[mirrored from my Dreamwidth blog, January 7th 2024]
Let me give you some advice, bastard. Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you.
-Tyrion Lannister
So there's this post on Dreamwidth. I'm not going to link to it. It's about "red flags and scammers in fandom". It's by one of the haters. This post, from January 2023, started making the rounds again in January 2024 as part of the "let's start our shit again" package.
In January 2023 I addressed the "scammer" accusation. Due to the continued wank and the fact that the "red flags" post has hurt and alienated plural people, soulbonders and Pop Culture Pagans I am friends with, I now feel the need to point out that the post, while seeking to defend Spiced, actually describes her. I’ll explain:
That "Big Red Flag" re: spiritual connection to fictional characters? Welp, some years back, Spiced publicly blogged about how her OC Vanimórë is real and tells her things and all these other people have contacted her saying they’ve encountered him and she knows someone who has a romantic/sexual relationship with him. These posts are still available at the time of this post, so I'm not outing anybody here. [Note: I used to know the person who has the romantic/sexual relationship with him, which was how I found out about Spiced's fic in the first place; I will not out their identity.] Here's a backup gallery in case of link rot.
And in her fic - which is publicly available for anyone to read - Spiced writes about how Vanimórë created the multiverse along with Eru, and her other OCs Coldagnir and Edenel are gods too and canon characters like Fëanor are gods; since the drama started in 2020 her fic been more and more about this sort of thing and some of her commenters have remarked that her fic reads just like mythology. So understand this isn't "just fiction" to her, she is Very Serious, this goes a bit above and beyond someone who has a Tony Stark headmate or they 'kin Groot or something.
My problem wasn't and isn't that Spiced thinks Vanimórë is real and is The God of Gods. I am also not judging any of my plural/soulbonder friends where it may have informed their spiritual beliefs, IMO weird beliefs are harmless in and of themselves, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, it's what you do with your beliefs that makes them harmful or not. So, my problem is that she weaponized her beliefs and went on a "witch hunt the heretic" thing against me and got her friends involved to dogpile me and help her smear campaign and get me shunned across fandom. The real reason why Spiced went after me starting in 2020 isn't because I "burned her OC without permission" which is bullshit, but because she is VERY just-so about her headcanons being The Truth and she equates my differing interpretations of Tolkien's world and canon characters with heresy.
I haven't said this in public before because I was afraid of retaliation [and I know she's going to deny it - hence why she made up bullshit accusations about me because she knows how nuts the actual truth of the situation sounds], but since we are now on Year Five of this shit and I'm tired: this is what happened, this is why I ended up falling out with her, because she had a spiritually-motivated hissy fit over my interpretations of canon/characters being "wrong" and so on. Hence why she decided to "rewrite" one of my fics and declare "THIS IS CANON" while simultaneously asserting my multiverse has nothing to do with hers like that makes any fucking sense.
Now, although Spiced and her clique are obviously complete hypocrites, I still feel a need to defend myself, since my beliefs and intentions have been deliberately misrepresented and flat-out lied about [like the rest of their fact-free smear campaign]. I dislike talking about this in public because this is an intensely personal matter that I dislike talking about in general and I don't want to get even more people over here cringing at me, but I feel like my hand has been forced since it keeps coming up.
From 2016-2023 I was more or less an atheist-leaning agnostic, due to Religious Trauma Syndrome where I experienced spiritual abuse as a fundamentalist Christian in the 1990s and then as a Pagan in the 00s through early 10s. I have the magical thinking and scrupulosity subtypes of OCD, which made me more prone to being manipulated by others as well as having disordered thinking. So I walked away from religion altogether for the same reason that alcoholics are told to stop drinking altogether, and spent the next several years trying to work on myself. In late 2023 after a very difficult year that broke me, I decided to convert to Judaism, and it plays MUCH better with my OCD than other prior spiritual paradigms, but also I needed to be away from religion for as long as I did to deprogram my brain enough to not begin the conversion process with the same sort of problematic thinking, etc.
Having said that, even when I was non-religious, I've always been... different. I'm a writer, and I have this tendency of characters dropping by in my head and deciding to stay. This started when I was a very Christian teenager. Also, this is not uncommon among writers from what I understand. In my agnostic thirties I ended up with Nicholas, Maglor and Anthony, who are still around years later in my forties as of 2024 [pretty much stuck with them 😂]. When I was an agnostic, I accepted a secular/materialist framework for it, and now that I'm converting to Judaism, I will possibly maybe accept a spiritual explanation. However, I also have C-PTSD and one of the known symptoms of C-PTSD is daydreaming as a way to mentally escape. So maybe it's spiritual, maybe it's trauma, maybe it's both, maybe it's Maybelline. Bottom line: I can't prove it's real. It's real to me, but this is not the same as thinking I have The Ultimate Truth about Life, the Universe, and Everything. Because of my experiences with religious abuse and disordered thinking, I literally cannot take a hardline "I have The Truth" position, not even now.
I like to think that whatever weird shit is going on here is at least useful for character development, because [back when I used to allow comments on Ao3] readers have remarked that my characters feel very real/lifelike. This is also why I can't just abandon my characters and write different stuff so I can have an outlet for continuing to write fic in the fandom equivalent of witness protection where I start fresh under a new identity, because that's like asking me to abandon my family.
I have casually disclosed being a soulbonder here on Dreamwidth behind a lock, yes, and that lock has been broken and I was outed in 2020 [and again, people have also deliberately misrepresented and lied about things]. However, I don't participate in the plural/soulbonder community [though I have friends who are plural systems, soulbonders or spirit-spouses] and I don't actually talk about it much beyond a few friends because I have severe trust issues [wonder why]. Also:
1. I have NEVER insisted that people agree with me and believe any of this is real in order to be my friend, this isn't a dealbreaker the way not supporting trans rights is or whatever. All I've ever asked is if people think it's cringe, they keep that opinion to themselves and that they don't make fun of me to my face or behind my back.
2. I write fiction about the guys, yes. And I believe that fiction is not reality. [And yes, I write Sören as a sort-of self-insert, however, you may want to refer to my character sheet on him before making further assumptions.]
The guys have Opinions about Tolkien's canon, but I tend to keep most of those Opinions private because I feel it's unreasonable for me to be like "no you can't ship Maglor with So-and-So because Mags said he doesn't want to be shipped with that person" or "you can't write that because Maglor gets triggered" and whatever. I don't think it's healthy to be like that. I don't begrudge people their headcanons, ships, etc that don't line up with mine, because I understand - and my version of Maglor understands - that when people write things, it's like a free form of therapy.
I personally write fiction as a form of therapy and escapism. I write fluff-and-smut with occasional hurt/comfort. I need to write comfort fic because of my trauma issues and the world being a non-stop trashfire since 2020. I used to feel forced to write epic, deep sagas when I was associating with Spiced and she constantly pooh-poohed fluff and acted like only serious, tragic fic with conflicts is worthwhile, and after she kicked me to the curb it took me about a year and a half to fully deprogram from that and start writing the kind of stuff I actually wanted to write - and I definitely don't present my fanfiction as some sort of cosmic truth or propaganda for getting people to worship any characters as gods. That didn't make sense when I was agnostic, and now that I'm converting to Judaism, that would be avodah zarah [idolatry*] - this was in fact part of why I felt forced to come out and defend myself re: the accusations. [Note: having a "Maglor fandom shrine" on my site is not this in case the silly GIFs didn't make that obvious; fandom shrines have existed since the early Internet on Geocities/Angelfire/etc and it's just a cutesy term for having a page dedicated to a particular character/celebrity/whatever. I also have a Tori Amos shrine and I obviously don't worship her.]
*with no offense meant to Pagan friends or anyone else, I am only pointing out Judaism is monotheistic
I certainly do NOT think my fic is "channeling things from other dimensions" as people have claimed. It's my happy place, simple as.
So, to sum it up - if you've been thinking that Spiced keeping this fandom wank war going since 2020 is excessive, now you have some context as to why it's still happening: this is a spiritual crusade for her, and she won't stop until I delete my AO3 account or I unalive myself. [I have no plans to do either, though this has adversely affected my mental health long-term.] And to try to further discredit me and make me look nuts, people have deliberately lied about my own spiritual beliefs [including and especially during the time that I literally had no spiritual beliefs].
Finally:
-As mentioned at the beginning of the post, I have plural/soulbonder/etc friends who saw the "red flags in fandom" post and felt personally attacked and threatened and deeply upset by it. Even if I wasn't a soulbonder myself, I feel like mocking people for sincerely held beliefs that they're not doing harm to others with [like bigotry or theocratic fascism] is really gross, so just for that alone the haters should be aware that you basically attacked an entire group of people with what hits dangerously close to sounding like bigotry against minority faiths - but then, bigotry against minority faiths is on-brand for Spiced and her buddies like Seleneheart - and considering how many plurals/soulbonders are neurodivergent, the discourse also borders on being ableist. "Ewwww you're so weeeeeird" and/or "lol you're craaaaaazy" is something many, MANY neurodivergent people have experienced. It's not cute.
-It's disingenuous to claim you're performing some kind of public service "warning people about me" when I have had a moratorium on adding new DW friends since the second half of 2023 and I keep my f'list small, I don't use social media or Discord and I don't read fanfic anymore that isn't by friends nor do I participate in exchanges/kink memes so I largely do not interact with fandom at all, and I feel backed into a corner. You're not making posts/comments "warning others" like this because you actually give a shit about "protecting people" considering I'm not even out there trying to win friends and influence people and haven't been for some time being I'm too fucking traumatized for that anymore, you're doing it to gratuitously keep punching down at me. Plus, one more time to really hammer this point across, it's hypocritical in the extreme for her friends to claim that anyone having a spiritual connection to fictional characters is a "red flag" but when Spiced claims her purple-eyed OC is real openly and blatantly for years on end and people are literally shagging him, that's somehow totally fine and isn't having double standards at all.