Blood In The Water

The Fallout from the Crashout

It’s quite common for those of us who’ve ended up on the wrong side of online dramatics and hysterics to make ill-advised statements after the fact that signal to shark-like critics that there is blood in the water—that we’re now emotionally vulnerable and easily hurt. For many online “trolls,” this is the moment they strike hardest to cause the maximum amount of social damage in order to ostracize and isolate their targets. There is no good intention to these actions, there is no well-meaning motive, there is only the rhetorical power that comes from show-boating one’s self-righteousness among the contrast of another’s destruction. One really good angry and bitter slip of the tongue (or the fingers) can be far worse than the initial “crime” committed, causing a veritable landslide of back-lash and the supposed “verification” of the canceled’s alleged “true nature.” This couldn’t be further from the truth.

The current social media landscape has proven itself to be a minefield, packed with Milkshake Duck moments just waiting to happen given the most innocuous of missteps. Though sometimes cancellation can be a net positive for personal growth, it’s more likely to have the opposite effect. For every one person who’s able to find themselves sitting with their thoughts and reflecting with a therapist in order to gain the most positive forward momentum, there are more who find themselves alone and stagnating in their isolated bitterness. If you’ve ever noticed the tendency of those who’ve been cancelled finding their way through what’s oft called the “alt-right pipeline,” this is what I mean: loneliness breeds contempt which creates emotional vulnerability. Emotionally vulnerable people have a higher tendency to become victims of cults or political manipulations based on strong emotion.

Those who’ve been ostracized from their communities are unlikely to consider an attempt at rejoining to be worth the effort due to the performative grandstanding and impossible re-entry standards invented by the gatekeepers of those communities. For some online personalities, it’s not too far of a stretch for them to go ten toes in on fascism when they find themselves love-bombed and offered a soft place to land in a community that doesn’t make them feel guilty for things entirely out of their control. Think about the scene in Barbie when she’s crying on the bench outside the school after being called a fascist. See, if Barbie wasn’t…well…Barbie, and was instead a person capable of anger, contempt, and resentment, she would have been a decent target for malicious alt-right recruitment. As the saying goes: Hurt People hurt people. Though we might grow up, we’re never going to lose the impulse to call our bullies names when they’ve called us names first and we’re never going to shed the resentment caused by any kind of public humiliation, even if we might have actually needed a bit of an attitude adjustment (or overhaul but that’s a bit more rare).

For indie VTuber Zentreya, this manifested in an outburst lamenting the actions of the “woke” or “snowflakes” which, understandably, conjured up fears that she was already halfway down the alt-right pipeline. Considering that the controversy was centered around a military style of her human VTuber model (“Commander” costume), these fears were multiplied among those who had originally fallen for the insinuation that the uniform style was particularly Nazi-esque. Zendreya has since come out on a stream to apologize for the utilization of these terms, explaining the cause of her outburst on Twitter, “I think not wanting to be labeled a Nazi immediately out of the gate would get anyone heated.” She did her best to quell concerns about her ideology and denounced those who defended her with dubious intentions as well as those who came into her comments only to cast hatred against those who had jumped on the bandwagon against her. Still, the sting of those words has yet to heal as there are some of her former audience who have yet to forget or forgive, still convinced even now that her model’s costuming is a covert dogwhistle in welcome to Nazis. Fortunately, the person who initially instigated the whole affair managed to hash things out with Zentreya—making this whole thing something that probably should have been done in direct messages rather than out in the middle of the open air where this kind of social damage can spark the beginnings of isolation and emotional vulnerability. Whatever her detractors thought they were doing, what they actually did was real and direct harm toward someone who just…has a VTuber model with a uniform aesthetic. In a clear and direct statement on Twitter, Zentreya made no bones about it: “[I’ve] made it clear today I don’t fuck with Nazis and I don’t let them into my community.”

In my opinion, Zentreya did a fairly good job in mitigating not only the initial issue of her military costuming but also the crisis of her usage of out-of-touch terminology in the face of an ever-growing paranoia of “secret” Nazis. She can only address it so many times before it becomes something only the worst of her online trolls will bring up again, the whole thing becoming what it should have been in the first place: a non-issue. From the very beginning, it should have been nothing, the military aesthetic comparable to thousands of other VTuber model costumes throughout the years and ultimately not that big a deal. Her statements beyond that were those which caused the biggest problems and they would never have happened aside from the context of the first nothing-burger complaint. At this point, she’s pointed out that she can only apologize so much because to do any more is to be beholden to it forever. From this point on, my advice to her is to never speak of it again. Those who bring it up should be blocked or muted. Do not answer questions about it, do not even consider that it ever happened at all.

We move forward. We cannot move back. The momentum is in the here and the now. Reflect, do some personal journaling, talk it out in therapy, read a few books to consider other perspectives…and then let it go. Let it go. Let it go. For some, there will be no coming back, but we don’t have to subscribe to that idea for ourselves, nor do we have to subscribe to everyone else’s opinions of us. Zentreya is another in a long line of folks unfairly maligned by the misguided, misinformed, or just plain old mean folks on the internet. To quote some of the youngsters on this infernal landscape: It’s not that deep.

If Zentreya or anyone else needs resources after having been “canceled” or dog-piled online, a very good friend of mine has provided a page specifically catered toward creators who’ve found themselves the epicenter of the outrage bomb. Since it seems like this culture of moral grandstanding is here with us to stay for now, it seems prudent to come to terms with how we should handle these episodes as they arise. It’s a disappointing world to live in, but it’s the one we’ve got. God speed, Zentreya. I hope you’re doing well. If you need to talk to anyone who’s been through this, let me know.