On Support: "What Can I Do To Help?"

[originally posted on Dreamwidth in January 2023]

So, if you read through the drama, you may be wondering if there's anything you can do to help.

The first thing is, I am not calling for vigilante justice. As tempted as you may be to go over and tell these people a thing or five, don't do that shit. Here's why:

I got a suicide baiting comment from someone's sock on AO3 in December 2020. Doing that to one of these people isn't going to "get justice" for me. Two wrongs don't make a right, harassing people with nasty comments and messages is not OK.
It's not going to make them stop, it's going to make me look bad. One of the lies spread about me is that my gang of "socks and followers" has been harassing Spiced, which I doubt. I have had no contact with Spiced since we unfriended each other on Dreamwidth in April 2020, and none with Narya since November 2020 - when I burn bridges with someone, I burn bridges with someone, I don't contact people once the friendship is over. I don't have the spoons to manage sock accounts, and I am not Verhalen The Evil Trans Overlord stealing Professor X's helmet so I can mind control my Dreamwidth friends. [In fact, in 2020-2021 I had hardly ANY Dreamwidth friends - me having more than a couple dozen Dreamwidth friends has only been since the beginning of 2022 onward.] I already told one of my friends not to do the attack dog thing. Please don't fuel Spiced's "bullying bullying" narrative by doing this.
It's not going to change anything. It's never going to make me not be persona non grata in the mainstream of Silmarillion fandom, they don't and won't believe me or this wouldn't have gone on into 2023 and counting. The damage has been done. The people who did the damage are never going to apologize to me. If anything, they're going to double down if they think they're being "attacked".
Spiced thrives on attention. Negative attention equals attention. You are fueling her attention supply if you leave her rude comments and such.

Here is what you can do instead:

While people are allowed to like problematic things and I feel everyone has the right to make their own decisions about whether or not to engage with media where the creator has shown their ass - which is why I don't yell at Harry Potter fans despite JKR's TERFery and I don't yell at Buffy/Firefly fans despite Joss Whedon's bullshit, I am not telling people to never watch Johnny Depp movies again, etc ad nauseam - you should consider that if you read Spiced's work and you leave kudos/nice comments, you are basically giving her a form of support. This is the thing. Spiced is a Big Name Fan. She got name-dropped in Slate magazine. She ran a Tolkien archive for several years and is preparing to do so again. Her OC made its way into the world record holder for longest fanfic, said fanfic got mentioned on Wikipedia, and has rather put this stuff on an amplifier. She is not some no-name person quietly doing their thing where it doesn't really matter. She sees every new kudos/nice comment as a form of proof that she got away with it and people support her.
The "reading, kudos/comments equals support" also goes for Narya's work and AnnEllspethRaven's work, which is connected to Spiced's - I've already talked about the wank with Narya, and AnnEllspethRaven [the world record holder for longest fanfic] is another person who's run her mouth about me in public and has bought into the Poor Pitiful Spiced bullshit and writes Spiced's OCs in her world's longest fanfic which gives Spiced free publicity.
I have, for the record, blocked not just these three people but also almost everyone who currently interacts with them, since blocking went live on AO3 in June 2022. [The shunning happened before AO3 rolled out blocking, so nobody can use "well Verhalen blocked me" as an excuse for non-interaction.] There's one or two exceptions to this for reasons [one is a friend and another is one of the only people who's stuck around since 2019] but otherwise... I block liberally. And if you think I'm being unfair by blocking people, consider that the suicide baiting comment came from one of Spiced's friends [I can't prove who, though I have my suspicions; I am positive it wasn't Spiced herself because there were no SPAG errors], so I have a "I don't fuck around and take chances" policy, assholic or not, "unfair" and "mean" or not, this is what I do to protect myself and minimize stress in what is supposed to be something fun for me.
Please consider not participating in communities/events that are run by Spiced, Narya, or their inner circle. Please possibly, maybe consider withdrawing from the Silmarillion Writers Guild if you are a member [or not joining if you have been considering joining], as they have coddled these people and some SWG members have participated in the mud-slinging.

If you see Spiced, Narya, or AnnEllspethRaven's work being recommended somewhere on Discord or a rec-the-thing Dreamwidth community, you have my permission to say "you should be aware the person who created this work is a bully" and link to this. [Do not do this on Tolkien-specific DW communities or Tolkien-specific Discord servers, you are among my enemies there and it will not help. It will backfire.]
My fic is not everyone's cup of tea. I write porn. I write kink. Sometimes I write incest ships and sometimes I write age-gap adult relationships. Nobody is obligated to read my work to be friends with me. However, if you think my work is something you might want to read, please consider getting an AO3 account if you don't already have one.
The reason why I'm saying "get an AO3 account if you don't have one" even though most of my works aren't archive-locked is because the overwhelming majority of my kudos are guest kudos, which is fairly common for porn, but also makes it look like I'm inflating my own kudos count [I don't have the kind of patience/energy to try to do that for hundreds of kudos, but whatever]. I'm not trying to diss guest kudos or tell people not to leave guest kudos - again, I get it that this is common for porn and a lot of people don't want to be horny on main where they might get judged when fandom is increasingly falling to anti assholes with nothing better to do than find out who bookmarks/leaves kudos on ~problematic fic~ and go bother them. I appreciate the guest kudos, by all means you can keep leaving them [and since I know you can only logged-in-kudos something once, I know some people leave guest kudos as extra kudos, which is nice of them]. But also, my fandom has been very deliberate in shunning me, so if nothing else, leaving logged-in user kudos and nice comments sort of spites them, it shows there are people who have not, in fact, shunned me.
That also goes for my fanart [or the fanart done in collaboration with my friends]. If you like it, please consider leaving logged-in kudos on AO3. This is not mandatory, but it helps, if that makes sense at all.
If you have my contact info, please do not contact me to tell me the latest nasty thing Whoever said about me. I maintain a "what you think about me is none of my business" policy for my mental health. The shit I know for a fact has been said about me on various spaces is bad enough and has fucked me up enough [I've thrown up from stress, I've had panic attacks, etc], without a constant new stream of information and more gasoline on the shitfire. You may think you're helping by giving me new evidence, but you are actually not helping. I have enough receipts of wrongdoing and that alone should be enough to "make my case". I try to ignore Spiced and her clique as much as humanly possible.
If we are Dreamwidth friends, please don't offer me advice like "try a different fandom" or "start over under a new username". I've already explained why those things aren't an option.
As a rule, I don't discuss this topic often on Dreamwidth because it's painful and I don't really feel like going on and on about it constantly in that space is helpful, it doesn't undo the damage done, I have only made a small handful of public statements about it since 2020. Because of that, it is especially important not to tell me to "just drop it" or tell me "don't be so negative", etc etc. I already suffered in silence trying to "take the high road" and "be the better person" because Narya's "difficult and draining" comment gave me so many brainweasels about being anything other than Mister Happy Sunshine [and indeed, kept me from trying to make new friends at all for awhile because I was convinced I was this horrible toxic person].

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