Clearing Up A Few Things

You've probably heard the name Stormsworder if you've been hanging around. But if you're new here, Stormy seems to be one of Ryuu's most vocal supporters. She was one of the first of his fansquad to post comments back in 2010 when Ryuu cried about the blog.

She's also pushed Ebony over the edge with her homophobia (despite having a gay brother! What a great sister you aren't), made a friend of mine cry, and it was recently brought to my attention that like Ryuu, she's a hypocrite and a liar.

I've mentioned this a couple times, but I figured I'd keep the details private because she claimed she wanted to "resolve things" with the blog. Which would be fine, except nobody's heard jack shit from her on that subject. 

It's been over a year now, so I'm going to make this public. Some of the accusations she's thrown out need to be addressed one way or another, and as she refuses to discuss it like a mature adult I don't see that I have any other choice.

(Also, any typos in the light red text are Stormsworder's, not mine.)

I was recently sent a link to her Tumblr (I'm not going to directly give her views, but if you really want to look, her Tumblr is registered under Stormsworder) with a post containing the following:

"Discovered last night that a hate-blog (trying to dub themselves MST type) actually targeted the first three chapters of my fanfic. Which weren’t the best.
And was written in like, 2009.

Should I feel honored that, because I stood up for my friend they targeted, they decided to target me, too? » *shrug*

Haters gonna hate~"

... "hate-blog"? "Trying to dub themselves MST type"? And the person sodomizing syntax like this has an English degree?! That job writing for game companies is a lot farther away than you realize, honey. 

Anyway, my WordPress is not a hate blog. It's where I post some mock fics (which is probably not the nicest thing on the planet but one of the people who has every right to be upset about the mockfics has no problem with them. STFU, Stormy) and a shitload of MSTs.

I've MSTed more stories than just hers. If she'd contacted me directly and asked me to take the thing down, there's a decent chance I might have (so long as she left the arrogant and demanding attitude at the door). I haven't even touched it in half a year, so it's not like this is something I'm absolutely determined to complete.

And that leads into my second point here. She's been lurking on my WordPress for a while (confirmed by magical Satanic devilworship), and she's only JUST noticed I MSTed her fanfic? I posted two chapters in July 2012 (the third was posted in December) and her fanfic has its own category on the front page for the sake of organization. It's not fucking hidden.

It's been over half a year and now she cried to a bunch of her friends? Her powers of observation are fucking staggering.

Interestingly, she's throwing out the exact same excuses Ryuu did when he originally found the blog. I guess there's some sort of fundie stock phrasebook I'm not aware of for when people call fundies' creative endeavors less than genius, because "this is out of date" is the exact same line Ryuu tried to feed us.
 
But she's added on to the story (with the same crappy Mary Sue self-insert protagonist, too!) and is uploading it to Archive of Our Own unedited. Clearly she's not as ashamed of it as she claims to be. 

Unless she got that English degree out of a Cracker Jack box, I'm pretty sure they taught her that if you're not happy with something you should edit, proofread, and revise it. As it stands she hasn't taken it down or revised it one bit.

Anyway, she claims this happened because she stood up for Ryuu. That's a blatant fucking lie. She's breaking the ten fucking commandments in order to make herself look good. How very christian of her.

Look, there's been a whopping total of two people I've MSTed who are friends of Ryuu's (Stormsworder and Iwuzheer69). If I was out to MST everyone who's friends with Ryuu, that number would be much higher.

If you like Ryuu, that's cool. If you're an unapologetic megadouche to my friends (Stormy) or make extremely disrespectful comments about my recently deceased loved ones (Iwuz) that's not cool. That's why they were MSTed, which has nothing to do with Ryuu.

Speaking of Ryuu, though, Stormsworder has a pretty screwed up idea of what "standing up for a person" means.

All she did was shout at someone who couldn't help, then when she was told who could she ran off leaving a trail of piss behind her. Coming from someone who thinks they're strong and honorable (time for more Tumblr quotes!):

"what would your patronus be? A dragon, more than likely. Strength, honor… at least that’s my headcanon of some dragons"

that's pretty fucking laughable.

Getting to the point here, my friend initiated a conversation with Stormy over something else entirely. Almost immediately, Stormy brought up the subject of Ryuu and Z:EF. She ranted at my friend for three hours straight, despite the fact that my friend had nothing to do with the blog or what we choose to post.

 The abridged version of what followed is that Stormy was extremely domineering, cruel, and refused to listen to anything my friend said. In the end, my friend was reduced to tears.

I was super-offended but told her to go ahead and give Stormy my contact info. I'm almost always willing to discuss some of the questions she wanted answered with anybody who bothers to ask, and I promised to behave. 

Never heard from her. I MSTed two chapters of her fanfiction out of frustration, one more in December and let it moulder till she started spreading lies.  Also in December I asked my friend for the chat transcript and she kindly provided it to me. Which directly lead to the MST of the third chapter of her story. [edit 11/7: I just realized I made it sound like "the incident in December" was an actual run-in with her. Holy crap I fucked up. The preceding entire paragraph has been reworded.]
 
The unabridged version... 

Stormsworder almost immediately claimed the blog was contributing to the deteriorating state of LZ and Ryuu's relationship. Her second message was literally

"They're ruining their lives"

You know, I really hate to be the voice of reason here, but how the FUCK is an erratically updated, unadvertised blog about art, writing, character development and bigotry going to ruin someone's life? 

Sure, the majority of our examples are taken one person but as it's not being posted on his page, he'd have to go looking for it to have any idea what we're saying. As far as we're aware, he hasn't.

If a site that we're fairly sure he doesn't even read is ruining his life, I think it goes without saying that Ryuu needs to grow thicker skin. 

"Whoever's in charge decided to gather up a bunch more people and attack Ryuu again. Hurt Zelly's feelings pretty bad too by pretending to be on her side then backstabbing her."

This conversation occurred right after Ebony started sending us some guest posts, so that's probably why this came up.

First and foremost, it was never our intention to hurt LZ, and I apologize from the bottom of my heart if we did. But I'm honestly skeptical of this, because I've heard otherwise before and after this conversation happened. 

Also, I know I've said this before but I'm getting as sick of hearing this as I am of people saying we should change our tone:

If you're one of the people who think we solicit for guest posts, you're wrong. If someone wants to make a guest post, they send me drafts via email, and if I like what they have to say, I post them. There has never been any variation on this.  Ebony is a special case, but only because Rinku liked what she had to say enough that we kept her around full time. The process was otherwise no different (other than the fact that she's the only one who's sent us multiple posts).

And if that's "gather[ing] up a bunch more people", what do you call that public Tumblr post, especially since one of her friends left a comment on my WordPress defending Stormy? Miss I-Fail-Abysmally-At-My-Own-Religion should look up Matthew 7:5.

(I also find it interesting that she accused us of rounding up people and Ryuu accused us of "secret rallies", but Stormy and Ryuu both made posts that sounded a whole fucking lot like they wanted people to complain/falsely report on their behalf. Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness apparently doesn't ring a bell.)

Anyway, after that Stormy told my friend:

"Frig. Don't tell anyone those specifics. Just thought you could get them to quit ruining my friends' lives."

So there's probably a decent chance you're wondering "hey Cala, why are you posting this if Stormy wanted it kept confidential? Doesn't that violate your anonymous-unless-asked policy?"

In a word? No.

In more than a word? If you're on this blog I'm going to assume that you guys are already familiar with Ryuu and LZ. While I would prefer to leave them out of this entirely, some of the especially offensive accusations are directly tied to them. I will be leaving as much out as I possibly can, though.

 In a similar vein, my friend's identity will remain as anonymous as humanly possible. And before anyone asks, she gave me permission to quote the transcript and make this post.

As far as Stormy goes, I said fuck that. As it happened, Rinku agreed.

She's had a whole damn year to resolve this privately, but instead she whines on Tumblr about something she could've solved months ago.

Oh, and at one point in February Stormy tried to be sneaky and sent anonymous asks to the (now-defunct) Stupid Shit Ryuu Says Tumblr:

Stormy, your grammar is its own breed of awful. Spoilers! That's how I figured out it was you.

 Despite the fact that Stormy didn't want any of this getting out, she proceeded to give my friend even more personal information:

"They're tearing apart a relationship."

Who wants to explain to me how the fuck we're doing that? I legitimately don't understand. 

Again, this is a blog designed to critique characters, art, fanfiction, and call one jackass out on being every kind of -ist or -phobe possible. We've never posted it on Ryuu or LZ's pages or sent it to them.

See that archives-by-year in the sidebar over there on the right? And the post count in 2011? Our updates are so sporadic the blog pretty much up and died for about a year.

If we were any more irregular we'd be the star of every laxative commercial ever made. 

But Stormy doesn't want their relationship to end, and is friends with both parties, which means that if they have fights (because all couples do) she's going to... blame a few people who have nothing to do with it instead of being a shoulder to cry on and not taking sides. 

Seems completely fucking legit. So to summarize:

Are we a catalyst for any relationship problems? That's possible, I guess, if one or both of them read the blog.

Is there even the teeniest tiniest chance we were the sole cause of any relationship problems? Absolutely not. I can still say with a fair bit of confidence that if their relationship has been going down the crapper, we're not the reason.

Now that that's cleared up, I'd like to direct you to a particular gem from the chat transcript. 

My friend was going through a rough patch at that point, and between that and Stormy being a domineering jerk for nearly an hour, Friend was extremely upset. She told Stormy that by her standards Friend was going to hell anyway (my friend's not christian), so why would Stormy care about her suffering? Stormy's reply:

"Because I care about people and don't like to see them suffering"

Which, about twenty minutes later, Stormy proved was a blatant fucking lie. When Friend said she'd spent a good chunk of the conversation crying:

"I seem to have a bad habit with getting upset enough to make people cry it seems. And soo you don't mind that they've hurt Zelly as well when she doesn't deserve it?"

This is as close to an apology as my friend ever got.

"I don't like seeing people suffering, but I have a habit of making people cry. NOW LET'S KEEP BEATING THE SAME DEAD HORSE I'VE BEEN WAILING ON FOR THE PAST HOUR." 

She clearly doesn't care about anything my friend could possibly have to say, or about people who she's not friends with.

How can you fucking say "you don't care they've hurt my friends even though they haven't done anything to deserve it?" while knowing you've actively berated someone who has nothing to do with our posts to tears? How can you not see that you're doing exactly what you're claiming we are?

 How can you claim to be a christian and say you can't stand suffering, but be that cruel to someone? 

For someone who claims to be a devout christian Stormy sure has no problems dropping trou and taking a gigantic dump all over the Golden Rule. 

"Did they ever seem the type to you to want Ryuu and Zelly to split up?"

Why the fuck would anyone think that would be our goal when we keep our shit to ourselves. No, no, no, no. We don't enjoy peoples' suffering, we aren't out to make Ryuu's life a living hell. The implications here are straight-up offensive.

"If he [Rinku] wants to ruin a happy couple's relationship? How can anybody stand by that an dsupport it?"

Jesus shit-titty christ, how many different ways do I have to say this? (God, I feel like a broken record but my poor friend had to tell her the same thing over and over for three hours straight. I have the sudden urge to hug her for putting up with that.) That's STILL an asinine, offensive, and groundless statement. Put very simply:

Nobody on the blog endorses breaking them up. 

I'm going to leave it there, because if you want to jump to this massively fucked up conclusion, then I'm going to have to go over why you're full of shit. Again. I feel like I've done that enough, don't you?

Anyway, if it were me? I'd be ashamed to have someone like this as a friend. For all she claims she wants to help her friends, she's the one exacerbating the situation. She's also causing a fair fucking bit of bad blood, which is usually not what one aims for when one is trying to defuse a situation.

 If she's deliberately stirring the pot while claiming she wants to help resolve the situation then she's a horrible friend, full stop.  LZ and (yes) Ryuu deserve better than that.

And that's totally apart from the fact that she shared their personal information without asking. If I were Ryuu or LZ and found out about that, I'd be extremely pissed, especially as she clearly knew she wasn't supposed to be telling a known friend of someone Ryuu probably can't stand.

That's a huge betrayal and if she didn't want it to come to light, she probably shouldn't have harassed my friend for three fucking hours. If she didn't want this made public, she should've put on her big girl panties and contacted me just once in the past year. She shouldn't have sicced her friends on my wordpress. She should've told me I was wrong herself. She did none of that. Oops.

By the way? I'm assuming Stormy has been left out of the loop but LZ, for all of her insecurities and self-confidence issues, has been kind and friendly to all of us who've spoken to her. She's shown more courage and strength in dealing with people who initially made her nervous than Stormy could ever dream of doing.  I think LZ's a lot stronger than she gives herself credit for.

But whether or not Stormy's lying again, I hope LZ overcomes her self-esteem issues, and I hope she keeps experimenting and improving as a colorist. I also hope she picks up drawing again.

I think she's capable of great things, and I'm looking forward to seeing where she goes in life.

By the way, if you're wondering about the Tumblr shit, I'll cover all that next time. This got way too long for me to go over that here.

Which is why I'm going to end this here for now. Later.