Patron Goddess of Shipping

Recently Chris Niosi (aka Kirbopher), who has admitted to abusing people around him for at least a decade, was cast in Honkai Star Rail as the character Moze. Five years have passed since his public apology, where he addresses some specific callouts from victims to debatable effect, but unfortunately he’s lied about apologizing to all of his victims (1, 2), and the specific apologies he has written are now deleted from his tumblr, calling his efforts into changing for the better into his question. Furthermore, as he has a history of taking advantage of his fans even in his more underground days (1+2, 3), putting him in a situation where he has access to more fans to put him on a pedestal is dangerous. Other users have iterated much of this already on tumblr, where it was already discussed in previous years, so this is just some context.

But I’m here to talk about something related that hasn’t gotten any Tumblr coverage. For example, people here have talked about Griffin Puatu’s reddit post defending him already. But nobody has mentioned Kyle McCarley defending him yet.

On July 19, 2024, in the replies of Moze’s introduction tweet, he had this to say:

He addresses his use of “bad boyfriend” downplaying legitimate abuse later. I don't think it's great but we’ll get to that. However, “the court of public opinion” is a concept that he does stand by, perhaps reinforced by the backlash he received for this. Some of this was vitriolic, given the kind of person he was defending from further criticism, but others did try to reason with him, including some of the above and more as evidence that Niosi isn’t being entirely truthful about his atonement, and overall most responses expressed disbelief and disappointment more than anything else.

Still, he deactivated his account the following day, on July 20, 2024.

Unfortunately, our story doesn’t end there. In the early morning of July 21, 2024, he made an announcement in his Discord server.

So here's the thing about Niosi not being a confirmed sexual abuser or rapist or pedophile. I don't have everything, with this being such an expansive case so this is off what I've found. You know the time he planned to take advantage of his girlfriend at the time while said girlfriend was intoxicated (plus this follow-up where he attempted to cover for himself)? Drunk people cannot consent, especially not when drunk sex is already a hard boundary. Although this technically doesn't make him a rapist, to my knowledge, if you're gonna argue semantics it'll just sound like "well he didn't ACTUALLY rape someone so it's not as bad". Is it not already terrible that he tried to and still downplayed it when called on it? Besides, as mentioned in Lighty's testimony linked above, he's let other in his sphere groom minors under his watchful eye, and his other ex Audrey had things to say about how he weaponized sexual favors too. If someone actually has more on a history of sexual abuse and pedophilia, though, please bring it to my attention. I'll add it to this post.

Either way, we don't know what he knows. At best, Kyle has a very incomplete picture of the situation, and at worst he does have a complete picture and he just doesn’t think it’s valid or up-to-date criticism. The person who first brought this to people's attention on Twitter also mentioned that her messages in the server were being deleted when she spoke up to provide evidence, so for someone who welcomes others to share evidence how open he actually is to it is questionable. (UPDATE: There's more to this part of the story but we'll get to it in a future update.) His final message a couple of hours from these just solidifies it.

Having joined the server myself to see, around the time of the announcements seems to have been scrubbed clean, but there is some current discussion of the topic as of this post. Furthermore, someone there has stated that they're compiling sources to send his way to give him a better understanding of the situation (even if they're not sure if he still wants to talk about this), so maybe this will finally get him to reconsider his stance! Only time will tell.

Overall, though, I stand by my point that if Niosi makes a living, it should be somewhere far away from the public eye. Don't give him a platform to find new fans to take advantage of. Don't give his victims the opportunity to be retraumatized whenever they start a new game of show. He's been given more than enough chances. It's time to turn over a new leaf instead of digging his heels into the ground.

Still, I don't know if Kyle will change his mind at this point. I want him to - I tried, back when his Twitter was still up - but even at this stage he's doubled down on a situation he knows he might not have the full story on and I'm not sure if I can trust that. For any other fans, give this some thought - keep an eye out for any future developments if you still want to have faith in him, move on from him if you can't stand it. I just want him to at least hold his friend accountable instead of trying to shield him from the lasting consequences of his own actions.