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dirkification · 9 months

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Follow up to previous post about homestuck twitter 2019

Tags from @mylifeas-iseeit from THIS post about the anxiety felt in hstwt2019 homestuck fandom especially around Egbert

#damn i didnt even know this happened#i thought june was a completely separate character from hiveswap#the only thing i know about this era is that kate person who was a shitty transandrophobe and harrassing/shitting on fans#idk if she was also a part of thr what pumpkin staff op has talked about in other posts on this subject#but god thats shitty

Reaching out and deciding to follow up:

I think I will begin by adding context to a post I made on Medium detailing my experiences with transandophobia in the fandom at the time. You might want to read it first, but that's up to you.

What's important to note, is while I will be adding names, this is not meant as a callout post. I'm not trying to list sins, I'm trying to talk about what happened from my personal perspective.

This is fucking long and I'm not even done with the first point as of typing this so under a cut it goes lol

Also heads up: There are screenshots in here I do not have the energy to caption right now. I'll try to do it in the future, and feel free to poke me to do it more quickly.

First:

A few disclaimers: Because of the nature of Twitter, I have little to no receipts of what happened as of this posting. Ideally I would have images of or links to tweets or discord chats or anything else, but I know at least one person I will be referencing mass deleted their tweets on a regular basis.

That's Kate Mitchell. I don't know why I bother being vague about her so much, since she's infamous enough even to people who weren't around at the time.

Okay, well, I do know. I'm still afraid. And I don't mean to build her up as some big scary evil trans fem, but as many of you know, she was responsible for a lot of harassment, and a lot of my harrassment specifically.

But also she is a trans fem on the internet and was Known before she got big in the Homestuck fandom (she was a team manager of some Overwatch League -- you can google it, I don't know enough about esports to explain, but suffice to say, she left that community with some bad accusations there as well). As such, she had her own page or thread or whatever on kiwifarms, and people used that thread of "evidence" against her when trying to criticize her.

Note: Do not fucking do that. I don't care what a queer person has done, never trust much less spread "evidence" you find on kiwifarms. They're lying transphobic assholes to put it mildly. If anything on any of those threads are true, you'll find it elsewhere. There's a reason Kate supporters called her critics "useful idiots" (outside of just wanting to call us idiots and then laugh because we didn't understand what the term meant in some real "I'm more woke/educated/better than you bullshit"). (From Wikipedia: In political jargon, a useful idiot is a term currently used to reference a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause—particularly a bad cause originating from a devious, ruthless source—without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically being used by the cause's leaders.[1][2] The term was often used during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation.[1])

In a similar vein, I've seen some of the callout posts and image receipts made for Kate and I just can't sign off on most of them. Some of them lack context, some of them are fearmongering about fictional content, some of them aren't actually that serious but treated as just as bad as everything else. At the same time, I'd be a hypocrit if I didn't mention that I used to agree with some of those points and it took many discussions and personal growth to figure my shit out. (What is funny to me personally, is at least one features Kate being an ass to one of my trans fem friends, so I do that point at screen meme each time I see it. If you see an icon of Ardata with a clown nose, that's my friend.)

This is all to say: I have complicated feelings about talking about Kate publicly. My dislike of her has gotten me accused of transmisogyny, and I do my absolute best to check my feelings and biases before I say anything to avoid perpetuating any transmisogyny. However, it was also often used as a bludgeon to prevent people from talking about their experiences, whether or not they were also trans fem. My problem with Kate is that she was a bully, and one of the tools she used was her identity as a trans lesbian. That does not say anything about any other trans lesbian or the concept of being a trans lesbian. Just her.

You see? Paragraphs of me making sure everyone knows where I come from with Kate. It's important, but the fear of being misinterpreted has made it hard for me to name her specifically. As recently as a year or two ago, I had an ex-friend accuse me of "still crying about a trans woman disagreeing with [me] on a podcast" (paraphrased) when I vague posted about it. The fear is not unfounded.

This is all to say -- Kate was known to mass delete her tweets, even before she left Twitter for good. I only have one or two tweets of hers saved (the one I'm certain about is in the Medium post, so I'll get to it).

Kate was not the only one who deleted Tweets, as documented by Homestuck.net (which is a great resource for Homestuck archival stuff, despite the discourse surrounding it (which I might get into on another post down the road)).

@andrewhussie: Andrew Hussie’s personal twitter, historically used to troll people and directly communicate with the fanbase. Deleted all tweets in 2022, before that the last activity was in late 2021.

Last activity: November 6, 2022, all tweets deleted.

@d-clussie.tumblr: Formerly @mspandrew, this is Andrew Hussie’s personal tumblr, nigh identical in use to his Twitter. Deleted all posts in 2022, before that the last activity was in early 2021.

Last activity: November 27, 2022, all posts deleted.

No WP staff's accounts are included in this, so I don't know who all deleted all their content or large sections of it, but it wasn't rare.

Moving on...

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I link a twitter thread of mine that is my immediate reaction to the Toblerone June "canonization"

This, I think, is what got me on Kate and Aysha's radars (I think it was this thread or a similar one that got quote retweeted to Aysha's locked twitter and then got noticed by Kate, putting me more on her radar) outside of "another Homestuck podcaster rubbing elbows with people we know better." This is the tweet that leads to the most uncomfortable and ultimately traumatic podcast interview of my life (I say as though I have guested on more than that podcast lmao). I can dig more into it later.

Shoving this here, as I'm writing this and have mentioned Aysha several times (down below) but have not figured out a good place to talk about who she is. Also I'm not sure if her pronouns are she/her or they/them. I think people refer to her using she/her, so that's what I will do, and I'll correct it if I find out I'm wrong.

Aysha is the lead writer at What Pumpkin. She wrote several volumes of Friendsim, helped with the Epilogues, wrote for and has her own self insert in Pesterquest, co-founded Snake Solutions with Kate, etc. You can look up all her contributions pretty easily. She is often considered "one of the good ones" at WP, but she was just better at keeping things on the down low until the whole Sarah Z/Gio situation, which I'll link to later. Probably in a reblog or at the very end.

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“Sorry, transmascs, you have to deal with June being canon the same way we have to deal with transmasc Roxy being canon, get used to it,” was about the kindest sentiment bnfs and hardcore June-stans had about the announcement.

This is almost word for word a tweet Kate made, in one of her "kinder" moments. Again, no receipts. Maybe someone has it out there somewhere, but I think if anyone had been diligently archiving Kate's tweets, we would have seen more of them by now.

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I was personally publicly ridiculed on an “unofficial” Homestuck podcast (that regularly had WP staff on it and even got an exclusive statement from Hussie to be read aloud on it) as a “June skeptic” simply for not having anything to add when the topic turned to transfem readings for Egbert in the comic and my previous twitter statements about not being a huge fan of Toblerone canon (my Twitter thread about it below).

That podcast was Perfectly Generic Podcast. It was created and run by Kate, and, from my understanding, launched her popularity. I'm not sure if she already had connections, because she was able to get What Pumpkin staff on pretty early on. As such, a lot of people listened to it.

I go into depth on how I got on the podcast and my feelings about it in the linked thread, but I'd like to add a little more.

I was kind of frozen once the episode ended. That was... fine, right? I tried to justify it to myself. It wasn't until my friend (the one whose favor got me on the podcast) talked to me and, after I was kinda weird about it, mentioned they felt weird about it, did I realize how terrible I felt. I had been given the file to upload onto my own feed since it was a crossover, but I never uploaded it. The episode is still out there, along with a transcript, if anyone cares to search it out, but I'm not going to link it.

More people came forward admitting it was an uncomfortable episode. I blocked Kate and kind of... shut down? I still had episodes to record and publish, and I didn't publicly talk about my feelings until the linked thread months later.

Speaking of the block:

So the above is from one of Kate's locked accounts. I was (obviously) not privvy to this one, and thus I've been hesitant to post it. But it's been years, and I'm tired of sitting on shit that was shown to me and made me feel worse about everything without being able to provide the context. None of y'all know how I got this screenshot, anyway. Also, it's clear that before I blocked her (or before she noticed) she had been saying some shit about me. (I ended up having someone tell her to keep the money.)

One of my friends vagued about the episode on my behalf, and Kate, in turn, also vague posted about it on main.

In the line of sharing screenshots that were from places I didn't have access to, but none of y'all know who shared them with me... "Jax Does Homestuck" is the old name for my podcast "Live Laugh Stuck." This was the episode that came out after my episode on PGenPod. I'm blacking out the people I don't know are for sure part of WP staff or otherwise someone to naturally come up in this discussion

Note: I had not said anything publicly about this until January, and these posts are from October.

Christ

This got a lot more in depth on my personal traumas around this than I initially intended, but here we are.

And yes, I'm sticking with calling them traumas. I have psychiatric permission and everything, if that even matters. I don't know if I'll touch on this again elsewhere in this post, but in case I don't, I guess I want to end this section saying that this whole thing caused me to lose friends, before I even started accepting and opening up about "proship" views, which lost me more. I was invited to then wordlessly kicked out of a Dirkkat zine because I got on Kate's bad side, and attracted the ire of others in her circle like Dani/lalonders, who might be mentioned later. I don't know. This is already so long and I don't think they get vagued in my Medium post and one of the things I want to bring up in regards to them is antisemitism which I simply don't feel qualified to do off the cuff, as a white gentile.

Continuing on

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I also think it’s important to note that around this time, most if not all bnfs were now associated with WP either on a contract basis (like writing one or more routes for Pesterquest) or new employees, even the ones causing the most visible and purposeful harassment in the fandom.

Kate started out as a bnf (big name fan) and got hired on as a writer for Pesterquest, then for Homestuck 2, and I think just as official staff? I don't know how What Pumpkin staffing worked. She also co-founded a company, Snake Solutions, with Aysha. Honestly, I can't remember everyone else who turned from bnf to official staff or contracter for PQ. There were several. Sarah Zedig. Pip? Greiver? KC? Dani was a big one (how I first heard about it pictured below), but I don't think this ended up amounting to anything. Could be wrong.

As I mentioned before, I feel ill-equipped to go into depth on them. The most I can say is they rivaled Kate in both popularity and shittiness and, in my opinion, were often used as a shield against transandrophobic/racist criticisms, since they're a black trans masc (correct me if I'm wrong about their specific identity), and the main target for Kate and co's harrassment was a black trans masc. If you know who I'm referencing, you know, but as of now I think I'll stick to vague references for them.

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Vriska: I have one million and three problems with Vriska’s route, but keeping on the topic of trans rep and discourse from Pesterquest, Vriska is very heavily coded as a trans girl. Or, at least, she is if you know anything about who wrote her or any of the discourse surrounding Vriska at the time.

Kate wrote Vriska's PQ route. Hussie was going to, but she convinced them to let her do it. This is also I think Kate's first official work for WP. Just for like, idk, timeline context? lol

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It being said that it’s fine to change canon bisexuals to lesbians because there are so many bisexuals in homestuck that it doesn’t matter if you take some away. .... (I don’t have the referenced tweet, unfortuantely, but here’s a similar one, which may seem innocuous but is coming from a person who had harassed people for hc’ing a character with no canon sexuality bi instead of a lesbian)

The tweet I included had the name blacked out, but it was Kate.

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This was also Kate.

Bnfs, some of which, as I mentioned, later became WP staff and kept saying these same things, often said things like “It’s lesbophobic and transmisogynistic to expect a trans lesbian to be nice about men or include men in what we do” setting aside the fact that said people actively harassed trans mascs and “boy likers”, encouraged other people to do the same, and also were, as I said, bnfs and later WP staff who had a lot of influence over the fandom. There’s a difference between prioritizing trans lesbians and actively shitting on trans mascs and “boy likers” to your thousands of followers.

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Okay and now I just have some other screenshots I dug up that I don't know what to do with so they're going to go here and I am going to talk about them in whatever order I happened to put them in lol

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This tweet references Kate qrt'ing and mass harassing a black, newly turned 18, trans girl, who made a post on her twitter account with a tiny following that got maybe a handful of notes about racism she saw in Vast Error. Kate was, I think, the lead writer on Vast Error's visual novel, Snowbound Blood. A huge problem with VE is, at least back then, every fucking ounce of criticism would be found by the creator (I forgot his name tbh) and commented on, usually argued with. It's a big reason why I could never get into it.

The person in question also denies ban evading, and even then, it's not an excuse to put an extremely vulnerable person on blast for the crime of criticizing Vast Error.

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The formatting on this one is weird, but I had to get screenshots of the thread because I could only see the linked tweet in discord. Anyway, this is how seriously people treated June. She wasn't just a cool interpretation of a character. How you felt about her was directly linked to how much you cared about trans fems.

Also like, I doubt it was intentional, but the "14 characters" message is, at the very least a terrible coincidence, as references to "14 words" is a white supremecist dog whistle.

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This was in response to people saying "Hey maybe people hired by WP who talk about working for WP shouldn't be using their platforms to harass fans."

It was a popular sentiment at the time. Still is, probably.

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This.... Where do I start...

This is the thread that shared it

It's a "leaked" thread from one of Kate's private twitters. Why do I say "leaked"? Because I personally feel Kate was fucking mad that people enjoyed Trace's Tavros route, which had a better Vriska than what she wrote (in my, and others' opinions). You can see the discord message in question is from months prior, but only got released after Tavros's route came out, and I know she vented about it before then. Also, this private twitter, basically anyone could request to join. I followed it for a little while! But "leaking" it was another excuse to target a previously mentioned black trans masc fan, blaming them for the leak with no proof.

This is not me defending Trace. I don't know shit about him. I don't know if this was a one-off comment taken out of context, or proof of repeated violations. I just know Kate and the discourse she approved of benefited from this being leaked. This one is probably the most speculation vs actual fact I have here, so I guess fitting that it's last.

Anyway. Might reblog with the Gio links for context for Kickstarter/Sarah Z/Aysha shit, but other than that, let me know if there's stuff you want to be expanded on or other shit you want to know!

And thank you if anyone actually gets through all of this lmao

#jax yacks #hstwt 2019 #hstwt discourse #oh god this is so long why is this so long #blame it on the screenshots

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