i’m sending you this cos i still care about us

your tweet calls for a long look in the mirror

i think you’re the most disloyal person i’ve known friend i’ve had

so i wonder if you know how i feel about being let down

despin doesn’t want to be friends because he doesn’t care for the sms community and the people in it

the overbearing dominance of a certain virtue-signalling hypocrite was a big factor (https://f005.backblazeb2.com/file/nthmcs/case/239.png) particularly in the mod cave

he dropped plenty of other good people like blaze and derpspace. it’s not personal, in your case. i can vouch for that

despin is not your friend

jeff likes to pretend everyone is friends, but you saw what friendship really meant to him. friendship was loyalty to his friend, even if his friend is a sociopathic bully, even if it meant corrupting a community he was meant to take care of

i invite you to think about if you make the cut with him

he is not your friend

the “sms community” is not your friend that i’m some threat to

lumardy is not your friend

this is a conflict that i’ve been connected to for the last year, between two people i consider friends

??

you decided to stop being his friend. in 2020. then you pretended for an entire year while keeping him at a silent distance

he may have been faking it with me but he genuinely loved you and had his confidence undermined by your mixed signals, distrusted the instances where i tried to help him understand how you actually felt, and i never heard the end of his obsession with it

but also, did i deserve language that made abuse seem like a random personal conflict?

i think a friend should foremost ask a victim how he feels, about events and people, and talk through how it affects their friendship and try to keep him onside. hooktail’s devil’s-advocacy (inventing excuses) for dongerduck may have been v cringe but at least he tried with me and we knew how we felt. he didn’t just complain about his own relationship with someone who shat on me, and then dip

a friend should not send hearts and then upon actually listening to the victim, react in complete silence to all of his fears

discussing it with jpep and trying to be friends with me while not even being around me is not trying

within our friendship, i have problems with you regarding persistent victim-blaming. you told me to sit down when i talked to you about lu, and then you apologised, but didn’t improve. i understood the obsession with retaining friendships given your history, and the extreme conflict-aversion, but over time i realised that this didn’t excuse your behaviour to me

rather i now ive started to see you as selfish, disloyal, and with an inexplicable need to stay friends with shit people, even when i made it very easy to take my side, by being a victim in very clear cases, and one of your best friends

there is more to discuss, about your failings and about mine, if you want to. i will explain, i will try if you try

but i wanted to send you this for two reasons. firstly, to clearly communicate and so absolve myself of the my own blame in case our friendship fails. i’ve accepted things and decided it’s not for me to fix things

secondly, to get you to consider your attitude towards friendship and the meaning of being let down

i love you and hope you grow from all this. you’re a good person, 1ups

hello, wanted to let you know i feel guilty and have been thinking about this carefully.

some of my language was too far so i toned it down.

im not angry with you, since writing things down helped me set that free.

i dont mean to be hurtful; im sorry i am.

i dont think youre a hypocrite, but rather your tweet and my pain form a holistic point.

i wonder if i couldve been less intensive, but discussion wasnt the precedent with us.

this is my idea of fighting for us, saying what hurt me and that i will try,

but i wont let myself get pushed around anymore.

i want to tell a story and see what you all think on some moral questions. it won’t be that hard to figure out whom i’m talking about but the idea of using letters is to make it easier to be objective

there’s a person B, whom A, C, D and I were friends with, and we used to hang as a group. the story is focused on B’s attitude to friendship with abuser A, and C’s reaction to that

B was always negative about the idea of online friends, and mostly hung out for fun talking about nothing in groups and blowing off attempts to even schedule voice calls. B said to me at this point in time that his only close friend was D

I and A were getting into an intensifying conflict at the time, and i remember joining B’s discord and becoming mutuals on another social and observing A wasn’t either of these things

at some point, A gets me banned from the group discord by extensively lying about me and manipulating them. B reads it all, doesn’t visibly react

about 3 weeks later, A and i supposedly settle our differences, but A maintains an impression of me abusing A to them

in this time, B and A have formed some sort of closer friendship

out of some sort of guilt for cutting me out, A talks to B about the idea of B and I having a chat about all that had happened. B says “roger” and apologises for replying late

when i go to B to sort things out, B leaves me hanging for days before claiming B was too busy to set aside time to talk, and then ignores me when i try to talk to B. B never replied, to this day

some 6.5 months pass before i expose A. B learns of the situation, which has consensus thanks to D taking my side, and does nothing. B continues being friends with A. to this day, i see B in A’s twitch chat talking about seeing a film together and such

C is my best friend and we’ve been close for a year. C and D both have a good understanding of how A abused me

before i was able to expose A, i had problems with C trying to suppress me exposing A because of the mutual friends (like B) that C stood to lose. C behaved like i didn’t exist in their presence for that period because C was too scared to confront the group for the hurt it had caused me. (at the time, we didn’t think A was responsible, rather the wider group hating me for some reason)

a couple of weeks after the exposé, i told C and D that i wanted to distance temporarily because i was uncomfortable with their continued ties with the group. i didn’t try to tackle my discomfort directly cos i was unclear on what was causing it and thought it was my fault

C’s reaction was mostly about the distress this caused C, and how C was considering giving up on B because of being anxious about B being distant despite claiming they were on good terms. this clarifies the ongoing casual nature of their friendship

I have an extensive discussion with D where I try to broach the issue I have with B. I don’t handle it very well and kind of essentialise B as being certain things that B did to me, which D refutes based on D’s experience with B being a loyal friend (them having been close friends from before all this happened)

C reads the entire discussion and says absolutely nothing. D and I agree to split for a bit to let things settle, and then revisit

in my time alone, I get frustrated by C’s attitude towards B and C’s reluctance to engage the fact that I have a problem with it, which I think is clear to C by now. I try to discuss some of this stuff regarding B with a mutual of mine and C’s [clarification: Jpep] but said mutual skirts around the issue and we never get into the details

I also vibe out from the mutual that C is “giving up” on me after “trying” for a long time, where this trying apparently involved extensive discussions with the mutual and no contact with me

so i face up to C with a letter about this (“inexplicable need to remain friends with bad people” i.e. B), contrasting C’s feelings of being let down by others with C’s disloyalty towards me, regarding B, regarding suppressing me exposing A, and ongoing problems concerning victim blaming regarding the sms bingo harassment. I talk about B directly:

[D]’s devil’s-advocacy (inventing excuses) for [B] may have been v cringe but at least [D] tried with me and we knew how we felt. [D] didn’t just complain about [D]’s own relationship with someone who shat on me, and then dip

a friend should not send hearts and then upon actually listening to the victim, react in complete silence to all of his fears

C blocked and unfollowed me on all platforms a month ago (ongoing), and maintained social media connections with B (funnily enuff, this was the point where C finally cut social connections with A)

my goals with C fwiw, which i was never allowed to express, were to reconsider but not necessarily end C’s relationship with B, but even more basically to say that B did something wrong and force some sort of accountability to me

the point of this story is i’m interested in hearing from you how you would judge C’s treatment of me on the stuff regarding C and B’s relationship, and how i should feel about it. it may be worth also contrasting it with D and B’s relationship, how i should feel about that. am curious if your takes align with mine. also, ask for any clarifications

later clarifications:

the issue u have with B, was his maintaining relations with A and the group, despite the evidence and expose u released on A treating u poorly the whole time, right? Or is there more to it

the devil’s in the details. i’ll reveal my entire opinion after discussion so i don’t sway you too much, but for me some crucially relevant stuff is that both I and A were on fairly casual terms with B before the abuse, and while it was happening (3 week period of A secretly turning people against me), they strengthened their friendship. then, B cut contact with me, left me in silence. post-exposé, B didn’t do anything to indicate reassessment of events, like say talking to me, apologising… but continued on closer terms with A as if nothing had happened

why C was afraid of losing friendship with B, if A was cut out of the picture?

C’s concern was that if i made a big fuss, it would put C in potential positions of having to not interact with some or all of the rest of the group anymore, the group which had effectively already chosen to keep A and chuck me. if u want direct quotes, here’s C’s apology to me about that from after i told C about exposing A, but before actually exposing A (so at this time, C didn’t know a lot of case details)

“i didnt push back much on that narrative because i was in that mindset of conflict avoidance and was doing whatever it took to make /myself/ feel better about it. i 1) hadn’t taken you seriously enough and 2) was still expecting myself to come through with that mediation dm… [which] is where i planned on ‘saying things to them’ because i was way more scared of a private dm going sour. the group idea felt to me like a way to have multiple people there for accountability and to force people to be less abrasive and more reasonable”

“lots of my previous actions have been driven by my extreme attachment to my friendships and anxiety about losing them”

so B cut contact prior to u releasing the expose, but post-expose, nothing changed. surely B knew about ur expose, right?

B absolutely knew. at one point D called B “the most receptive” to talking about it (not with me obvs) cos the rest of that group really closed ranks

This was part of her attempt to shut down me speaking out about lumardy, and the highlighted is what I’ve referred to before as “textbook victim-blaming”. Parts of her apologies for this are quoted at the end of the context doc, and I forgave her and we moved past it. That’s still the case. This is what I refer to in my letter to her as “you told me to sit down when i talked to you about lu, and then you apologised, but didn’t improve”.

It is quite painful to watch a friendship unravel like this, isn’t it? This is the exchange I mentioned in the context doc as me distancing from our friendship. At the time this was written, I thought her reaction made sense. But this, and a few messages with the same content and tone, are the last that she said to me on the topic, ever. Her final message to me about it was, tellingly, “i haven’t gotten around to fully reading and processing everything yet”.

So as multiple months rolled by, I took a dimmer view of the egocentric nature of her reaction, and the complete silence as I went in detail over some of the most painful parts later on, including her (ongoing) association with the person B from the context doc. I made things worse for sure, by pre-emptively distancing instead of leading 1Ups thru how to behave. Jpep considers that I ended the friendship here and gave 1Ups no choice. I believe in giving people agency to make decisions and in reading the implications of those decisions, hence me distancing without making demands at first, then getting so angry with her months later. At the time, I also thought it was my fault for feeling uncomfortable with her, and a few months passing made me change my mind.

Nonetheless, the other person I distanced from handled it maturely, and we stayed friends. He realised the importance of active communication, picked up on the fact that I was uncomfortable, and so made his response about my feelings rather than his own, given that I had just been victim of a serious kind of abuse. This makes me think that 1Ups might just not have engaged with the case and understood the severity of what had happened. But still, I clearly communicated to 1Ups many of my problems with her (example below), and gave her months to come around and start responding to my feelings. She never spoke to me again about it. Despite me having distanced from her, and having never precisely identified her association with person B as the biggest ongoing problem, I think this silence was telling. But maybe me failing to do that means the falling out is my fault.

The only time she did reach out to me between April and August was to send me this cringe. The toburr shine heads ban is an incredibly petty drama I don’t want to dig up again, but a lot of the resentment on both sides was caused by 1Ups agreeing to ban him, then in discussions with others giving the impression that she had not agreed and refusing to ever clarify. There’s no discussion in this message she sent me, right – she removes me from mod, acknowledges none of her role in the dispute, and refuses to even affirm that I was a victim of toburr. This led me to feel like my problems with her were ongoing.