An Open Letter to People Attacking Some Kid on DeviantArt

kiwibigj:

So most people who follow internet happenings know about Paige Paz, AKA Zamii,
the kid who was terrorized to the point of near-suicide by the Steven
Universe fanbase on Tumblr for drawing a character skinny.

You might not
be aware of this, but they haven’t exactly stopped their attacks just because this shit hit the mainstream press. Quite the contrary, they are now quite displeased that this kid has not killed herself.

This shit needs to stop. Now. We already had fucking Vade (for the uninitiated, a Tumblr user who drove her boyfriend to suicide, milks his death for pity points, and was responsible for an infamous harassment community here on Tumblr). We didn’t need more of that shit.

Tumblr should have learned from that incident, but no, of course it fucking didn’t. We have people who are literally at the point of  “asking for mass shootings by a madman” level as
far as Steven Universe goes.

This is insane, and anyone who does this should be treated as the absolute monster they fucking are. Nobody deserves to be attacked like this, least of all over a fucking kid’s show. You have to struggle mighty hard in order to outgun some of the internet’s previously infamously bad fandoms, but congratulations, Steven Universe fandom: You’ve done it. You now have a writer on Fusion trying to defend the actions of the abusers, claiming that we can’t blame the fandom for this attack.

I beg to differ: We can and we frankly should:

Steven Universe has become, without exception or hyperbole, the
single worst fandom on the entire internet now, to the point where it is now trying to standardize harassment attacks on a kid whose only crime was fucking fanart, and has responded to her suicide attempt with demands she die and/or be killed. There are over forty Vade-esque blogs, specifically dedicated to this one fucking kid’s destruction. For the crime of making art. I know almost nothing about Steven Universe, but I know that any fanbase that tolerates this behavior is not one I wish to be a part of.

It’s mind-boggling to ponder. So many fucking people, leveraged in such a way to attack some fucking kid who just wanted to do art, all doing so with the surety of a fucking lynchmob. This is disgusting and shows, without exception or hyperbole, that these people think that hurting other people for thinking differently than them is acceptable.

It isn’t, and is fucking disgraceful. There’s no defending this kind of shit. I don’t care what crimes, real or imagined, you feel have been perpetrated. If you do this sort of shit, you’re automatically in the wrong.