Vent About Chel

(Thank you to @spockandawe for the suggestion)

Honestly, I think this might be a good place to start given that I have a lot of complicated feelings about Chel and I might as well actually start talking about them. The thing is, I didn’t go into WPARG wanting to hate it. I didn’t go into Chel’s thing wanting to hate them. Before, I did think that certain aspects of WPARG had the potential to have Unfortunate Implications (as TV Tropes would say), but I didn’t think that automatically meant the authors were bad people. I never truly think that. After all, authors are only human, and even stuff that I find offensive usually turns out to be accidental on the authors’ parts or they end up going “Yeah, that was a terrible idea.” One Miraculous Ladybug saltfic author freely admitted that one jab they made Alya say about one of Marinette’s friends was too far in hindsight, so I think that even fanfic authors who make baffling decisions about characterization (for example) tend to have a thing called acknowledging when they screwed up. For all people accuse fanfic authors of overreacting to criticism, I think they also don’t give fanfic authors enough credit for when they handle criticism with grace or acknowledge that they screwed up. (I think even some badfic authors known for being prima donnas way back when have had a history of regretting their behavior as they’ve gotten older and wiser, as well as their writing, so people are still capable of growing and changing; it’s just not our job to fix them)

And even then, I had the naive belief that “well, surely they can’t think this way about all BIPOC, right?" when stuff like the Shere Khan chapter happened and another part of me was wondering if there were any BIPOC writers on the team handling it. I think at the time, Dolly was the only BIPOC writer on the team. Honestly, when I did learn that Chel described themselves as white in an attempt to discredit S as being white and his criticisms thus invalid, after the S incident itself, I actually felt — it was kind of like I was disgusted, though not entirely surprised. It was like, “I get it; every time I tried to think you weren’t that bad was for nothing.” Not because they were white, but because they, a white person, were trying to decide who was BIPOC and who wasn’t just because S gave their feelings a boo boo. And I’m not going to lie — I wouldn’t say that the experience has given me white guilt, unless white guilt gives you the urge to tear your own skin (mine’s extremely pale) off, just sort of like “Get it off me, get it off me." Like, Chel hasn’t given me white guilt; Chel just gives me this desire to tear my own fucking skin off because I want to have nothing in common with them, even whether or not we’re both white. (At least me being American and Chel British gives me another barrier of distance, but everything about my whiteness and Chel’s makes me want to go “Get it off me, get it off me")

I guess to be fair, wanting to tear off my skin isn’t anything new; I did have a substantially more downplayed reaction when people complimented my skin tone and skin smoothness when I was a kid, more like subtle discomfort. (Part of it might have been insecurity due to having the worst case of acne ever, though it mercifully cleared up later, but later on, the compliments I got got a little awkward) And I did have some genuine sort of…not even white guilt as much as white secondhand embarrassment when I saw how Star Wars fandom treated characters of color (and to be fair, I made the occasional fuck-up regarding race, but I was always open to constructive criticism. It helped that one reviewer who gently critiqued my portrayal of Finn…one reason I didn’t get angry was just because they backtracked before I even replied and apologized for being too mean even though they were kind of…I guess compliment-sandwiching in their original review? And I was like, at least mentally, “What are you apologizing for? You’ve been extremely polite."), but Chel made it so much worse.

I mean, for all Reylos got accused of racism (and sometimes for good reasons, such as with one portrayal of Finn in a Reylo Beauty and the Beast fic that cast him as Gaston and was so dedicated to making Finn a Hate Sink, as TV Tropes would say, that Finn got portrayed with horrible antiblack stereotypes. I couldn’t make this up if I tried), it’s not that they weren’t trying to speak up; I know they just had bullies of their own in their ranks who were trying to make sure they didn’t speak up because, for example, they saw every Reylo who spoke up about racism as equivalent to the antis who mocked an e-sports AU written by Cait Corrain before the drama she induced (I could not make this up if I tried either. Oof). But even then, in 2020, they did finally say that enough was enough and try to do better. And later on, when Cait Corrain and Obversa were being extremely petty and racist, they were willing to take them to task over it while also calling them out on genuine toxic behavior they had even when they weren’t doing a racist. And even at their worst, I don’t think I ever personally knew anyone equivalent to Chel. Chel, I maintain, is somebody who is just unique in the levels of cruelty they’re capable of (I admit I was fortunate enough to never meet Ray, so maybe I am still naive as to how bad it can get), because they just don’t have a stopping point. Most people I have heard of usually have a place where they draw the line. Chel has none, or if they do, after a fake apology, they usually discard that drawing of the line and cross it gleefully. Such as what happened yesterday.

I am personally not Jewish myself (I’m agnostic, not even Christian-raised agnostic), but something like that really feels like no, nothing that happened to Chel in their past could ever justify what they’ve done. It’s a weak excuse at best, and being bullied in school shouldn’t give you a license to go on and become a bully yourself. Or, in this case, do what they did yesterday. I mean, it’s not my place to decide who forgives Chel given I’m not Jewish or a survivor, so I can only offer my personal opinion simply as someone they hurt: I think they’re weak as shit. Small, boring and evil, and I hate them for hurting me when I already had been hurt by that Discord guy trying to destroy my reputation after I blocked him. I mean, I mistakenly entered the co-write of WPARG thinking that fanfiction could be enjoyable again; I was wrong. At least on the flipside, knowing what I do about how comfortable I was co-sporking three Reylo fics that could have been better with Esme Amelia and collaborating with a friend on another co-write lets me know that it’s not that collaborations are evil, but rather that Chel was the wrong person to work with. Then again, for anyone and everyone, Chel is the wrong person to work with: I can’t forgive Dolly for what she’s done in trying to help humiliate S and Sparkles, or her hatred for gender non-conforming women or any female characters in Homestuck (Chel said as much in their Homestuck spork that Dolly thought the male characters were mistreated in favor of female characters, and that Dolly brought to their attention how masculine women were seen as better than feminine men, and given how Chel’s used it as an excuse to accuse Homestuck of fetishizing butch women by having them exist — like, why is it bad to accuse anyone of fetishizing gay men, but it’s okay for Chel to accuse butch women of being fetishized just for being represented and any LGBT+ rep that isn’t just token background characters in RWBY of fetishization? — I think it’s safe to say Dolly hates women who don’t conform to gender stereotypes. For some reason. Even though she’s a woman who accuses everyone of misogyny for breathing in her direction, she hates women who aren’t pretty and girly and frilly and pretty crying, like Lapis. Why do she and Chel never get called out for fetishizing girly-girls?), but I can still admit that Dolly and Crow are still victims of Chel’s racism in Chel calling her and Crow a reclaimed slur for Indigenous people that Chel, as a white British person, can’t say.

I guess I’m just also disappointed in Dolly; she didn’t use to be the Sabrina Raincomprix to Chel’s Chloe Bourgeois (although hell, Chloe has more redeeming qualities than Chel, even if Astruc never intended Chloe to have redeeming qualities in the first place). She used to be nice to me. She used to actually talk to me when Chel, Wicked and Writearoundchic just preferred to ignore me, especially Wicked and Writearoundchic. She used to actually bring up concerns she had about stuff that confused her or something that I wrote as opposed to cyberstalking me like she did to S and Sparkles, she was the only one to try and at least comfort me and defuse the situation when I walked in accidentally on Chel shit-talking me and accusing me of disrespecting survivors (and yeah, maybe my backstories in the villain backstory doc relied too much on the Chain of Harm trope, but why the fuck does Chel get to disrespect actual real life survivors like Sparkles, and think it’s righteous and justified when they do it even after Chel explicitly said they weren’t a survivor? At least I can laugh about them accusing me of disrespecting survivors. Because I didn’t do what they did to Sparkles. Them accusing me of disrespecting survivors is just pure hypocrisy and projection given the type of person they are) when Chel didn’t even try to comfort me or apologize (and Wicked and Writearoundchic didn’t even try either). Dolly had to do damage control here. (And honestly, it’s unfair as shit that the other white writers had to sit back and force the only Indigenous woman on the team to actually play diplomat. I can’t forgive Dolly knowing what I know, but I can’t deny that even among the writing team, she seemed to get treated like shit, from small ways like being forced to be damage control after I walked in on myself being shit-talked — and I don’t even know if Dolly was among the shit-talkers; I think Chel was, though, and Chel didn’t even give me a fake apology — to Chel calling her that reclaimed slur to refer to her)

I feel like I have some damage left over too. I feel like I lost interest in anything M/M related after Chel decided to scapegoat LGBT+ fans as a whole for the fetishization discourse (with the implication, I interpreted, as Chel thinking LGBT+ fans didn’t deserve any good representation just because of the fetishization discourse. I mean, it shouldn’t be controversial, should it, to think that marginalized groups shouldn’t be punished in fandom because of one stupid bit of discourse? I agree that the fetishization argument is absurd; I just don’t think it justifies bigotry against LGBT+ people), I have ambivalent feelings about sex at best after Chel used sex and kink to justify their attacks on minors, and LGBT+ fans. Like those fears that if I don’t think minors (even antis) deserve to be obsessively dogged with Chel accusing them of being obsessed with cis women’s genitals over slash pairings (like, misogyny should be called out, but the way Chel did it was so gross), mostly because of the rather explicit sexual elements in there, I’m a misogynist who hates sex (even though I don’t hate women, or sex, but unfortunately, I guess it’s not like I’m smart enough to know my own mind, right? /sarcasm), and if I don’t have sex immediately even if I don’t feel like it, then I’m a misogynist. It’s more about “I only feel like I have to have sex so that the Chel in my head will stop calling me a damaged, sexually repressed bra-burner for not letting men stick their dick in me whenever they want and never when I want”. Like the whole “lie back and think of England” thing. Granted, Chel wasn’t the only one; a woman actually virgin-shamed me and threatened my lesbian co-sporker with corrective rape all in one phrase — “Y’all can’t appreciate a good dicking.” — just because we were critiquing a rape scene. Like, rape fantasies are all well and good, but I can’t forgive that woman for what she said. It’s like, this shouldn’t be normal, right? Threatening a lesbian with corrective rape for critiquing a rape scene with me? And incidentally, when Chel told me I had to hide my gender on the Internet/pretend I was a guy to avoid antis (and honestly, given what I know now about them and antis, I wonder if they ever made that suggestion in good faith and then I end up feeling guilty afterwards because I worry about being bigoted somehow), they didn’t really care about the same co-sporker from earlier, who was writing a what-if-Ben-Solo-survived-Exegol fic, suffering harassment despite their justification for me hiding my gender/pretending to be a boy being “you get harassed more by antis if you’re a girl.” Whether or not it’s true, they were still willing to leave my female co-sporker who was writing the fic and actually got the anti commenter in the first place who mistook me for a guy in the first place (the anti commenter was originally targeting her, not me) open to harassment from antis. On the one hand, I’m glad she didn’t get that suggestion from Chel, but on the other, the fact Chel was okay with leaving her open to harassment even via sheer indifference — I just wonder if they ever supported Reylos in the first place, given that my friend’s fic was only targeted when there was the possibility it was about to go Reylo, and fortunately, that was mercifully brief even when she did decide “fuck it, I’m going Reylo.” I don’t even think that Chel really cared about women being harassed in that moment, at least if they weren’t part of the WPARG inner-circle. Plus, given that they were okay with harassing women themselves, such as cyberstalking Essence’s Tumblr just because they were angry she wouldn’t edit the Narm entry she put down just because they were pissy that she mistook Meghan for eating a cat when Meghan actually well, did something lethal to the poor kitty, never mind that authorial intent doesn’t matter if the writing isn’t clear; hell, even I initially thought Meghan ate a cat because the stupid Lamia device they used for Meghan did make it look like that, but naturally, Chel would have thrown a tantrum if I got confused. (And yeah, being frustrated when I have to explain things to someone is something that I have in common with Chel, but unlike Chel, I’m at least working on it and trying not to be a bitch, and unlike Chel, I know I am capable of poorly wording things, hence why I add corrections or clarifications when need be; Chel’s own writing weakness seems to be style over substance, and they’re not interested in fixing it because it’s easier to make ableist dunks on their audience while conveniently forgetting that it just shows their own internalized ableism given that they’re autistic)

But Chel doesn’t have a right to complain about Internet harassment when they only care when it’s women in their inner circle, and that women outside it can burn for all they care. With my friend, it was more passive not giving a shit (and hell, my friend did nothing to them; not that she’d deserve it even if she did make them mad, but she didn’t even interact with Chel. The worst she did was roll her eyes when she saw Chel accusing pixarjem of kinkshaming just for saying “sex slavery isn’t sexy” in response to a fic with Merida being made a sex slave, and not in the kinky consensual way either. And Chel couldn’t have known about it given that my friend kept it between us, and Chel still didn’t care about my friend being harassed), and with Essence, it was more actively stalking her, and trying to incite their co-writers (except me; I just stayed out of it) to dig up some dirt on her Tumblr to use against her (and yeah, Essence did allegedly use to be acephobic, but she’s turned over a new leaf thank God, and Chel could have been triggered by it given that they themselves are aro-ace, but that being said, I had this gut feeling that they weren’t doing it entirely because of that, but because they were angry at Essence not editing the YMMV page and for politely criticizing WPARG. So, yeah). I don’t know why Chel thinks that harassing women is okay when they do it, or at least allow it. Hell, given their relentless stalking me after I left, leaving comments and direct messages I didn’t want on Dreamwidth, sending me asks on Tumblr, etc., I feel like that kind of could fall into harassment, though I feel like maybe it was my fault for not explicitly explaining that I was leaving. I mean, I kept removing them from co-creator invitations (though honestly, given that they rarely used my work, it didn’t make sense to keep me as a co-creator on stuff like the She-Ra chapter, which I had no part in writing) only to be added back, and I did think that explaining would actually get them to stop, but my mother, who I confided in about this, said that they didn’t deserve an explanation. Plus, given how they reacted to S when S tried to explain why he was breaking things off, maybe I would have gotten the harassment S did in his place, so who knows?

But Chel got so persistent with stalking me that even after I successfully blocked them everywhere I could, I still feared they’d come find me. It was difficult to relax and feel physically safe, and it didn’t help that I worried about being punished by anyone, outside of WPARG and inside the circle, for sympathizing with Essence. I don’t know if I handled it perfectly, but honestly, I just wanted to be left alone and I also wanted to check as to what about Chel’s behavior was normal and what was not.

And hearing from Tez — I’m glad she told me, in a way, because I got the ultimate confirmation that I wasn’t crazy for thinking there was something wrong with Chel’s behavior (like, usually when somebody talks about “do you want to share your experiences working on a fanfic for this masterpost I’m writing”, it usually means said author really fucked up, especially since most fanfic writers aren’t actively looking for drama and prefer to cultivate positive PR. So when you get attention and not for your talents as a writer or the quality of your work but for the negative way you treat others, it usually means shit’s about to storm), but I actually felt furious and betrayed when I learned Chel was falsely accusing me of plagiarism behind my back even when I didn’t want to be stalked by them anymore. Especially when I wrote that fic back when I still, stupidly, looked up to them. (God, Chel, you just have such a talent for even making everyone who gave a damn about you hate you, you really do. You saw someone caring about you, wanting to help you, and you decided to break your favorite toys, didn’t you?) And even that took a backseat to learning about S. That was the worst.

 

Is this about the user here named chel? I could not read all of this but from what I did read you have had wquite the unpleasant ride :(

 

Yeah. Fortunately, Chel isn’t at Kintsugi anymore. They’re still kind of being a little bit of a pill in other ways, though. They really are.

 

Thank you, Spock. Really. It was really just kind of a lot for anybody to deal with, and the bit with them shit-talking me actually caught me off-guard because nobody had even told me that they had issues with certain stuff like the villain backstory docs. To be fair, it was Dolly who suggested she had issues with stuff like the Shere Khan and Kaa backstories that I offered, but even then, she never really said anything about me disrespecting survivors or anything like that; she mostly said that said backstories never got brought up again. And Chel — I think it was mostly for Judge Hopkins’ wife and such that they objected to stuff like me giving her a reason for passively going along with her husband’s horribleness. Yeah, the leader of God’s Will First is Judge Hopkins from Paranorman, and even Chel’s attempts to say “we’re just making a villain act like a villain” would fall flat because Hopkins, by the time of Paranorman, had really realized that “Maybe we were shitty people after the Agatha thing”. Hell, having Frollo lead God’s Will First would have made sense, especially since not only is he a canonical religious fundamentalist bigot but he also has canonical tendencies of nearly raping Esmeralda. So honestly, I kind of always wondered if Chel had a grudge against Hopkins for what he tried to do to Agatha — which, to be fair, isn’t completely unreasonable — and decided to turn him into Frollo 2.0, while pretty much demoting Frollo to being an extra. I mean, it’s not that I think that what happened to Agatha was okay, and people aren’t necessarily obliged to say “the villain got a redemption arc, stop whining” (though bizarrely enough, Chel kind of had a hypocritical double standard in that regard with the Diamonds from Steven Universe, acting like “oh, the Diamonds didn’t know the Gems they were shattering were sentient so they should get off the hook for all of it”, just because they were salty that people compared the Diamonds to Nazis. I mean, at least people who were defensive over “Change Your Mind”, to my recollection, didn’t say it was okay what the Diamonds did, and were more concerned about Rebecca Sugar being called a Nazi sympathizer by people like Lily Orchard. Chel just…didn’t even seem concerned about that as much as going all The Diamonds Didn’t Know So It Was Okay That They Did Stuff Like Gem Shattering. Make of that what you will), but it just seemed so strange.

That and, back on topic (sorry), Hopkins’ wife was not really shown as raping people or carrying it out like her husband was. Of course, it doesn’t mean she was a good person at all, really; she does have one child she refuses to let GWF hurt and even manages to get Jake to back off, but even that does have ulterior motives due to said kid being white and blonde. And there’s stuff like her bringing up the idea of GWF punishing asexual people (or “prideful”, to use GWF’s terminology, and to be fair, ace people can be victims of stuff like corrective rape), as well as being a bit of a pro-gender-conforming asshole towards Wendy Corduroy (yes, they meet), and — well, other than the actually horrible shit that Judge Hopkins’ wife has actually done or allowed to happen, I think the narrative had contempt for her for just sort of having internalized misogyny, for just being a “good little woman". I think that from Chel’s perspective, being a woman even suspected of having internalized misogyny (and even outside of Mrs. Hopkins, I think they just thought every woman and girl, even those hardly as bad as she was, even those who did the Not Like Other Girls thing — which, say what you will about how annoying it is, but it’s not as bad as, say, actually going around raping people, even though I did wonder at times if Chel held “being gender nonconforming” up to the level of, say, what Mrs. Hopkins allowed to happen) was the worst thing possible, and it meant that you were pretty much irredeemable as a woman. Mrs. Hopkins obviously did much worse than just having internalized misogyny, but Chel was more okay with my backstory for Judge Hopkins, it seemed, than my backstory for Mrs. Hopkins, where the Judge himself actually did go around actively corrective-raping people and generally being a horrific psychopath. Like, backstory for Judge Hopkins, here an established rapist with a massive bigoted streak (like, some of the stuff he thinks about Wilhelmina, a trans woman…I actually wanted to puke reading what he was thinking, especially since he seemed to be focusing on her, um, non-passing features. I could write it off initially as “yeah, what he’s thinking is disgusting but it doesn’t mean that Chel shares his views", but knowing what I do about Chel’s transphobia, including their transmisogyny —let’s say they don’t treat trans women any better than trans men. I remember they even treated the allegedly unsatisfactory trans rep/worldbuilding in Homestuck as equivalent to that article “The Rape of James Bond", an article about how female characters get targeted with rape more than male characters. So yeah. They compared trans rep in Homestuck to rape. It’s safe to say that they share at least some of the transphobic views other characters they write share, even if they’re not going around having trans people tortured) — somehow the backstory for a man like Judge Hopkins where I established him as being abused by his father (and yes, I will admit that in retrospect, it was a mistake to use the Chain of Harm trope given that it can be too simplistic at times) wasn’t insulting survivors, but stuff like Mrs. Hopkins’ backstory that I only used as a shout-out to Carrie with the whole emotionally abusive fundamentalist mother thing somehow was insulting survivors. Even if my implementation of Mrs. Hopkins’ mother was more of her being emotionally and physically abusive, because I knew that I had to show that sexual abuse wasn’t the only type of abuse that left marks. And Chel themselves pretty much did a similar thing with Rattlesnake Jake’s backstory, which, admittedly, did have some unsettling bits of effective prose, but basically had everything Jake did boil down to “his mother died in childbirth, his dad blamed him for it, and said dad was also a religious fundamentalist who didn’t get proper treatment or therapy for his mental illness” and I don’t think said sperm donor’s issues got fleshed out outside of “generic crazy” — there was stuff like him being recounted as ranting and raving about Jake killing his mother via sucking the life out of her, which, um…yeah, it really feels in retrospect too much like “generic crazy", I think. And given Chel’s established ableism in and out of the fic, I don’t think it would surprise me if it was intentional.

But yeah. It really felt like saying that male abusers with tragic backstories weren’t disrespecting survivors, but female abusers with tragic backstories were. Not that Mrs. Hopkins should have been absolved of what she did just because she was a girl, but it just seems confusing in hindsight, and trying to figure out whether or not Chel was justified in shit-talking me behind my back is hard. I do know they are a bit of a hypocrite themselves regarding “don’t disrespect survivors" though; I mean, I might have fucked up with the villain backstories, but I never did what Chel did to Sparkles, which should obviously be worse than anything written down. Like, I may not have been perfect or as smart as my former co-writers, but I knew enough to treat survivors with kindness and respect even when they gave my feelings a boo boo.

So it’s not like I don’t think Chel and co. didn’t have points about my writing, but my God, I wish they’d told me, instead of falsely saying that Dolly needed to talk to me, acting like I was a complete idiot/lazy for not immediately responding to the Google doc even though Google doc discussions are not like texting where you get the notifications immediately (hell, one of the less horrible things I was surprised by with S was that they were open to using email in order to talk with him before things went south. I mean, I’m not saying my treatment was worse than S’, because S still had a lot of racism, transphobia and anti-Semitism in how he was treated, but it really made me wonder why Chel didn’t even consider email if they wanted to make sure I replied to them), and then, when I was guilt-tripped enough to go to the Google doc, allow me to walk in on them shit-talking me and accusing me outright of disrespecting survivors. And I decided to apologize, with as much grace as I could muster, and ask what I could do to fix things and do revisions. I’m not gonna lie; I did feel like I was about to cry in that moment, because I had no idea that they thought that little of me. But I made sure not to grovel, or cry. Dolly was actually the only one who was willing to talk to me; everyone else scattered when I made myself known, sort of like, “By the way, I was here the whole time and overheard everything you said."

As for Dolly? I honestly don’t think she was even in the shit-talking conversation. My memory might be shit, and I might be trying to let her off the hook to some degree because back then, she was nothing like the woman Kintsugi got introduced to, believe it or not, and she was always consistently nice to me; the worst she did was ask too many questions, but she was never outright mean. Like, she made sure to talk to me when most of the writers, even Chel at times, just acted like I didn’t exist. But the main reason I don’t think Dolly was involved was — well, the writers always had color-coded text when they talked among themselves, Dolly’s being beige, Chel dark purple, mine pink, and during the conversation memory…maybe my brain’s trying to protect me here, but I don’t think I ever saw any beige text, i.e. Dolly’s text, show up. Plus, I have this sort of theory that Dolly didn’t really start cyberstalking S just out of anxiety, or Sparkles, because as angry as I am with her for her contribution, it just seems bizarre that Dolly would all of a sudden do this even though back when I was in the co-write, it was Chel who did stuff like stalking Essence on Tumblr to find dirt on her, coincidentally after Essence allegedly criticized Meghan’s portion of Water of the Womb as being confusing and lacking in nuance and allegedly criticized the chapter about Tumblr antis as strawmanning.

But I guess whether or not Dolly was, I know Dolly was the only person to try to negotiate with me and explain things, though I think that was just because she was the only one who even consistently talked to me; I had to seek out Chel on Dreamwidth back when we were Dreamwidth friends to so much as ask, “Can we be friends on Dreamwidth too?” Dolly was really the only one to really talk to me consistently, and she wasn’t as terrified of direct confrontation as she apparently was when you first met her; if she had any questions or gentle critiques of my writing, she talked to me. With lots of gratuitous apologizing (she says hypocritically) but still, she wasn’t scared of me. I’m not even excusing her roles in S and Sparkles’ thing; mostly I’m wondering how she changed so drastically a few months or so after I left the co-write when S’ thing happened. And given how Chel has no problem not only being racist regarding her and Crow but also subtly abusive in terms of stuff like outing her past to accuse Sparkles of forcing the writers to reveal their trauma when Sparkles didn’t, as much as I’m disappointed in Dolly, I also think she needs to get the fuck away from Chel. (It’s a complicated situation)

And honestly, Spock, your theory about Chel definitely makes a lot of sense, that they were on their best behavior (initially) here but things got worse in places where they had authority and power. I mean, with me, it was definitely kind of a slow creep because even when I was in the document, they did a good job of being nice to me and even did some of the compliment sandwich stuff regarding my writing; it only made walking in on them shit-talking me behind my back even worse because I really did think they liked me. I think if the red flags were there, they were extremely well-hidden, and I don’t think that even when they said stuff I disagreed with like with the discussion of The Goodest Guardian that they were…that bad, nothing that couldn’t be cleared up if I didn’t talk to them. It was that way with the Kyle from Fanboy and Chum Chum chapter, where I could get the impression that despite the heroic-ish characters cyberbullying a twelve year old for writing the Good Witch Azura version of My Immortal (which I think got even more horrible given that Kyle wrote it to cope with his own molestation), Chel didn’t think Kyle deserved that level of harshness due to his age. (God, that chapter…that was just a trainwreck. Luz and Kyle were the only people in it I didn’t hate, because at least Luz had the decency to show concern for Kyle and go “Let they without badfic cast the first stone”, basically, regarding Kyle’s online bullies. I mean, I wouldn’t call anyone who flamed or made fun of the OG My Immortal good people, but at least they would probably draw the line at making fun of a victim of child molestation. And given how fucked up FFN’s reviewing culture is, that says something)

But after Essence…it didn’t help that I did talk to her myself because I was trying to make sure to moderate any anti flaming WPARG (bizarrely enough, it never happened, and hardly anyone in the comments section of that chapter really had Chel’s level of hatred towards antis; the most vitriolic comment there was just said that that sort of discourse brought back bad memories for the commenter and that thank God Boo Boo faced the consequences of her actions — and hell, even Boo Boo in universe never faced the sheer level of humiliation and punishment that Gene Khan did, even though the worst thing Gene Khan did was “fake his race”) and I learned that she had OCD from previous bullying. Maybe Chel didn’t know, but I think they could have at least read the thread a little bit when I was talking with Essence, especially since AO3, back when I had a co-creator credit, informed me of every little comment and reply going on, so Chel could have at least been slightly aware of it. And given that Chel has OCD and based Sylvester’s experience off their own, I thought they at least wouldn’t bully Essence or conspire to do so knowing they’d be retraumatizing her, but getting slapped in the face with that truth proved me extremely wrong. I think that day, which should have been the first day I tried to live on campus, really did end up being a death by a thousand cuts situation, because I was already stressed and sleep-deprived, decided to check on my at-the-time co-writers because checking on my friends (or at the time friends) is something I do/did, and got slapped in the face with that, and to a lesser extent, other things. I think it hurt me too because they had initially been civil to Essence and kind, and I thought that everything was okay now, especially since I stayed up late through the night to make sure that things didn’t involve Chel being attacked because I thought then that they didn’t deserve it and was relieved when things went well. Like, “Okay, that was rough, but it’s over now, nobody got hurt” and that day I tried to live on campus was like, “Not so fast”, only it was Chel’s treatment of Essence that was the rude awakening, kind of literally. And I thought it was a misunderstanding when I first woke up. Then things just started hitting me later on.

But well, thank you, Spock. Now that I think about it, it is a lot for one person to work through on their own, let alone me.

 

I guess in terms of "struggles of the day", well, this is something I was originally supposed to talk about in Bad Content Breakdown Jamboree (talking about JD Riley, who...she's a different kind of awful, let's just say that), and I just realized that it all turns back on Chel. Again. Because one of the worst things they did...it was obviously overshadowed by stuff like how they treated Shan Yu, but Chel really just seemed obsessed with the idea of "survivors who lie about rape", and how they're borderline irredeemable. Hell, when there was somebody who was an anti commenting on their fic who turned out to be surprisingly civil and even liked the fic quite a bit (I don't know if they were actually an anti or just a misguided idealist though, given that they weren't really against dark content as much as trying to make sure characters of color weren't subjected to racist treatment in fandom. Or maybe I'm just naive here), Chel basically said that the reason they hated antis was how they randomly accused people of pedophilia and all that -- although given that their answer to why they hated antis might as well have been multiple choice every time they got asked, I don't even know if they were telling the truth here. Still, truth or not, it really makes what they did regarding the Pinocchio chapter debacle, because it was already horrible and unforgivable as it was, but they basically proved that they don't care about false accusations of pedophilia as much as they claim to. At least not when they're using them against others who really, really don't deserve it no matter what they're writing.

So now that I really think about it, maybe I shouldn't really trust Chel regarding their opinions on false accusations of pedophilia given that they were willing to do that when push came to shove. And given how somebody compared them to Goody Proctor after they did that, maybe I shouldn't trust Chel about anything regarding pro-shipping stuff, given how they basically are willing to engage in anti behavior when it suits their needs. Like, I shouldn't trust them regarding them defending fujoshis, or deciding who's pro-ship and who's not (honestly, their definitions of pro-ship just involve "anyone who's a clone of me in terms of my views", anyway, which is something that nobody can really achieve), or who's misogynistic and who's not (given that a lot of their faux-pro-ship bullshit was about "protecting" women from minorities and such) or whatever. And conversely, anything anti-shipping -- well, I shouldn't trust that anyway, but knowing that Chel was willing to make the hyenas a genuinely pseudoincestuous throuple starting from when they were underage, I think that by their screwed up logic, they don't have any right to condemn anyone critiquing the Pleasure Island chapter for something they did themselves. Plus, given how much incest there is in WPARG, as well as how Hivefled has a major villainous incestuous couple, well, they're a hypocrite for screaming about anyone writing incest. It doesn't matter that they tagged their fic either; even if someone did tag, if Chel was salty enough about getting constructive criticism that they requested (so yeah, they basically brought all this on themselves, really), they would refuse to even read the tags, and so would Dolly.

(Hell, I still don't know how Dolly became such a cyberstalking gossip just there to attack who Chel told her to; she wasn't like this when I was in the group, but I guess it doesn't really matter, does it?)

But yeah, maybe Chel's just a hypocrite who doesn't have any issues with false accusations when they do it. And a misogynist, obviously. I mean, maybe it's not really okay to call Chel that, but it just feels like their belief that women are liars is just so, so blatant sometimes. Like, even with girls of color; the Mulan chapter as well as the Lady and the Tramp chapter basically had the Siamese twins from Lady and the Tramp and they're reimagined as human, and they just have this idea of going around falsely accusing men of rape for shits and giggles. Kind of like Malty from Rising of the Shield Hero (from what I heard; I do remember hearing that Rising of the Shield Hero just sounded like an incel fantasy regarding how it portrayed Malty). I mean, said Siamese twins even falsely accuse Tramp of raping Lady (yeah, um, that happened), and the problem is that honestly, given that Lady's underage and Tramp's not, it's not like the twins are completely devoid of a point (and plus, why was it necessary to include statutory rape in there? I mean, given that part of the issue in the original was basically class issues only with canines, from what I remember, you could have had Lady be kind of an uptown girl and Tramp kind of not, and maybe the Siamese twins could have been like, "Ew, what does she see in him", conspire to break them up, all's well that ends well, and honestly, there could be multiple other things to include that weren't a false rape accusation), and then there's just the fact that their established goal is basically for-the-shits-and-giggles, with bits and pieces of them kind of bordering on female Asian stereotypes? To be fair, Chel did have an author's note saying that Tramp isn't really in the right for what he did, and they did try to flesh out the twins a bit by having them basically be former Ark kids who got adopted by someone thinking they were from legitimate kids' homes, though honestly, given what I now know about the antisemitic implications about the Ark, I'm extremely hesitant to say that it makes it better. Then again, the Ark -- honestly, even the attempts at playing up the victims of human trafficking as sympathetic were terrible, one example being with Aurora/Briar Rose. Like, basically in this fic, she's abducted by Maleficent, who's an Ark member, and raised in the Ark, or more accurately, groomed. And she does admittedly do some bad things in the Ark's service, and the kids' reaction to her is...understandable to a degree, but she just gets victim-blamed and slut-shamed so very much even though she's set up as a victim of the Ark, and I thought it was one of the most disgusting things in the fic, which says a lot. Basically, she's treated like one of the "bad" victims for not immediately realizing that her situation isn't normal -- not unlike Rocky, who's just ridiculed and seen as a freak by even the other Palace members just because he doesn't immediately realize that his situation was fucked up even though he was too young being raised there to know any differently -- and part of it being stuff like participating in the "kinky" aspects of the Ark, because yeah, that's a thing in this fic. I don't know if that's how human trafficking works, but I think realism left the chat long ago.

But yeah, she's slut-shamed and treated like one of the "bad" victims just because of her not realizing that she's not supposed to find participating in the kink thing as a sixteen year old girl normal. It was something that was actually so disgusting and horrible for the wrong reasons, so victim-blaming and slut-shaming, that I actually pretty much tried to make an effort to make her more three-dimensional to some degree. Like, to be fair, not everyone in the Palace engages in that mentality; see also Panchito, a.k.a. one of the characters I think belongs in a better fic, who basically instantly recognizes that Aurora's just a traumatized kid who's as much of a victim of the Ark as anyone else and is genuinely distraught when Agatha's ghost tricks him into shooting her (yeah, um. I think Agatha was trying to protect Panchito, at least; it wasn't her fault that the story fucking hates Aurora). And honestly, between that and the obsession Chel has with false-rape-accusations-are-only-okay-when-I'm-falsely-accusing-someone-of-being-a-pedophile-in-fandom, I just wonder what women ever did to Chel to make Chel hate them so. (Well, women aren't the only group Chel seems to hate, but still)

 

I'm going to freely admit that this article on intersectional feminism...I don't know what other people on Kintsugi think, really, but I found this particularly helpful in terms of just providing a guideline as to what intersectional feminism is supposed to be: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/yes-...re&utm_medium=guest_desktop&utm_campaign=copy

Honestly, I think it is helpful regarding untangling my Chel-related brainworms, because one of the things that made me hesitant about saying anything was basically worrying about disagreeing with Chel on anything involving intersectionality. For one thing, it felt like everyone in the Google doc was smarter than me, and I felt like the dumbest bitch in the room (metaphorically. Not that there was a room, but you get the idea), and it was one reason I stayed out of stuff where Chel was trying to rile up the other co-writers into "God, look at this bitch eating crackers; isn't it so horrible that this bitch is eating crackers, let me elaborate on why said bitch eating crackers means that she's an anti-shipper" and all that junk. Some of it actually was pretty reasonable, I think; there was one Discord incident where apparently they got banned just for mentioning Hitler existed, and honestly, that is pretty messed up that that happened (even if they did just brush it off as "God, Discord has stupid rules sometimes, doesn't it, what's with the fucking app", which is obviously not as bad as other ways they've reacted to being banned for much worse reasons). I think one reason that I just went with it was that Chel did actually occasionally have good reasons to yell at said people. Like, I will freely admit that no, them telling the Blue Lives Matter commenter to stick their head in a pig isn't the best reaction to criticism, but I can at least understand why Chel got angry, especially since it seemed to be trivializing stuff where the cops abused their prisoners. Plus, I think that the Karmic Rape trope on principle is a horrible one, because IMHO, from what I can imagine, one reason that rape is such a horrible, disgusting crime is that it not only changes the victim irrevocably -- their trust has been violated, their sense of what's normal and what isn't has been utterly sabotaged, and they blame themselves for something that's done to them which is, IMHO, the ultimate cruelty -- but it changes the perpetrator: even if the perpetrator's doing it against another rapist, there is the idea of "you're still committing the same act and the only difference is that you're doing it to a 'deserving' party, but that doesn't change what you've done, and if you go past that point, no matter what the outcome, you're still irrevocably changed whether or not the victim forgives you or not." It changes the victim, it changes the perpetrator, it changes the people caught in the crossfire -- it's an act that is basically like a grenade being thrown into a crowd. Then again, given that I'm not a survivor, my opinion shouldn't be taken as fact as much as "this is why I don't care for this trope and any fanfic or original fic that uses it gets the 'Skip!' response from me". Other survivors with more expertise obviously know more than me. And honestly, I could get behind the idea of "nobody deserves this sort of shit", but then fast forward to Femme Fatale and Shenzi raping her and -- you could just hear the intended Aesop being broken just about immediately. (Which makes me think Tez might have been correct about how Chel's trying to have it both ways -- serious drama vs. making the brain go ping -- and how, unfortunately, those flavors just clash horribly. You can write a serious drama fic, you can write a fic that's just there because kink -- which, whatever; I'd take that over somebody actually committing crimes in real life to make the brain go ping -- but having both? You have to be good at what you do to make it work)

But I think, back on the subject of intersectionality, I was still pretty disgusted regarding -- you know the bit with dancing around saying the N-word? (I think Chel's commenters noticed but really took it more as "God, those cops are terrible people; you are so good at writing Hate Sinks!" as opposed to "Why was this chapter necessary?" Kind of taking it at face value) Well, during Chel's slapfight with said troll, they decided it was a great idea to (in the context of listing the nicknames the police had for their victims, but still) actually use the N-word. I mean, they did censor it out, but it's less of an excuse than just kind of giving you a good picture, and that made me lose a lot of sympathy for Chel right then and there. So yeah, that chapter regarding dancing around saying the N-word? That was just the tip of the iceberg regarding how screwed up the whole thing was. And add in the whole issue with reclaimed Indigenous slurs (it's like, I should hate Dolly, and in some ways I do, but at the same time, I really think she needs to get the fuck away from Chel ASAP after said incident with reclaimed Indigenous slurs Chel can't use. I mean, her sporking a novel allegedly containing anti-Indigenous racism with somebody who had no problem being racist to her, Crow, Rigel and just Indigenous people as a whole during the Adventure Time controversy thing just actually makes me wonder why. Like, I'm sure the book has problems, but I don't know why Dolly thought that Chel could be trusted not to be racist and actually pick up on the apparent racism in the book. It's like, I'm worried about Dolly, even though maybe I shouldn't be after her own role in things, and her being willing to play the victim on Chel's behalf with das_sporking regarding what happened with S, but it's like...it's one thing to call out Dolly on her actions, but the worst I really want for her is for people to hold her accountable without being racist to her), and I have this feeling that if Chel could get away with it, they would be actively screaming every racial slur in the book if someone accidentally stepped on their toe.

 

So Chel has a hateboner for Stolas in Hazbin Hotel and thinks that Stella did nothing wrong. Admittedly, I haven’t watched the show, but the idea of them standing up for women makes me want to say “I am not your damsel in distress and I don’t want you to be standing up for me, leave me alone”. Like, they think Stella’s in the right just because she got cheated on, and that Stolas is a rapist. Honestly, given that they seem to think all gay men are disgusting rapists, it’s no wonder. I don’t think Chel has any experience with actually meeting a gay man that isn’t binge-watching The Hayes Code’s Greatest Hits. And given that they rather derisively talked about how Hazbin was only pandering to the slash fangirls — well, I guess they only care about slash fangirls when they can blame minors for ruining fandom.

I just actually hate their guts, I really do. I hate how they think that not being a fucking bigot is a sign of weakness, that it’s women’s solemn duty to hate gay men (yeah, fictional gay men, but still). I hate how they have r/fanfiction and r/proshipping on their side (then again, r/fanfiction did bully an abuse survivor for having views contrary to theirs, so, of course they and Chel are going to get along beautifully. And they hate slash pairings as much as Chel does, so there’s that. Like calls to like, after all). I hate how Chel thinks it’s okay when they ridicule female fans and call them useless and stupid, in the case of “why don’t they sympathize with Stella instead of Stolas”. It’s like, maybe you’re a hypocrite hiding behind feminism just to get what you want, Chel. Like Joss Whedon. Joss Whedon claimed to be a feminist and that didn’t stop him from firing Charisma Carpenter for being pregnant.

I just wonder if Chel ever cared about defending the slash fangirl crowd/female sexuality, or if they thought putting them down was okay when they did it. Like, it was okay for them to regulate what women masturbated to, at least when their favorite character Stella came into play. (To be fair, I did come across more nuanced takes on Stella, saying that even as a love-to-hate villain she had issues, and the occasional good point that other characters got away with stuff Stella didn’t and it was more of a “Hazbin kind of has flat female characters" thing, so not everybody’s like Chel, at least) At least I can say that I never want to hear them say anything supporting female sexuality again, or saying that women aren’t sexual enough. It’s not just Chel internalizing acephobia; it’s also them just thinking that only they’re allowed to harass female fans and make them feel unsafe.

And they’ve been…dear God, they were vagueposting about Rigel just for starters on Reddit just to get sympathy points after Rigel decided to gently call them out on the accidental undertones of the Adventure Time chapter. And everyone else too. There wasn’t anything that they weren’t vagueposting on Reddit and lying about under the guise of needing a sensitivity reader, and they just were willing to lie about it all.

I mean, I think I don’t want to watch Hazbin if Chel likes it, if Chel’s in that fandom.

 

List of Chel’s hypocrisies:

-Vivienne Medrano getting more of a pass for her art than with the “untagged underage incest” bit. I mean, to be fair, yes, aging up characters is normal and Vivienne didn’t deserve being accused of pedophilia, but Chel never reflected on “maybe Dolly and I aren’t that different from the people who falsely accused Vivienne of pedophilia". Because then they’d have to be forced to realize that maybe they’re not a good person, they never were, and they’d have to fix it.

-Accusing antis of regulating female sexuality while also dismissing female fans’ sexuality regarding Hazbin just because they hated Stolas. (It’s honestly one thing I hate about feminist allies like Chel: their hypocrisy. Like they can scream at people for being misogynistic but they can never get called out for their own misogyny because when they do it, it’s good and righteous and pure. When they’re misogynists, they’re good people, basically. Even though misogyny’s unacceptable no matter who does it)

-Acting like trans men have a misogyny problem but never unpacking their own hatred towards women.

-Going “fuck the patriarchy” while treating me and Dolly like complete garbage.

-Acting like people who criticized them for spreading Q-Anon bullshit didn’t care about kidnapped Indigenous people while calling Dolly, Crow and every Indigenous person out there reclaimed racial slurs they have no business using.

-Tone policing people for saying “punch Nazis” while feeling free to be as self-righteous, condescending, hostile, cruel, bigoted, and outright a fucking emotional vampire of a human being. Like, Chel doesn’t have a right to go Adrien Agreste in Chameleon and tell people to take the high road when they insult people they hate as being unfuckable and generally feel like they have to personally insult people as much as they fucking can in order to get their point across.

-Virgin-shaming anyone when they’re asexual and virgin-shaming is a form of acephobia.

 

I know this article is from 2014, but I hate it so much: https://fangirlblog.com/2014/03/fan-artistic-endeavors-challenging-the-fandom-perspective/

God. It’s just…this lady would hate me for deciding to quit fanfiction. Because after Chel, I want to quit. I don’t care about it being misogynistic to want to write about original fiction; hell, this lady’s a hypocrite anyway given that she already has an original fiction debut. (Though to be fair, she has talked about how original fiction writers with fanfic origins deserve more respect. Fair enough)

But yeah. I know it’s not all fanfic writers who are like Chel, but I feel so gross that AO3 just allowed them to get away with so much. I feel like it shouldn’t have happened. Though then again, at least fandom bounced back from awful stuff before. I hope. Msscribe, KyloTrashForever, all that stuff.

And I guess to be fair, the original article did say that female fan creators deserved more respect in general. I just…every time I hear the word “misogynistic”, I hear Chel. I really do. I hear them going on these spiels about how liking dark romance means you’re Not Like Other Girls. (Though on the flipside, I think they genuinely hate themselves for being AFAB, for being autistic, for being nonbinary, associating it with helplessness for them)

(Hell, given that people like Tricia Barr see being female as meaning helplessness, pain, horribleness and suffering, and that any woman who thinks we can be more than this as just having internalized misogyny/being dumber than — for example — Tricia Barr, maybe Chel learned this sort of shit…no, I wouldn’t even say from 2014. Because in 2014, they were too busy accusing someone who didn’t like a fic with Merida being raped of kinkshaming)

(Huh. Now that I think about it, maybe Chel’s kind of a hypocrite regarding being a feminist, especially since they just jump between “kill all men” and “women are horrible people by nature”)

 

Arguments for Chel being a feminist:

-Well, they sure love accusing people of misogyny for breathing.



Arguments Against:

-They treat me and Dolly very poorly.

-A friend of mine says that they have a habit even in their co-sporks of treating their female co-sporkers like shit, though sadly, they didn’t go into further detail about it. They did, however, say that they had been harassed by Chel after a chapter of Partially Kissed Hero struck my friend as transphobic.

-Chel seems to have a pattern of harassing trans people and while TERFs exist, most feminists don’t approve of harassing trans people (even if unfortunately they get less of a megaphone than TERFs, from what I heard. Even in Britain, apparently most people aren’t transphobic but the British press keeps giving the transphobes a megaphone over your average Jane). Hell, given that most of their shit is harassing trans people…maybe it’s just Chel being a TERF.