This post is in reference to recent events on and around the Euphoria &if channel; it’s not really of interest to people who don’t have that context. Some community issues have to be addressed, but I don’t want to expand the circle of anger by supplying a recap. Chances are, if you need to read this, you have context already. This is the second post I am making on this issue, this time regarding my own personal thoughts and feelings on the community.

In the original incident that prompted this discussion, back in 2015, Vaporware was in the wrong. And Peter Piers is in the wrong now for defending him. I am not going to apologize or equivocate around the issue of transphobia.

More to the point, I am not going to treat a deliberately hurtful comment made explicitly to test boundaries as an honest mistake. The response to a boorish transphobic joke was, as far as I am concerned, entirely appropriate.

Vaporware is someone who has admitted to being a troll. He explicitly went into a community space not with the intention of participating in good faith, or even having a frank exchange of views, or even protesting what he might see as politically correct overreach, but with the intention of stirring shit.

This might be written off as a lapse in judgement, but the reality is that it’s part of a pattern of callous, disrespectful, and nasty behavior on his part, going back a couple of years now.

I don’t relish putting all this out in the open, but I have to extend my displeasure to Piers, too. Besides multiple interactions with him that I find personally slighting, I find his presence in the intfiction.org boards to be constantly detrimental, as thread after thread is derailed by boorish arguments about his pet issues, often coupled with an obdurate refusal to empathize with the viewpoint of people who are unlike him.

That forum has seen declining activity ever since 2014, and frankly a refusal to face quiet toxicity within the community is probably one of the reasons why. Multiple people I know don’t feel comfortable engaging in that space, including myself. The reality is, we have a number of people in the trad-if community whose behavior is persistently inappropriate or hateful, but which we’re used to blocking out or ignoring. I’m not comfortable with the hurtful results of trying to make a tent so big it can include unreconstructed bigots and sympathizers of hate movements; too much of that going around in the games space already.

I have already been avoiding posting on intfiction.org for some time. Whether you agree or not, I have to believe my contributions have value, and there’s not much of a point to posting if whatever contributions I have are seemingly 50/50 to be swamped by yet another Peter Piers derailing, or by yet another idiotic flame war on whether Twine authors deserve respect and consideration, or by yet another incidence of a malicious, longterm troll resurfacing. So I have to join those who already don’t feel comfortable using that forum any more. But I thought it important that I didn’t do it silently; because the reality is that the behavior on that forum silently drives a lot of people away.

Bruno Dias
July 14th, 2016