Hey everyone. On account of recent events, me and the team find it necessary to make a public statement on the situation. Squigglydigg, who previously did freelance on “The Future” video will not be returning for any position of production on any project related to Mystery Skulls Animated.
She was brought on as freelance, among a group of other freelancers, roughly a year ago. Her input on the project itself did not extend beyond her given roll as an animator. Regardless, the views expressed by her in no way reflect the views of the small, core MSA team or anyone else who participated in any leg of production. I wish to personally denounce such statements as much as possible. These views are extremely irresponsible and dangerous.
We will be placing an open call for freelance animators in the near future as expected. For anyone harmed by the toxicity this situation presented, I wish to personally extend an apology to those effected. We will strive to make sure this kind of scenario does not happen again.
A little while ago, I got internet-cancelled for something online… again. It started with a person throwing false accusations at me, then other people dogpiling on, adding all their own personal grievances and complaints about me, some even digging up arguments about shipping preferences from five or six years ago. It culminated in me being publicly denounced by the very people who employed me on a project I poured years of love, admiration, and assistance both official and unofficial into - some of whom I had considered very close friends.
They threw me to the wolves the instant I became the subject of hatred, and used a vague justification for why they were dragging my name through the dirt.
These same people, of course, are happy to keep my work in their project, despite me having given it to them absolutely for free. They even tried to quietly remove my credit from the video’s description (though one individual on the team, claiming to feel sorry for having allowed the team to do this to me, added it back immediately when I asked them to over Discord messages).
The problem here is that this cancellation is founded upon a series of lies, mostly because people deliberately misinterpreted things I’ve said or deliberately took my words out of context… or worse yet, put the words of others into my mouth.
As I see it, the current incident started in April 2020, when I made a humorous but scathing critique of the movie Lilo & Stitch, after being asked why I drew this picture:
By now, I’m sure it’s kind of a big joke that I don’t like the film, but it’s true - I don’t like it, and I think it has a bad message. But that’s besides the point - the point is that people deliberately misinterpreted this post I wrote to accuse me of racism, sexism, classism, ableism… many even accused me of hating kids. (That last accusation was further emboldened by another accusation, claiming that I want kids to be bullied… because of a retweet where I recounted what I learned from being bullied myself, in which the second sentence started with the words “bullying is bad, obviously.”)
I owe the public denouncement over Lilo & Stitch largely to a popular Marvel artist, whose response to my initial post on the movie inferred that I was somehow bigoted because of my view of the film, and began the torrent of false accusations of bigotry against me and led to the topic trending on Twitter. Twitter allowed the topic to trend off and on for several days, which of course led to online “journalists” writing articles about it as though false and unbased accusations lobbed by a mob accounted for any form of legitimate news.
This public denouncement led to the usual online mob doing what they do best: trying to find anything at all that they can spin and misinterpret and outright lie into becoming “proof” to justify their twisted need to tear someone else down in order to feel good about themselves. One such tidbit they gleaned from my personal blog was a post about immigration at the USA’s southern border shared with Mexico, specifically the matter of children being put into cages. I had indeed reblogged that post, so the screenshot was indeed taken on my blog. However, those familiar with Tumblr’s format will recognize that the format of this post indicates that it is a reblog, and the text in the post is taken from what was written by another user. What the screenshot conveniently crops out is the fact that I had responded to this post, pointing out that regardless of any given stance on the matter, the policy was put into place by the previous presidential administration… rather than the one they attributed it to.
But of course, the screenshot wouldn’t serve as “evidence” that I want to put children into cages if it showed what I actually said.
At the time, my workplace requested that I simply remove the posts instead of responding. So I did not respond. I did not have the chance to defend myself or speak the truth about what had happened. And, quite frankly, I was afraid to.
Alas, it was not any of these issues that caused the Mystery Skulls Animated team to collectively publicly denounce me. Firstly, the issues in question were all false accusations, so they would not have had the justification they needed even then to hang me out to dry.
Secondly, if they really were concerned about these issues, they would have dropped me long ago, when they were first trending… but instead, they decided to milk me for my work and devotion to the project until after the video “The Future” was released.
Their abandonment of me, a valuable freelance animator to their team (AND concept artist and story consultant; I created several pieces of concept art when discussing the plot of the next video with the co-director, despite what is being claimed by the post denouncing me), was prompted by a Twitter user deciding the fact that I had an account on Parler was evidence of my being a horrible person, and accusing me once more of the same tired, old, false accusations.
My Parler account was one which I used exclusively to post and share art, in part as an attempt to expand the social media platform away from its existing association with politics.
I did not say anything remotely “irresponsible and dangerous” on that site or anywhere else, unless one counts encouraging people to listen to a dangerously good Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
The truth is that the Mystery Skulls Animated team caved to an angry mob over what they knew to be lies about me, and then proceeded to lie about me themselves.
I suspect that the reason nobody else on the team has spoken up in my defense is that they are also terrified of retribution at the hands of this mob. And I know that, because the director of the project was willing to turn on someone who animated as many of the money shots as I did, nobody else on that project is safe, either.
This is simply the side of the story I have been reluctant to share, because I know that I am a bit of a hothead when not kept in check. I don’t say things carefully, and I’ve seen too many times what happens when I react out of kneejerk impulse.
I have also been terrified of what could happen if I say this. I know what can happen when mobs get together. I have seen people doxxed, physically attacked, fired from their jobs, driven to suicide… the list goes on. I’ve been subjected to it for the last ten months. I am terrified of the consequences of telling the truth. But I am even more terrified of the consequences of staying silent and letting the lies proliferate.
So here’s the first time I’ve allowed myself to be fully honest online.
Thank you for your time.
Squigg’s is a animation queen and deserves better.
I’m honored to have been featured along with my bud @kaleidraws in this absolutely FANTASTIC analysis of cancel culture by TacticalConsumption, who has done a number of detailed videos about the various recent goings-on of the internet world.
If you’re at all curious about WhuHappun over the last few years online, I cannot recommend his channel highly enough.
