Why? Why Are You Still Here?

“Why? Why are you still here?”

Further to this :

I’m posting one more time on this, and then I’m hoping I’m done. But I continue to see bad-faith takes on the settlement statements that were released this week, and I’m so done with the double standard from so many people in Kinnporsche fandom who have spent the past three+ months engaged in hypocritical bullying and victim-blaming and/or remaining damningly silent in the face of actual, public and visible abuse of Build Jakapan.

This wasn’t even a he-said, she-said situation. This was a months-long campaign of cyber-bullying, harassment and abuse – verbal, emotional and psychological – that Poi carried out against Build online, in the open, with no attempts to hide it. We saw her abuse him, repeatedly. We saw her be homophobic toward him, and not only did everyone who was ready to rush into battle against Build for supposedly being homophobic while making money off the queer community now stay silent about it, Poi got almost 10K retweets of it, so all those people who’ve wanted to cancel Build since last summer? We can see how much their allyship is actually worth. We saw the release of the VP novel with his bruised, bloody and battered face on the cover like some kind of disgusting revenge fantasy splayed out in public. We saw her release messages about sexual matters that were insinuated to be his private messages – which, like everything she’s ever posted, have not been verified as real and correct, in the setting of her admission of lying and faking and making false accusations with other material she released. But if they were real, the release of those messages would be on the same spectrum as revenge porn. We watched her commit outright theft of his belongings, and we watched her lie about his words and actions in an attempt to drive a wedge between him and his fans, we watched her punch down at those fans by invading their privacy as surely as she invaded his, we watched her make it all as filthy and gross and mercenary as she could in order to besmirch it as much as she could, watched her laugh about how much fans cared about him like he doesn’t deserve any kind of care or concern, like he’s a dog she can kick around without repercussion.

And antis joined in that abuse, plenty of people in the fandom were complicit in it – lies were collected and reblogged and spread around as supposed receipts of what a terrible person he was, by people who repeatedly represented themselves as “neutral,” without the least bit of concern for the provenance of those rumors, which were already in unbelievable supervillain territory and sure enough, turned out to be actual legal slander. People posted things like “burn in hell,” or made and spread vile memes when he left BOC like the whole thing was something funny, to laugh about, rather than a serious issue like accusations of intimate partner violence. He was called trash, garbage, an incel – at the same time people were vilifying him for supposedly cheating on Poi, so which is it? Is he an incel or was he fucking half of Bangkok? In one of the most breathtaking instances of victim-blaming I’ve seen in a long time, people amplified and spread the lie that he slept with Poi to get his role like it was some kind of gotcha, as if – had it been true – that wouldn’t have been evidence of Poi’s harassment and sexual abuse of him. The casting couch isn’t any less abusive when a man is subject to it than when a woman is subject to it. If it’s gross and abusive for Harvey Weinstein to do it, then it would be gross and abusive for Poi to do it, and the way some people acted like it would somehow be Build’s fault? I’m sure every actress in Hollywood would love to hear that. Or would it be OK because he’s a man? Because that sounds awfully close to those creeps who say that teenaged boys should think they’re lucky when their female teachers molest them. (Or maybe when women in power over them on the filming set coerce them into giving massages?)

And as we saw all this happen – even as people patted themselves on the back and reassured each other that this wasn’t a witch-hunt, that it wasn’t an online mob working itself into a frenzy - 99.5 percent of the people who had been so very concerned with compiling and spreading everything and the kitchen sink during the initial feeding frenzy on Build went aggressively silent in the face of Build’s legal claims, including defamation, coercion and other abusive behavior by Poi. Suddenly, we started getting calls for circumspection and civility - aka silence - now that Build and his reputation and his career already had been savaged. Now that it was becoming evident that these same people were complicit in her abuse of him and had helped create the very scenario he said that she had threatened and kept him under control with. Now that they had helped an abuser get their satisfaction during what is traditionally the most dangerous time for abuse victims – when they try to leave.

Suddenly people were just done with all of this, just so very tired of it - now that the damage was done, and what was left was clean-up of the havoc they had helped wreak.

This fandom has done nothing to change my opinion that this whole debacle was never actually about genuine concern over intimate partner violence, but was rooted in shipwars - going all the way back to last summer, when someone went digging back through Build’s socials to find comments eight years old that could be blown up by Twitter cancel culture just as the Vegaspete storyline kicked off, VP was increasingly pulling attention, and BBB’s facetime was increasing. Not a single thing I’ve seen since then – since Build was identified as the soft target of the VP ship and discourse around him was poisoned by purity cancel culture – has convinced me otherwise.

People in this fandom took a deadly serious issue like intimate partner violence, and they used it as a tool for their petty shipwars, and they used it to get a little hit of self-righteousness, as a little “moral” crusade that allowed them to get their Two-Minute Hate on in a way that was deemed socially acceptable and gave them a taste of blood because it was wildly successful in the real world in a way keyboard slacktivism rarely is. It’s very telling, though, how much concern they actually seem to have for abuse survivors when they won’t even call out abusive behavior happening publicly, right in front of their faces. I guess some abuse victims do have to be perfect, or maybe it’s that some people do deserve to be abused, despite the claims when people were simping for Poi?

It’s very telling when their biggest concern appears to be using abuse claims as a cudgel to make themselves feel righteous - because it appears that’s all Poi ever really was, a tool for some people in KP fandom to beat Build with. If they actually, honestly gave a shit about her, someone would have shown concern about her mental health and whether she has any kind of support network at all, rather than egging her on, encouraging and amplifying her abusive and out-of-control behavior online. I’m not going to deny that I dislike Poi, that I’ve found her distasteful and incredibly off-putting since watching her behind-the-scenes behavior with the KP cast, including trying to yank Build to the edge of a balcony on a high-rise building as he tried to resist and laughing about being called out by Jeff for sexual harassment of a minor. But one of the things that I also found disturbing about this whole debacle was the way people encouraged and enjoyed - relished - behavior that ought to be concerning for her mental health.

And even now, I’ve seen people act as if the behavior that Poi and Build have admitted to in their statements was equally bad. Sorry, no, him secretly recording a conversation that was evidence of her abusive behavior is not equivalent to her faking pregnancy claims against him and insinuating that he was the reason she got an abortion or miscarried. I’m sure all abusers would love it if conversations in which they talk about their abusive behavior were kept private and secret, but I’m extremely suspicious of anyone who wants to act like that recording shouldn’t be released - they should ask themselves why they’re ok with abuse being covered up.

Would they call a woman who secretly recorded evidence of being abused a liar?

aloof characters who smile the most with a certain someone 🤧

the only thought going through my head as i watched this scene was: they wrote it for me

i've never felt this way before – or if i did, i got disappointed before reaching the finish line. but with vegas? the writers truly gave me everything i wanted and then more, and i still can't process it

i know some people wanted vegas to kill his dad, or pete to do it for him. i can see why. but what i wanted was this: the angst, the pain, the inner conflict. because vegas can hate his father all he wants, it doesn't change the fact that his feelings are a lot more complicated than that

he hates him but he's also desperate for his love and his approval. he can't stand him but he also wants to make him proud. he clings to the hope that one day things are gonna change and he's gonna prove himself worthy and his dad is gonna stop thinking of him as nothing but a failure, a disappointment, a burden he's forced to carry

so when his father dies, vegas grieves

and this is everything i needed from this scene

BUNGOU STRAY DOGS + SEASON 4 EPISODES

What is your most unpopular Vegaspete opinion!! Please please please I want to know

i need to apologize to everybody who is expecting some sort of deep and meaningful headcanon here, because this is... not that deep. i do feel very strongly about it, which makes reading fic for this pairing difficult if not impossible, but i acknowledge that having such a very strong opinion about it is A Bit Silly.

but this is fandom. The Silly Opinion Place.

my opinion is this: i don't think post-canon vegas and pete are into pet play

my reasons aren't even that deep. i just think that it would remind them both, in a very bad way, of some of the worst moments of their recent lives, what with it being linked directly to a) torture, and b) attempted suicide. i don't think either of them intensely craves getting off on anything that's dehumanizing or based in an extreme power differential or, you know, reminding them of almost dying. the sex that blew both of their minds and rewired their brains and altered their worldviews was the exact opposite of that, and the reassurances they gave each other in the epilogue were also the exact opposite of that. so.

(also, related but somewhat separate: i do think vegas is a sadist, and pete clearly likes bondage, but those are not actually the same thing as being strictly dominant or submissive, for all that fandom stubbornly assigns all flavors of kink to that one spectrum.)

also i think this is one of those cases where pete might be down for it cuz i think he's a kinky fucker who will try anything (in bed! absolutely not out of it! as his whole character arc is about realizing and admitting he hates being a non-person in life), but vegas would get thirty seconds in and immediately have a complete spiraling breakdown remembering pete holding a knife to his own neck and crying about never feeling like a person, and that would not make for a sexy time. it would be a bad time. ugly crying. anger. panic. lashing out. lesson learned. they wouldn't do it again.

i get that almost everybody in the fandom disagrees, which is fine. that's cool. we all like different things. it just means i don't have much to read in this pairing even though i love them and want to read about them being horny fucked-up assholes all the time. sigh.