My incredibly busy week has finally come to a close. I do still have a couple more social obligations that will continue to distract me, but I should now have the time to stay at home and recover some mental bandwidth so I can return to work properly.
It's probably a good thing that I've been out of the house as much as I have been, though. Seasonals set in a bit early this year, and spending all this time with friends and family and hobbies has gone a very long way toward preventing me from rotting at home while staring at game script like it's supposed to do something on its own.
Spending all this time away from work has left me mildly unfamiliar with everything I was putting together, so the few chances I've had to open it up and work on the things that weren't quite operating the way they should be, I've had to spend more time re-learning my own script than actually making progress on it.
Which is originally where I wanted this post to end. I would've been a little upset with myself for the lack of meaningful progress over the past week, but I'd have resolved to put my nose back to the grindstone, get the training system properly implemented, and get to work on the rest of the new content for Redemption Harem v0.2. Maybe mention the new scenes that would be available or sharing thoughts about some of the ideas I've got for how to present the new quests.
Instead, the only individual I've ever banned for harassing me decided it was a good time to resume harassing me.
I'm not normally one to make my suffering a public matter. It's why I try to avoid talking about my financial struggles unless it's in aggregate, like the amount of money Maids & Masters cost me to make, or generalizations, like simply stating that I am struggling. It's also why I try to restrict any mention of my mental health to lines like the one in the second paragraph, or simply stating that treating myself better is something I have room to improve on.
Harassment, however, is not okay - no matter the subject or severity - and sometimes I need to put thoughts somewhere other than my head so I can stop myself from dwelling on them and spiraling.
So, if you want some drama, like context, or just don't have anything better to do, keep reading.
If you don't care, this will hopefully be the last you or I ever hear of this, and you can stop reading here.
Just be warned that this is an exercise in venting for me. I no longer want these thoughts inside my skull, and this individual no longer deserves my kindness. I'm going to do my best to stick to facts, but this individual deleted most of their own posts, and having them blocked means I can't view what they didn't delete, so I have to operate from memories I'd rather not recall. You may be able to see them for yourself on my Patreon page, as I never deleted anything myself, but some of this back and forth is in a community chat, which you need to be an active Patron to see.
First, some context - this individual joined my Patreon page at the VIP tier before they were reworked. That meant this individual represented more than 20% of my monthly income at the time. While they were an active Patron, they became the first and only person to make fan-works (that I know of) for Maids & Masters. They stole some of my custom assets to create at least one of those fan-works, but if they'd asked, I'd have said they could use them with no strings attached, so I let it slide. Past that, the amount of money they were giving me left me in a position where I felt pointing out I should've been asked first was putting my livelihood at risk, so it wasn't worth the confrontation.
And I had reason to think it would be a confrontation. This individual regularly left comments that were generally the sort of mild offense that you'd expect out of the worst customer you have to deal with at your job. They're out of line, they're making everyone else the bad guy, they're telling you their way is better, and they're following all the rules so there's nothing to be done but try and avoid further interaction. This became regular, but again, this individual's pledge was the difference between being able to afford groceries and starving, so it was in my best interest to ignore them.
All of this coming from someone with a username that pushes an agenda. The sort of name people put in tiers where creators say the names of supporters of a certain tier out loud at the end of their videos, even if it's just a prank like Mike Oxlong. This wasn't a prank or anything positive, though. If their screen name was "Trans Rights Are Human Rights," I wouldn't complain. No, this individual's full username was "ByogenLivesMatter - HealinGood Precure is ableist bullshit - Junko Komura is objectively evil and caused real life damage!"
If you're somewhere between confused and bewildered, so was I. I still am, really. I can understand supporting a cause. Y'know, free Palestine, release the Epstein files, love is love. But this?
To save you the time, Healin' Good Pretty Cure is a standard magical girl anime. The Byogens are the bad guys. Junko Komura wrote it. I don't blame you if you've never heard of it; neither had I, and I've been part of the anime community for more than 20 years. I was even anime club president in high school.
So why the profanity and trying to cause harm to a person this individual likely never met and knew nothing about? Turns out there was a mild controversy among a small sub-set of fans over the anime's ending. The TL;DR there is that the main character was sick before becoming a magical girl and refused to let "king virus" inhabit her body after she defeats him.
That's it. That's the whole story. This username is so long it breaks things on my Patreon page's back end when it appears. It hurls accusations and insults over a woman having bodily autonomy. The individual harassing me made their whole personality "why wouldn't the author force a terminally ill girl to be terminally ill again so the pandemic allegory wouldn't die?"
But I put up with it, because if they canceled their pledge, my income would destabilize, and I'd start having to choose between being able to eat and being able to leave the house.
Eventually though, I did gain enough support to not be riding a knife's edge. While I'd normally say empathy is a good thing, this individual was trying to get me to rewrite the start of Maids & Masters so that rats wouldn't be an enemy and Master would love them instead of hating them. I never had any interest in doing this but I'd never said as much for fear of losing the income. Rats seem more important than people to whoever this individual is, so if I ever outright refused, that'd likely be all the excuse they needed, and I'd be trying to figure out how to keep my bills paid.
When I finally had the room to lose this individuals support, the next time one of these comments came up, I didn't have to be afraid of defending my creative decisions, so I explained myself.
This I remember clearly, and won't need to look back on old posts to give you the whole story.
It was on the poll for which character should be used in the promotional image for one of Maids & Masters' love shack updates. I mentioned in the original post that I'd re-render the image, both to re-frame it so Celine would fill the image in a wide-screen aspect ratio and to remove Master so you could see her.
Removing Master from the image was apparently this individual's breaking point. Removing Master wasn't malicious, it was so the image felt more like an invitation for you, the player, to spend a weekend at a cabin with Celine. Keeping the back of Master's head in the image would both make it harder to see Celine and at least partially remove the idea of that invitation, as there's already someone else there.
This individual's response was to go off on a rant complete with examples to "prove" I was wrong, and when I pointed out the intent of the composition of the example, they proceeded to delete nearly every message they'd ever sent, cancel their pledge, and start hurling accusations of sexism in a community chat room within my Patreon page. Their tantrum needed to be in front of as many people as possible so I'd be thoroughly painted as the villain. My response at this point was to block the individual on Patreon and apologize to my community for the drama. As far as I was concerned, it ended there.
Unfortunately, it didn't end there. Once this individual realized they couldn't cause chaos and displeasure in a way that might directly damage my livelihood, they created a long post about how rats actually aren't disease-carrying pests, complete with a link to an article about how useful literal lab rats are.
Look, if you think rats are cute or maybe even have one as a pet, good for you. Most of my personal distaste for rodents comes from their propensity to break into my house and leave droppings all over my cookware if I don't keep traps baited.
For this individual, though, it apparently makes me evil on the same level as the terminally ill magical girl that refused to surrender her bodily autonomy to a living plague and the author who wrote that piece of fiction. You'd think that an individual so concerned with rats being an enemy in a video game and had so much empathy for the villains of an anime would object to lab testing, but the point wasn't that I'd wronged them or offended their lofty morals, it was to harass me. They'd posted the same article with the same rant on at least half a dozen of my post recent posts trying to promote Maids & Masters before I blocked them on Twitter, too.
For a few months, that was the end of it. They couldn't damage my income or harass me on Twitter.
Of course didn't sit right with this individual, so they made another account and joined my Patreon as a free follower. In hindsight, I should've blocked them again as soon as I saw it, but shame on me for thinking people should get second chances. My personal bias toward empathy was even rewarded, as they didn't say a single word for close to a year, maybe longer.
Until this weekend. I mentioned that I'm still struggling financially and was debating opening a new potential revenue stream. Obviously they couldn't tolerate me doing anything but struggling, so they copied a bunch of text so if I changed it they had proof I was being manipulative (I assume; my stance on giving me money has always been very transparent) and said it didn't make sense for me to offer commissions if people couldn't afford to pledge to a Patreon tier.
I called them out for circumventing being banned from my page, but went on to explain myself anyway, just in case anyone else genuinely didn't understand what I'd said in the post.
This individual, true to their character, called me nasty and aggressive, called themselves polite, dug up the past, and said I'd lied and viciously attacked their moral character.
Needless to say, I've blocked the new account on Patreon and ensured they're blocked everywhere else I'm on social media to (hopefully) prevent any more attempts to undermine my trying to do more than just barely scrape by because I'm continuing to give away the vast majority of my hard work completely free, only asking for financial support from those who feel I truly deserve it and who can afford to provide it.
If you see anything this individual posts about negative interactions with me or reasons you shouldn't support me, you can assume it's a false allegation intended to cause me harm as revenge for the crime of having an artistic vision that doesn't line up exactly one-to-one with their world view.
And if you're the individual being talked about here, I sincerely hope you find the wherewithal to reflect on your actions and grow some accountability. The performative empathy you've been putting on display doesn't hide how toxic and manipulative you are. There's a decent person in there somewhere, but if you keep putting the blame for your own actions on everyone around you, they're never going to make it. I genuinely hope it isn't too late for them and you find the strength to change.
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