#elffymess

This is the DM @almosinnia​ sent me just over 24 hours ago, possibly on behalf of their friend (and Discord server co-mod?) @dreamfall. I’m sure they think they’re asking nicely and being polite, but in my opinion this was NOT polite – and I apologise to my followers for putting my answer on your dashes.

First things first. If I were going to ask someone to delete a post rebutting the lies you and your friends are spreading about them in your Discord server, the first thing I’d fucking do is APOLOGISE for spreading those lies in the first place. I see no attempt to say “sorry” in your, quite frankly, arrogant and demanding message above. 

Also, you claiming the post was “made a long time ago” is a lie. We’re not stupid. We can ALL see the timestamp of that Discord post with the blocklist is 20th January 2022 – THREE WEEKS AGO. That’s not “a long time ago” unless you’re a fucking foetus in the womb. 

The only reason you and your friends care that I publicly exposed @dreamfall as the person spreading lies about us, is because I made you look bad. I understand Dreamfail is whining that this whole thing is “setting off their anxiety”. How selfish of Dreamfail, and you, to not think about the anxiety of the people you named on your blocklist – many of whom have had to re-live the trauma and anxiety of the false accusations your friends made back in 2020 when it’s fucking 2022. Some of the people on that list weren’t even involved in The Mess. And certainly one of the people you’ve accused of “shipping incest” doesn’t even have any incest ships. 

Did you think about the feelings of the people you and/or Dreamfail were falsely making up lies about? Did you think about their trauma, their anxiety, their right to a safe space where they can create fanart and fanfic free from spiteful, lying bullies like yourself and your friends? No. You DIDN’T think about their feelings once. So why should I give a fuck about yours? 

If @lustyargonianmaid​ wanted to delete her post after you asked her to, then that is up to her. However, I am not her – and I will do what I personally think is best. So telling me she deleted her post at your request has absolutely NO bearing on me, and I am incensed at your piss-poor attempt to manipulate me into doing what you want, especially as I know you have not asked anyone else to delete their reblogs of her post or my post. Furthermore, you and your friends were quite happy to harass her / vague-post on Tumblr about her for the “crime” of leaving your Discord server until she posted your blocklist from that server. You DO NOT CARE about “avoiding more targeting and harassment”. Don’t pretend that you do, because you and/or your friends were already harassing people before that blocklist was posted. You lot only care because your actions are unexpectedly blowing up in your faces.

In fact, one of the people on your blocklist told me they have already received anon hate from one of you. The only “damage control” you care about is any damage done to your reputation, as (presumably) a mod in that server, and @dreamfall’s. I am not aware of any anon hate that has been sent to your side, but given that you have sided with a bunch of people from The Mess who have long been rumoured to have sent themselves racist anon hate to garner sympathy when they were exposed for the jealous liars they were, all I can say is that anyone who HAS sent you anon hate is disgusting and should stop. 

But here’s the thing. If ANY of you cared about “damage control”, you would not have made up a bunch of lies about people you don’t know and encouraged your server members to block them. Even your DM to me above implies that you only care about “damage control” to yourselves. You don’t care about “controlling damage” done to us. You don’t care about damaging us, even in 2022, because we dared to challenge serious lies people were accused of back in August 2020. 

You say you’re “doing your best to fix this mess on our end too”. You have not made it clear how you are “fixing this mess”, but you and @dreamfall can start by publicly apologising for what you’ve done. And for the love of God, don’t fucking spread lies about people you don’t know ever again. Right now, you deserve everything you’re getting and I am sick of having to deal with people like you time and time again who only care about yourselves and not the people you hurt. Repeatedly. 

Furthermore, I am not deleting my post. I think it’s ridiculous of you to single me out and ask ME to delete "to reduce the visibility of the original post” when my addition had already been reblogged by so many people before you sent me your message. Are you going to DM all 50 people who’ve reblogged it and demand they delete, too? Like hell you will. I think you know it would be useless to do so: the internet doesn’t forget and nothing truly gets deleted. Maybe you and your friends should remember that the next time you post horrible accusations about strangers that you can’t back up or prove.

TL:DR: This message is an insult and I am not deleting my post. Frankly, you (and especially @dreamfall) owe most of us on that list an apology, and you need to get better friends and hang around more honest people. 

Hey there! Ahhhhhh, you're not overstepping at all – thanks so much for sending me this very kind message and I'm sorry it's taken me so long to reply to it! ❤️  And yeah, I gotta admit – out of all the fandom Discord servers I’ve joined, none of them have a channel called #blocklist full of names to warn server members about, or even a list written out like that.  

And that’s even before you get onto the fact that most of the names on those lists (the ones I know of, anyway) have not done or said the things they’ve been accused of. In fact, many of those on that blocklist under “The Mess” subheading (and some of us on that list, like me, are POC ourselves) who have been accused of “targeting POC with harassment for calling out racism in the Dragon Age fandom” were targeted ourselves with harassment (AND racism!) by the perpetrators of a callout post that called out a bunch of popular fandom creators for being “racist”.... and when questioned further about what these creators did that was so racist, the answer was.... those creators wrote and drew popular sexual Cullen content???

Some of the sexual Cullen content was so mild I’m not even sure I’d call it sexual Cullen content. More like romantic Cullen content. Romantic content with the whitest straight man in the Dragon Age franchise (no shade to anyone who romanced him, even if he’s very much not my thing). One person was called out as racist for.... drawing her Cullen-mancing Lavellan with a low-cut blouse, which the callouters said was “hypersexualising WOC” even though she was barely showing any cleavage. Another person who was called out was a pale-skinned WOC who drew a Cullen-mancing Lavellan based on herself, and was called racist for making her Lavellan pale-skinned like herself?!?!? Their crime wasn’t that they were racist – their crime was that they were popular and well-liked Cullen creators... and the people behind the callout (also Cullen creators) wanted to drive them out of the fandom because of it. 

They collectively had a meltdown when screenshots were leaked from their private Discord server showing them admitting to sending us anon hate, planning how to lie about it to us (and each other!) and attempting to “strategise” (LOL) when their callout was blowing up in their faces. Many of the original perpetrators are still around, but under new Tumblr URLs so that they can hide their former shitty identities (but of course, they’ve not really changed as people). 

And that was what the fandom wank known as “The Mess” was all about, back in August 2020. @weird-in-thedas and @visceralcoma have the receipts, and debunked the entire callout with evidence of these people’s lies, spite and jealousy. At the time, The Mess blew up so big that people outside the Dragon Age fandom came to gawp at it – it got discussed a lot on the fail-fandomanon comm and even made it onto Reddit 😅  but even then, I didn’t think we’d still be talking about it in 2022. But here we are! 🤷🏾‍♀️ 

So, yeah. You were right to get bad vibes from such a list. Some of the people on that Discord blocklist were on the original callout post, some of the people (like me) were somehow dragged into the fray (receiving abuse and even racist remarks from the callout perpetrators simply for saying “hey I know these people, I’d like to know how they’ve supposedly been racist”), and some of the people on the blocklist were never even involved in “The Mess”. Not to mention that one person accused on that blocklist of shipping incest definitely doesn’t, and another was last on Tumblr three years ago (and hasn’t been in DA fandom for nearly 10 years anyway). 

There’s definitely a lot of needless drama and bullying in this fandom, as well as callout posts made on false pretences, and has been for the 8 years I’ve been in it – but I’m glad you’re now active in it after 5+ years: I promise you there’s lots of good and decent people in the fandom; they’re often quieter and harder to find than the more wanky and/or drama-mongering ones. But they’re there, I promise. ❤️ 

On a happier topic – thank you SO MUCH for your support and especially for your kind words about my Carver/Merrill content! 😁  I love them – they’re my favourite Dragon Age ship (my OTP, actually, LOL) and I am forever sad that Bioware planned to get them together if you didn’t romance Merrill, and then denied us by cancelling the third Dragon Age 2 DLC where they’d have got together 😭  which is why I write all the fanfic and commission all the fanart, LOL. I honestly could rant for ever about why I love them and think they’re perfect for each other, but I think this post is long enough 😂  so perhaps that’s one for another post. 

Awwwww, thank you so much for this very kind message of support ❤️  I really appreciate it. I'm honestly fine – but I really do feel terrible for the people on this blocklist who are newly being accused of stuff they didn't do/say/ship (including those who were never involved in the fandom wank known as The Mess nearly two years ago), and I also feel terrible for the people who were on the original Mess callout post who have had to re-live the trauma and anxiety of what they were put through in August/September 2020 until the accusations were debunked. I wish there was something else I could say or do to alleviate the anxiety and terror I know they have been through these past few days, because none of them deserve it.

Oh hey there chidorinnnnn, and thank you so much for reaching out – and as a fellow South Asian (well, half-South Asian, in my case) HIGH FIVE! 😄 Thank you so much for this lovely message of support! 💕 I’ve received so many kind and supportive private messages – especially from total strangers – that it’s been overwhelming and heartening and honestly I didn’t realise so many of us felt silently felt this way. So thanks for having the bravery to reach out! 

I am really glad you’ve said this because honestly when I saw the callout’s evidence post insisting that Piper Lavellan’s tattoos were henna I remember thinking “um, that doesn’t look like henna to me” and then the post went on to argue that the character’s tattoos are problematic because they don’t look like henna and then I was like “......maybe that’s because they weren’t meant to be henna after all” LMAO 😂

It IS really difficult to watch others use (and misuse) our cultures and ethnicities solely for the purpose of putting down people they don’t like, and I totally feel and understand your frustrations about that ❤️ *hugs*. I usually try to stay out of fandom wank and drama as well – I mean, really, all I ever want to do is write OTP smut LMAO, I tend to prefer being quiet on Tumblr – so I get where you’re coming from. 

The people behind the callout have talked a lot about “people in the fandom doing harm to BIPOC” while completely ignoring their OWN harm they’ve been doing to BIPOC in this fandom and they’re REPEATEDLY doing harm at that. It’s manipulative and galling. And also – they’re talking out of their arses. I’ve heard from a LOT of POC (and survivors, and queer people) who are just absolutely fucking fed up of it all. 

I 100% agree, and I’ve been in Dragon Age fandom for.... somewhere over 6½ years now. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those abusive personalities are still in our fandom, protected behind their ability to say the “right” things without actually being good people. 

And DA fandom is AWFUL to fans who don’t speak English as a first language -- especially if they don’t speak English well at all. Those same people will decry (say) the terrible treatment of immigrants in the news while perpetuating the exact same prejudice (and even racism?) towards people in fandom who might even fit the profile of some of those immigrants were circumstances different. 

I was brought up by two people who were ESL -- English was actually a third language for one of my parents, not even a second language. There were lots of things they got wrong or got confused by or nuances and subtleties that they missed simply because they were not fluent in the language. In this fandom, that kind of thing makes you easier to call out and have your words twisted and ripped apart.