anamneseverge

[anamneseverge]

apologize to the minors specifically who were involved in the group. after the first major scandal the group should have been made 18+ if not closed altogether but this being the final straw makes it ring out so much worse that this environment at the same time alienated minors along with putting them in danger. you tried so hard and made your group feel like prison to protect people only to make them feel guilty and isolated. apologize properly.

You’re right, and we wanted to make a more direct apology to the minors within our group. This will be addressed below.

The reason that Anamnese Verge was 15+ and stricter than other MFRPs to begin with, was because there was no other space within the Discord MFRP community that a minor was able to join. All of the major MFRP groups are 18+, a fact that was true then and a fact that is true now.

We ourselves were passionate and wished to create a safe space for members who are minors to roleplay, to the point where this was one of the founding principles of the group. Much of the moderation team spent some time as a minor in the MFRP community, and we’re firsthand aware of how unsafe it can be. Our policies were made first and foremost to mitigate this danger, and we tried to make these as thorough as possible to keep people safe. However, we understand that this level of strictness was uncomfortable in many cases, and made people feel like they were in danger of receiving disciplinary action due to the rigidness of our policies. We want to apologize for this discomfort and understand that even if this effect was not our intention, the fact remains all the same that it was a feeling present in our group that we did not address.

Our intentions and founding principles, however, do not matter. What matters is that despite our stricter rules and our intentions, ultimately we failed to keep our group safe for the minors within. We’re sorry for that, and we cannot convey how much we regret it.

When the conduct of the previous Mod Ebonstead came to light (which is what we assume you mean by ‘first major scandal’), we removed as many of their contributions to the group as possible, did not expect forgiveness, and promised to do better in the future. At the time, we felt confident that we could do better, and because of this we did not raise the group’s minimum age to being 18+. We also did not raise the age limit due to the fact that we felt it would have severely punished and alienated minors for being in a space that was meant to be safe and welcoming to them over a single moderator’s transgressions.

We understand that this explanation seems antithetical to our current plans on closing the group, as there have been questions regarding why we didn’t just remove these two moderators and continue hosting Anamnese Verge. We went into detail regarding these justifiable concerns in the previous post, but want to reiterate our reasoning briefly since it’s also relevant here.

We mentioned that we would not have the resources to train new moderators, nor the resources available to continue managing group upkeep and real-life obligations, while having a downsized team. Furthermore, we remain of the mind that only removing the two moderators from their positions would not have fixed the larger root issue, which was that our collective team was no longer comfortable acting as moderators for our community. This is especially the case in this context, as Anamnese was a group open to members as young as 15. If we’re not sure of our ability to moderate our community, we feel it’s our responsibility to admit this and remove ourselves from these positions.

We also sincerely apologize for alienating minors within our group. There were some phenomena that we caught and tried to discourage, such as members hosting live threads in NSFW channels (when they didn’t need to) despite muns who were minors having reacted to the RP ad and is why our boss threads took place in SFW chats with special rules regarding tagging triggers. However, it’s clear that what we did was nowhere near enough, and we apologize for this failure as well.

Again, if anyone in the community would like a direct or personal apology, they may reach out to us through DMs.

[anamneseverge]

This is the anon who brought up the question about the other concerns on twitter. I didn't mean that you guys should target specific tweets, but that a blanket statement would be better than none. A lot of these tweets are are saying the same things over and over again, that can be addressed. You also specifically mention "members", how about the massive amount of people coming out that they were banned for personal mod bias, manipulation by mods or other members, etc? Are their words (cont)

not valuable simply because they were previously banned? Many of these bans were justified I'm sure, but others seem like there may be more to the story than you guys are comfortable with talking about because it paints you in a painfully biased light. I have seen several times something about racism and allowing someone to get bullied come up, how about addressing that? This is starting to veer into negligence at best.

Hello again. Thank you for the further clarification. After discussion and pooling together the team’s thoughts regarding what we have personally observed during our time as moderators, we agree that there are several significant issues that we did not adequately address in our closing announcement or in your previous ask. As such, we will try to provide a satisfactory blanket statement and apology below, which we hope will address some of the concerns and grievances that have been publicly shared on social media platforms since our closing announcement.

We do want to emphasize before going forward that this address may be purposefully broad in certain areas. To reaffirm statements we have previously made, we are not willing to single out individuals or disclose specific details of past misconduct cases due to concern that those involved might be harassed or pursued. We desire to maintain the privacy of the many individuals who came to us over the course of the group’s run with personal anecdotes and experiences, some of which may have necessitated disciplinary action for another member. This is because many cases involved trauma that members had experienced, as well as personal details regarding their lives which we do not feel our team has the right to share in any context. This said, we still desire to provide an apology and closure to anyone we possibly can.

To begin: as far as we are aware, we did the best that we could to look at any case brought forward to us as impartially as possible. At no point that we know of did any member of our team celebrate a member’s misconduct either publicly or privately, and the process of delivering warnings, strikes, and bans was something we took absolutely no pleasure in. Each misconduct case without exception caused significant stress for all members of the team, and many dealt with moderators’ personal triggers.

This bridges into the first apology we want to make. We tried to investigate concerns brought to us as thoroughly as possible before acting on them. Some investigations took as long as several weeks, due to us being reluctant to take action without being certain that misconduct had occurred. Even so, we’re aware that this still wasn't by any means a perfect process. We recognize that at times, these lengthy investigations allowed those eventually proven to be breaking group policies to grow in presence and the amount of individuals they affected. For this we cannot apologize enough to anyone who was exposed to harm in Anamnese Verge servers as a result. It is something we deeply regret.

Regarding the concerns of moderator bias and member manipulation you’ve mentioned, we’re going to split each into its own separate paragraph so we can address both points as thoroughly as possible without either becoming muddled.

We’re going to touch upon the concerns regarding moderator bias first so that we may provide as much transparency and clarity as we can about our past decisions. If a member was banned for a moderator’s safety, it was due to said moderator being certain that they’d be unable to perform their tasks while sharing a server with the individual, as doing so caused them significant discomfort or to feel unsafe. The tasks we are referring to include various kinds of processing, answering member questions, and most importantly interacting with the server in itself, all of which are necessary to maintain any group long-term. We trusted the members of our team to be honest about their intentions and the reasons they felt unsafe with a given potential member when making these decisions. These reasons were cited within ban notices, but we are aware that many of these reasons were years old and these individuals have since changed. For that we apologize, and we agree that we should have just cited moderator discomfort for the ban.

There were multiple groups open at the time, and if someone was turned away at the door to ensure moderator (or member) safety in Anamnese, we were confident that they would find another space to write that better suited their needs. These were choices made, ultimately, for the sake of our fellow team members. We apologize that these specific instances felt isolating, however. With that in mind, we also want to emphasize that our intention had never been to make the banned party come off as malicious; due to our own limitations, we truly felt that our group was unfortunately not a place where space could be shared between the two parties.

Moving on to the concerns about allowing other members to manipulate the investigation process: there were times where we did have an inkling we were being approached by members who did not necessarily have the best intentions in reporting potential misconduct. In these cases (as we mentioned in an earlier paragraph), we attempted to take as much care as we could while diligently investigating the information brought to us. We will be fully candid: there have also been times where, when provided with such information, we came to the conclusion that what we were provided was not sufficient to act on or did not yet warrant our intervention. On a few occasions, this overlapped with instances where we felt that the report was coming from someone who was not acting in good faith. Other times, though we may have been cautious about the individual’s intentions in bringing the report to our attention, we found undeniable evidence that misconduct had taken place, and therefore we were obligated to intervene and take disciplinary action. We say all of this to emphasize that we still did not ever take pleasure in potential misconduct, and only acted when we felt we had sufficient evidence to act on our policies.

This said, we know that being involved in any misconduct case is stressful, as is interacting with moderators regarding potential infractions. This includes both being contacted by moderators about a misconduct case, as well as approaching moderators to share your own concerns regarding another member. We’ve been made aware by many past members on Twitter just how intimidating and stressful messages from the EMISSARY account could be, specifically. Our reasoning as to why we went about communicating in this way was because we felt that it was the most reliable method to receive information as a team and respond promptly, as the account’s information was available to all current Anamnese moderators. It would also avoid singling out any one mod, as for the most part we made and agreed to decisions collectively. That said, it's abundantly clear that we could have taken more steps to make conversations with moderators less taxing regardless of context, as many members have cited dreading ANY notifications from the EMISSARY in DMs due to fear of disciplinary action. We apologize, sincerely, for this oversight on our parts and for the undue intimidation members felt simply being within the server as a result. We also apologize for how this surely compounded the inherent stress of warnings and strikes, and how it exacerbated any members’ discomfort in Anamnese spaces overall.

Building from that, we want to also say that we do not necessarily feel that every member who was ever banned could not unlearn the behavior that led to us issuing them a notice. Bans were issued in our attempts to curate the server to make a safer space for our memberbase and the members affected by the behavior of banned parties. Even so, we see the criticisms we have received since our closing and understand that how we have carried out several of our cases has harmed many members of the community, and we sincerely apologize for that.

We have also received criticism for sharing our ban list with other groups. For the sake of transparency, we have only shared it with two groups, which were Echsat Lost in early February (which never opened) and Lacuna Sol in early May (which is now closed). Both of these groups were run by relative newcomers to the community who had only been around for less than a year, and we emphasized to both that they should take our ban list with a grain of salt and make their own decisions in enforcing or choosing not to enforce each ban. This is because the reasons for us banning someone within our own community may not be a reason to ban within theirs. When we made this copy of our banlist, we removed anyone banned due to Anamnese moderator discomfort from the list when giving it to them.

(Warning for mentions of pedophilia in the next paragraph.)

For the sake of further transparency on this subject, we have also messaged Ataraxia five times regarding cases, two of these times involved cases with predators (whether they be active or formerly part of Ataraxia's group), one of these times involved a catfish, another to inform them of a member previously interacting with pedophilic content in the case of it potentially becoming a pattern (which we also informed Melodiae of), and the last we had been approached by one of their own members to inform the moderation team about a dangerous member of the community. Whenever we approached Ataraxia regarding cases, we emphasized that they should do what they thought was best for their community, and that it was their own decision.

(Warning for mentions of pedophilia in the above paragraph.)

This was done with the best interests of the MFRP community in mind, as it’s near impossible for moderation teams to be aware of dangerous conduct that occurs in other groups if they are not informed of them, since misconduct is handled quietly in every community. However, we understand that this has also made many people feel ostracized and isolated within the RP community, and we’re terribly sorry for that. As mentioned before, we do not feel like members who were banned from our group could not unlearn the behavior that led to us issuing them a notice, and we’re sorry that this led to an atmosphere where those in the RP community were terrified of making mistakes.

To continue to the next concern we would like to address, in cases where we were made aware of harassment occurring, our procedure involved immediately taking action to investigate, including checking in with the victims we knew about. We also tried to deal with instances of public harassment on platforms like Twitter as discreetly as possible, given the fact that they inherently involve someone being spotlighted for one reason or another. That said, we’re very aware that we were not perfect in this regard. We know that there were times when bans inadvertently led to the banned parties being pursued, especially in an instance where a case was published in the form of a public warning. This is something we attempted to dissuade, but know that even directly asking members not to harass these parties did not necessarily prevent it from happening regardless. For that, we are deeply sorry.

On a related note, we mentioned earlier instances where prolonged investigations allowed members to come to harm. There were instances when a case being opened for a prolonged period of time left enough room for soon-to-be-banned parties to direct harassment towards other members. Specifically, where banned parties pursuing those they inferred may have reported them, criticizing them on the Twitter timeline even if they did not use names to do so. This would be obviously and understandably distressing to experience, both for the person that it was directed at as well as any others who witnessed the hostility. Regardless of the fact that these parties were eventually banned and a public apology was issued by our team to the memberbase, we should have offered private apologies to those affected. We are sorry, and if anyone would want an even more direct apology from us, they’re absolutely welcome to approach us, whether that be through our official channels or a moderator’s personal DMs.

From there, we want to apologize for all similar failures, which includes any instances of harassment experienced by past members that were not covered in the above two paragraphs. Though we were unable to act on cases we were not aware of, we remain horrified that they have happened in the first place. Similarly, we remain horrified that members did not feel safe or comfortable enough approaching us for help. We’re sorry that Anamnese wasn't the safe environment we tried to make it, regardless of our intentions as we moderated it. We’re especially sorry for any members who are BIPOC who were made to feel unsafe or unwelcome as a result of these failures on our parts. Protecting our memberbase was something we cared deeply about, and that we could not live up to the standard we set only proves to us that much more that the group needed to be closed.

We wanted to touch on another concern, which regards why the group was closed to begin with due to the conduct of two moderators, when we have remained open in another incident where a moderator’s transgressions necessitated their immediate removal from the team. We have seen several individuals express confusion and concern over this, and we’re understanding of that. We have to be honest in saying that while the original misconduct cited in our closing announcement was unacceptable and banworthy, removing these two moderators would not have solved the larger problem of the whole that was the mod team not noticing this discrepancy for over a year. We will also be honest in saying that through removal of these two moderators, we would not have been able to continue running the group, especially as several moderators were also hurt by this oversight and doubted that they would be able to stay with the team long term due to broken trust.

Many members of our former team were, at the time, entering the busier part of their work life or school in preparation for the end of the semester/the approach of the holiday season. Limiting a part of our processes temporarily was not an option as we did not think that we had the resources available to even continue monitoring the server, which is at baseline the most important duty of hosting a community. Similarly, we would not have the resources to simply hire additional team members, as from our experience training these new moderators was a long-term and exhaustive effort that we again did not feel we had the resources for.

Circling back to the ask once more, we apologize that our use of the term members was alienating. We’ll clarify that we are open to providing explanations and clarification for anyone who desires it, whether or not you were a member of Anamnese Verge at any point. We did not mean to make it seem as though this wasn’t the case, and we consider the criticisms we’ve received valuable.

[anamneseverge]

✵ closing update.

Hello everyone. We felt that it was necessary to give everyone an update in regards to the inbox, as we'll be closing it on November 16th at 12 AM EST (midnight). 

We understand that this goes against what we've said in our closing announcement and we apologize for the change in plans. Alongside some of the concerns brought to us in the inbox, we have also been receiving threats, and at this time several of us no longer feel safe keeping this avenue of communication open. After a discussion between some of us, the former team came to the conclusion that the best course of action to take would be to close the inbox.

Should you still wish to reach out to us and are worried about exposing yourself, the most we feel that we can recommend at this time is that you can make a burner account and contact us in that fashion. We will be continuing to reply to DMs as we receive them through Tumblr, Twitter, or Discord. If you feel uncomfortable with this method, then we completely understand. More than anything, we would rather that people do whatever they can to ensure their own safety and security. We are incredibly sorry that we cannot offer anything more than this.

With that said, the Anamnese Verge server will still remain up for members to retrieve any contacts or content that they may still want to keep until the 18th as we explained in our original announcement. We additionally still have some asks left pending in the inbox that we will be getting to after this announcement and will try to have answers for them as soon as possible.

We will update the closing announcement appropriately with an addendum to reflect this fact. We again apologize for this sudden announcement and emphasize that if there is anything that you would still like to ask us about through the inbox, then you will have until November 16th at 12 AM EST (midnight) to do so. Thank you for your time.

#anamnese announcements

[anamneseverge]

An anon sent us a message that deals with discussion of teacher/student relationships. The original question and our answer will be below the read more, and we ask that readers please take note of these content warnings.

hello, apologies in advance for adding onto the amount of asks you all have received, but as someone who was roleplaying three houses during my time in the verge, i'm curious as to why the game itself wasn't just banned from the start if it made moderators uncomfortable? learning that makes me feel rather conflicted, as it feels as though i was indirectly contributing to the discomfort of a mod. to my memory, i also remember there being some teacher/student ships in the beginning of anam, so i'm rather curious as to why it was allowed back then?

Hello Anon.

Thank you first and foremost for reaching out. We want to emphasize that there's no need to feel guilty; when first opening the group, we didn't feel that Fire Emblem: Three Houses was a series that needed to be banned at the time. There were numerous different series that the mod team individually disliked or felt uncomfortable around, but in many of these cases, we were confident that we would be able to navigate the group while also interacting with the series within our own comfort levels. Series that were outright banned were in the cases that the level of discomfort a piece of media caused made a moderator feel unfit to do their job/unsafe to navigate the group, or if of course a series warranted a ban due to containing what we felt was an egregious amount of disallowed content.

As for your second question, after reviewing our files it appears that this trigger was added on September 2nd, 2020. This would explain why the content was not so heavily monitored at the beginning of the group (though we still find it unacceptable now and regret it being roleplayed within our group at all). However, our shortcomings in not acknowledging that some of the ships in the group, including Rheacedes, fell under this category after this addition was completely unacceptable. We again cannot emphasize enough how deeply sorry we are that we allowed this oversight to occur, as it is representative of a larger issue when it has come to our negligence as moderators.

[anamneseverge]

You are focusing a lot on the ship and not of the other concerns that have been brought up since the closing, and it's really starting to... Not reflect well on you guys. A lot of you have clearly been active on twitter, you're aware of what people are saying. Are you ignoring that? You want people to come forward individually and expose themselves for an apology? Will anyone else hurt by the moderators actions over all this time just be expected to get over it?

Hello. We are very aware of the criticism we're receiving. Though some members of the team have been less visibly active on Twitter than others, we are all reading and internalizing everything we are seeing to the very best of our abilities. We definitely are not ignoring it and appreciate the candidness and honesty of members. These criticisms will help us improve as individuals in the future.

We also see and understand that many of our members are upset about having lost the community that Anamnese Verge provided, due to the fact that the closure of the server was so sudden. While we have explained our reasoning for locking the server when we posted our announcement, it would be wrong to not acknowledge that it hurt many of you deeply. We're sorry for that hurt, and we're sorry that our actions have made many of you feel that your investment in the group was in vain. This is something that we should have handled better, and we understand that we betrayed our community by doing this.

To explain the varying amount of activity on former mods' personal accounts: this is a result of a mix of things. All of our team has real-world obligations, like full time jobs and responsibilities to our families, as well as university and other academic responsibilities. We do not mean to list these things as excuses, but we have been dedicating the majority of time outside of any other obligations we have to discussing these criticisms together, and well as answering concerns and grievances through our inbox, which has included investigating past moderator conduct as more has come to light. This has been a process that has consumed much of our individual energy.

Our team does not want to speak over community members who are discussing the group either. We feel that individually commenting directly on any tweets where members have shared personal thoughts and feelings, or similarly contacting any member privately without prompting to apologize as a team, would be inappropriate and cause further distress and discomfort to the community. For similar reasons, many of us aren't comfortable tweeting "regularly" at the moment. Team members with careers attached to their social media presence must be active, as it dictates their income. We apologize that we've given the impression of ignoring anything, because that is the last thing we want to do.

Onto your other point, of course no one is obligated to approach us for a personal apology, but we feel that it is important to extend the invitation to those who feel comfortable doing so, as our team is not cognizant of every instance where we have caused members hurt or discomfort. We would like for all to have the opportunity to have their concerns and feelings addressed; however, we feel that it is right to leave further interactions up to any individual member's discretion, so that we may avoid crossing any boundaries and causing further harm. Additionally, this is why we believe it would also be inappropriate to post a document of apologies or to publicly discuss any specific instance. We are reluctant to do anything that would single out any individuals with identifying information, which could leave them open to being harassed or pursued.

[anamneseverge]

can we know what mod(s) is answering these concerns? it does matter considering the context.

Hello! These answers have been written up by Holiday (Mod Umberfell), Faust (Mod Echuil), Cyrus (Mod Glisshallow) or Kaye (Mod Chalcedony). There's typically been a bit of discussion within the mod server itself, and then it's been approved by the rest of the available team, sans Diesel (Mod Fylgia) and Cas (Mod Flick).

Diesel and Cas have been excluded from these discussions and approvals, for obvious reasons. However, we did ask Diesel if anyone approached them regarding the teacher/student ship when that question came up, and their response was that they didn't remember it. Other than that, they have had no input.

[anamneseverge]

An anon sent us a message that heavily deals with discussion of grooming and teacher/student relationships. The original question and our answer will be below the read more, and we ask that readers please take note of these content warnings.

Hey, mods. I understand that there was no malicious intent behind this, but I really do think that calling the ship in question "grooming" when both of the characters involved were adults and did not meet until one of them was nearly in their 30s is incredibly irresponsible and misleading, especially considering a few of us are victims of grooming. While the power imbalance is definitely something that's suspicious, calling it grooming is factually incorrect and I really think you should be more careful about throwing such a serious term around.

Hello, Anon.

Before we say more, we first want to emphasize that we are not attempting to diminish anyone's experiences by describing the ship between Rhea and Mercedes from Fire Emblem: Three Houses as grooming. We cannot apologize enough if we have, and we'll explain more of our reasoning for tagging our announcement the way we have below.

We touched upon this in our initial notice of closing, but Mercedes is a religious student, and Rhea is the Archbishop of Mercedes' religion and school. Rhea is someone who would presumably know all of the school's students. There is an inherent power imbalance in any romantic relationship between these two as a result of the above.

As we discussed and investigated outside of our spheres and into the greater FE3H fandom, it became incredibly clear that the majority of individuals interested in content surrounding the ship in question are specifically interested in content emphasizing this power dynamic whenever depicting it. This is why we tagged it for grooming on our announcement.

Even if that was not the way the ship was intentionally portrayed within the group, this remains the case. That is why we are responding to it how we have and are tagging it as such.

[anamneseverge]

So you guys are not gonna post any of the remaining lore?

Hello Anon,

We won't be officially releasing any further lore for Anamnese Verge, no. Officially sharing any content after our closing announcement feels incredibly inappropriate when considering the circumstances of why we're closing. We'll also be honest in saying that a number of the mods find it difficult to look at the creative work that they've made for the group and would not be able to collect it for distribution.

However, after some discussion we've come to the consensus that moderators are free to discuss lore that they assisted with or got permission to speak about. While this doesn't put all of Anamnese Verge's lore on the table, as parts otherwise incredibly personal to members of the team may be redacted, we hope that this compromise can allow you some closure.

We are incredibly sorry that we don't feel comfortable sharing all of our lore, but it's also worth noting that due to the fact that we had nearly a year and a half's worth of events outlined, compiling it all and making the notes into something understandable would take weeks of effort.

[anamneseverge]

please post a reminder to server boosters just in case they would like to cancel before getting charged again!

You're right, as it currently stands there are 8 members within the server with the nitro booster role (ten total, but two of which are moderators). If you had been previously boosting the Anamnese Verge server, please remember to revoke your nitro boost as we ourselves aren't able to do it for you.

[anamneseverge]

I know for sure that issues with the teacher/student thing were brought to the attention of at least the mod playing Rhea, if not others (I wasn’t the one who brought them forward I just know if this thru others) and I don’t like the lie that this was unknown. Additionally, this isn’t the only trigger from the trigger list that was just disregarded because it was a mod doing it, you know. Where was this energy for all the other instances of this?

If the issue was brought up to Rhea's mun (Diesel) prior to when we received an anonymous ask on Sunday, they do not remember it. However, more concerningly, if it was, they did not bring it to the rest of the moderator server to discuss. (Typically when we received questions or concerns, we would discuss it within the moderator server to come to a consensus before sending out replies. This also means that we can backsearch concerns that we've been approached with in the past, and we do not have a log of this situation.) That itself is entirely unacceptable moderator conduct, and we're terribly sorry.

We are also unaware of what specific situation the latter half of this ask is referring to, but disregarding our trigger policy under any circumstance is also unacceptable behavior. If members of our team were unable to abide by our own policy, we should have never allowed them to be in a position of authority or entrusted them with the community's safety. We apologize to all those who have been harmed by a moderator's conduct, which includes the team's collective negligence in failing to properly enforce our policies.

Since we've posted our closing announcement, more cases have been brought to our attention that demonstrate a distressing pattern where we also failed to ensure our members felt comfortable approaching us with concerns. Once again, that is entirely unacceptable on our parts, and these members have every right to express how stressed, upset, and uncomfortable they were made to feel inside our group. Ultimately, these types of oversights and mistakes are why we are certain it was necessary to close the group.

We want you all to know that we are truly sorry for everything that has happened. If you would like an individual apology, please know that you can reach out to our DMs.

[anamneseverge]

can yall post the rank five gifts that were planned/written because a lot of people spent a lot of time and effort into this group and especially with shutting out all the chats theres just absolutely no closure here it feels really disrespectful to the people that stuck around for your group

Hi Anon.

Your frustration is understandable, and we apologize for that. This said, we will not be releasing any more content for Anamnese Verge, like rank 5 gifts.

Our reasoning is that we feel doing so after our announcement would be disrespectful to the members who were hurt by moderator conduct. We are closing the group to hold ourselves accountable for negligence, and we're of the mind that putting out anything we've developed creatively from this point forward would be disingenuous to that idea. We do not want to have a platform as an MFRP any longer for the sake of those harmed.

We also genuinely have very little to show at the moment, as there are few rank 5 gifts that are fully finished in our drafts. As we mentioned, we will not be preparing any new creative content for Anamnese Verge going forward, so we would have nothing to give many characters.

[anamneseverge]

Hi, I'm also coming with a concern. I understand the explanations put forth and that the group is closing, but can we have the explanation for the main server being locked immediately? It feels disrespectful to all the effort we all put into our characters to not have the chance to finish their arcs here or share goodbyes. Even without as thorough moderation as the server had previously, I think many of us would appreciate having the chance to finish what we can.

Hello Anon.

This is a valid concern as well, and we apologize sincerely. We did spend time debating whether or not we would keep the server opened for OOC discussion ourselves, as we knew that many members would obviously want to stay in contact after the group's closing. However, we ultimately decided for a few reasons that setting the server's channels to "view only" was for the best.

First is that our reasons for closing are highly triggering, to a large amount of our memberbase and the former members of our team. Discussion would have inevitably touched upon these topics. We feared that keeping the server open could have created a platform for further misconduct, and for members to come to further harm. We trusted that any discussion related to the group would be taken to other spaces (Twitter, personal servers, etc.)

Additionally, we as a team no longer wish to be in any position of power among our members, as we do not feel our judgement is fit. Though we are no longer moderators and Anamnese Verge is officially closed, the archived server is still owned by the EMISSARY account. Keeping the server's channels open to discussion until the 18th would inevitably require moderation in the meantime, something we do not feel we are fit to provide.

We promise that we will not be taking down any of the group's worldbuilding documents. You are welcome to use the material within them to conclude character arcs in other spaces, if you desire to do so. Applications with OOC contacts will also remain available on the masterlist blog until the 18th, so that members who are not already in contact with one another can reach out to each other.

[anamneseverge]

hi! i just wanted to bring forward a concern i, along with many others, have with your closing statement. please understand that i do not intend to flame you guys, but i am concerned that either the reasoning for accepting the ship between mercedes and rhea was a blatant act of negligence or certain mods were willingly complicit in it. multiple mods do have a past of being publicly aware of fe3h, including rping from it. as such, there is practically no excuse for having allowed it. 1/2

2/2 i simply feel that the statement is not entirely truthful and wanted to understand just why these excuses were made for the situation at hand and why it had not been brought up sooner. thank you, and have a good day.

Hi, Anon.

We are in complete agreement with your allegation—it was negligence that allowed this ship in the Verge in the first place, and it was negligence that led to us failing to reexamine it until now. Our statement is broad not because it is untruthful, but because there were a few different explanations for the type of negligence each moderator contributed to the situation and we did not want those explanations to come across as excuses. To elaborate some, we do have multiple moderators familiar with FE3H; some had incomplete knowledge of the game, not playing routes focusing on Rhea and Mercedes, and some simply failed to consider the implications of their relationship until confronted. On the other hand, at least four moderators have zero FE3H knowledge and never interacted with the game at all. Regardless of our individual failures, this never should have happened, and that is why our response to this issue being brought up directly to us was to determine that the group should not remain open with this negligence on our shoulders.

If there is anything else we can answer or clarify, please feel free to continue with follow-up questions or comments.

[anamneseverge]

✵ anamnese verge’s closing address.

Hello, Anamnese Verge. 

This will be an update regarding the status of Anamnese Verge and our future plans for the group. It is after an extended period of debate that we have come to the decision that the group will be closing officially on November 18th of 2021.

We understand that this will be surprising to hear for a number of you. This decision is not being made lightly; we'll be going into further detail as to why we feel that this is the best course of action to take below the cut.

( Warning for discussion of grooming and teacher/student relationships beyond this point. )

Recently, we were approached anonymously about a concern regarding a previous relationship that was allowed to take place in the Verge, that being Rhea and Mercedes von Martritz from the series Fire Emblem: Three Houses, played by Diesel (Mod Fylgja) and Cas (Mod Flick). For those unfamiliar with the series, Mercedes von Martritz was a student enrolled at the Garreg Mach Monastery Officers Academy and Rhea was in charge of the academy as the Archbishop of Seiros. Because of these circumstances, there is an inherent power imbalance that would be inappropriate and is unacceptable regardless of circumstance.

Initially, we were unaware that the ship itself was a cause for concern, since from Diesel and Cas’s portrayal, Mercedes was a character who seemed equivalent to Rhea within the context of existing in the group. Mercedes was from the Crimson Flower route, had not met Rhea before her late twenties, and had not met Rhea outside of a war against the Church of Seiros prior to her time within the group. As such, Diesel and Cas were under the mistaken impression that Mercedes and Rhea were on equal footing as Envoys, and their portrayal led others to believe this as well.

For further context, many of our moderators are unfamiliar with Fire Emblem, whether it be because they have not made much headway into the game or that they have not played it entirely, to the point where several members of the team were unaware that Mercedes was a student at all, mistaking her for a member of the faculty due to her age. We were largely unaware of the implications between the two characters’ relationship as the context that we received was mainly through the group itself. As teacher/student is also a trigger for multiple members of our moderation team, we were sickened when this information fully came to our attention.

We want to emphasize that even with this information in mind, our negligence in failing to notice this was completely unacceptable and outright shameful. We've stated in the past that we believe that moderators should be held to a higher standard than our members, as it is our task to keep the group safe and enforce the rules as necessary. This collective inattention on our part to this oversight was not only irresponsible, but actively harmful to multiple members of our community. We cannot properly convey our regret for allowing this to be present for such an extended duration of time in the group, and for betraying your trust when we should have been doing everything in our power to keep our community safe.

After much consideration and discussion amongst ourselves, we feel that the only acceptable thing we can do that can even begin to convey our apologies and make amends is to close Anamnese Verge. We feel that simply dismissing the two moderators who directly wrote the ship would not be an adequate action to start repairing the trust between us and our member base, especially since the whole of the moderator team was complicit in this. If we have caused our members to feel that they cannot trust us when it comes to serious concerns such as this one, we feel as though we should not be moderating a group that involves working with anywhere from dozens to over a hundred people.

As of posting this, the ability to send messages has been disabled within the main server itself, and it will be archived via kicking all accounts except for the Emissary’s in one week’s time, on 11/18/2021. This is also when we will be deleting the group’s applications from our blog.

Our official avenues of communication via Discord, Twitter, and Tumblr will remain open should you have questions for us or want further clarification on anything. We will be transparent in saying that after the 18th, we will not be looking at these accounts on a regular basis, meaning that responses to reach-outs made after this date will be much slower.

(EDIT: As stated in our announcement made on November 15th, the Anamnese Verge Tumblr inbox will be closed to further contact on November 16th, 12 AM EST (midnight). We will be trying to respond to pending asks as soon as possible and encourage you to reach out via DMs to our Tumblr, Twitter, or Discord should you have any further questions or concerns.)

We know that this is sudden, but we hope that this will give anyone who wishes to enough time to archive anything they may want to keep from within the main server, and to obtain contacts for anyone they may still wish to keep in touch with.

We wish you all the best in the future, and we hope you can all understand why we’ve come to this decision.

✵ anamnese mod team

#anamnese announcements

[anamneseverge]

✵ — inbox clear!

hey everyone guess we’re startin off today with a cool lil inbox update for you all! as always if you dont see something here that you thought you sent in let it be known it was simply absorbed by tumblr and that’s how it be so feel free to resend it! short and sweet run this time around

additionally, we've received an anonymous message through the ask function on our blog containing a concern. typically, we don't answer asks like the one we received publicly, as we feel that it doesn't lend itself to an open dialogue where we can properly address concerns of this nature. however, please know that we'd be more than happy to discuss it with you privately through DMs, whether that be through our tumblr dms, twitter dms, or the emissary's dms. however, please don't feel as though you're obligated to reach out to us!

🜂—MOD PARTY

#anam inbox

[anamneseverge]

✵ — THE VERGE OPENS ITSELF TO YOU, ENVOYS.

Urianger Augurelt

#anam welcome

[anamneseverge]

Vixes who go hiii. My contact is @vivixacious on Twitter as per usual, and today is 11/9. Could I please update Celestia Ludenberg's ic pronouns to she/it? Thank you so much!!

heya vix! we've given celestia new pronouns on its page like you asked us to! i hope she has some kind of euphoria over it :DDD have a lovely day!

🜂—MOD PARTY

#anam app updates