fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3389 ]

[ SECRET POST #3389 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3389 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 022 secrets from Secret Submission Post #484.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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Name a time (or a dozen) when you defended someone and regretted it.

A friend of mine was hurt over something the mods of a LJ community we belonged to did, and I brought up our "concerns" on her behalf.

Cue her stepping in "for me", except she got 100 times nastier. It damaged both of our reputations on that site. Worse yet... she was in the wrong the whole time. The mod had been a little harsh, but she took it way too personally.

Too many to count. But if you want a specific example, well...

I once knew someone -I won't say who they were or what fandom this was for- who was extremely high maintenance and got on the bad sides of a lot of people in this fandom for a variety of reasons, the biggest being their obsession with a certain genre of romance. We were friends at the time, so me being me, I stuck up for them and tried to get people to back off (politely) and even stuck by them when they pissed off someone important.

Then a few years ago, they got pissed off because I got interested in something they, in no uncertain terms, had no interest in, and proceeded to throw me under the bus, complete with passive-aggressive remarks and everything. Keep in mind, I did my best to put up with stuff they were into that I had no interest in, because I didn't want them to feel bad for liking something I didn't. (I'll admit, I am not a spotless lamb in this regard in the past, which is why I bit my tongue this time) I wasn't surprised they did this -they exhibited similar behavior to another friend of theirs-, but it still stung like hell, especially after a particularly catty remark on some birthday gift art they did for me.

I quietly cut them out of my life and I haven't spoken to them in years. I don't wish them ill, not in the slightest. I still remember the good times and creative synergy we had. But I'd rather not ever deal with them again if I can help it.

Edited 2016-04-14 23:40 (UTC)

Fandom friend. had an OC that I always defended from Sue accusations and reassured the author they were fine. I also defended the author from a lot of criticism for their attitude and behavior.

Got a little older and I started to keep my mouth shut about the OC because I started to realize things about them. Author seemed to improve a little and change their character up.

Eventually I started to drift away from the author as our fandoms changed and we grew apart. They developed an annoying habit of complaining about the fact that people shipped things they didn't like and wrote a post every week about how "I can't understand how people can ship that" or "ugh ___ shippers are such immature brats" . So I followed.

I check up on them a little later and they're a staunch conservative who follows Fox News because thy're not Obama lovers and the liberals are so stupid and suck and basically sounding like my eighty year old grandfather.

So glad I jumped ship when I did.

*so I unfollowed

I had the same thing regarding a friend's OCs. I defended them, and her, so much. The difference is that even she'll tell you now how terribly written they were. Also, she never told me not to defend her, but defending her the way I did made things worse for her, and I'm sure she knew it.

Well, to be fair I think I spent a lot more time talking with her then I did going out there and confronting people thankfully. I'm not a confrontational person. I think I did it because at the time I didn't have many friends in real life, and I felt like I owed her for being friends with me.

I guess we're both lucky in that.

She does admit her flaws now with the earlier version of her character, to be entirely fair.

There was a Spuffy fight that I wasn't even part of and the original comment was about stuff pre-Seeing Red, but this guy was getting jumped up and down on because "well, in two episodes Spike will try to rape Buffy!" and flooded with "humorously violent" gifs to make him "stop saying words" or "leave now and never come back", and when I said I didn't agree with him but am sorry for the treatment he was getting, *I* became the new monster in need of a takedown and banning.

Did this happen at Mark Does Stuff? :/

This sounds like a situation I remember happening there.

I almost got banned from there, too, but I copy/pasted every single comment I made and used them to prove what I did and did not say so they couldn't ban me. But it was a big mess. Ugh. That site gets really frustrating.

You are 100 percent correct.

ayrt, again

I also copy/pasted comments and emailed them to Mark to make my case. He flat-out ignored me.

a Muslim fandom friend who was a rather big name slash writer in our fandom, then who decided that gay people were against her religion and took all those fics down. I defended her and gave her hours upon hours of a listening ear, telling her to do what felt right to her, etc. Our relationship had always involved us respecting our different backgrounds and beliefs. But I was also struggling with my sexuality at the time, realizing I was bi or gay, and when I tried to process this with her, she shut me down and stopped being my friend.

Seriously, after that, I realized there's no fucking reason I should give religious people a pass for being bigoted. When I tried to reach out to her and respect her, she couldn't do the same for me.

Dude, a lot of times? I sort of do it on principle. I really got into trouble with a teacher ones for defending classmates I wasn't even friends with. Comes with the pesky sense of justice. People hardly ever appreciate it.

I moved out with a good friend of mine who was known for being pretty flaky and not emotionally stable, but she made it seem like she was growing up and getting her shit together and even though everyone thought it was a terrible idea I was like, "She just hasn't had a chance to prove herself! Just watch! She'll do fine!"

Skip forward to a year later when she's lost two jobs in three months for attendance issues after she swore to me she was going to get better about showing up for work. I made the mistake of telling her that I felt like she didn't care about how her actions were affecting me and that I couldn't afford to hold her up for very long.

Basically she blamed she of emotionally manipulating her and actively trying to make her start cutting again and blamed me for being the reason she couldn't hold down a job because I was apparently a terrifying, potentially violent monster who she still wanted to be friends with for some reason??

I got out of that apartment and friendship as fast as I could and you bet I'm not putting my ass on the line to help anyone else prove how changed they are anytime soon.

OH GOD prepare for a tale of drama (warning: pseuicide?)

So I had this friend, less than a year ago even. She was sweet, nice, and the kind of person you just want to roll up in a blanket and hug all the time. Let's call her Person A. The problem began with Person A being the kind of person to go on self-loathing suicidal rants about once a day. Which in itself doesn't make her bad, like, I struggle to refrain from doing the same thing, but it can be overwhelming. Now, I met Person A through Person B, a fandom friend of mine, and B started to get emotionally overwhelmed by this and took a step back from their friendship.

Person A flipped out.

She decided that she was going to tell everyone in the fandom that B had been sending her harassing phone calls and vicious text messages and that she'd had to destroy her phone to get it to stop. I believed her, because I was closer to her at the time and I have a bad tendency to instinctively believe the person who claims victimhood the loudest. She turned the entire fandom against B with her lies, and I found out much later that she actually pushed B to a full-out nervous breakdown.

Person C was a mod in the fandom. C was friends with both A and B like I was and was trying to figure out what was true and what wasn't. C was the only mod who was really considering that A might be honest, because apparently A had a habit of exaggerating things, and that pissed me off. I told C, and C agreed, that she should be taken seriously even if her claims seemed overblown to others because I know what it's like to feel more strongly about a situation than the people I'm talking to.

The drama continued to evolve with no sign of ending, as A started accusing B of more and more outrageous things and contradicting herself more and more, and yet I still defended her because I ~knew how she felt~ and apparently was naive enough to really think she wouldn't make up lies like that.

The thing is, some of it was her lying out her ass, and some of it wasn't lies, just extremely manipulative versions of the truth. This pattern of manipulation was exposed when I did what B had done and told her I was taking a step back to clear my head (me and C had only each other to solve the case with, so we both wound up really stressed out by the whole thing even as we struggled to piece together some conclusion with all the inconsistent logs and screenshots that passed for evidence).

In fact, it was her reaction to me "abandoning" her that finally got me to stop defending her. She started alternating between messaging me yelling at me for being a shitty friend and sending me videos of herself crying and begging me to take her back. I blocked her on everything, multiple times in some cases until C threatened her with a public disciplinary thread on the staff forums, which apparently she wanted to avoid badly enough to stop making new accounts to Facebook me and shit. I upgraded from my beloved flip phone to a smartphone just so I could block her number. The last correspondence I ever got from her was a text pretending to be from someone else, saying that she'd killed herself and that ~the person who would for some reason be texting me from her phone~ hoped I was happy with myself, because I was her only reason to live.

Me and B and C are all friends now and haven't heard from A in months, but I spent far too damn long refusing to believe A wasn't the totally innocent little cinnamon roll I was so sure she was. I feel bad for her in a way because I don't think her unhappiness itself was a facade; I think she suffered from delusions, and perceived molehills as mountains. I felt that even if some of what she was saying wasn't true, I needed to protect her.

I'm torn between hoping she's okay, and hoping she actually did jump off a bridge in the end because a part of me is just that terrified of her now that I can see all the abusive manipulation in hindsight.

Holy shit that's terrifying.

...woooooooooooooooooooow...

sending me videos of herself crying and begging me to take her back

Yikes. Yeah, whatever the deal is with this person, she definitely sounds like she's got some issues of SOME sort, and I do hope she is getting help for them or has gotten help for them.

That said, I'm REALLY sorry you, and persons B and C in this story, had to deal with that whole mess. Sounds like the mod in this story handled things pretty gracefully and maturely, too, so good on them for that.

I used to work for a small government contractor. I got that job in 2009, after the Great Recession had decimated the economy. I was happy to have that job, and grateful to the man who owned the company and hired me. When other employees mentioned he was sleazy I would say, 'he's not that bad.' He was a service-disabled veteran. He owned a small business. These were good, heart-landy things.

Time went on and after I had been there six months we went from having 8 employees to 4 overnight. Turns the fucker had three lawsuits. One was with his ex-wife, and the others were with the feds. After getting rid of half his work-force, he developed the habit of forwarding huge projects we didn't qualify for on to me, then disappearing to Colorado for a couple of weeks. I brought in some huge sales, and his question was always 'well, why didn't we get more?' Because there was no more. Contrary to popular belief, the feds do not have unlimited amount of monies they will give contractors.

I got laid off after working there for about a year. Last I heard the feds caught up with the asshole. I don't think he spent any time in prison, but I did hear he paid through the nose in fines.

I defended someone who I thought wanted a particular pairing tagged because the pairing was incest (which it seemed like the other people in the conversation didn't know), only it turns out no, they were just being homophobic.

Urgh, I hate when that sort of thing happens. And you can never seem to take it back without people thinking you're just backpedaling.

Ex-BFF. The one coworker (oh boy).

A friend of mine faked being abused by another friend of ours, when in fact she was being the abusive one, and lied to me about the whole situation.

I'm retroactively very glad that I kept what she'd "told" me a secret, and sorta treated the supposed abuser (actual victim) perfectly normal. But on the other hand, I'm pretty sure that some of the emotional support that I offered to the liar ended up both enabling her further, and making her crash worse when she lost that support after I found out the truth, and she kept trying to deceive me enough times that I had to cut all ties with her. And when she did crash, she did this thing where she tried to repeatedly drag everyone else into the dirt, presumably so that eventually someone other than her would land guilty side up.

Every time I tried to help someone who was actually the antagonist in the scenario. Like, I stand up for someone getting pushed around, and it turns out they're a sexist/racist/homophobic bully who actually deserved the treatment they were getting.

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[ SECRET POST #3389 ]

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