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firebird-inkheart · 10 days

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harassment and vagues rampant within the selfship community

hi. this has been a recurring problem here for a very long time but it seems in recent years it’s been getting worse and i am sick and tired of watching it happen. so many people here fail to talk about issues in a healthy manner which results in a plethora of vagues, a lot of moral puritans, and even spying being extremely commonplace. like, do you guys hear me? spying, STALKING, is something that happens here. a lot. how is that helpful to anyone?

this post is detailing accounts from a handful of different people that have all been victims of harassment and have either been chased away or struggle to interact within a space that thrives on interaction, all because of one person. there are many others out there that are guilty of harassing others too, but i’m only going to be talking about one person some of you may know as rara, who currently uses the url @/motherjaguar. that currently is very important since it gets changed a lot.

this isn’t meant to be a callout post, but rather one that promotes awareness. there is no such thing as a villain in this situation, just like there’s not any angels. glorifying and/or demonizing others does nothing but spread terror in a place that is meant to be safe, because trying to be an angel when you are a person that makes mistakes is impossible. we are all people, and if you read this post, i ask you to keep this in mind. please don’t send anyone involved in this any kind of demoralizing message, because if you do that, you are part of the problem and missing the point.

before i dive into the issues here, i’d like to present a few examples of people talking to me about their experiences. keep in mind that some of the people i’ve talked to do not know each other. i’m also keeping some of them anonymous per their wishes. rara currently goes by he/she pronouns, but due to the timing of when some of these people knew him, there are some different pronouns here. i’ll go more in-depth about things when i’m done presenting what was told to me.

cloudy

cloudy has given me permission to mention her name, as what is being referred to in the following screenshot.

she mentions a lot of people also having bad experiences with rara, one of which i did talk to. she made a post in late 2023 that details her experience more than what was mentioned in dms, which you can read here. please keep in mind the triggers of the post because they are very important. if you can’t read the post because of them, it boils down to cloudy defending a friend who put a part of their own life experience and trauma into their selfship with a canon adult character.

what i want to highlight on for this post in particular is namely this part, but i’ll touch upon the post as a whole soon.

zale

zale is my closest friend and so i’ve heard her talk to me plenty of times about how rara has worried her. she gets extremely anxious because of him and his vagues. because i’ve watched this happen, and because her general experience is in the form of vents i’m not going to post for her sake, here’s a screenshot of a very quick description of something that happened to her.

this was taken a few months ago, and “that post” she mentions is a post that got taken out of context with her feeling hurt over stereotypes regarding autistic people. much like how many mean women get sterotyped as lesbians and how shy and dainty men get stereotyped as trans men, many autistic people get stereotyped as aroace — all of these are fine on their own, but it’s not wrong to dislike certain headcanons. almost everyone is guilty of having different opinions. she also mentioned to me very recently that she got some anons that set her anxiety off.

anon 1

this person is a friend of someone else unnamed talking to me about their friend’s experience, and how anon 1 was involved with said experience.

do you see a similarity in what was mentioned above? taking advantage of someone’s trauma and talking about anon 1 without naming them? there’s also some things introduced in this screenshot that will show up later as well.

anon 1 also knew some other people that had similar problems and experiences, much like cloudy.

they mention a tendency for people in this community to remake to escape accountability, which is a true statement in general. they were very kind to me about this whole ordeal.

anon 2

this person has unfortunately been a constant victim for a long time.

they mentioned to me rara’s tendency to remake, something that’s been mentioned by anon 1. there’s also the fact that he has spied on people in the past, but this person has not been friends with him for a long time now. despite this, i do believe he still does this for reasons i’ll mention soon.

they said he has a tendency to target to people that aren’t men, which, taking into account the people i’ve talked to in order to make this post possible, seems to be accurate.

they also talked to me about this because of the fact that they were impersonated, and while they state here that they aren’t sure if it still exists, there was a semi-recent post that made the rounds that makes me believe there’s a concern it still may be a thing.

anon 3

this person mentioned to me someone else that got involved, but i censored his name at their request.

rara got involved in, quite frankly, an extremely terrible way, willingly misgendering this person and painting them out to be someone that disrespects certain queer identities when this is not the case, much like what he did to anon 1.

these are all of the people that i decided to fit in the post, even though there were others i could have reached out. there’s already a lot here and i think it’s enough for one post.

now that everything is laid out, i’m sure you can read and make your own judgement and see what’s happening here. i still want to talk about the recurring issues i’ve noticed though, not because it only involves rara, but because these are problems that generally run through the community.

vagues

i cannot stand the amount of vagues i’ve seen. for some reason, everyone thinks it’s okay to talk smack about people as long as you don’t say their name. it’s not. if you think someone is bad, either say their name or block and move on with your life. if you need to vent, reach out to a friend or mutual and keep it private. this sneaky behavior of bringing attention to something that’s been taken out of context, not mentioning a name, and only telling people who it is if they privately ask for it? it’s all for the sake of upholding some moral standard rather than trying to look out for your fellow community members.

and what’s worse is that i feel like rara knows this, because this year he made a post calling out a proshipper, name and all. he was fairly respectful about it as well. i don’t understand why that isn’t more commonplace, unless people that partake in vagues don’t actually see the person they’re talking about as bad — which is actually worse, because if you don’t communicate what you think of them, then they’re left wondering what they did wrong. it is incredibly damaging and all this behavior promotes is anxiety.

i’ve seen people i call acquaintances partake in vagues. even people i care a lot about. this has got to stop if you guys want the community to be a safe place, because otherwise, all it does is harm people.

every person i showed screenshots of has likely been vagued by rara. i say likely because rara loves to exclude names in public and mention them in private, which is something that cloudy and anon 1 explicitly mention. and they’ve all wordlessly lost people they cared about because of it. instead of talking to the people above, some of their mutuals quickly threw them aside because it would look bad if they didn’t. either that or they didn’t really care about the people above in the first place.

in that same vein, rara has vagued very recently, which has caused a lot of undue and undeserved distress because of twisting words and trauma to make someone, who zale is certain is her, out to be way worse than is true (who, by the way, asks strongly identifying proshippers not to interact with her). and if it’s not about her, then i would love to know who, because therein lies the problem with vagues — it makes people worry. and that leads to many different bad routes.

vagues are inherently manipulative because it does not allow the other person to speak safely. don’t you dare try and argue otherwise, because you know just as well as i that a person that’s been dumped in hot water is more likely to be deemed the hysterical one compared to the person who dumped them in.

twisting words and trauma

trauma is inherently messy. trauma cannot be held to a moral standard, because when it does, you get acceptance of certain things but demonizing of others. this can be seen by how autism and adhd is commonly accepted, but people with personality disorders have yet to be.

cloudy’s friend and anon 1 are the biggest example of both of these topics, and zale has had her words twisted. to demonize people already struggling, labeling them as proshippers when they’re not, and boiling down actions to tie it up into a neat little box you can rip apart because it’s been painted as bad is fucking terrible.

if you cannot comprehend nuance, you are part of the problem. if there’s something you don’t understand, simply messaging someone and asking about it so they can explain will likely clear things up. i literally do not care if you do all of this and end up still deciding you don’t want to engage with them, that’s actually perfectly fine. you listened to them and made your choice and that’s what more people should do.

this topic goes hand-in-hand with vagues, because they erase the full picture and more often than not demonize people that don’t deserve to be treated that way.

women and misgendering

as much as some of you don’t want to admit it, there is a problem with not only misogyny, but blatant misgendering of folks that have their own identities. women, or people that identify as women in some way, can also be misogynistic.

zale has been targeted a lot because she is a woman. i’ve SEEN this happen — she and i are close friends. she talks to me all the time about the way the community treats her because of the fact that she’s a woman. selfship may be something that is more female-dominated, considering many reader insert writings present a female reader, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to get pissed at women for it. women already don’t have many spaces to call their own, so why would anyone think it’s okay to try and discourage them in these spaces?

nonbinary, agender, and/or other unlabeled identities get attacked as well. every single person that has been recommended to me to speak to has either been a woman, woman-adjacent, or some other gender-neutral label, except for one man. that’s around an 8 to 1 ratio, and i’m being generous and not including friends people mentioned because i wasn’t directly led to speaking to them.

it is frankly appalling that not only have these people been knowingly misgendered, but also treated as disrespecting gay identities because clearly unlabeled people are just women. clearly.

and that’s not even talking about the fact that gay coding was just an excuse to harass anon 3, because they tried talking to a bunch of people and didn’t get any answers. and instead of personally trying to talk to anon 3, they got called out for something that, yet again, got twisted horribly.

while the interaction between anon 3 and the unnamed person would still have been incredibly frustrating, it would have been significantly less harmful if the unnamed person just chose to block and move on. instead, rara got involved and they both said things about anon 3 that were by no means justified.

people like them are why others are so scared to communicate.

anon harassment

this is another general problem the community has, but yeah, i feel like it’s self explanatory. what the hell do you guys think harassment accomplishes? do you need a punching bag that badly? i hope you at least wear the fact that you’ve done it with pride, but you probably don’t because you felt the need to go on anon in the first place.

once again, everyone i’ve spoken to has been harassed because of the things they’ve been accused of — some worse than others. i feel like i don’t really have much more to say on this topic because it’s the most obvious of the bunch and also the least likely to change.

closing

if you read all of this without clicking out, thank you. i hope you’ve kept in mind what i asked in the beginning — that we’re all people. some people are worse than others, that much is true, but none of us are perfect. we all have skeletons in our closet somehow. rara is no different. he’s just a person that has done some bad things to these people, but i’m also certain he’s had bad things done to him in turn.

that doesn’t excuse him or anyone else, though. when you do something bad it’ll eventually catch up to you. i’m sure rara remakes and changes names a lot for reasons i don’t know, but it’s just a fact that it makes it hard for people to keep up with him. i’m not accusing him of doing it for that reason alone, or even for that reason at all, but it’s important to understand that it leaves a trail no matter the intentions.

there was a callout post made just yesterday as of posting this, and it’s just a sad sight to see. please, for the love of god, let’s make the community a better place. stop the vagues, stop stalking. post what you love and share it with those that want to talk to you. as it stands right now the community is just a place where everyone gets thrown aside the second they get involved in discourse or whatever.

i can’t take anyone seriously who says they love their mutuals or that they’re all friends or whatever, because more often than not, it’s not true. if you really feel that way, then show it. talk to your mutuals if you care so much. i understand that there are personal hurdles that exist, such as social anxiety, but that’s an explanation and not an excuse. you can’t blame someone for feeling hurt if they get ostracized because it’s easier and less messy.

#discourse #long post #it's under a cut but still #damn i leave again for awhile and come back to find this shit #op I'm sorry but i do have to admit i laughed at your comment about this community and safe spaces #because the selfship community as a whole has not be ''safe'' since 2020 at the LEAST #it's generally only ever ''safe'' in little bubbles where people have extensively curated who they follow and who follows them #but lemme tell you #this community got overrun very quickly by purity culture and it's definitely made it hard to enjoy being here at times #more often than not i'd take hiatuses from this blog because my anxiety was through the roof every time ''rules'' were made up for this #''community''#i've compared it to how i used to have to walk on eggshells around my dad to avoid setting him off for whatever little reason before #because i was so afraid that someone would look at my stuff and maliciously decide i broke some kind of sanctimonious rule of theirs #or the fact that i don't perceive things in absolute black and white like they do and decide i need to be persecuted #i've even watched someone get bullied off of here who had accidentally shipped with a character they didn't know was a minor #and they received so many death threats and urges to kill themself and they were ACTUALLY considering it #before they disappeared #i genuinely hope that person is doing better now that they aren't hanging around this ''community''#but anyway #i don't hang around here much anymore just because my interests have moved elsewhere #but there's always that ''what if'' that haunts me #because outside of my circle #things never really change in this ''community''

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