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kincringeemporium · 6 years

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The Promised Party Cat Callout (Long Post!)

Here we go, y’all. I’m not gonna go all-out with the salt and vitriol typical of my longer posts, because... this isn’t about me being salty. This is about highlighting the issues with Mod Party Cat of the fictionkinfessions blog.

Nor is it intended to bully or chase Party Cat off of Tumblr. Yes, this is a callout post; no, it’s not an invitation to attack the blog with hate or stalk their sideblogs. And no, it’s not just my personal opinion, which we will get to.

This is intended to show Party Cat exactly what is wrong with how they’re running the blog and how they’re behaving. If they learn from it, good. If they don’t... then, they don’t.

Last of all, we did gather opinions from both kin and non-kin in a survey. This isn’t meant to antagonize the entire kin community. In fact, the information from kin really helped to support this argument. Thank you to the kin people who did respond to the survey.

(Btw, survey is still open: https://goo.gl/forms/lDoffQVVmELDo2EZ2 )

Obvious content warnings for dark shit apply. (Abuse, depression/suicide, etc.)

With that being said... let’s begin.

The main reasons for the callout are these:

Passive aggressiveness to or about other mods

Passive aggressiveness to anons/senders

“Cutesy” or overly positive typing/behavior in serious situations

Material that is generally improper for this kind of confession blog

Hypocrisy

Majority of survey takers agreed with each other and with the points made in this callout

We’ll go one by one.

Passive-aggressiveness to/about mods

(The bottom half of the mod page was linking to Party Cat’s other blogs and crediting some theme elements. Not relevant to callout.)

There isn’t a lot of information about the other mods or why they left; the general consensus on Maude is that they left because of school, but nothing about Kuroocrow. Now, why is this passive aggressive?

There was no need to publicly say that there’d been a “catfight” (ha ha, funny) with Maude. We don’t know if Maude even gave Cat permission to say this. If not, it’s disrespectful. (Nothing wrong with saying they’ll be okay.)

What Cat is saying about Kuro is even more aggressive than that. “They refuse to do anything to help!” Okay. That could be true. There’s still no need to rant about it.

“Ask them on my behalf what the fuck is going on with them!” Adding ‘on my behalf’ comes across as incredibly self-centered. And saying ‘what the fuck’ adds to the aggressiveness. Even if not intentional, that is how it looks, and it needs to be changed.

All that needs to be said is something like this: “It’s just me, Party Cat! Maude is on hiatus, and Kuro is absent. If anyone knows what’s going on with them, please DM me!” There. That’s respectful and to the point.

Passive-aggressiveness to Anons/Senders

This section will be... long.

So.. there’s a lot of overlap here with the ‘cutesy typing’ issue, but I’ll get to that later. I had to crop the screenshot to just this because there was so much that wasn’t 100% relevant to the callout. (Context for this post: Cat promo’d a kin server, an anon found some unsavory things happening in the server, anon warned Cat, and Cat said this.)

“...Seriously there’s like a few thousand people following this blog” is an unnecessarily rude way to say this. The point itself is legitimate and understandable. It really just need to be reworded so as not to come off as salty.

Alright, I’d understand this one if there was anything in the blog description or about pages to warn people that the blog can get dark. Confessions about death, suicide, rape, incest, murder, violence, high emotional distress, etc are jarring to see when this blog tends to be lighthearted.

While this anon does look a little bit defensive or offended, that’s so slight compared to the defensiveness of the response. Personally, I read the question as confused. (Y’all, who agrees with me? Who disagrees?)

Cat... people don’t tend to expect very dark content on a blog like this, especially when there’s no warning, and they might not even bother to blacklist the tags you use because they don’t expect it. (That’s a guess. If I’m wrong, then smeone should explain it. ) There isn’t much of an answer here - you just answer their question with another question.

So, okay, I agree with Cat saying that this ask is vague. And it’s not good to add “but” after something like ‘No disrespect...’ -- because “but” does negate whatever precedes it.

Those are the only things in this screenshot that make sense. Now we’ll get to the things that are passive-aggressive.

“Maybe it’s because...” Vague in itself. ‘Maybe’ gives you wiggle room to get out of this perfectly legitimate critique, instead of saying “Hey, I seem this way because...”

“People keep asking me things without providing the barest amount of information...” People actually do provide information. Sometimes it isn’t enough. That doesn’t mean they aren’t trying, and they could be dropping the subject because of how you respond (nobody really wants to interact with someone being rude).

“I just fill up the dead air with jokes!” Plenty of people do. And it’s fine... just not in this situation. When something serious comes up, you shouldn’t simply make a joke and move on. This reads like an excuse, and even a way to shame people. (”Oh... it was only a joke? Now I feel bad! :(” )

“And then people get more mad because... I don’t know!” This looks like you are blaming people for their feelings. People are allowed to feel mad. It’s never okay for them to send hate or be dicks -- which they’re not doing.

“Nobody reads that page, lollerskates!!” This could easily be solved by a regular, repeated post linking to the FAQ. Or a regular, repeated post explaining why confessions sometimes aren’t answered. Or something like that. Just a bit more effort.

Okay: “This blog is only for kin. We want to keep it within our community. If you have questions, check out this FAQ!”

Not okay: “You have no business interacting! You don’t know anything!”

That ‘sincerely’ isn’t very sincere at all. Most antikin will respect kin not wanting anti interaction on their blogs. Those that don’t are being dicks. And non-kin people who don’t have anything against kin are not at all likely to be hostile toward you, so being this hostile to them is unwarranted.

It’s confusing that this community, in general, would like non-kin and antis to become educated about what kin is/means... then such an influential blog sends a message like this. Regardless of how people feel about Cat, she does have pretty decent influence and a huge following; it’s very easy for impressionable kids to pick up on this weird double standard.

There’s nothing wrong with preferring to let someone else educate non-kin. There’s nothing wrong with pointing non-kin in a different direction.

There’s a lot wrong with blatantly pushing them away like this. It’s rude.

Inappropriate Cutesy/Overly Positive Typing

Cat isn’t stupid and knows full well what this anon (same one from before) meant. There was no need whatsoever to make such a giant joke of the question.

(Not to mention... why the hell would she tell everybody that she has so much medical debt and can’t afford electricity? I don’t know her situation so I can’t say it is/isn’t a joke too. It is something that could genuinely upset people, and some would even believe it. It’s a terrible thing to say.)

“:3c” Not harmful in itself. Just doesn’t belong in a serious ask.

This anon meant a post in which they were venting about abuse... they were angry that a character had abused their kintype. Cat knew that, considering their abuse content/trigger warning tags. This response looks sugarcoated and mentions some random anecdote about a thing Cat does, which is not appropriate in a situation regarding child abuse.

This was in response to something that was legitimately annoying Cat and breaking a blog rule. It does not look like an appropriate or effective way to address the issue - even looks immature. Did people take this seriously?

Yes, this really is a tag on a venting ask about a real life abusive stepfather. A joke. In a venting ask... about an abusive home life. There is a tag saying ‘Your stepdad sucks’, which is good. A joke, though, is too far.

(Apologies for a repeat screenshot - I saved this one for right now, for the sake of organization.)

There is, as I’ve been saying, no need for this. It’s very strange to ‘roleplay’ and act cute when there’s possibly a toxic Discord server going around.

When asked if any of Party Cat’s mannerisms were bothersome, one person said this:

Others said these things:

Inappropriate Material

Shoutout to @queen-dragon-slut (damn Tumblr won’t link you) for getting me this screenshot.

What the hell, Cat? This is serious -- this is even more serious than people sending confessions saying things like “Ugh, I hate this kintype!” or “Ugh! I hate that character!” This person actually endangered their own health and safety to force themselves into a ‘kin shift’. And it’s in no way Cat’s fault.

However.

To not even provide the anon with links to help blogs or any kind of resources, list some tags, and move on, shows an incredible lack of effort. Not only that, but I feel bad for this person. One note. That’s it. Nobody seemed to care that someone was suffering this badly, Cat included, which is, quite frankly, disgusting.

Again, something this dark doesn’t belong on a casual confession blog (which is what your blog looks like it’s supposed to be). And again, it genuinely fucking worried me. Is this person okay?

And it’s not even tagged. Not as ‘suicide’, not as ‘depression’, not as ‘suicidal ideation’, nothing. Which is what this is. This person feels like they’re not needed, like they’re pointless, which exactly what suicidal ideation does to you.

You can’t DM an anon saying, “Hey, you alright?” You can, however, at the very least, link them to the help blog page.

Mod Ryan, who is also part of the fictionkin community whether we like it or not, has seen:

Confessions about incest

Confessions about being abused otherwise

Confessions about stalking and being stalked

People saying they liked to kill

People saying they weren’t at all sorry for violent things their kintypes did

Asks saying characters or people should’ve killed themselves

@queen-dragon-slut said about some of the suicide-ish confessions: “ Tbh when somebody sends in a confession saying “I killed myself in my canon” it just sounds like they have some fantasies of wanting to kill themselves but cover it up by saying that their kin kill themselves and try to play it off. That’s not healthy.”

Hypocrisy:

Alright. That looks reasonable -- but wait.

The asks and other screenshots I just posted do strongly come off as suicide wishes, if not actual notes.

Here’s what people had to say when asked if they’d seen Party Cat acting hypocritical. I did not even mention suicide asks or dark asks in the survey question:

____ I wish I had time to say more but class starts in twenty minutes. When I’m back, I will add onto the callout with one more thing: that people feel Cat isn’t doing enough to help distressed anons.

Huge thank you to everyone who helped out with this!

It’s something that people have wanted to say for quite a while, and something that should’ve been said a long time ago.

Nobody should be demonizing Party Cat; there is a real person behind the screen. This should be a learning experience for her. Not an attack.

-K

#party cat callout #tw suicide #tw abuse #otherkin #kin cringe #otherkin cringe

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