Violet Hellfire

Dont’ Like, Don’t Read

or DL; DR

You are responsible for curating your own online experience.

If something upsets you, makes you angry or queasy or triggers you, stop reading/looking at it. Avoid things that might make you feel that way.

Learn to use the Sort and Filter function on AO3, especially the Exclude tools.

On social media, block and mute accounts / tags / words when necessary.

If you hated something, you don’t need to tell that to the creator or start pointing fingers at them publicly.

The Back button is free. Use it.

Addendum:

Yes, for this to work, creators need to tag their works accordingly, so that people know what sort of content they are about to engage with and can nope out if necessary.

I will probably make another PSA about the importance of proper tagging later.

Ship And Let Ship

or SALS

You are allowed to ship whatever you want.

Everyone else is also allowed to ship whatever they want.

You are entitled to dislike or even hate a ship. If you want to do this online, in public, don’t use the ship tags for hate posts.

If you see someone posting about a ship they like and you don’t, there is no need for you to start arguing with them in their replies / comments / QRTs / reblogs. Don’t throw your hate in their face.

Do not harass fan creators or fans for shipping something you disapprove.

All of this also applies to liking / disliking an individual character.

Addendum:

”I agree with this, except when…”

No, then you are NOT agreeing with this.

Let me make this VERY clear. There are NO exceptions. None.

You don’t EVER harass real people over pixels.

If you disagree with this, kindly block and move on.

Your Kink Is Not My Kink

or YKINMK / YKINMKATO

The longer version is ”Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That’s Okay”.

People have different tastes. Not everything is for everybody.

Even if you don’t like a specific kink, other people are still allowed to use it in their creations.

You are entitled to dislike kinky content and think that it’s ”weird”.

Don’t kink shame or judge people based on their kinks.

This goes both ways: your kink is not someone else’s kink, so don’t push it onto those who are not into it.

Be Kind

or Don’t Be An Asshole

Focus on the things you like instead of the things you hate.

Create and unite instead of destroying and dividing.

Don’t harass real people over fictional things.

Stop stirring up petty drama just to get some attention on social media.

Stop trying to ”win”. Fandom is not a competition.

I know I'm supposed to be working on my antichrist au but hear me out

For example, these four are all the same, with only slight variation in #1:

(I actually have duplicates from some of the "self-identified" anons above.)

But these two anons share the same new stock phrases:

"days are heavy" / "days that feel impossibly heavy."

Not to put too fine a tin foil hat on it, but:

That is the kind of threat someone involved in these kinds of financial scams and the social engineering behind them *would* make! It's a threatening statement to the existence of my blog which usually means heightened fear/anxiety of the target, which makes people more likely to fall for a financial scam. Social shame and embarrassment are also heightened emotions! Bullying works! This would make an excellent social engineering counterpoint (if tugging on heartstrings doesn't work!) and might even be effective on many people!

Sure, you can search the supposed connected usernames those anons claimed and find out specifics that way — but not a single one of those screenshots I showed specifies what they're referring to! The IDENTICAL messages from four "different people" never actually mention what their "family's struggle" even is! There's zero fucking context in the space of those messages. They're all IDENTICAL. I literally cannot be committing denialism about anything specific because those asks don't actually say anything I could be denying. How does this person know that these anons aren't a recently impoverished Nigerian prince?

So now you're asking why don't I just click on the usernames and find out more details? Simple. Because they're fucking fraudsters who sent me the same message like, six times with 4 different usernames attached AS ANONS. Why as anons if they have their own blogs and could send the messages that way? SIMPLE AGAIN: because if they're not logged into the blog accounts, you could have whole teams of people copying and pasting these anon asks to various Tumblr users constantly, and you can probably just bypass the ask limits by changing VPNs or going incognito or something. This is a DEDICATED scam. Is it a bot? MAYBE! But that also would explain some of why it doesn't work *while logged in* to the blog accounts — because being anon probably makes it easier to focus on volume.

Falling for these isn't just an 'oopsy doopsy, you're out some money' sort of a thing. If you send money to obvious scammers and if you platform obvious scammers, you are very likely directly financially supporting modern day slavery. That's not an exaggeration, and I'm not being alarmist. Please read any of these articles on the subject if you don't believe me:

Step 1: an appalling atrocity happens, and victims of it ask for aid. We're all on board.

Step 2: Scammers pop up pretending to be those victims. A few users step forward to vet requests, to try to filter for genuine victims.

Step 3: the race begins. Some people, used to associating things like poor English and young accounts with scams, assume that most of these victims are therefore scammers, and the vetters are either incompetent or in on it.

Step 4: the race diverges. Other people recognise that these "tells" are just as easily symptoms of non-English speakers who are making hasty blogs under unimaginable circumstances, and so conclude that claiming a victim is a scammer on the basis of their English is actually racist.

Step 5: the race concludes. These two groups repeat their points so many times that they gallop in opposite directions until they reach the binary poles of this particular spectrum. Group 1: absolutely none of these accounts are genuine. It's all scams, and only stupid gullible babies would ever think otherwise. Group 2: saying a single one of these accounts is a scam is a racist denial of the very genocide itself that they're facing and only a simpering fascist would think so.

This happens all the time in all fields on all subjects and in every corner of humanity. But that's what's happening with the random accusation of genocide denial on this post. That is someone who reached their binary pole, and now even the suggestion that scammers might be posing as genuine victims - a thing that is literally, definitely happening, which is why we needed the vetting in the first place - is somehow twisted into a claim that there's no genocide.

Tobias Forge's track-by-track guide to new Ghost album Skeletá | Metal Hammer