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burnersideblogjustincase-ies · 9 months

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MY TIME HAS COME. IVE BEEN HERE TOO LONG AND SEEN TOO MUCH. Most of the hate I see Jess and Jason get publicly is for bad writing choices, but. Uh. THINGS RUN MUCH DEEPER THAN THAT! Here's a big compilation, of both serious and less serious things, that people have gripes with Jess and Jason for.

Disclaimer: A lot of this stuff is sourced from twitter, which I do not use. I am a MCD fan and have been here since MCD Season 1, I also am not a Mystreet/modern content fan. There could be stuff/context I'm missing for some things. I'm trying to keep this post to stuff I can provide links/sources for, in order to prevent that.

Tw for discussions of homophobia, racism, abusive workplace, uncomfortable IRL age-gaps, fatphobia, and depictions of abuse and incest. This post is long, be warned.

Homophobia:

Jessica is a fetishist of gay/mlm relationships. I feel this is pretty visible through her actions as a whole, but in case you don't believe me, here's her tweeting about being a Septiplier fan.

(Ship between Jacksepticeye and Markiplier. Yes. She really tweeted this. https://twitter.com/_Aphmau_/status/748004225305677828)

And this.

And the video she did where she publicly supported the "ship" of her IRL employees/coworkers (Mithzan and YourPalRoss), which she then publicly reblogged a clip of to her tumblr here: https://www.tumblr.com/aphmau/142601660059/mithross-ahaha-thank-you-so-much-for-this

AND back when they did fanfic readings/reenactments on the channel, one of these videos was devoted to Septiplier.

(This video has since been privated, but you can see someone's... uh.... ""reaction video"" to it? Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jodpDmeqES0)

Yeah.

This fetishization does leak into the content Jessica creates. Jason himself has confirmed that the way Jess wrote Laurance and Garroth was intentionally written as queerbait.

The person he was replying to is no longer visible, but the tweets are still up here: (https://twitter.com/jasonbravura/status/802295131218984960)

Racism:

Yeah so remember how Jason said that they'd never have someone on the team make the skintones of characters to be lighter. Remember how he said that in those tweets above. Yeah well they did that they absolutely did that. They do it in the official poster merch, in the official music videos, thumbnails, and in the skins/ingame footage as well.

(Lots of the in-game whitewashing seems to be a side-effect of the shaders they are using, as they overexpose the footage and make everything lighter as a result. The difference in skintones is glaringly obvious, and definitely would've been tackled by the team by now if they cared about whitewashing as an issue.)

It took until Season 3 of MCD to have a single black character purposefully placed into the show. He had potential to be more than a side character, but the show was cancelled soon after his introduction. As far as I'm aware, Teony is still the only black character in all of Mystreet/Phoenix Drop High. She is a side character who is not included in the minigames or other modern content. Unless I'm misremembering, she doesn't appear in Mystreet in anything beyond Season 2.

Let's talk about Nana Ashida now. Or as she was known as up until late parts of Mystreet, "Kawaii-Chan." Good news! Jessica and crew realized that having an anime-obsessed neko-girl who works at a maid cafe and loves "shipping" and all things "Kawaii" was offensive, and changed her name as a result. Bad news! They confirmed this character to have Japanese heritage through changing her name, further enforcing every single stereotype she carried and more!

(Though it's not as if there was a very good out for this aside from acknowledging the stereotype, tearing out everything about her character, and rebuilding her from the ground up. Either you make your Japan stereotype Japanese, confirming she's a walking stereotype, or you make your Japan stereotype a white girl, and confirm that she the character is stereotyping Japanese people. Either way, they wrote an offensive stereotype and refuse to fix it, because the stereotype is intrinsically tied to her character, and all that is supposed to be appealing and likable about it.)

Fatphobia:

I don't even know what to say. Here is a roleplay video from 2018, where the sideplot is that Aphmau eats too many hamburgers, causing her to hiss at fruits and vegetables like a feral cat. She goes for a jog with aaron, where she fails miserably until being deceived that there is a... "wild hamburger" in the bushes. The video ends with her bursting into tears over turning down a cookie. Eating and food humor are common in this era of video from the Aphmau channel, and these topics are never handled well.

(https://youtu.be/PnOCMK1i-hQ)

Basically every character who is implied to like food (aside from Nana/Kawaii-Chan, because of course a Japanese stereotype Cutesy Icon™ can't be fat, because being fat is not appealing in the eyes of the writers) is implied to also be both unhealthy and overweight. Three out of Four of the trivia bullet-points for Betty (FCU character) are about her love of food, because she genuinely has no other memorable traits. If I have to tell you what is wrong with this, I can't help you.

(https://aphmau.fandom.com/wiki/Betty_(MyStreet))

Abusive Workplace Allegations:

Back while it was still known as BluJay, Catface Studios was reportedly not a good place to work. Here are some twitter testimonies from ex-employees, ranging from things such as PTSD, to possible legal threats for speaking out about working conditions/experiences. (Some of the text is very small, click through to read better.)

A lot of these tweets are, at this point, deleted. Especially the more negative/accusatory ones. Some of them can still be found online, search for them if you're curious.

(And context for people unaware, _Castr_ aka Castor is the same person as The Chicken Shaman in MCD. He used to work on/be a part of a lot of Jess' old content, and was a writer on various projects for her for a VERY long time. I believe he was involved in the writing of MCD since Season 1, but if anyone has a source on that so I know I'm not misremembering, feel free to let me know. His sudden release was VERY shocking to me personally, seeing as how long he's been a part of Jess and Jason's work.)

Jess and Jason have also pretty iconically had beef with Sebastian Todd, the voice of Laurance. This beef is why Laurance rarely appears in videos, and was written out of Mystreet. I personally don't really care for either of the involved parties, but here's what Mithzan has to say about Sebastian:

Child Labor (???):

I literally don't know how else to describe it. This tweet (and linked google doc) from 2015 is the source of this one:

(This tweet is still up and available at this link by the way: https://twitter.com/_Aphmau_/status/661051379234922497) The bit.ly link (http://bit.ly/1Q10LEA) leads to a google doc (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yPd1dsY99sOwIl_fITmUryfH4s00zVgiSuwodfcNiK8/edit) describing what a body actor is and where to apply to work as one for Jess. In case you don't feel like clicking links, here's just the "terms and conditions" and all listed requirements:

Yep, that's right, kids as young as 13 were encouraged to apply for this! Or even 12, if your birthday was close enough to the application date. Though it mentions "promotion", there is no payment mentioned or listed anywhere on the document. Presumably promotion is referring to asking for more important jobs, such as writers or voice actors, though I don't know for certain. Despite the mention of "credit given to you as the body actor" I do not remember seeing body actors ever credited on Aphmau videos of this era. (If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me, but I checked a couple MCD S2 episodes that came out a couple months after this, and could only ever find VAs credited.)

I don't know how young anyone who applied or was accepted was, and I don't know what their working conditions were like. I personally doubt anyone accepted was paid for their time at all, though I have nothing to back that up.

(Also, I don't know if that email is still active. And don't plan on testing it. I'd encourage not sending anything, just in case.)

Aggression towards fans:

This is more a point towards Jason specifically, but multiple times he has spoken out very... I don't even know how to phrase it. Agitatedly? Blame-y? Against fans on twitter for seemingly minimal or nonissues.

These are some of my "favorites," and by favorites I mean "I cannot believe a grown man actually said these things to young fans on twitter, for the crime of... wanting to see more non-Aarmau ships with Aphmau ???"

(These tweets are ALSO still up: https://twitter.com/JasonBravura/status/866345911571562496)

I'm sorry, but "whoring Aphmau's character out" is an INSANE thing to say about your literal actual IRL wife.

(Also he went real jokercore this one time I still cannot believe this is real.)

This is less of a serious accusation in comparison to some of the others, but looking at it with the following in mind makes an interesting picture:

Jess and Jason's Relationship:

Hate that I have to make this a bullet point given how fetishistic and weird people online are about celebrities/internet personalities' IRL relationships, but unfortunately this is necessary. The summary is, Aphmau and Aaron's 4 year age gap (Freshman and Senior in highschool) displayed in Phoenix Drop High is based on Jessica and Jason's real life relationship. Here's a better post breaking this down: https://www.tumblr.com/dantes-gf/648264700307668992/jess-and-jason-a-disturbing-dating-history

As of making this post, I believe Jessica's IRL age is 33 and Jason's IRL age is 37. They met before Jessica was 18, seeing as she moved in with him when she turned 18, as stated by Jessica herself in her Draw My Life video. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekOog6xKDMQ)

TLDR: Assuming the timeframe displayed in PDH is correct, their IRL ages suggest that Jessica was 14 and Jason was 18 when they started dating. This age gap is disturbing for obvious reasons.

Some fans have also found Jason controlling for things like this:

(I don't feel right commenting on this given the whole "This Is An IRL Relationship I Am Not A Part Of, And Thus Will Never Have As Much Insight Into As The People Who Are In It" thing, but here it is regardless. You can make your own judgements on it if you wish.)

Irresponsible Depictions of Abuse/Incest:

Ein is a character. He's certainly a character. If you don't know who he is, he appeared in Mystreet and Phoenix Drop High as a villain who wanted to romantically abuse and manipulate Aphmau. In some cases he succeeded. Towards the end of Mystreet Season 6, he was revealed to be Aphmau's sister. In contrast to his villainous persona in the main-story content, he appeared as friendly, teasing and even flirtatious in the mini-game and non-canon content. Many fans were upset to see him treated as a friendly member of the cast, instead of as the incestual abuser he is in canon.

Around mid-late 2018, many fans on tumblr were vocal about how they found Ein's story and character handled to be upsetting and uncomfortable. A voice actor for the channel (condescendingly) responded that depictions of bad things do not necessarily mean the writer is bad. This post was then reblogged by Aphmau's official tumblr account, without any commentary.(https://www.tumblr.com/aphmau/179882946599/hey-so)

Obviously writing about problematic things does not make you a bad person. You cannot have a story without conflict. What is concerning is writing about this content irresponsibly. Many fans around this time failed to understand that Ein should not be shipped romantically with Aphmau. This behavior was most alarmingly seen by (younger) fans who looked to the out-of-character minigame content of Ein for how he should be treated, and began shipping Aphmau and Ein without understanding the full force of their actions.

(Tumblr) Fans were then concerned about the responsibility involved in displaying this kind of content uncritically to younger audiences, especially since this time was when the mini-game videos became very clearly more aimed towards younger kids. This was Jessica's response, posted on tumblr: (https://www.tumblr.com/aphmau/179945128104/the-audience-of-my-channel)

It touches on the topic, but falsely identifies the main concern of fan backlash of mini-game and overall channel content becoming kid-friendly, instead of the real concern of irresponsibly exposing children to """friendly""" depictions of incest and abuse.

Making funny, silly content of abusers does not successfully condemn an abuser's actions. Making funny, silly content of an incestual relationship does not convey to the audience that the writer sees these actions as wrong. Without knowing that these text posts exist, the average fan would likely never even know they supposedly saw these things as an issue.

Not only has Catface never apologized for this, they later tried to retcon it out of existence:

This post sums it up pretty well. (https://www.tumblr.com/dantedeservedbetter/655931596641353728/oops-this-rant-was-longer-than-i-expected-but)

TLDR: Jessica/Catface has acknowledged that Ein was written to be Aphmau's sister multiple times, including a mini-game video in 2019 that directly referred to them as siblings in the title and thumbnail.

At some point after this comment was made, they changed the video title to be consistent with the "red herring" statement.

To spell it out, after defending their irresponsible portrayal of this abusive and incestual character for years, Catface quietly pretended like it was never an issue and erased all references to his sibling status, so that they did not have to keep trying to explain themselves or apologize.

If you need more proof, check out this tumblr post below where Jessica does not contest Ein's sibling status, which is directly mentioned and discussed in the ask prior! If it really was a red herring, then go on Jessica! Why not correct it here, when the sibling discussion is causing issues all the way back in 2018? That you yourself took credit for writing IN THIS POST! https://www.tumblr.com/aphmau/179877266199/i-think-jasons-a-really-good-guy-but-im-never

I think it's very clear why nothing about this was ever corrected earlier, and it's because they saw it as nothing needing correction. There is no red herring. Just a poorly-handled retcon.

Many characters are given this treatment in canon, where their poor writing was later friendly-ified or excused for little to no reason:

The treatment and attempted "redemption" of Derek, Aaron's abusive father in Phoenix Drop High/Mystreet, is another clear example of this poorly thought-out behavior.

As well as Travis and Katelyn's abusive relationship, which is initially handled seriously, then comically, then swept aside altogether.

As well as Ghost, the undead form of Emmalyn from Minecraft Diaries, who repeatedly forces herself upon Mystreet Zane, because she has confused Mystreet Zane and Minecraft Diaries Zane, and for some reason has also confused Minecraft Diaries Zane, the man who killed her husband... With her husband. Makes sense /s.

As well as.... whatever the hell is going on with Aphmau and Aaron's relationship in Mystreet altogether. Remember that time in Season 4 when Aphmau threw a rock at Aaron after he just got done freezing to death or whatever, because the person that helped him not die... was a girl...... ?????? and she was...... jealous ??????????? so she tried to hit him with a rock??????????????????? was this supposed to be cute??????????????????????????????????

Okay now here's the less serious stuff. Reasons people dont like Jessica and Jason beyond the horrible stuff.

Because the original asker was just asking why people are mad at Jess and Jason, and despite all of the above being very prevalent I mainly see people angry at them for the following:

Bad writing. It comes from both Jess and Jason. Stuff that isn't bad because it's offensive, but because it's just plain bad. In all produced rps, they frequently forget their own lore, characterizations, and write things that just plain make no sense. A lot of people get frustrated with that, understandably.

Stringing fans along. New MCD/Mystreet/Roleplay content is continuously promised and not followed up on. Seasons/series are left unfinished without warning, or rushed to completion in order to throw them in the bin and stop having to write them. Lots of fans have grown tired of hoping for new content for the things they originally followed for. The Aphmau Fantasy Stories channel is inactive for a reason.

Related to above, she mostly just does clickbait-cocomelon-styled videos targeted towards very young children now, which frustrates a lot of old or returning fans looking for more serious content.

Also related to above, retiring or benching main/beloved characters for seemingly no reason. This is most demonstrated by Laurance, but can also be seen in characters like Garroth, Daniel, Lucinda, and Vylad. (One commonality seems to be that this "benching" frequently happens when there are difficulties with employing the voice actor.)

Shipping. Yeah Aarmau is basically the only Aphmau ship featured anymore in all her content, and has been for a while. So people who don't ship that often don't like Jessica, Jason, or their modern content, since the characters are their self-inserts and it's basically their fault.

Content stealing. A lot of her work references other established works, such as making the wyvern dragon language in Minecraft Diaries just being the dragon shout language from Skyrim, taking the titles and sometimes names of the Divine Warriors from mythical figures featured in Final Fantasy, or, most egregiously, stealing the entire Mystreet Season 6 Finale from Fullmetal Alchemist. Yes, they really did do that. In my opinion, some of these seem like simple references to media she enjoys, while some of these (looking at you Mystreet Finale) just feel lazy at best and incredibly deceitful at worst.

The baby voices. All the VAs, including Aphmau, pitch their voices up to sound cartoony now. It's grating.

Jess learned the word "himbo" and now it is Garroth's only personality trait. It's grating.

The Fucklist, or sometimes referred to as The List, is a list Jessica made and posted on her tumblr of characters who, in a less child-friendly version of MCD, would have fucked. The sentence alone is upsetting enough. It's upsetting to read as well. And she didn't even include the canonical Aphmau and Aaron fucking, because it was spoilers at the time. Maybe this doesn't belong here, I don't know if this is the One Reason why a fan has turned on her. But it's probably been the straw that broke some poor camel's back out there.

Some Mystreet fans don't enjoy the more lore-heavy later seasons, and prefer the sillier slice-of-life first couple seasons that the series was originally written with the intention of following.

Similarly to above, some Mystreet fans don't enjoy the MCD crossover lore added late in Mystreet Season 6. Some MCD fans don't enjoy that the series now crosses over with Mystreet.

And more im probably not thinking of at the moment.

You cannot unlearn what you have learned here today.

Sorry.

#jessica bravura #jason bravura #long post #queerbaiting #queerbait #qlsur #racism #racism tw #fatphobia #fatphobia tw #abuse tw #incest tw #age gap tw #all images should have embedded image descriptions. let me know if one is missing and i will fix it.

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