If stalking, harassing, or being manipulative is the way you choose to get someone to date you, then you better be ready for the consequences. Doing those things are Never okay and it’s better to not date them at all if you’re thinking that.
Last night, tumblr used clownyprincess was approached via DM by Carmen/courteousmingler. The conversation opened with Carmen asking clownyprincess to “walk [her] through” how to commit suicide and went downhill from there. Carmen has since made several postsabout this, and posted some decontextualized screencaps from their conversation.
It IS gaslighting to consistently lie to someone, over and over again, and then berate them for not believing you automatically. Which is not to say that courteousmingler gaslights people - I don’t think you can call any singular, one-off interaction with a person gaslighting; gaslighting by necessity takes place over a series of interactions, that is how it works - but having been in an abusive relationship that included gaslighting, it’s noticeable to me that Carmen frames people simply trusting their own immediate perceptions over what she tells them to believe as “gaslighting”.
After talking to clownyprincess about her interaction with Carmen, we decided that it would make sense for me to post the screencaps of their conversation, as well as a statement from clownyprincess, here. The caps are below the cut. I received them from clownyprincess via e-mail last night, and am only posting them this evening because I had a lot to do today and couldn’t post them earlier.
PLEASE note that this chat contains heavy trigger warnings for suicidal ideation, discussions of rape and abuse, and honestly, serious emotional manipulation. I am not kidding. I find these screencaps deeply upsetting, even triggering. Take care.
There’s a lot I could say about this interaction and I may say it later. The way Carmen lies (claiming that catandkitty tagged posts about her own abuse with “aces”, for example, which is provably untrue) and then repeates the lie over and over and then demands that clownyprincess tell her where she’s lied and then immediately changes the subject - the way she opens with a request that clownyprincess go over suicide with her in explicit detail - the way she starts out questioning and becomes increasingly aggressive and verbally abusive (going from “it’s been really scary lately” and “I’m having a bad day” to “RAPE WORSHIPER! RAPE WORSHIPER! RAPE WORSHIPER!” in very short order) - the CONSTANT, constant, attempts to define catandkitty’s thoughts and intentions, followed by a complete meltdown when clownyprincess said that she felt she understood Carmen’s thoughts and intentions - the accusation that catandkitty and clownyprincess want to rape asexual people. All of that is here. What’s also immediately obvious is that Carmen has a specific sort of arguing style - I observed it from her in the DM interaction we had on my old blog; other people have commented on this as well. She messages you repeatedly, VERY quickly, often shifting the subject slightly from one message to the next, so that it’s hard to get your bearings, and you end up responding belatedly to some point she made earlier. When you do this, she berates you harshly for lying or changing the subject. Recently, she has claimed that this is a symptom of autism, and that therefor if any other disabled people find it hard to follow her particular chat style, they are being ableist, because her disability, I guess, trumps theirs.
However, I want to close this out with a statement from clownyprincess, that she sent me along with these screencaps. I’ll preface this by saying that clownyprincess and I have been mutuals for many, many years now; our internet friendship dates back to livejournal days, and during that time, I have seen her get triggered and angry, but I have never seen her be dishonest about her feelings and motivations. If there is one person I trust on this hellsite to be a straight shooter, it is clownyprincess. She and I have very different styles of engagement in this sort of thing, but I understand where her anger here comes from, and I have a lot of respect for her relentless honesty in confronting online harassment and abuse.
Anyway, here is what she had to say:
first of all, I am well aware that I lost my self-control whilst DMing with carmen yesterday and that nothing productive could come of it. I have worked hard to gain a great deal of self-control I didn’t have over the last few years and having it stripped away like that left me shaken. the entire interaction has left me feeling hollow and ill.
carmen knew exactly which buttons to push in order to trigger me and elicit an hysterical reaction, because later she can use those against the person she attacked. the aftermath of knowing a manipulative liar managed to suck me into the vortex of her awfulness is stark and ugly. fuck you, carmen, you’re a fucking black hole.
carmen maliciously and savagely attempts to rewrite history, casting catandkitty in an incredibly ugly role of a rape advocate and apologist and which I knew could also be extremely triggering for her target. the following in particular horrified me: “catandkitty ran a campaign trying to associate asexuals who say “no” to sex, to violent abusers who withhold sex. because associating these two groups with each other can make the rape of asexuals more socially acceptable.”
it is such a heinous, depraved thing to say, especially as it is absolutely untrue. seeing such a malicious lie said about someone who is themselves a rape survivor infuriated and disgusted me. it was so blatantly evil. I sent carmen an ask saying simply “you are an evil fucking monster”. though some may say I started it, I stress again that what prompted my reaction was an evil fucking lie.
she then responded by DMing me with a request to help her commit suicide, as seen in the screencaps. this was deliberate, I have no doubt. it is such a vile, violent thing to say to someone and she knew exactly what she was doing, evidenced in her own words “I know”. she attempted to manipulate me by trying to get sympathy and when that didn’t work, she doubled down on the same awful, repeated statement about catandkitty. frankly, the whole thing was triggering for me.
having someone deluge me with endless messages all basically just repeating themselves and all with the same disgusting, UNTRUE message about a traumatised woman who was only speaking the truth drove me right over the edge. so many people have explained so many times in so many ways, the only possible reason that occurs to me that carmen maintains her insistence that catandkitty’s motives were what she claims is pure vindictiveness. having someone repeat the same HORRIBLE lie like that, over and over, someone intentionally using the most distressing and awful language possible, knowing full well the impact it would have, was awful. I couldn’t believe she could lie like that, like she doesn’t give a fuck about the actual impacts this is having on a real person. I yelled at her because I wanted her to know that no matter how many times she told the same lie, I would not believe her.
the messages were flying back and forth constantly and by the time I was able to reply to one thing she’d said, another couple of her messages had come through, disrupting the continuity of the messages. her efforts to trigger me reached their peak when she told me that I was trying to make rape easier so I could rape someone. with the sexual violence I’ve experienced in my past, I just went numb. I realised I was arguing with someone who has no soul and no heart. I played cool and blocked her. good riddance to a toxic hellhole.
I’m not proud I lost my shit with carmen, but that’s because it’s what she wanted. from the second she sent her first message she knew what angles to play. asking me to help her commit suicide was a seriously abusive and violent thing to do and I am still shaken by it. she wanted to distress me as much as possible, knowing she could then manipulate the conversation to further blind her sycophants and cast herself as persecuted.
I will call an abuser an abuser. carmen has lied and lied and lied about catandkitty and has obsessively stalked catandkitty for seven months now, which is a type of abuse. carmen uses catandkitty’s abuse history against her in order to further traumatise her. that is abuse. and when someone is screaming the same stomach-churning lie calling a rape victim a “rape worshipper”, you bet I will double down and tell that abusive person they are a liar, that I know they’re lying, that they’re not fooling me for one second. and there is no damn good reason for these vile lies, except that that piece of shit enjoys it. if someone is gonna stand their ground and maintain the same obvious lie, expressing it in the most violent language they can find, I will definitely draw my own conclusions about their agenda.
oh and catandkitty did NOT send me. another blatant lie, carmen. I acted on my own accord.
So, there has been a reckoning in wangxian/mdzs fandom since yesterday, when twitter fandom found out that popular author (AO3 user Shinocchi) was suspended from AO3. And it turns out it was because she was behind what seemed to be a cyberbullying campaign against other authors on AO3. Which she did on her own (well, and some of her followers. But mostly by herself). She created sockpuppet accounts (fake accounts), which she used to stalk and leave hateful comments, harass authors when their fics were becoming increasingly popular (more comments, kudos and bookmarks). She did this to drive these authors off of fandom. She is a STALKER, and she did severe emotional damage to others. Why? Because their fics were becoming too popular? Because she didn’t agree with wangxian characterization? Proof shows that the one thing all of these authors had in common was that their fics were becoming popular. As soon as this happened, they were attacked by multiple accounts
Geragrena, rikke, cafecliche and yiqie are only a few that have been mentioned that were her victims.
This came about thanks to AO3 user sweetlolixo, another popular mdzs author who was also targeted and harassed by Shino. She compiled pages of proof that all of the people leaving hateful comments on her fics were coming from ONE person. Don’t believe me? She created a thread here where she published a google document with everything that happened and all the proof, plus the response from AO3 that resulted in them banning Shinocchi.
And what was Shino’s response? She blamed “her sister,” then privated her twitter account. Today, she became public again and said she would take responsibility for all the people she hurt and apologize. However, people confronted her about her crappy apology and she ended up deactivating her account.
TLDR: AO3 author Shinocchi was removed from AO3 after another popular mdzs author, sweetlolixo, compiled evidence proving that Shino was a cyberbully who created fake accounts to harass and leave hateful comments on other fics, while pretending to be multiple people. So if you’re looking for her fics and find them deleted? This is why.
UPDATE: Found screencaps of Shinocchi’s apology from this morning, where she said she would take responsibility (well, she still blamed her “sister”) and apologize to everyone involved.
A little less than an hour later (I think?), she deactivated her account and flounced to her website (which is private), where she made a post saying that she’s leaving fandom and that she won’t apologize because nobody wants to hear it.
She made a post on her (private) website, where she basically doesn’t take any responsibility, and instead implies that most of the people dogpiling on her are “those who held grudges” against her, and that she won’t “admit to faults that aren’t hers.” So no apology from Shino to all those affected. Pretty different from what she posted this morning on twitter, isn’t it?
The sun is setting as Antoni pushes the shopping cart out of the store, throwing a kind of golden haze over the dozen or so cars in the parking lot. The water in the bay will be glittering, he thinks, appearing streaked with reddish gold. To the north, the sky is turning orange, the legacy of wildfires up in the canyons far from Berras, fires that won’t stop burning.
If he stops, he can smell smoke in the air, just a little.
The fires aren’t coming south, they say, but it doesn’t matter. Antoni’s carefully rebuilt life is on fire without their help. The people he loves are being set aflame and he can’t do anything but offer to go buy groceries while Jake holds a shaking, sobbing Kauri and the new one, Rafael, tries to talk to a nearly-silent, perfectly-still Chris.
Heat sticks his shirt to his shoulder blades, makes his scars itch all over his arms and his torso, has the dark brown curls at the nape of his neck tickling his skin. He wears long sleeves no matter the season, but that gets its own kind of unwelcome attention in blistering dry heat like this.
One wheel on his cart sticks and he has to constantly course-correct, pulling the cart back slightly and then pushing forward again, bumping off the walkway into the pavement. The cart rattles, the plastic rustles, and Antoni is going to lose his mind with the anger he can do nothing about.
A woman with a little girl holding her hand walks past him, the little girl singing something vaguely familiar. They look at him - and whatever the woman sees in his face, she tightens her grip and hurries the girl along.
Jake’s ancient car doesn’t unlock from a key fob, and Antoni has to feed the key into the lock on the trunk physically to get it open. The trunk groans in protest, but Antoni pushes it up anyway, and feels a brief burst of something like delight when it stays up instead of trying to crash back down on his head like usual.
The trunk is huge, at least, and there’s plenty of space for everything he needs to put in there. Chris’s favorite cereals and some chocolate nutrition shakes - he stops eating when he’s like this, unless you force him to, and then what he can eat narrows to a tiny sliver of options. Antoni did his best - the cereal and the shakes, the frozen chicken nuggets and french fries, loaves of plain white bread - that’s all for Chris, to coax food into him when his body is too frightened for anything but whatever it reads as safe.
He has cat food and litter for Krista’s little old man Pepperjack, too, while she stays with them for a few days. Jake’s called some people to check her apartment over and change the locks, but Antoni thinks Krista will move, soon, anyway. Her lease is almost up and she won’t feel safe in that space any longer.
Even if she wasn’t the actual target.
His chest twists in anger and nerves, but Antoni is solid, and he is quiet, and he loads the bags without allowing his anger to take root. They’ll deal with it all as it comes, like they always have. Antoni will handle it, if he can, and let the rest of them heal themselves with contact and touch and soft words.
Antoni will handle the other things, the things that would make them have to leave the safety of their home.
Above him, the light has dimmed enough that the big streetlights in the parking lot click on, and a low soft buzzing sound settles under the calls of birds and distant human voices, the rumble of traffic down the highway.
If it weren’t for the slight scent of smoke that prickles across every visible centimeter of skin, it would be a lovely night.
He drops the last bag inside and slams the trunk door shut so it’ll catch, turning to push the shopping cart to the little cart corral on the next row, about ten spots down. He’s vaguely aware of another car door opening, clicking shut quietly, but the rattling of the wheels and metal of the cart mostly cover up the sound of footsteps behind him.
He pushes the cart into the corral, watching it crash against the back and come to a rough stop. He exhales, sticking one hand in his pocket to pull Jake’s keys back out.
And then there’s something immensely, awfully familiar shoved against the small of his back. Antoni tenses, spine ramrod-straight, and the solid muzzle of the gun - that’s what it is, he’s had guns pushed against every part of him with Mr. Davies, knows the feel of a gun more intimately than any kiss - pushes harder, bruising through his shirt.
Ok, ok, I think I put my thoughts in order enough to manage some sort of comment!
First of all, I love Antoni’s quiet anger and more than that his resolve to keep that anger at bay
I love how he is scared, but still mostly in control while Owen threatens him with a gun, and beats him up, but the moment the clove cigarettes appear he’s panicking
I love that he did call Jake for help, I love that still determination is his answer to all of this.
I don’t need to tell you how much I fucking love Antoni, by God, you know… But damn, Ash… I can’t handle this man! This was so good and I had such high expectations for his piece and I am so thrilled at what we got!!!
