fuzzy post-it

🚨🚨🚨  Read the actual response, on Google Docs (CW: everything) 🚨🚨🚨

I apologize for the preposterous length of this document.  Which is linked above, if that weren’t obvious.  This post isn’t the response; it’s a shorter cover letter for the response.  Yes, I know, “shorter”.  There was a lot to respond to.

I’ve done this once before, to respond to the original callout from Pengo.  I foolishly assumed that filling in all the gaps in his logs would put the entire matter to bed, but I was wrong.  I’m still not sure if responding to him accomplished much at all, so it’s been hard to muster up the will to respond to subsequent callouts.

I’m sure I haven’t even scratched the surface here, but there’s only so much I can slog through.  Writing this has been emotionally and physically exhausting.  We don’t keep up with this stuff because it’s so draining to pore over through pages and pages of people talking about how awful they think you are.

I’ll respond to follow-up questions as I can (though probably on a side blog so I don’t flood everyone’s dashes), but I doubt I’ll produce something of this magnitude again anytime soon.  I happened to start writing this just before my computer died, so I had little else to do for a few days ­— but now I have some serious catching up to do on work I’d intended to finish before the end of month.

There’s a lot in the document, and I understand that most people won’t want to read it all.  So I’d like to talk about the accusation that I was responsible for the worst event of my life: the death of my young cat, Styx.

Styx died of FIP — a mutation of a very common and mostly harmless cat virus.  FIP is hard to test for, has no known cure or even treatment, and kills virtually every cat within a few weeks of the first symptoms.  Cats with weaker immune systems are more susceptible, so it’s more likely to hit very young cats.  It’s a cruel, cruel disease.

Unfortunately, the only way to prevent FIP is to prevent the cat from ever catching the original harmless virus, which is very difficult in high-population places like catteries.  Styx came from a cattery, and since all our cats are indoor cats, that’s almost certainly where he caught it.

One of the people behind these callout blogs suggests that Styx’s death is my fault.  The reasoning, as I understand it, is that Styx died of an illness that’s spread mostly through feces, and they have a photo showing that Pearl had had an accident on our cat tree.

But this gets the details wrong.  It’s the original, harmless virus that spreads through feces — and it does so because cats share litterboxes.  Even if Styx hadn’t almost certainly brought it home with him in the first place, even if we’d known about it, even if our house were pristine at all times, preventing it from spreading would’ve been very difficult.  And Pearl, who has accidents because she has IBS, wasn’t even born yet when Styx died.

My best guess is that someone read a paragraph on Wikipedia, saw a photo that had some stray cat poop in it, and concluded that Styx’s death was my fault.  Both of the source facts are even true, so the story looks “proven”, even though 90% of it is either speculation or a misunderstanding of the details.  Look how much shorter and punchier the false story is than the real one, too.  That’s how this stuff spreads so easily.

Most of what I’ve read on these blogs is of similar quality.

They accuse glip of trying to lure children into seeing porn, because glip’s separate SFW and NSFW comic sites are, somehow, not separate enough.  Meanwhile, their own blogs and posts — some about glip’s porn and serious sexual topics — appear prominently in SFW Tumblr searches for the SFW “floraverse” tag.

They accuse glip of scamming Kickstarter backers, but they don’t even get the right Kickstarter.  They don’t bother to contact the people they’re using as evidence — people who are, in fact, quite happy with their backer rewards.

They call us out for being mean to people online, and cite snarky remarks from years ago that we’ve long since apologized for.  Again, they don’t bother to ask the other people who were involved.

They accuse glip of inciting harassment by posting someone’s tweets with only the handle hidden, not the avatar.  Later in the same post, they include completely uncensored tweets about trans representation from a trans woman they disagree with — neglecting to identify her as trans, but emphasizing that the person she was talking to is genderfluid.  They then publish a couple anonymous asks gossipping about that trans woman.

They accuse glip of poor asexual representation over a character who draws from glip’s own experience with asexuality.  They accuse glip of making a character too stereotypically autistic, but the character is based heavily on me.

They say repeatedly that glip’s work has poor trans representation, which is something we’d both definitely be interested in fixing.  But they never say what would improve the work, only that it’s “obviously” fetishy (and not why).  Our own trans friends, meanwhile, find their criticism downright offensive.

They’ve complained that I keep dismissing their accusations as mostly made up, even though the logs and screenshots are real.  But anyone who’s played Phoenix Wright for five minutes is familiar with the idea of a false story “proven” by legitimate evidence.

They do have one genuine new grievance, which is that we said some fucked-up things to an autistic person on our IRC some years ago.  It was embarrassing and inexcusable, and I apologize to that person.

And I’d certainly be interested in their criticism of representation, if I could make heads or tails of it — and if it acknowledged that some folks actively like the representation for the same reasons that they hate it. We can’t listen to everyone if different people have contradictory criticism.

But much of the rest is gossip, conjecture presented as fact, misunderstandings, and straight up just deciding that we’re lying because they like their first impression better.  Even when they’re unsure about something, instead of tracking down someone who was actually involved, they ask for other anonymous people to chime in.

We do our best, like everyone else.  Sometimes we screw up, and we try to fix it — and if you think we’ve personally wronged you, you can always contact us privately.  Sometimes we do or make things that different people get very different impressions of, but that’s the nature of having an audience beyond just the people we know personally.

It’s okay if some people don’t like us.  It’s okay if some people don’t like our work.  I don’t even mind if people call me out for things that are actually true.  I try, but I know I can’t ever please everyone.  But playing internet detective with people’s lives, spreading dozens of twisted stories without doing even the most basic verification, is simply vile.