Look, if this post is too heavy for this community, feel free to remove it. Admittedly this is a very serious subject, and it occupies something of a grey area regarding suitable discourse that I’m uncertain of. But Gore is one of the more popular of the recent batch of follower mods to hit the Nexus, and it’s because this situation is so serious that I feel there needs to be greater attention brought to it.
For those who aren’t familiar, Gore was a follower written both as a way for the mod author to express deeply personal feelings about traumatic experiences that occurred in their own life and as a memorial to a transgender friend of theirs who passed away. In order to be welcoming to the greatest possible audience, Gore had dialog options in order to refer to players by non-binary pronouns, and in response to some backlash against the above, Gore’s dev also uploaded optional textures that could be used to add top surgery scars to Gore, implying that Gore himself was transgender.
I imagine that these traits attracted a certain. . .audience of individuals who found the premise unpalatable.
Regardless of what one personally thinks about a follower being handled in the way Gore was, the fact that the situation ended in this manner concerns me deeply. Harassing not just the individual themselves, but someone’s real life contacts over a follower mod being written in a divisive way is terrifying, and it sets a nightmarish precedent for how the Skyrim modding community might conduct itself in the future. I feel the need to discuss what happened here because not acknowledging issues like this just leads to them festering further.
The community here at Lemmy is small. But I think we should put our best foot forward in holding ourselves to a high standard. We should strive to maintain a civil, friendly demeanor not just on Lemmy, but in the Skyrim community as a whole. To that end, it’s important to know what behavior is not civil and friendly, and what situations we should do our best to try to put a stop to if we see signs of it ramping up in the wild. Harassment of this nature is very much one of those situations. So I’d like to propose this. Let’s do whatever little we can to ensure that a situation like this never happens again. If harassment is against the rules/TOS of a website, it should be reported. And if not, I strongly recommend pushing back against it. The Skyrim modding community deserves to be a place where people can feel safe. Let’s make sure it is one.
EDIT It appears that development on Gore has resumed.
There is. . .a lot to unpack, but the TL;DR of it is that the people that Gore’s mod author has accused of targeting his friends and family were a pair of women that he also claims had an unrequited crush on him and targeted him for that reason??? And in response, those two women have in turn accused him of being the one to have a creepy unrequited crush on them and that have threatened to doxx them and have posted on a now-deleted Reddit thread outlining their side of the story. This story seems highly plausible on its face, however one of the two accused individuals has been going back and making posts and edits after the thread has already closed that make her narrative increasingly shaky. Most notably, she claimed that another follower mod author named RabbittWinri was opposed to her repeatedly bringing up information about a third party because RabbittWinri was afraid said third party would be targeted by Gore’s developer and his friends, which I personally decided to confront RabbitWinri about and received an incredibly blunt and noticeably confused response denying.
EDIT 2 SO IT TURNED OUT MY OWN RESEARCH FORESHADOWED A BIGGER REVELATION
The evidence posted against Gore’s developer has been revealed to be highly manipulated. The Reddit moderator that previously trusted the women who pressed counter-allegations against him has confirmed the legitimacy of this. I’m posting in bold text because considering the misinformation we’ve been fed, this update is important.
New information can be found HERE: https://www.teddit.net/r/skyrimmods/comments/14qwcap/regarding_recent_allegations_about_me_and_my_mod/
Part of my speculative discussion in the comments below this post involved suspicions of malicious editing in an image. AS IT TURNS OUT, THIS IS OUTRIGHT CONFIRMED TO APPLY TO THE AUDIO FILES, THE MOST DAMNING PART OF THE INITIAL REDDIT THREAD
YOUTUBE LINK TO REFUTATION, WHICH IS ALSO PROVIDED IN THREAD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTSoLGBSask
The new Reddit thread also contains a full transcript of events compiled by a different moderator than the one involved in the post, for those hard of hearing.
In case it isn’t clear, I would also like to point out that it’s Alarycia’s testimony that was refuted in the full footage which is now available. My own research turned up flaws in mookymilk’s narrative. So it seems that both of them really were lying in tandem for some reason.
. . .ehh?? Well that explains why the comments section for it unlocked and then locked again.
Looking at RabbittWinri’s Discord, he seems to have decided to. . .go back to working on it like nothing happened???
Which is frickin’ weird, but the messed up thing is that it only really tells us more about our own biases than what’s actually going on. If he’s guilty, then of course he wants to evade consequences for the whole thing. And if he’s innocent, the allegations he made were serious enough that he probably just wants everyone targeting him to buzz off. Because, you know, the reason he initially decided to stop was because he was being targeted, and now he intends to take other routes to deal with the situation.
. . .Looking at back at mooky’s post, the image where she says she has doxxing receipts has screenshots of him actually attesting to the fact that he was going to do exactly the above, so I guess we could have technically found out sooner. . .but it’s the exact same post where she kept lying about other topics for no fathomable reason, so I’ve started placing under deeper scrutiny what the context could be and why she would say that. Frankly I think there’s a theme of Gore’s dev doing things that look incredibly suspicious, but far more so if you already presume guilt out of him. The litigation threats towards the women are real as per what RabbittWinri told me, but if his friends and family were actually targeted he actually has grounds. . .plus can’t Alarycia countersue if he’s serious? If he’s lying, good luck in court I guess.
I’m going to guess the threat to contact (presumably mooky’s) college is also real (and worded in an entirely childish manner that doesn’t help his case), but that’s. . .not actually doxxing unless he says what college it is publicly, which the screenshot conspicuously doesn’t show. Doxxing is posting someone’s private contact information online, not alluding to the fact that you might have some of it. Which tracks, because in some comments that I think the mods deleted but are still visible on mooky’s page, she also accuses RabbittWinri of doxxing the Kaidan 2 Extended server, which is. . .also not what happened. She links the exact same thread I did in another post at one point, which very clearly just posts people’s Discord names. There was no personal information presented at any point. That is, at most, exactly as much doxxing as mooky is doing herself constantly bringing up RabbittWinri’s friend. I mean, as far as the Imgur link goes, Hayd contacting their college is unsettling, yes, but doxxing is still different than what’s being shown, and if they contacted his IRL friends and family. . .well, it’s not a good look, but I can see where the motive would come from. And the kicker with that particular screenshot is that it’s cut off at the top in a way that makes Gore’s dev look like a cartoon supervillain, but with a comment that could very easily be referring to mooky and Alarycia. Which wouldn’t prove innocence, either, but is definitely some very deceptive editing if I’m picking up on it correctly.
For my part, I’m still going to watch the situation cautiously. I’m not going to fully presume innocence of him yet, perhaps it’ll still turn out that he harassed Alarycia and I’m going to look very silly for playing devil’s advocate, but at the absolute minimum I no longer unquestioningly believe anything mooky said. Even the Reddit mod doesn’t know where the heck she came from, the response was basically just “Well, Alarycia has a very good track record on our server, so I have no reason to disbelieve any of this. . .oh, and mooky corroborated it, I guess. No clue who this woman is, but she’s a second witness, so she must be in the clear.”
Yeah? And I was in Carthage that time when it stopped being Carthage.
Even if Alarycia is telling the truth, I’m fairly certain at this point that mookymilk at best was contacted by Alarycia the same way RabbittWinri’s friend was, took one look at the accusations made, and decided to take what she thought was a good opportunity for 15 minutes of fame and run with it. And her testimony being bunk raises questions about the whole thing. Does she seem normal outside of this incident? Yeah, but like. I’ve unknowingly hung out with not one, but two different guys that pretended to be their own girlfriends online for attention and was clueless for years, along with an entire community of other people. Both of them faked all kinds of other bizarre drama as well and people didn’t realize until things eventually came to a head. It wasn’t a focus for people because, 99% of the time, they just posted normal content about their hobbies. People are weird. She wants approval from Alarycia, she wants approval from the Kaidan 2 Extended team, and she wants approval from Reddit. And she’s pleased as punch that she’s getting it.
Admittedly this post got kind of long and off the original topic, but I wanted to make a point about how perspective plays a big part in how everything comes off. The Reddit mod being exasperated that several people showed them “evidence” of the accusations being fake but it all just being what she saw is probably because all of the information is incredibly ambiguous to the point that people can make contradictory assumptions. I don’t think anyone can claim that Gore’s mod author is a man possessed of the fine art of, ahem, social skills. On the other hand, a massive chunk of the narrative against him is someone who’s clearly just in this whole thing for attention regardless of what literally anyone else’s motives are, so I’m going to just watch the whole thing with narrowed eyes and see what comes of it. While continuing to make note of any developments I can find to see which way the evidence falls.