ryliesundertalerphubblog - Tumblr blog

ryliesundertalerphubblog · 2 years

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Breaking the Vow of Silence.

Hi. It’s been a long time.

I’m reposting this story here from my personal blog as it’s more relevant to the Undertale fandom, and I feel that it really should be said here.

So last night I discovered a very old chat with someone I had an extremely bad falling out with in the Undertale fandom. After reading the final messages sent to me by that person, followed by what they did to me after the friendship had ended, I feel the need to no longer keep the vow of public silence I was.... idk if saying manipulated or forced is the right word (though it sure feels like I was manipulated, back-reading with retrospect), but I was asked to keep the falling out of our friendship private and not make it public, for this person feared that if I made it public, I would end up cutting them off from their little friend group and chase them out of the fandom.

Though I will not be outing this person's nickname at the time, because this isn’t a call out. This isn't a warning to "stay away from this user" or whatever. This is just... me finally breaking that "public silence" Vow, solely for myself, to give myself as much closure as I can get.

So yeah. Here goes a random rant about probably the second worst experience I've had in my fandom experience. I will be reblogging this version to all relevant blogs. Sorry if that causes spam for anyone who might still be following these blogs for... whatever reason, but. This is a story I’ve kept inside and out of the public eye for so long that I just... sort of feel the need to.

So for the sake of this post, I will be calling the ex friend in question “Maple.

Maple and I first met in what I call the "first phase" of the Undertale fandom, and I thought we hit it off pretty well. We rped a lot, talked a lot, ectect. And we eventually had more intimate/personal discussions about our respective traumas and abuses. I loved them as my friend, and I wanted to support them in any way I could.

An incident occurred where another Sans RPer was venting to me in DMs about how a thread with a certain Chara made them uncomfortable, or that just rping with them in general was uncomfortable, I don't exactly remember. So I told them point blank to tell the Chara mun the truth and to not string them along. They did. And I think that what happened next was the Chara mun was venting to me about this, and I told them that I encouraged the mun to be honest with them. They took it to mean "I told this mun not to RP with you" and gathered a bunch of their friends to block me for it. At the time, my brain didn't math well, so I don't think I put the two incidents together. To me, it felt like I was blocked by a bunch of my rp buddies out of nowhere. So I reacted pretty poorly.

This incident, apparently, was the inciting factor in Maple's discomfort with me. A discomfort they never addressed or spoke about with me.

Oblivious to their discomfort, I continued to interact with them as normal. But their behavior started changing towards me, and I started getting weird criticisms on my blog from an anon I'm going to refer to as DOAnon, and I'll explain why in a bit. Because of my actual worst experience in fandom happening prior to Undertale, I track my rp blogs (to this day I do) so if/when I get anon hate, it can give me the information I need to go to the police if it got as bad as it did in the fandom before Undertale. So I was tracking the movements of DOAnon and my friend whom I cared for dearly was acting strange. Eventually Maple started to vent in wingdings in a server we both occupied, venting in a way that made me think they were scared of someone, that they were afraid they were going to be hurt by this person. Note, this was YEARS ago, and I had to hand translate the wingdings text to normal text just to read it. But because Maple was my friend, I pushed through to try to help them. When their vent started making me think they were being harassed, I confronted them privately about it out of concern.

Needless to say, when they finally told me the vents were about me, I was upset.

However, because they were my friend, because I cared so much about them, I wanted to talk things out. Get to the bottom of the issue and resolve it. But Maple made it very, very clear that they didn't want to talk about it. They just wanted me out of their life, "for their own comfort," because they refused to have a discussion with me about the problem, let alone a solution.

So, deeply hurt, I reacted... well, better than I remembered reacting, actually. I was definitely upset, but my final words to them on discord weren't as vicious or biting as I remembered them to be. I basically told them "You really don't want to talk about this??? Fine. Goodbye." And blocked them on everything I could think of. If they wanted me gone, I was going to stay gone.

But that wasn't the end of it.

Note I want to stress that from my perspective, Maple's discomfort and upset with me came out of nowhere. They never talked to me about it. For about a month or even more, they pretended like nothing was wrong. Hell, they vented about me to my face and it still didn't fully click they were upset at me until they said it right to my face. I had on rose colored glasses and was very, very dense.

So yeah. After your trust in someone you cared for so much was very suddenly broken like that, I did not react very well. I was emotional and impulsive and paranoid. I made a post on my RP blog saying I no longer felt safe or comfortable and that I was going on an indefinite hiatus. Apparently, Maple didn't like that, even if I wasn't talking about the details of our now-ended friendship publicly like they had asked me not to.

So Maple found the only blog I forgot to block them on and messaged me on tumblr. Now, I couldn't tell you what was said in those DMs. I was so emotionally distraught and hurt that I probably reacted a lot harsher and with a lot of venom. After all, I did what they wanted--I got out of their life, blocked them and didn't even imply that my feelings in my post were from a falling out with a friend. And they were block-evading me despite this, so I do think it was much more of an argument than the discussion on Discord. I blocked them on their account, ready to just ride the waves of my hurt until I numbed over and moved on. I told a few close friends about what happened (still then trying not to say Maple's name but some figured it out anyway, not sure if I said anything or if Maple's vague vents about me on THEIR blog tipped them off, but I'll get to those in a bit regardless) and that was as far as it should have gone.

I made a new rule about how I wasn't comfortable following people who interacted with "people I've had issues with in the past" (yes, still keeping it vague for their sake) and that I'm more than fine with rping with people regardless if they interact with them or not, I just won't follow for my own comfort, and I asked that if anyone figured out who I was talking about, to not contact me about them/not to discuss them with me. I do believe I made a general hurt vent post after that as well, on a blog barely anyone followed, but again, I still kept my friendship break-up a secret from the general public. Like I promised.

Again, apparently this was too much for them, and one of their friends messaged me on tumblr on their behalf.

I don't remember this conversation much either. Just that, I was angry, and they were being stupidly vague to me about Maple being the person they were talking about. After a fight with the friend, I blocked the friend. I then added a rule to my RP blogs to not to be a fucking asshole and use vague language to talk to me about a person you know I have a problem with.

I don't really remember much after that, but remember how I mentioned I was getting weird anons? Well, that's where this story takes a turn for the worse.

DOAnon started to get more aggressive with their asks they sent to me. I don't remember most of them, because there was just, so many passive aggressive/hate anons that I just tuned it out after a while. However, I was keeping track of them. The reason they were nicknamed DOAnon was because the tracker stated that their provider was DigitalOcean, which among other things, is a service that provides a VPN. After realizing this, and when the anon started saying things like "You chased someone out of the fandom" or used my more personal Insecurities in their attack on me, I was about 70% sure it was Maple, or a friend sent on Maple's behalf. They were hurtful and annoying, but there was a part of me that just, didn't want to believe it was Maple sending them. I wanted to have faith in that friendship, despite how it ended. I kept giving them excuses. I really tried to believe in them. There’s an inkling of me that still wants to.

I figured DOAnon would get bored and move on eventually, but they never did. They stalked me onto new rp blogs, personal blogs, and sent in annoying and hurtful stuff. They even claimed I stole an idea for a character design from Maple (not directly referencing them, of course, just calling me a thief), which bumped my suspicion from 70% to 80% that it was Maple or a friend of theirs. (To clarify I have, absolutely no idea what aspect Maple thought I was stealing, most of the design elements for the character I’m pretty sure they were accusing me of building with “stolen” assets were ideas given to me by Celest, but I digress) They were persistent, and they were annoying.

Eventually, they screwed up. They went onto a device that wasn't using the DigitalOcean VPN, and the tracker showed me that the anon was coming from Maple's state of residence. That's when I knew it was them. Even when I wanted to deny it, I knew deep down, Maple had to have been the one harassing me for... god, it was probably months after I tried to move on from this. And, god, even if I try to sound so firm here, I still want to believe it wasn’t them.

Around this time, I was made aware of the fact that Maple had been vagueposting/venting about me on their blog, a hell of a lot more than I was about them. Funny, rules for the and not for me, but I digress--I don't think they stated my name or anything, but my friends could tell immediately that Maple was talking about me. They had a goodbye post that made me out to gave chased them out of the fandom, and their description was as equally hateful towards me. (They then apparently deleted the blog and someone else took it, so if you’ve figured out who Maple is, don’t bother looking for it.)

It hurt, but the pain wasn't as bad due to how long it had been. I knew I didn't "chase them out" like they claimed--their own god damn paranoia did.

Finally, DOAnon--or, let's just call out who it was, Maple--finally took things way too far. Harassing me for months, Maple eventually sent me a link on anon to a gif image of a woman burning to death in her car.

This was the last straw. I made a public post, STILL keeping their identity a secret for, some godforsaken reason, (Oh hey look the post is still up, linky link for you guys) under the advice of law enforcement--to essentially tell them to stop stalking and harassing me, or I WILL call the police again and get them arrested. They finally stopped actively harassing me after that.

They stalked my blog after that, sure, and I made posts noting that so they would be scared off even further, but I didn't get any more anons. Finally, after being scared enough, they stopped stalking me all together.

To this day, I'm still confused about everything. Bitter too. And I want to reiterate, to stress, that this is not a call out post. This isn't aimed at them to get cancelled. This was years ago and if you know who this is about and/or figure it out... please, don’t bother. This isn’t an “Us VS Them” thing. I just needed to get this off of my chest.

I know I reacted poorly to the situation at the time and I was no innocent party. I may not have sent them anons or stalked them, but I also don't think I was entirely the victim either. Then again, maybe that's the part of me that I need to kill off--the part that keeps trying to excuse the shit Maple did to me all those years ago. There’s still a part of me that wants to apologize, and I don’t know what even for. I just want to say “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” without anything coming to my mind to even apologize for.

Again, I'm just... recounting the experience here publicly as a form of closure. As a form of letting go. I want to heal from this experience, as I never properly did. I want to trust in people, my loved ones, again. And I think by making this post, by breaking that promise of silence, I'm acknowledging that Maple was not and shouldn't have ever been considered one of those people. They might have been fine during our friendship, but the end and aftermath of it proved to me that my love in them was misplaced. Maybe I am a pure innocent victim who just reacted piss poorly to it all, or maybe I wasn't. I cannot tell you because I cannot trust my own judgement anymore. I don’t want to take credit for shit I didn’t do, but I also do want to own up to any mistakes I genuinely did make.

Sorry for the sour story all of a sudden, and seemingly unprompted. But after being reminded of my promise, how I did my best to uphold it, and how I was treated regardless--I just. Needed to break the promise.

I needed to stop respecting the wishes of someone who ended up wanting nothing more than to hurt me. That's all this is.

I... don’t even know why I want to add this, but if for god forsaken reason you find this, “Maple...” Despite what you did to me, I hope you’re well. Where ever you are. If you find yourself coming to these old blogs seeking to reignite your anger towards me, I beg of you to stop. It’s gone. It’s done. There’s nothing left for you here. I’m gone. You’re gone. We’re gone. I’ve stated several times that this is not a call out for you and I really, genuinely mean that. The promise you made me keep for all this time, though? It wasn’t fair to me, after what happened to me because of what happened with us. Remaining silent was only hurting me. I’m sure this will only make you defensive or angry, and I’m sorry. Maybe this is what I wanted to apologize for--for breaking the promise I made to you all those years ago with this post. At the idea that you might one day find this post and it spikes your paranoia or anxiety. For upsetting a metaphorical you that may have completely forgotten about me altogether and will never read these words.

Again, this isn’t an attack on you. I don’t want any more drama to come from this. I just needed to break the one thing that was keeping me from healing and learning to trust others again. I don’t want to give you trouble--I’ve kept you anonymous still for this reason, because despite how much I hate to admit it, I haven’t fully killed the part of me that loved you. I don’t want people to find you or attack you or anything. I’m sure you’re a different person now--and hopefully, a better one, with a happy life and lots of friends to make you happy. I don’t hold what happened against you. I’m hurt, and the scars you gave me haven’t healed, but I don’t hold your past self against your current self.

So if you’re still here...

Please, move on.

#negative tw #vent tw #harassment mention tw #long post #I don't really know how to tag this #sorry #I doubt anyone is even like #still following these blogs for whatever reason #but yeah. Just. Gotta get it out.#Sorry for the trouble.

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