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.
SO. Uh, update on the Gore situation for everyone. Making this a top level post because this is an important development.
So postgeographix shared this Reddit thread, which I will also link here for convenience, which seemingly has some pretty damning evidence that this was actually a coverup for HaydenDaws harassing a couple of women. After all, there is a lot of it.
However. . .because I didn't want to believe that there was some woman-harassing follower mod author conspiracy, I decided to react in the only way a completely psychotic internet weirdo can.
I absolutely slammed RabbittWinri's DMs with requests for clarification while she was asleep.
Which, you know, in and of itself wouldn't prove anything. I guessed I just assumed I would be able to read the truth from the vibe?
But no, it actually did, insanely enough and here's why.
A couple of hours ago, mookymilk posted an update on the Reddit thread. Not sure why, the Reddit thread is closed, but here it is, in censored form out of respect for RabbittWinri's concern for her friend. You can find it there yourself, although it might be more respectful of the woman in question's privacy to simply read the censored excerpt here:
"A person" blatantly refers to RabbittWinri if you actually read through all of the posts on Reddit. So how does this prove anything?
Babbling incoherently about this was the last thing I did before RabbittWinri woke up, and her very first response was "Real quick, no, Hayd didn't threaten my friend."
So yeah, the whole thing that was said by mookymilk two hours before? Complete lie.
RabbittWinri didn't know too much on her end, but apparently her friend was initially on good terms with mooky and Alarycia and was approached by them about Gore_dev's supposed behavior, including that he was apparently insulting her behind her back. She apparently started getting suspicious and asking for proof (much as I did with RabbittWinri, although that ended much more amicably), and they promptly turned on her and went full Mean Girls. Which is just one person's word against another, of course, but the narrative disconnect sure isn't. Like, seriously RabbittWinri was ready to share her side and here I was eyeballing her groggy half-awake first comment like none of it even mattered.
After having learned about all of the above, I decided to share the quote from mookymilk with RabbittWinri, because Rabbit's initial response was pretty damning against mooky. Her response to the full quote? Her friend isn't banned from that server, she just leaves sometimes, that is her friend's real name, and any screenshots of her friend agreeing with mooky and Alarycia are from the time period where they were initially friendly to her mentioned in the previous paragraph.
None of which would have made mooky's narrative look fake if she hadn't specifically made up a story about how RabbittWinri was just trying to protect her friend from the evil Gore_dev. If RabbittWinri had been depicted as in on it, there would have been no way of knowing anything was fake. Certainly Hayd, RabbittWinri, and their friends weren't going to say much outwardly. But no.
The Reddit thread is a scam and a hoax and I feel like fricking Sherlock Holmes solving an unsolvable crime with some stupid minor chunk of evidence all the cops overlooked.
Edit: Also a couple of hours later she edited it again to say this:
Also not true. I saw people who were from both there and the Remiel server acting incredibly confused because the entire Gore server was shut down, without warning. There was no simply shutting down invites or "purging of the enemy," the place just up and closed up shop before the people already there even had time to react.
Like, mooky's narrative was so hard to challenge in her initial several pages of information, and now she's just. . .compulsively lying because she likes the attention? Which, again, the Reddit thread is closed. I don't even know what the point of this is.