when they joined an online “cringe culture” forum to mock people like me. I was not targeted on this forum but another person had been put in danger because of their behaviour. (You might wonder why and how I know of such a place online in the first place, which is a very valid question. It was a pretty well known place we kept tabs on in a “ficto” community I used to be in to make sure we didn’t have any leaks from private servers).

^ Some of the Reddit posts. These were screenshotted a while ago so I apologise for the missing info there although their username was pretty random and really wouldn’t have prove much except if you had access to their posts history. The (multiple) accounts don’t exist anymore anyway. These specific ones were from a time when they thought to leave the Vaati fandom altogether before joining a fandom server again in end of March 2022 where they finally saw for themselves that I was a normal functional human being despite my love for a fictional character.

The relationship and its end

As you see it had started already very unhealthily. I had accepted their apologies and their feelings for me, just grateful that they wouldn’t hurt me anymore, also thinking that they had learnt a lot from it and changed. Overtime I learnt to love them. They do have some nice qualities, I believe in that, although I wonder to this day how much of them I truly knew.

In hindsight some of their behaviour persisted in the relationship. They always said themselves that they were very scared of abuse, always looking for signs of it, always saying that they would never lay a hand on their partner for that reason. And it is true, I have never known any physical violence from them. Their constant vigilance about these topics were a double edged sword however. Somehow in arguments I found myself called manipulative, controlling, wanting to cage them, when in hindsight I realise I was asking for the bare minimum. I ended up questioning my own reality. By the end of our relationship I was getting regularly ghosted. I felt literally insane. “It is not about you, it is about me.” They were going through some issues and I wanted to be there for them. I tried my best at leaving them space. But got angry outbursts from them when I dared checking in on them because I feared the worst (I am keeping it vague on purpose here). So I left them that space by breaking up, seeing that all my partner needs were stressing them out and proposing my friendship instead for the time being so that i could still be there for them but in an healthier way. It still wasn’t good enough and I ended up getting blocked everywhere again.

They came back months after following someone else’s advice because they were seeing me “triggered”. I indeed was alarmed by their behaviour mimicking a lot their behaviour of back then, no bullying this time but including claims of them saying once again that they were “caged” , metaphors about how glad they were free from me and in those new DMs being upset at me that they couldn’t “control the narrative” as they once did after they learnt that I had talked in private about what I am talking here now. We did talk some of the things out. Ultimately I felt like the only reason they wanted to keep me around was to give themselves a good conscience: “I am glad we can be on friendly terms”; to keep me around for self soothing and their own peace of mind. They would say that it would be an advantage for the both of us. It only reopened old wounds for me and gave me false hopes because I was blinded by the idea that their love would help me heal. But it didn’t back then anyway. For that, thank you for turning me down.

That is when I realised once more that we lived in two different realities. It is easy for someone to move on when they were not on the receiving end of everything they did. They were not the one whose name got dragged in the mud, had very private emotional info displayed publicly for everyone to laugh at and judge twisted out of their context (which used to make me feel very shameful hence me keeping my mouth shut until now), spent an entire night deleting private messages with them because fearing them using private info once more against me, were constantly anxious for months then years after around their own social medias because this was the place it all happened on, got their very soul raided for their own “dopamine hit” and are still dealing with the aftermath to this day with them running around in the same online space as if nothing happened.

This is for these reasons that I am doing this post now. Yet I am still doubting myself. Until the very last minute I will ask myself if this is really the right move. If all of this will help me heal. If this will help me move on in a last desperate attempt. If this person deserves it. If I will get once more my words twisted so that I look once more like the villain. If people will start hating me. If it’s too late because the core of it happened “years ago” as this previous partner said. If this really is the right place to talk about this. If people will see me as the crazy one.

But then I remember that they didn’t have any issues destroying me and betraying my trust multiple times.

Final words

I do not want to disguise this post as me doing it to pass a big self righteous message. I think there indeed are several lessons from this experience but I do not want to tell you what to see in it or what to think. In the end I am really making it now to move on, now with a rested mind knowing that I stood up for myself like I was supposed to instead of wondering for the next years wether I should make this post or not.

If anything, the one takeaway I could point out is that it is so scary because it’s never something you think will ever happen to you. That you would never let yourself down to anyone. Then you come across someone who says or does something that you find upsetting and you try to stand up for yourself or ask for explanation. Then you are called abusive for it. You love that person and trust their judgment so from now on you try to watch out your behaviour for any toxicity sign. you slowly end up not standing up for yourself anymore because that would be “toxic” and you do not want to be toxic, do you? And by the time you realise it you already are a shell of your former self. Once it ends, they tell you to cherish all the good moments like they do, they tell you that it wasn’t all that bad, that they learnt so much from being with you, but you cannot because they are tainted by everything else and you didn’t get really anything positive out of this experience. And now it’s your problem for not sucking it up and moving on like they do. Which you obviously cannot because while they might be able to walk away with scratches you are paralysed by open wounds and deep seated trauma.

Before I get eventual backlash from them, I am not perfect. We are all fallible. I had some unresolved issues too, notably considerable ones that the trauma of the online harassment left on me. I wasn’t honest both with myself and with them with blindly believing that their love would make up for everything they did. I also had some issues as well prior to this but I never wanted to make it anyone else’s problems.

By now I have rewritten this post multiple times, not sure of which approach to take in order to not be misinterpreted because I am well aware of how this post can come across with having an ex who happens to have been a well known and very liked figure for years. I know how people tend to treat exes of such people who come forward. In fact there is no perfect approach. No matter how I come forward with this, there will always be people to criticise me for simply coming forward in the first place. No, no one needs to know what happened behind closed doors between two online micro personalities. In fact I HATE talking about personal things publicly (I did try not so long ago being more public about some things as a coping mechanism to make up for my anxiety but it simply is not like me to do that so I stopped). I do want though for people to finally have my side of the story out there as well so that I can finally move on and for that I do, yes, need to talk about some behind the doors things.

Ultimately I hope I can build a safe place here for myself again and no longer have that sinking anxiety when visiting my socials. I want to set the record straight because this is pretty much still widely affecting me to this day.

I still, somewhere very deep within myself, believe that people can change, just I learned that for some it can take several lifetimes.

I know so far I made it sound like everyone will be against me but objectively this is not true today. I have had many people who supported me in private places in the last few months: I am very grateful for that and in fact this is also what today gives me courage to talk about this here. I guess all my concerns are just the trauma speaking again.

I trust you to be mature about this, form your own opinion (or none). This is supposed to be my very last post about this issue and I don’t want this mess to drag on for any longer or give it any more of my energy.

Now I have talked for way longer than I originally intended. Thank you for reading.

[zeldasgard]

Abuse can sometimes feel like a slow, torturous deterioration of your sanity. You can't name what was done to you, you can't point out what anyone has done to hurt you, you can't prove to yourself that you're being abused. You instead feel like you might be going crazy. Like everything they're saying about you might be true and you can't get a hold of your senses or figure out what is going on.

And when it keeps getting worse, you hang onto every little thing trying to analyze if you're having the correct perception of it, trying to figure out if what you're feeling about it is rational or true. You don't know what's going on anymore but you know something is wrong deep inside of you and it's harder and harder to exist, to experience anything. Your every experience becomes a mass of uncertainty, doubt, questions, endless analysis, and you still don't know what is right, what you're allowed to say, think, believe. You cannot state the facts, because you're not sure what they are. You're blind in a fog, unable to stop whatever is going on, unsure if you're being hurt, or if you're imagining it in your head.

There doesn't seem to be any way out. If you could only stop imagining it, stop going insane, but no matter how hard you try, your emotions go out of control, you feel like you're going to explode, you end up feeling helpless and ashamed. It feels like a descent into madness, you can't stop feeling like you've embarrassed yourself, done something wrong, had the wrong reaction to every event, ashamed of how others must see you as pathetic and crazy. It makes you want to hide from everyone forever, but the doubt and inability to see reality still follow you and drive you insane. You end up wishing you didn't exist because you can't even do that right.

This is what gaslighting does to you, and why it can be damaging and painful just to exist next to the people who have done that to you. Even if they don't do anything else to you, just being continuously gaslit about what did happen can make you feel like you're losing your mind, because you're trying to force yourself to emotionally experience a fictional reality that is super-imposed over the actual truth of what had happened. Your emotions are the result of the events that did happen, so they cannot change to correspond to the abuser's imagined, revised and fictional version. However, if you fail to force this process, the abusers will humiliate, degrade and psychologically attack your sanity, pressuring you to keep trying to change how you emotionally react to reality. No person can change that.

[zeldasgard]

I kept wondering whether I should make this post or not.

This is the truth about what really has been going on with me and my experience with someone else that you probably know.

Now that I have advanced enough in my healing and that the rose tainted glasses and the distorted filter of love are no more, I have no reason to pUrotect that person anymore.

The images in this post are screenshots from things that were public. I do have further evidence in DMs proving it is indeed them behind the content in all of these screenshots but it wouldn’t feel right to share them publicly.

Backstory

I got bullied by them after having befriended them for around two months in summer of 2021. The whole cyber bullying and online stalking phase lasted for well more than 6 months (started in September 2021, ended in end of March 2022). It started on Instagram with their public stories about me (not naming me, but absolutely dropping my name everywhere in DMs to various people of the fandom) right after lying to my face in DM about how sad they were about the friendship ending. If you saw these stories back then, well yes: these were about me.

Now as a side note to retrospectively defend myself about these claims for people here who might not know me well:

- when visioning these for the first time I was multiple times having doubts if these were really about me with just how much things got twisted out of their context. When showing the stories to people close to me they pretty much had the same reaction and laughed at me when I asked them if I was manipulative (which I was really wondering back then as a result).

- Mind that I got all this treatment all because I was doing “delusional” things along the lines of what this person is currently doing with their yumeship. She got obsessed with self shipping culture and further to an unhealthy extent ever since she knew me.

- I had come across these stories because I wanted to check on them at first to see if they were doing okay, as they had told me in DMs before blocking me saying right before that they were soooo sad that this friendship ended. It was out of a place of concern and not whatever they had depicted here.

- The whole claim about me being a “stalker” and “obsessed” with them was due to me knowing they had a public online activity since around 2015 and checking their profile when they would post Vaati art. I had indeed personal issues back then but that weren’t relevant anymore around the time I started exchanging with that person.

- visibly I wasn’t that “toxic” in the end since afterwards we got into a 2 year long romantic relationship (I know).

Now for the context following these stories:

They couldn’t stop talking about me online for all these months. Among others they kept vague posting on Reddit for months about me, making a whole freaking website for me to find, joining multiple places they knew I was in.

The peak of it was when they joined an online “cringe culture” forum to mock people like me. I was not targeted on this forum but another person had been put in danger because of their behaviour. (You might wonder why and how I know of such a place online in the first place, which is a very valid question. It was a pretty well known place we kept tabs on in a “ficto” community I used to be in to make sure we didn’t have any leaks from private servers).

^ Some of the Reddit posts. These were screenshotted a while ago so I apologise for the missing info there although their username was pretty random and really wouldn’t have prove much except if you had access to their posts history. The (multiple) accounts don’t exist anymore anyway. These specific ones were from a time when they thought to leave the Vaati fandom altogether before joining a fandom server again in end of March 2022 where they finally saw for themselves that I was a normal functional human being despite my love for a fictional character.

The relationship and its end

As you see it had started already very unhealthily. I had accepted their apologies and their feelings for me, just grateful that they wouldn’t hurt me anymore, also thinking that they had learnt a lot from it and changed. Overtime I learnt to love them. They do have some nice qualities, I believe in that, although I wonder to this day how much of them I truly knew.

In hindsight some of their behaviour persisted in the relationship. They always said themselves that they were very scared of abuse, always looking for signs of it, always saying that they would never lay a hand on their partner for that reason. And it is true, I have never known any physical violence from them. Their constant vigilance about these topics were a double edged sword however. Somehow in arguments I found myself called manipulative, controlling, wanting to cage them, when in hindsight I realise I was asking for the bare minimum. I ended up questioning my own reality. By the end of our relationship I was getting regularly ghosted. I felt literally insane. “It is not about you, it is about me.” They were going through some issues and I wanted to be there for them. I tried my best at leaving them space. But got angry outbursts from them when I dared checking in on them because I feared the worst (I am keeping it vague on purpose here). So I left them that space by breaking up, seeing that all my partner needs were stressing them out and proposing my friendship instead for the time being so that i could still be there for them but in an healthier way. It still wasn’t good enough and I ended up getting blocked everywhere again.

They came back months after following someone else’s advice because they were seeing me “triggered”. I indeed was alarmed by their behaviour mimicking a lot their behaviour of back then, no bullying this time but including claims of them saying once again that they were “caged” , metaphors about how glad they were free from me and in those new DMs being upset at me that they couldn’t “control the narrative” as they once did after they learnt that I had talked in private about what I am talking here now. We did talk some of the things out. Ultimately I felt like the only reason they wanted to keep me around was to give themselves a good conscience: “I am glad we can be on friendly terms”; to keep me around for self soothing and their own peace of mind. They would say that it would be an advantage for the both of us. It only reopened old wounds for me and gave me false hopes because I was blinded by the idea that their love would help me heal. But it didn’t back then anyway. For that, thank you for turning me down.

That is when I realised once more that we lived in two different realities. It is easy for someone to move on when they were not on the receiving end of everything they did. They were not the one whose name got dragged in the mud, had very private emotional info displayed publicly for everyone to laugh at and judge twisted out of their context (which used to make me feel very shameful hence me keeping my mouth shut until now), spent an entire night deleting private messages with them because fearing them using private info once more against me, were constantly anxious for months then years after around their own social medias because this was the place it all happened on, got their very soul raided for their own “dopamine hit” and are still dealing with the aftermath to this day with them running around in the same online space as if nothing happened.

This is for these reasons that I am doing this post now. Yet I am still doubting myself. Until the very last minute I will ask myself if this is really the right move. If all of this will help me heal. If this will help me move on in a last desperate attempt. If this person deserves it. If I will get once more my words twisted so that I look once more like the villain. If people will start hating me. If it’s too late because the core of it happened “years ago” as this previous partner said. If this really is the right place to talk about this. If people will see me as the crazy one.

But then I remember that they didn’t have any issues destroying me and betraying my trust multiple times.

Final words

I do not want to disguise this post as me doing it to pass a big self righteous message. I think there indeed are several lessons from this experience but I do not want to tell you what to see in it or what to think. In the end I am really making it now to move on, now with a rested mind knowing that I stood up for myself like I was supposed to instead of wondering for the next years wether I should make this post or not.

If anything, the one takeaway I could point out is that it is so scary because it’s never something you think will ever happen to you. That you would never let yourself down to anyone. Then you come across someone who says or does something that you find upsetting and you try to stand up for yourself or ask for explanation. Then you are called abusive for it. You love that person and trust their judgment so from now on you try to watch out your behaviour for any toxicity sign. you slowly end up not standing up for yourself anymore because that would be “toxic” and you do not want to be toxic, do you? And by the time you realise it you already are a shell of your former self. Once it ends, they tell you to cherish all the good moments like they do, they tell you that it wasn’t all that bad, that they learnt so much from being with you, but you cannot because they are tainted by everything else and you didn’t get really anything positive out of this experience. And now it’s your problem for not sucking it up and moving on like they do. Which you obviously cannot because while they might be able to walk away with scratches you are paralysed by open wounds and deep seated trauma.

Before I get eventual backlash from them, I am not perfect. We are all fallible. I had some unresolved issues too, notably considerable ones that the trauma of the online harassment left on me. I wasn’t honest both with myself and with them with blindly believing that their love would make up for everything they did. I also had some issues as well prior to this but I never wanted to make it anyone else’s problems.

By now I have rewritten this post multiple times, not sure of which approach to take in order to not be misinterpreted because I am well aware of how this post can come across with having an ex who happens to have been a well known and very liked figure for years. I know how people tend to treat exes of such people who come forward. In fact there is no perfect approach. No matter how I come forward with this, there will always be people to criticise me for simply coming forward in the first place. No, no one needs to know what happened behind closed doors between two online micro personalities. In fact I HATE talking about personal things publicly (I did try not so long ago being more public about some things as a coping mechanism to make up for my anxiety but it simply is not like me to do that so I stopped). I do want though for people to finally have my side of the story out there as well so that I can finally move on and for that I do, yes, need to talk about some behind the doors things.

Ultimately I hope I can build a safe place here for myself again and no longer have that sinking anxiety when visiting my socials. I want to set the record straight because this is pretty much still widely affecting me to this day.

I still, somewhere very deep within myself, believe that people can change, just I learned that for some it can take several lifetimes.

I know so far I made it sound like everyone will be against me but objectively this is not true today. I have had many people who supported me in private places in the last few months: I am very grateful for that and in fact this is also what today gives me courage to talk about this here. I guess all my concerns are just the trauma speaking again.

I trust you to be mature about this, form your own opinion (or none). This is supposed to be my very last post about this issue and I don’t want this mess to drag on for any longer or give it any more of my energy.

Now I have talked for way longer than I originally intended. Thank you for reading.

[zeldasgard]

May I treat you on this Valentine’s Day with the artwork that has been sitting in my folder since October?

[zeldasgard]

100 posts!!!

I DID IT GUYS

[zeldasgard]

One (1) attempt at simplifying my art style.

I LOVE working on big pieces but I struggle a lot with the time and mental energy I spend on them. So simplifying my art style in some way is in my projects for more “casual” artworks and maybe comics.

I just struggle a lot with that (and honestly have been for a longer time) because I often time feel like simplifying my work makes me take a step back in my skills. It might be just me tbh.

[zeldasgard]

W.I.P. for a redraw

[zeldasgard]

Why I was frequently gone

As you might have noticed I am not as frequently active as I once was when starting posting my art online a while back. I have never stopped drawing though, just I never posted some things or posted them way later. The reason behind it was fear.

The thing is… despite claiming since forever that I don’t care anymore what people think of me and that it’s been a while I have grown past that… deep down, I do.

The truth is that it is my love for a fictional character that started my art journey. Yes guys, it is Vaati that made me pick up the pencil. I feel like this is shamed a lot, when truly anything is good to get you started on your own path. This is also why my « yumeship » or whichever you wish to call it (I am myself not fond of labels, I only find a use for them to find like minded people and even so a lot of luck is needed because of how misused some are) is so important to me and a part of who I am. This is also why I keep drawing Vaati over and over. It is what got me started but also what keeps me going. And it goes well beyond Vaati. The Minish Cap was my first Zelda game and what re-introduced my depressed self to the fantasy genre, which led to important choices in my real life.

I am still deeply scarred by some things I have been put through because of false assumptions about my character because of my love for him and reduced to a flat, one dimensional image of "if she is like xxx/, isn't comfortable with xxx then she must be yyy!!!". I have been bullied for it on social media a little while ago and deeply wounded. I am scared now that anyone getting too close to me would judge me or hurt me again for something that is… harmless. Many times I do want to show more of my person and interests but those bad experiences made me very anxious about social media and personal one on one online interactions. One big issue with social media, and not only for the topic of “loving a fictional character” is that it is so easy to judge or assume who someone is based on their feed or one façade that they decide to show about themselves. We tend to forget that there are full complex living beings behind usernames, with way more going on in their lives than the breadcrumbs of it that they post on social media. No, I am not "delulu" about Vaati, yes I have a social life and I even have so many hobbies that it would be too long to list them all. I could yap all day about metal music, Tolkien's Legendarium, astrophysics... But this is not what most here follow me for.

There are some times when I want to rebrand, forget and leave everything behind. But that would be making choices motivated by fear and I do not want that for me anymore. Not everyone out there is an unstable bully after all.

This post already went far beyond what I originally intended it to. I originally wanted to share what I had learnt, what I am learning in order to make my artworks, my inspirations and all that, but clearly some things go way beyond art itself. Also to address my social media anxiety because of the experiences I mention here, and I fear that I couldn’t do that without giving all this larger context.

I now hope that with these small tickets that I plan on sharing (although this one isn’t but shhhh), I can slowly gain back some trust in social media and humankind in general and actually take pleasure again in sharing my art with you all. I actually like Tumblr as a platform and honestly I cannot wait to post all these artworks I have been holding back on.

Peace ☮️

[zeldasgard]

I really need to finalise this one asap

W.I.P. and happy birthday to Vaati!! 💜💜🦇🌪️

[zeldasgard]

I have been super silent since the beginning of the year.

…Happy new year :3

[zeldasgard]

i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year

[zeldasgard]

A piece I had drawn for the fall themed event in the Zelda Creators server. The prompt was “spooky”.

I made it in only a few days hence it is not as finished as my usual work but the result still works out well imo.

[zeldasgard]

A server icon I had drawn :) I like experimenting with the original TLoZ toon style.