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On the Atlyss controversy, and a concerning trend as of late
6 months ago
I'm sure you've heard, at the very least, that people are upset about Atlyss. This is going to get a bit political, be forewarned.
Here's the situation as I understand it: A few months ago, one person had a stick up their ass about boob sliders and harassed Kesiff, the lead dev of Atlyss, about it. Kesiff understandably got snippy with their harasser, saying "if the sliders as-is bother you that much, just use mods." The situation was dealt with and the conversation deleted from their discord for stress management. The original harasser in this case is an inexcusable asshole, and I have no sympathy for them.
Fast forward to the present. Kesiff is testing fixes to the body size sliders due to armor clipping issues, and is rolling out the changes to beta testers. This results in larger belly sizes being unavailable to the beta testers for a time. This is misunderstood as Kesiff removing fat bodies from the game, resulting in angry social media posts and negative reviews. A contextless screencap of the "just use mods" comment worsened the misunderstanding, but was later corrected and given proper context.
However. While this was a misunderstanding, it was a completely understandable one. If you've been fat for most of your life, hearing that fat people don't deserve accomodations and that they're too much of a pain to make clothes for, you're going to feel defensive if it sounds like yet another person is excluding fat people for the same old reasons. I should know. I'm fat myself. This is not malicious, nor is it "making a smear campaign," nor is it "review bombing."
A wonderful person who has been very supportive of me during recent times, who is a fat trans woman-- therefore giving her life experiences that I have some of but not others-- was hurt by the wider internet's response to this controversy. She was hurt by people lumping her in and dismissing her as "a self-righteous internet harasser," "a degenerate gooner who just wants big boobies," and "a fatfur mad that their fetish isn't being pandered to." These kinds of remarks are not okay. And I'm not going to stand by and let her and her community suffer alone.
Especially when so many people are getting all self-righteous about "you all need to stop harassing indie devs and ruining their careers," when developers who include even token mentions of trans people, or try to be more inclusive of women and people of color, get worse harassment and actual review bombs. This is not deflecting the issue. This is pointing out a real double standard that's being applied here. It becomes clear that this response doesn't come from a place of genuine care for marginalized people or harassment victims. It comes from a place of single-mindedly defending your gaming opinions, and reactionary anger at being asked to listen to people who are marginalized in ways that you are not and self-reflect. And these people have the nerve to say people like me and the friend who inspired me to write this are the reactionary ones.
But to make matters worse: this isn't the only example of people taking a messy conflict (by which I mean an actual messy conflict, not just "people who are politically to the left of me are making me uncomfortable, uwu no pawlitics")-- and deciding that only one side of it is right and anyone who isn't on the "right" side entirely is acting in bad faith and has no good reasons for the position they hold. It's been happening way more often recently.
The same incredibly supportive friend I've mentioned earlier, along with her girlfriend (who has been similarly supportive), have been the target of sustained harassment for over a year. The harassment originates from a person who unfortunately suffered sexual abuse from someone in a community they trusted. To be clear: this sexual abuse is unacceptable and should never have happened. However. This person decided that they were justified in targeting a particular mod from the community, a non-binary person who had previously been harassed themselves for reasons couched in righteous fury, and therefore was an easy target. To make matters worse, the harasser had a stick up his ass about people blocking him, which is how my friends became his next targets.
This is not okay. People have accused my friends of being pedophile sympathizers, knowing that accusing trans people of pedophilia is a common smear tactic to justify their harassment and even death, while self-righteously justifying themselves by saying: "Well, the harasser is trans too. I'm listening and learning to the trans community." That's not how this works. You can't just pick the member of a marginalized group that makes you feel the least defensive and self-reflecting. You have to take in more perspectives than just that, and be open to the possibility that the member who makes you the least uncomfortable might be wrong.
On a similar note, a few years ago, a white trans woman tried to reclaim the shitty transphobic "attack helicopter" meme in a sci-fi short story. Unfortunately, she did so in a messy way that kinda fetishized US military imperialism. It should come as no surprise that many trans people, particularly trans women of color and trans people from outside the Western world, were hurt by her story. Unfortunately, at the same time, other people in the sci-fi and fantasy literature communities, many of them cis people, bombarded the author with angry messages and defamation until she had a catastrophic breakdown. The latter group is guilty of harassment, and this is not okay.
However. What's also not okay is saying that the trans women and trans people of color who were hurt by the story were complicit in the harassment. Especially with guilt-tripping language that makes it sound like they committed an unforgivable crime. Especially when people start insinuating that black people are entirely and unilaterally privileged over white trans people, after talking about the nuance of social dynamics out of the other side of their mouth.
Why is this so personal to me, you might ask? Because someone who was my friend for seven years reblogged an article with this kind of guilt-trippy language against the trans people who were hurt by the helicopter story. Unfortunately, I was in a rather foul anxiety mood when I came across the article, and I snapped at them about it in our DMs. Their response to this was to ghost me for two months. In the meantime, they proceeded to dive down a rabbit hole of defending AI art, eating up crypto-fascist bullshit from the leftovers of 4chan, and being skeezy about anime girls. I blocked them after those two months.
I'm seeing the state of the world get worse by the week. And I'm tired of having to keep quiet about it so as not to step on "no pawlitics" people's eggshells. I want to at least try to make things better by saying what I truly believe is right. This might not be much, but at least it's something.
Here's the situation as I understand it: A few months ago, one person had a stick up their ass about boob sliders and harassed Kesiff, the lead dev of Atlyss, about it. Kesiff understandably got snippy with their harasser, saying "if the sliders as-is bother you that much, just use mods." The situation was dealt with and the conversation deleted from their discord for stress management. The original harasser in this case is an inexcusable asshole, and I have no sympathy for them.
Fast forward to the present. Kesiff is testing fixes to the body size sliders due to armor clipping issues, and is rolling out the changes to beta testers. This results in larger belly sizes being unavailable to the beta testers for a time. This is misunderstood as Kesiff removing fat bodies from the game, resulting in angry social media posts and negative reviews. A contextless screencap of the "just use mods" comment worsened the misunderstanding, but was later corrected and given proper context.
However. While this was a misunderstanding, it was a completely understandable one. If you've been fat for most of your life, hearing that fat people don't deserve accomodations and that they're too much of a pain to make clothes for, you're going to feel defensive if it sounds like yet another person is excluding fat people for the same old reasons. I should know. I'm fat myself. This is not malicious, nor is it "making a smear campaign," nor is it "review bombing."
A wonderful person who has been very supportive of me during recent times, who is a fat trans woman-- therefore giving her life experiences that I have some of but not others-- was hurt by the wider internet's response to this controversy. She was hurt by people lumping her in and dismissing her as "a self-righteous internet harasser," "a degenerate gooner who just wants big boobies," and "a fatfur mad that their fetish isn't being pandered to." These kinds of remarks are not okay. And I'm not going to stand by and let her and her community suffer alone.
Especially when so many people are getting all self-righteous about "you all need to stop harassing indie devs and ruining their careers," when developers who include even token mentions of trans people, or try to be more inclusive of women and people of color, get worse harassment and actual review bombs. This is not deflecting the issue. This is pointing out a real double standard that's being applied here. It becomes clear that this response doesn't come from a place of genuine care for marginalized people or harassment victims. It comes from a place of single-mindedly defending your gaming opinions, and reactionary anger at being asked to listen to people who are marginalized in ways that you are not and self-reflect. And these people have the nerve to say people like me and the friend who inspired me to write this are the reactionary ones.
But to make matters worse: this isn't the only example of people taking a messy conflict (by which I mean an actual messy conflict, not just "people who are politically to the left of me are making me uncomfortable, uwu no pawlitics")-- and deciding that only one side of it is right and anyone who isn't on the "right" side entirely is acting in bad faith and has no good reasons for the position they hold. It's been happening way more often recently.
The same incredibly supportive friend I've mentioned earlier, along with her girlfriend (who has been similarly supportive), have been the target of sustained harassment for over a year. The harassment originates from a person who unfortunately suffered sexual abuse from someone in a community they trusted. To be clear: this sexual abuse is unacceptable and should never have happened. However. This person decided that they were justified in targeting a particular mod from the community, a non-binary person who had previously been harassed themselves for reasons couched in righteous fury, and therefore was an easy target. To make matters worse, the harasser had a stick up his ass about people blocking him, which is how my friends became his next targets.
This is not okay. People have accused my friends of being pedophile sympathizers, knowing that accusing trans people of pedophilia is a common smear tactic to justify their harassment and even death, while self-righteously justifying themselves by saying: "Well, the harasser is trans too. I'm listening and learning to the trans community." That's not how this works. You can't just pick the member of a marginalized group that makes you feel the least defensive and self-reflecting. You have to take in more perspectives than just that, and be open to the possibility that the member who makes you the least uncomfortable might be wrong.
On a similar note, a few years ago, a white trans woman tried to reclaim the shitty transphobic "attack helicopter" meme in a sci-fi short story. Unfortunately, she did so in a messy way that kinda fetishized US military imperialism. It should come as no surprise that many trans people, particularly trans women of color and trans people from outside the Western world, were hurt by her story. Unfortunately, at the same time, other people in the sci-fi and fantasy literature communities, many of them cis people, bombarded the author with angry messages and defamation until she had a catastrophic breakdown. The latter group is guilty of harassment, and this is not okay.
However. What's also not okay is saying that the trans women and trans people of color who were hurt by the story were complicit in the harassment. Especially with guilt-tripping language that makes it sound like they committed an unforgivable crime. Especially when people start insinuating that black people are entirely and unilaterally privileged over white trans people, after talking about the nuance of social dynamics out of the other side of their mouth.
Why is this so personal to me, you might ask? Because someone who was my friend for seven years reblogged an article with this kind of guilt-trippy language against the trans people who were hurt by the helicopter story. Unfortunately, I was in a rather foul anxiety mood when I came across the article, and I snapped at them about it in our DMs. Their response to this was to ghost me for two months. In the meantime, they proceeded to dive down a rabbit hole of defending AI art, eating up crypto-fascist bullshit from the leftovers of 4chan, and being skeezy about anime girls. I blocked them after those two months.
I'm seeing the state of the world get worse by the week. And I'm tired of having to keep quiet about it so as not to step on "no pawlitics" people's eggshells. I want to at least try to make things better by saying what I truly believe is right. This might not be much, but at least it's something.
And unfortunately I can commiserate on "friends" showing their true colors in the worst possible way. I can commiserate a lot.
The experiences sting no matter what, but it's really helpful to know we're not alone in this.