yet another note for dolly/chel/whoever else has come to check this thread in their stead! hello! as mentioned previously in the thread, i got involved because i am very well versed in online stalking and drama like this. you may have even noticed chel calling me out on that exact familiarity and expressing that they wish i would have been more understanding! unfortunately, they completely misunderstood both my relationship to this sort of thing, how i feel about the events that lead to it, and why exactly there are threads with hundreds of pages on this forum that include a heavy dose of talking about my actions! i may have improved as a person, i may have a much more positive relationship with the forum now, but that doesn't mean i look back on what happened and think, you know what, i was right actually, and the twenty people screaming at me to stop were horribly wrong! i need this to be very clear: i did not win that fight, and there was no realm in which i was winning. it stopped when i looked back at my actions and decided that no, i was wrong, and was hurting people. it stopped when i left that awful situation and started apologizing. my arguments, no matter how good i thought them, did not disprove the existence of harm, nor did they make me look like a cool and approachable person. so from one person that has a history of getting into fights online to another, i can promise you that nothing good ever comes from googling your name/username/whatever. i used to compulsively check what people might be saying at me online all the time. old friends, shitty partners, people i argued with. a lot of it circled around this forum, actually. i had a few accounts i did it on. i'll be real: it achieved nothing other than working me up and upsetting me so much that other users actually put together a thread in the hopes of catching my attention. they left heartfelt notes and cute pictures for me to find. because as much as i was an asshole, and as afraid as they were of being caught in that, they knew i was going through something and was taking it out on the world, and they wanted to reach out and tell me that things didn't need to be this way. despite the drama, despite how much the situation sucked for them, they still found it in them to care. and i think that's something that rests at the core of this forum. the lack of rules here pretty much allows for people to throw as many fits as they see, well, fit, here. we have one over-arching rule, but it shouldn't ever get in the way of people being able to speak about the harm someone has caused them, even if the person being spoken about disagrees. even if that person is on the forum itself. this is not meant to be a safe space, but it;s a space full of people who are, well. people. who are hurt, who struggle, who want to be heard, who sometimes hurt each other. and what we do here, is encourage people to work through it and talk about it together, so that both sides can choose better in the future, or so that same harm can be avoided later on. the mods very rarely step in on personal issues, we just offer support, or reassurance, and even a quick proofread. we aren't here to tell people what not to post, though i know sometimes it can seem that way, we just want to mitigate splash damage. i know it seems big and scary and like everyone here is waiting to attack you. being held accountable is supposed to be uncomfortable. sometimes you have to learn to sit with that discomfort. you can disagree, but you can't change how that person feels. sometimes we hurt people in ways we don't understand. that doesn't mean it isn't there. i genuinely encourage you to make an account here, even if you never post, even if you do post and it's just a place to argue. you don't even need an email. all i ask is that you treat people who say things you dislike with respect and hear them out, rather than ask us to silence our users. you have a voice of your own. use it, and talk about the issue like an adult.
Well, thank you, Tez. Really. I needed to hear that. And it’s good to know regarding…well, my apologies for some of the more offensive content in the fic. It was definitely something that dawned on me that “my God, I might have been feeding into Chel’s shit”. I do know that they were thinking of trying to have more diverse depictions of human trafficking because they recognized that it could come off too much like Taken, which really makes their blow-up at Sparkles even more inexplicable. And yeah, you’re definitely lucky to not have been hurt by them. I wouldn’t wish Chel’s cruelty on anybody. And maybe prioritizing my own oxygen mask is a good idea. I mean, I think that one of my weaknesses is feeling like I have to rescue other people. Ever since I was a kid, really. But I think that yeah, I do need to put on my own oxygen mask before assisting other people. And…if it’s not overstepping anyone’s boundaries, can I have a link to the private thread?
ahh right right thank you both for refreshing my memory. I had Chel blocked for ages on here and couldn't remember why aside from they'd done something that had annoyed/insulted me so severely that I had to put a buffer between me and their stupidity or I'd scream. it's all flooding back to me now :') i think the initial thing was definitely the constant begging for feedback about writing and getting it and ignoring it and then i guess buying someone's time off fiver to help them and complaining about THAT too in several places while continuing to claim Romance was stupidly easy to produce+profit off of.
Did they? What did they complain about/ignore regarding the feedback? And honestly, as someone who’s tried to write romance subplots, that shit is hard. I can’t even imagine writing romance professionally (I guess my shipping fic comes close?). I mean, you have to make the romance believable, you have to make people care about the characters, and you have to make sure that the audience is satisfied, to say nothing of trying to avoid what TV Tropes calls Unfortunate Implications in your romance. And you have to make sure that your audience doesn’t get bored; I always worry about my audience getting bored if my ship ends up together. Or me getting bored. Doesn’t help that I haven’t dated. So yeah. You have a lot to juggle in terms of writing romance. Hell, romance authors who have to do that professionally at least deserve much more respect than they’re given, regardless of how good an individual book is. They work hard. I think then again, it does sound like Chel. I remember they shat on pull-to-publish for example because they thought it was lazy/plaigarism, while also bragging about how they were going to write a novel and publish it and it was going to be so original and so much better than the pull to publish stuff, and it’s like, fuck you, Chel. I mean, pull-to-publish is still a legit genre, and just because Fifty Shades exists doesn’t mean that the genre itself is shit. Heck, as much as I didn’t care for The Love Hypothesis, I’m glad Ali Hazelwood’s being published at all just so that Fifty Shades isn’t the only thing to reference when it comes to pull-to-publish. Plus, at least Ali Hazelwood actually accomplished something. Chel…if they have published that novel they were bragging about doing, I sure as shit haven’t heard about them doing anything but burning bridges and making people hate them. And egosurfing. (See, people, back in the day, the For Dummies books called compulsively Googling your own username egosurfing. Just a fun tidbit) It’s actually kind of tragic, because Chel’s nearly forty and they’ve wasted their life trying to ruin other people’s.
my memory's a bit vague because it was several years ago now and i'm not super great at remembering specifics at the best of times. but yeah it was. a whole thing. they'd repeatedly said how writing romance would be an easy way to get money and when people were rightfully going "Uh actually-" they doubled down. And the feedback was mostly them coming repeatedly to complain about how hard writing was and how they couldnt write anything at all and asking advice and pointers and guidance and then... just... ignoring all of it. flouncing away from the thread entirely only to come back and ask the exact same fucking questions not too long in the future as if the original repeated advice had never happened and then getting pissy when people weren't willing to give them a repeat of the same advice for the upteenth time (to ignore again) or were redirecting to the previously given advice. it was very cyclic and annoying as shit. the fiverr thing was kind of hilarious because they were already making an ass of themselves here ignoring advice but now they were paying a rando and asking repeatedly on reddit and getting pissed at the advice and feedback there instead. If homegrown feedback resources and information cannot be ingested, store bought is apparently fine.
Well, shit. I'm sorry that you had to go through that. And yeah, I think that getting paid for your work is a right that everyone has, or a right to earn money, but Chel's way of doing it just sounded really fucking scummy, IMHO. And honestly, it's like, that whole thing with them just ignoring advice just sounds frustrating. I don't really know why they'd flounce when people tried to help them either. And I don't know why they would get pissed at the advice and feedback on Reddit. It's not like Reddit is always great for advice (it really depends on who you're talking to), but Chel just kind of shit-talking Redditors behind their backs just for trying to help them sounds...just kind of bizarre?
my only guess for flouncing from the advice here was because it wasn't either an Instant Fix without needing effort on their part, or what they wanted to hear in general. and yeah Reddit is really not great for all advice, so I never understood what they wanted to gain from asking a bunch of randos on there for stuff when they couldn't even respond to or enact anything from here.
I can pull up a few more details later (I don't want to go too deep into the weeds, especially because Chel is stunningly bad at internet privacy and I don't want to drag too many of their details out just to bitch), if people would like that- I've got an appointment in a bit, but I'll have time this afternoon. There was a lot of backstory, because Kindle erotica wasn't even the first time Chel made a big Thing about a business they were starting, asked for a lot of advice, didn't listen to any of it, and then got really upset because they were struggling, but the immediate impetus for the March 2019 incident was that in short succession, they: solicited recs for romance books because "I have been told I was judging the genre unfairly" bought a random "dark romance" book off the Kindle erotica bestsellers leaderboard instead of anything anyone said threw a performative tantrum about the fact that a book that was as clear as it is possible to be without getting removed by Amazon that it was horny femsub noncon whump didn't have a sympathetic enough male lead asked in a different thread, which was originally meant to be for asking people who have firsthand experience with subjects you don't for help writing about those subjects well but which Chel had been using for years to post incredibly basic writing and worldbuilding questions, how to... come up with plots. Just, like, in general. Any and all events that can occur in a story. Things... escalated. From there.
Yeah. I did hear about the dark romance tantrum, but I didn’t quite hear about the plot shit thread. As for the dark romance — I can understand the whole “what would other people see in these sorts of love interests” sort of thing, but given how self-righteous and pretentious Chel is, I doubt it. Plus, it’s like, they defended a fic (well, prior to it getting sporked) about Merida being gang-raped and tortured and kept as a sex slave, so methinks Chel’s throwing stones in their glass house.
You might be right. (Also, hope this doesn't seem like a too harsh criticism, but you kind of used "her" and "she" in one sentence where you probably meant "their" and "they". Just a heads-up)
hi chel and dolly <3 i would actually like to talk to dolly herself one of these days. a note on WPaRG posted by chel has claimed she is a “qualified mortician” in order to post a (now removed) photo of a real human body that dolly apparently claimed was a fake, and i’m very curious about that. as a licensed funeral director and embalmer, certified crematory operator, and certified practitioner of green funeral service, a lot of what is contained within WPaRG is inaccurate or something i would consider extremely inappropriate for someone in the field to publish and tie their profession to in that way. i also know she’s younger than me, and this field takes time to get licensure as a professional —it’s not impossible by any means, but it means she hasn’t been in the field for a long time. idril, no worries either way, i know we’ve not spoken before, but would you happen to know if dolly ever mentioned this as a profession she was involved in or interested in/mentioned going to school for mortuary work? i don’t need any identifying details (none of my business) but i’m somewhat suspicious that she actually is a “qualified mortician” —strange phrasing regardless—and since she won’t speak for herself, i’ll have to do it this way. again, no worries either way, i hope you’re doing well.
Thank you, Dave. And no, Dolly never mentioned anything about mortuary work. Not as a profession she was interested in or involved in, not as something that she was going to school for either. I mean, I didn’t know everything about her obviously, but she never mentioned anything about it. Personally, I think Chel just posted a picture of a dead body to be edgy. It’s not uncharacteristic for them, at least.
interesting! thanks so much. yeah, obviously this doesn't 100% preclude anything, because not everyone shares everything about themselves, but my guess is it would be pretty strange for someone to never once mention their profession/interest in the field if they're the kind of person to then wave it around on an AO3 author's note for justification about why these human remains are totes fake. or i guess, allowing someone else to wave it around on their behalf...? very odd! just some context for anyone reading the thread as to why i asked: it's my understanding dolly is canadian, but the qualifications are fairly similar in both canada and the USA, and i will note if she did decide this was the field for her after dolly and idril lost contact, it is technically possible for her to have immediately pivoted and gone for a two year program, but boy, i think that would be a hell of a thing to randomly decide to do one day. of course, she might have just not mentioned it, so i will allow for that possibility. but that is perhaps not something that i would tout as a "qualified mortician." i bring up that phrasing again because i find that quite odd in itself -- when i'm throwing my metaphorical weight around with my credentials, i'm going to mention my licensure, my certifications, and the actual technical term for my field, because "mortician" is a slang term that covers both funeral directors and embalmers (different techniques, different skillsets, someone who only does funeral directing has little or no exposure to the actual process of preparing a dead human body; i am both because i work in a dual licensure state where both are required). it is i think something someone would say when trying to elide the specifics of what they actually do, or when someone is a layman or speaking to laymen in a way that their professional qualifications don't really matter. i don't think "posting a picture of human remains" is either of the latter two situations. furthermore i'm going to say that the specific (again, since removed) photo of a real human body was skeletonized remains that chel was using dolly to claim as fake, and chel absolutely seems the type to just post that shit to be edgy. but using dolly's "qualified mortician" status in this specific context is really strange. i will point out again i'm a certified crematory operator as well because i can't be normal and just do one thing, and i think a funeral director or an embalmer claiming themselves to be a qualified individual to identify skeletonized remains is really, really strange. you do not see skeletons in your capacity as an embalmer. when i work with skeletonized remains, it's during the calcinization process of an active cremation, or after cremation when i am processing the remains into "ashes." a funeral director or embalmer who is not also a crematory operator is usually only going to see those remains post-processing. not exactly something that lends one expertise in what an intact human skeleton looks like. anyway that's all i had to add, dolly if you want to speak for yourself and explain what the fuck you think you're doing claiming you belong to a field that requires utmost respect, compassion, and dignity for dead human beings and then going "lol probably fake haha" and posting a picture for AO3 rape fic, meet me in the pit. chel, you can huff my farts for also thinking that shit was in any way appropriate, but i'm not going to argue with some random unqualified yeehaw about the industry.
Yeah. That is a bunch of good questions. I really don’t know. I mean, obviously, she didn’t share everything with me back when we were still in contact; I don’t think she even mentioned anything about going to a mortuary school to Chel and co., though. I don’t think she mentioned anything about schooling at all. I think that yeah, you’re right, it’s odd that Chel brought this up on her behalf. And they didn’t have to say “qualified mortician", not really. They could have said something like “don’t worry; that skeleton’s from a movie” or whatever. Also, why would they need to post that picture to illustrate their fic or something? Usually when people post picture illustrations, it’s moodboards, or bits of fan art that they’re happy about, or whatever. Or just random porn GIFs. I mean, usually when they do that sort of thing, it’s meant to be positive. Not posting stuff of a dead body that may or may not be fake. I think that yeah, you’re right, Chel’s the sort to post this crap in order to be edgy, because they seem incapable of not acting like an edgy teenager in a nearly-forty-year-old’s body. Not to mention incapable of empathy. Not that Dolly has empathy either, mind you, especially for dead bodies she’s allegedly working with.
As someone who has this same urge, there comes a point where you have to recognize that some people just don't want it, and I think Chel is one of those people. It's truly a virtue to have a nature that wants to be helpful, and I don't think we should completely kill that urge in ourselves, but it's okay to look at someone like Chel, someone like Dolly, and go "you know what, if you're going to keep assaulting me every time I try to put your mask on you, then I'm not going to help you."
Thank you. Very well said. I think that sounds just about right. Chel and Dolly just don’t want help. I think that I should just let them be, and focus on putting my mask on first.
Also, @artistformerlyknownasdave — I hope I don’t sound too intrusive, but the whole instance of the dead body pic: was that Water of the Womb? Because I have a feeling that might have been why Dolly was Googling Water of the Womb. I mean, basically, you remember when Chel was shit-talking Kintsugi, saying awful things about Jewish forum members? Well, basically, I did some sleuthing, and I figured out that it happened not long after their Purim special that featured a Jewish woman being assaulted and a commenter complained about it, saying that she didn’t like the idea of the special being released on Purim. (Basically, kind of like a redux of the Hanukkah special) So I think that the thing with Water of the Womb being Googled could be connected to the corpse pic controversy with WPARG. It’s just a conspiracy theory on my part, though.
it was actually "stories about pieces of the past", which i haven't read, someone just let me know there was a corpse pic being posted so i could verify its realness quotient before whenever they went and took it down, but that is interesting!
