Chel. Like how Dave was joking about the walls of text earlier, this forum has a long history of everyone's instinct being to chime in to help Solve An Problem™, which regardless of good intentions frequently does not end up helping very much, but does generate a whole lot of words. :::')))
Damn. Honestly, the way you lay it out about Epstein, if Chel had actually cared about doing their homework, actually sticking to the facts about Epstein and, say, using that as a storytelling device for Pleasure Island and the Ark could have been more terrifying than what they actually came up with. And plus, I don't think Chel really cared that much about making the Ark members scary, to be perfectly honest, because there were definitely some instances where they tried to act like Ratigan's treatment of Basil was somehow easy to rationalize with "he just wuvs him so much" (which, no. I mean, I definitely played into that too and I take full responsibility, but when I look back on it, it's genuinely icky. I think I was trying to go for the idea of Basil trying to examine the utter horror of the idea that someone who claimed to love him did these horrible, horrible things to him -- killing his pet, raping him, forcing others to rape him -- and trying to embrace a healthier version of love and I think I was going for the idea of "He is not what other people did to him", but I don't think it's a stretch to think that I fucked this up) and even played some of the Ark members' stuff for laughs. I mean, it wasn't even like the Silver and Daisy thing where they were at least trying to banter amongst themselves to deal with the horror (I mean, if not for the whole Daisy-being-kidnapped-off-the-street thing, I think that it could have been pretty good. And on an off-topic note, I definitely thought it would have been better if Daisy's parents were the one to sell her and Gary. As in, better storytelling-wise, because they were already established as molesting her and Gary -- admittedly, it's slightly odd because I'm not a Pokemon person, but I don't recall the Oak parents being abusive in canon -- and yet somehow when Daisy goes missing and doesn't come back, the parents inexplicably have nothing to do with it for a change. I think it would have been more in line with what Sparkles said if someone didn't kidnap Daisy randomly but her parents were in on it; even Ash's grandfather brings up the possibility of the parents being involved even though they aren't. Hell, I remember there was one Cracked article on human trafficking where apparently the girl's mother was involved with hurting her own daughter in that way, which isn't really uncommon in cases like that in general from what I heard); they were actually kind of playing some of the Ark's stuff, like Ratigan's serial rapes, for laughs. (And I wrote for that bit too, and...I'm not proud of it. I didn't really go for the attempted "comedy" thing as much as Chel, I don't think, but I still fucked up.) So yeah, trust me, there's a lot of depth to this rabbit hole, Tez. There really is. So I don't think they can even use "We just wanted the Ark members to be scary" given that even by that logic, it's pretty much inconsistent at times as to what they were doing with the Ark members. And they did it to a degree with God's Will First as well, the whole "playing them for laughs" thing. (I'm not counting the part where Psycho humiliates them in public; Psycho actually did the right thing there and it was a form of protest against basically a hate group) And yeah, I think Chel just really wants nothing more than to come up with increasingly taboo forms of violence because they're an edgy asshole. That's pretty much what it boils down to. And in retrospect, it really drives me nuts that they stole the monologue structure from Haunted. I mean, having a Shout Out (as TV Tropes) is one thing, but this kind of feels like bordering on plagiarism. (Which actually makes it hilarious that they accused me of plagiarism. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, Chel)
It should probably be said, I don't think most people here have an automatic objection to many of the extreme subject-matter spaces Chel is playing in. Haunted itself is shock fiction- allegedly when Palahniuk has done readings of the first story in the anthology, there have been people in the audience who passed out because it's so gross. But even people who hate the book because they think it's an exercise in cynicism and misery that relies on transgressing the lines of good taste to get people's attention will generally accept that Palahniuk knew exactly what he was doing and is very good at what he does. I've had my brain permanently rewired by a million-word visual novel series where the main character falls in love with an evil witch who repeatedly murders his entire family and tortures him to death. Chel had conniptions over Helluva Boss, which is about a relationship with unhealthy power dynamics and massive communication issues; I'm pretty sure that if they read just about any popular Cnovel they might actually explode. I own the official English release of one where the love interest keeps the preserved corpse of his homophobic teacher who pushed him down a pit to hell for no reason to cuddle with in bed like an anime body pillow. It's a comedy. It's all in the execution, though what people think is a good execution is still going to vary. IMO the reason Chel keeps handling things in ways that certified enjoyers of stuff that would curdle the skin of normies still find objectionable is that the same way they kept being completely certain that big challenges would be a nonissue even while they were panicking and asking for help over very basic low-level ones, they just... take for granted that they have the execution handled. I don't know if I've ever seen them say something like "I don't know if I can do justice to this," or "I'm not sure if I pulled off what I was aiming for." There's healthy levels of confidence, and then there's the kind where you, oh, I don't know, lose your shit at people for finding your story unintentionally funny because you provided too little detail for them to be able to tell what was supposed to be going on, or for not being able to keep the plot straight in a nonlinear novella-length story with 70 characters who all go by alternate names. And one of those two ways of operating means you're a lot less likely to notice whether your first instinct about the best way to handle something might not be a particularly good one.
Yeah, I wanna be clear that like, my main objection to the trafficking isn't that it happens in the story, or even that it happens in a way I feel is executed poorly; that I see all the time and mostly just roll my eyes at. It's the fact that it's presented within the story and apparently to the authors as having some level of realism WHILE actively promoting a harmful ideology. I don't remember what the disclaimer on the pleasure island story is now, but I do remember checking it a few months after the initial blowup to see a very passive aggressive one, and tone aside bc I'm so not one to talk, ironically the contents of that disclaimer would have satisfied what I actually wanted from chel re that chapter to begin with. (And frankly, if they just slapped a big ol "this is idfic" label on the whole thing I might think parts of it are *tasteless* but I would have much less of an objection to it as a whole. It's the presenting things as realistic and then the harassment for any criticism of that that's like, actually harmful, imo. God knows the amount of shit that's truly horrendous irl I've waxed poetic amount in fiction over the years; probably there's at least a quarter of wparg in words in various places over the internet.)
They have conniptions over Helluvaboss because, besides thinking that Stolas and Blitzo's relationship is rape (for various reasons), they love Stella, for some reason, and they think that she's horribly mistreated. For some reason. I mean, admittedly, I haven't really watched Helluvaboss, but I think they like Stella because she's a power fantasy for them: someone who can treat everybody in her path like shit and still get worshipped for it. Maybe Chel has that fantasy, the idea that instead of people calling them out on Kintsugi for being terrible, they can just do whatever they want to other people and still have people falling all over them telling them what a poor, put-upon martyr they are even when they're committing a felony. Which, I admit I don't understand. I mean, I can understand being upset and wanting sympathy, but it's like, Chel takes that to levels that I didn't think were possible. And yeah, I don't automatically think that dark stuff is awful. I've come across handlings of dark stuff that are surprisingly very well done. It's just that Chel isn't a good writer. They never have been; hell, even the better parts of WPARG have been handled by people like Dolly, for example. Like, Dolly's a terrible person, but she's not an incompetent writer, at least. Meanwhile, Chel's not a good writer. Even the friend I've mentioned before actually said that Chel's a terrible writer who changes tenses constantly, misuses words, has terrible grammar, and their biases are on display in the worst ways possible. And they still have this overinflated opinion of their own talent. Which I guess ties into the execution thing. Hell, maybe the overinflated opinion of their own talent thing ties into why darkfic enjoyers are turned off their content nonetheless. And I don't know why they're so arrogant and so resistant to criticism. I really don't know what's wrong with Chel.
You know. I would love SO much to forget about Chel. I have a job, I have a house, I have dishes to wash and dogs to pet and books to read and invasive bindweed to pull out of my yard. But every single time somebody has checked in to make sure Chel hasn't had any more bright ideas about writing rape fanfiction about people who criticized them, they have STILL been complaining about the argument from 2023. We’re coming up on two years since the meltdown, and I don’t think Chel has managed to go a month at any point in that time without vagueposting about it somewhere. This is so pathetic that I haven’t seen any point documenting it, but the other day they simultaneously increased the reality-editing and reduced the vagueness enough that I think a public comment is warranted. On May 7, 2025, a guest asked in the comments of the “Heritage Months” fic whether there are topics they would refuse to cover or had to remove from the story. (Wayback Machine link) Chel responded: People who have read the documentation thread will immediately recognize that almost every single word of that paragraph is a fucking lie. On September 12, 2023, two separate Jewish people told Chel, via two different channels, that they found the Hanukkah fic baffling, tasteless, and offensive. One, Rats, asked them to not write about antisemitic violence in the future, and the other, Aondeug, told them that if they were going to touch the issue, they should do at least a year of serious, dedicated research before they even consider putting pen to paper or looking for a sensitivity reader, and recommended several books to start with. Chel responded by deleting Rats’ comment and editing the summary of the fic to include: Rats and Aon were both so disgusted by this that they gave up on any further attempts to communicate with Chel. By about 24 hours later, the fic had been edited to remove the 8-themed sequence of Nazis raping a Jewish child during the Holocaust, because “concerns were raised” that it was “iffy,” along with accusatory messages in the author’s note and sent directly to Aon about “continu[ing] an explicitly ended private discussion in a public forum.” This injunction clearly did not apply to Chel, because a chapter of “From the Mouths of Babes” posted on September 24, 2023 was titled “Wait, you’re Jewish?” and features a My Little Pony character lecturing a child about how it’s totally normal for someone who isn’t married to wear a headscarf traditionally worn by married women, and therefore it was definitely unreasonable for the three or four separate Jewish users who all immediately clocked that as a sign of poor research to criticize it. September 24, 2023 was, incidentally, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, dedicated to reflecting on and repenting for the past year’s sins. Then, on March 23, 2024, Chel and company posted “WPaRG: Purim,” another holiday special for a Jewish holiday, featuring antisemitism, hate crimes, and rape, “but it doesn’t happen on the holiday and it isn’t BECAUSE she’s Jewish.” At this point, some random unironic Jewish reader who had no connection to or knowledge of any of this shit made the mistake of taking the author’s note on the Hanukkah fic, which at that point included, “if any of our regular readers are Jewish, do comment,” seriously, and left a comment saying that they found the decision to write about Jewish characters experiencing rape and antisemitism to supposedly “celebrate” a Jewish holiday hurtful and shitty, and it made them feel unwelcome in fandom spaces. Chel and company responded with their usual good taste, which consisted of saying they didn’t do anything wrong because they didn’t intend to be antisemitic, listing every single non-Jewish culture that they’ve written holiday hate crime rape fic about, asking this random stranger to sensitivity-read, finding a Jewish person somewhere to comment saying that actually this commenter should feel uplifted and empowered by the chapter, and then demanding that the commenter respond to their flying monkey. Chel even low-key accused the commenter of being a stealth Kintsugijin operative, to the commenter’s confusion. Despite Chel’s flying monkey being described as a “beta/contributor,” as far as I am aware, she never received a credit on anything in the fic in the well over a year since Chel claimed this, until the chapter of “Heritage Months” after the one the comment that started this whole rant was on, which features… ...a Jew being raped by Nazis during World War II.
Unfortunately, I do actually know about the whole Purim incident. I think one of the things that really got to me was the whole thing about Chel doing some "but what about the domestic violence rates on Christmas" stuff, where it's like -- it's not that the domestic violence rates on Christmas aren't a big deal, Chel, because they are, but it's like...it doesn't mean that antisemitism on Jewish holidays isn't a big deal either. I mean, it's not too much to ask that you don't write antisemitic holiday fic, is it? As for Chel's flying monkey, she did kind of get a credit on the fic regarding when you kind of went off on them in 2023 or so, Tez. Basically, Chel kind of had that comment about "but our Jewish contributor didn't have any problems with the whole Pizzagate undertones thing with the Ark!" Stuff like that. So it's like...she was always there, really.
It's possible I might have missed a credit somewhere because there's so much WPaRG and see above re: better things to do, but as of the conversation with Aon, Chel claimed the group was entirely gentiles and did not have any Jewish contributors, betas, or sensitivity readers: (FTR, I have access to logs of the whole Discord conversation, but they're not public because, well, Chel fucking doxxed someone in it.) If Chel has been claiming to have had a Jewish author onboard when the Hanukkah fic was written, this is another lie. Even the rant in the author's note of the Purim chapter about how they totally asked a Jew who said it was fine was edited in after the fact; Chel will repeatedly edit ANs on any chapter that is ever criticized to add more justifications for months afterward, which is, honestly, very funny.
That’s really kind of childish of Chel to do. It really is. I think that regarding the Jewish writer/beta/whoever, Chel said it was when they showed her the Pleasure Island chapter, I think? But I wouldn’t be surprised if they just said it to “defend themselves” after you called them out for harassing Sparkles.
...I was actually being nice and trying not to link to or directly reference any of Chel's Tumblr or Reddit posts where they vagued people for months and months after the argument was over, but wow, at some point they edited the AN of the Pinocchio chapter to link directly to a Reddit thread where they were lying about what happened for sympathy and claim none of their critics were Jewish! You know, I had deliberately left that out of my post yesterday? I'd thought about mentioning it because I found it to be one of the more disgustingly self-serving of Chel's lies, but I hadn't mentioned it anywhere in public for well over a year now because, again, I did not want to drag this shit out without a good reason! But I guess they're proud of it! Jesus fuck, Chel, how do you keep limboing under my subterranean expectations?
What the flying fuck? God, I hate them. I hate them so much. I mean, I already found that a disgusting self-serving lie as it was, but linking that in their Author’s Note of the Pinocchio chapter? That’s just a whole new level of messed up. You know, the really sad thing is that I thought that Chel and Dolly would actually apologize for what they did, give a sincere apology, but I think I need to let that go now because it’s abundantly obvious that Chel isn’t interested in actually taking accountability/apologizing to the people they hurt. They’re more interested in being a compulsive liar, it seems, and trying to get sympathy from other people over things that were their fault to begin with. Ugh.
...Aaand after that nonsense, I have helpfully been informed that there was a whole extra major antisemitism Chel did that nobody here had even spotted in September 2023, so it didn't make it into Aon's list of concerns! Not that Chel and co. being confidently wrong about subjects that none of them are remotely qualified to talk about is ever unexpected, but wow, do they have a talent for stumbling ass-backward into completely novel forms of bigotry.
The most recent chapter of "From the Mouths of Babes" at the time of Cheltdown 2023 was titled "How are you eating that?" and was Christiansplaining kosher and halal dietary restrictions as, quote, "the reasons they weren't allowed don't really apply anymore, so..." Which. Okay. Obviously not everyone who is Jewish or Muslim follows kosher or halal, and not everyone who does so does so equally strictly, and both religions have explicit rules that not hurting yourself is more important than following everything to the letter, so, like, Orthodox Jews can eat shrimp in survival situations and Muslims with eating disorders are exempt from fasting during Ramadan. And people have proposed that some of the kashrut laws may have been rooted in food safety, but oh look you can literally go to Wikipedia and you'll immediately see, Chelco present it as fact, and frame this explicitly didactic story about how it's totally normal for a Muslim to eat ham as her doing it because the rules of both kosher and halal are non-applicable because of modern food safety, and they don't include any mention whatsoever of religious reasons for either set of dietary laws except "it's in the rules." The result was something that, when I showed it to one of those Jewish people who criticized Chel who Chel decided wasn't Jewish, got this response: It's not something I normally would have made a whole separate thing about, but all that other antisemitism really got to me.
Jesus Christ. I just kind of wonder what kind of other stuff Chel's wrong about, to be perfectly honest. I used to think that they were so very smart and all that, but the more you break it down, the more I'm starting to wonder if any of what they said, ever, was true.
