My View. (r/PokemonMasters vs. PL)

October 7th, 2020

       Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Meeting
3. The deeper discovery of PL
4. Our response and how it affects the community
5. Opinion of the community
6. Opinion of PL
7. Conclusion

Disclaimer: This document only represents my views and not those of anybody else involved in this doc (ie the rest of the staff team).

I. Introduction

Well it's about time I finally speak out publicly about the drama behind PreciousLeaf and the impacts it had on the community being a community figure of the Pokemon Masters community. With the thread about them posted by メインアカウントではありません(笑) (aka @ROSEMAR1NE), and the rise of anti-mod users due to our “inaction” against PL and heavy moderation favoring them, think it's time I should speak about the situation in my respective opinion. In case you don’t know me, I go by Mewleon, but some people call me Josh by my irl name. I’ve been running the r/PokemonMasters ever since the game was announced. I will try my best to explain and mainly show my opinion and some context regarding the situation.

II. Meeting

PL was first known to us by the mod team around the release of the game on twitter, he did not go into the discord until a little later. At first, we thought he was an alt of leafferoe (I forgot the name), an infamous user who posted NSFW continuously, especially of Leaf, on the PM twitter. However as we come to know later, this wasn’t the case, and as I theorize, possibly a person who targeted PL due to their heavy distaste (and possibly trauma) of NSFW. As we learn later, they continuously posted Leaf art, especially from the JP art community, which caused them to be targeted and cyberbullied for art theft.

Now this is where my first criticism comes to place, and a continuity throughout this document. People decide not to ignore PL’s all caps rambling about what they want from PM and their heavy appreciation for Leaf, I understand the art theft stuff, however, you should just respond to how the user was stealing art and call it quits, or again, simply ignoring them. Instead, the community decides to continuously harass them out of stealing art and their overapperciation for Leaf. I’m an artist myself and reposting without permission is unacceptable, yes, but we shouldn’t have to over brigade about what they’re doing, just keep warning them or even reporting it to twitter.

At first, yes, I thought too, that this PreciousLeaf was just over enthusiastic about Leaf and even Red, however, as I came to learn later with the staff team, there was much more deeper meaning, life defining meaning.

III. The deeper discovery of PL

According to our logs, PreciousLeaf first joined the discord around January 27th, 2020. As he progressed throughout the community, it seemed like he had a place to fit in, granted though, all the other communities I’m a part of like r/PokemonGo and r/Pokemon banned him eventually, r/Pokemon more quickly due to their actions which I could understand. r/PokemonGo however, tried to give them a chance. We had multiple joint meetings with admins and some of our mods having round table discussions about them.

r/PokemonGo did similar actions with PL as I will explain later. When users have heavy dislikement/resentment towards PL, specific mods would mute them or go one to one about their condition secretly, this condition I will also heavily specify in a bit. We generally did the same thing with users. Our goal was to make every user welcomed in the community, we didn’t want to be like other bigger communities that sometimes discriminate and we really do try our best to not let that happen.

PL is known to have multiple conditions, such as schizophonia, anxiety, bipolar, aspergers, and even mute. This caused him to be raised poorly and never even gotten treatment for any of the aforementioned conditions above, for more context, see figure 3.1. Allegedly, he’s 30 and even our team has to treat him more hands off in a way rather than to normal users, which is where the “staff bias” comes in. This was all discovered via 4chan and its archives and PL mentioning them on their twitter, when we tried to figure them out more.

Figure 3.1 - Further explanation of each of the conditions PL has.

IV. Our response and how it affects the community

With this discovery mentioned in part III, we tried to make them more welcomed and fit into this community, this includes our heavy moderation against cyberbullying. I admittedly, made at least 2-3 announcements on the server regarding cyberbullying all because of PL and nobody else, but vaguely. We frequently have to go one to one with users about PL’s conditions, some understand, some don’t and that’s ok. What’s not ok is what is aforementioned in part II, not ignoring and fueling the fire more about their overenthuism. It’s not generally hurting you or anybody else.

This mindset however, caused an anti-mod rise throughout the community and rising drama about us and our response. I think, especially more recently, we’ve been way too liberal on moderation actions, with 40-50% of them being related to PL, while PL has few moderation actions as an equivalent to, admittedly, a slap on the wrist. Dealing with PL was more of a drain than anything else, literally anything else, like improvements to the server or future plans that relate to PM. A recent staff feedback form had major complaints about “staff bias”, although not saying names, it's come to the conclusion that the finger is mainly pointed towards PL. It’s difficult for me to take a break from modding without having to worry about what’s going to happen to the community with tensions rising mainly due to over-modding and in favor of PL.

With all of this, I finally gave in to the mod team and the community about future plans regarding our actions of over-modding and committing to doing better on our behalf, however, I still worry everyday for the sake of PL and the community. I’ve had days where I wanted to ban them because it caused more unnecessary stress than what it needed to be, and I feel like that’s still true today.

V. Opinion on the community

I feel like in my opinion, the community is more at fault than PL, but PL is still at fault regardless, which I will explain in the next part. The community kept pushing this narrative against PL in bad faith, and it became a domino effect, with more people joining in this bandwagon. PL necessarily hasn’t done much wrong to begin with besides reposting art. They’re over enthusiastic and you somehow take offense to that, like why? The situation has evolved somewhat to a bad intent against PL when it was originally about PL continuously reposting art that isn’t theirs.

On the plus side, they don’t claim it's theirs and we really tried to teach them how to source art, however they don’t listen either, which again, I’ll elaborate later. I feel bad for the artists, not only is their art being used without their permission solely because someone is over enthusiastic, they are sometimes used as a pawn for the group who doesn’t like PL, and it's disgusting sometimes. They use the artists to take down PL because they simply don’t like them for being who they are, and PL is just another of those cases where people will manipulate people for their own gain. I’ve modded for 4+ years in various communities and I’ve seen it happen over and over again, even as recently in r/Pokemon against PL (Figure 5.2).

No wonder why PL tends to lash out easily against others, because they’re only defending themselves, or well, their definition of defending themselves, although not the best. Not only this, PL has explicitly wanted nobody banned for actions done against them (Figure 5.1).  I think it’s very sad how no matter how much they’ve been messed around, whether it’d be in 4chan, twitter, and various discord communities. I think the thing I could complement about them is how they continue to be themselves after all they've been through in said communities, especially 4chan, however the reposting of art as I continue to say, is still unacceptable. In my opinion, certain members of the community need to grow up and accept them, ignore them, or even block them instead of pushing them away from a community where for once, they feel accepted. If you’re one of those people that try to push them away, shame on you, especially if you understood their conditions. Speaking of conditions, it's why PL has their list of conditions on their darn twitter profile, so that people could try to understand, but to no avail, so unless you’re not a twitter user or don’t know any context of PL, you have no excuse.

I still remember how back in the former part of 2020, there was an anti-PL group on twitter that consisted of 15-20 people. It’s long gone, but that’s just a vague reminder of what people really would do against them (Figure 5.3 and 5.4).

In conclusion, I’m tired of the community lashing us out for doing what we think is right for both the community and PL. Yes, I admit we’ve leaned more towards PL recently, but I’m tired of dealing with continuous cases of cyberbullying within our own community and how that reflects on us. The response of the community should’ve been better if they really were opposed to PL that heavily such as what I mentioned. We did our part as mods, and its to keep the peace and make sure everyone is welcomed within our community.

Figure 5.1 - PL dming me not to ban one of their cyberbullies from the r/PokemonMasters Discord.

Figure 5.2 - Backing up Figure 5.2 as to what happened in 5.2, people making mockery of PL in r/pokemon, even after they were banned from there.

Figure 5.3 - Screenshots of the anti-PL group on twitter, names are censored for safety purposes and because this was a long time ago and the users above have been forgiven for their actions.

Figure 5.4 - Same as Figure 5.4

VI. Opinion on PL (cw//suicide)

I really do try my best to sympathise with PL, I really do, but not too much to an extent as to how the community would respond as aforementioned in part V. We really do try to help them, part of it because of me as I have huge bias on mental health. I grew up myself with deficiencies, and I got better as I grew up, but still somewhat struggle to this day, which is why we do our best to help them, but mainly on the downlow. As I mentioned over and over again, we and the team pride in making everybody welcomed in the community. For PL However, as months and months went and came, nothing came out of it but more backlash. Admittedly due to pressure from the community, we reflected on what we’ve done with PL really hasn’t improved at all. Chats about what we should do with PL only go in circles and no decision is made about their future actions and so on and so forth.

Like for PL, I could do only so much, and they refuse to change despite giving them advice to help make “the bullies stop”. We tried to help them source art, which they’ve done but stopped eventually. We tried to get them off of 4chan because it was hurting them but they won’t listen. The relationship between them and 4chan is like a parasitic relationship, it hurts them, yet they need it for one reason or another.

That’s just the bare minimum of what we tried to do with PL, and again nothing has come out of it but more drama. My opinion, for that matter, has grown more negative of them recently due to their inability to change despite advising multiple times and throwing out moderation actions. I could understand why they won’t change, especially for a person like them. Adapting to change is hard sometimes and I try to sympathize with that, and we can’t just force them to be what the community standards are. My biggest pet peeve is when people just keep saying “well why can’t they just get help?”. It’s far more complicated than that, we don’t know where they live due to the constant fear of being DOXXed by 4chan. All we could do is support them while being viewed as neutral to the outside community.

We’ve had several scared of them wanting to “disappear” and wanting to commit suicide all for the name of Leaf. That is what made us appease as much as we can. Honestly, I’m scared of the prospect of them committing suicide because I don’t want to be held liable nor should anyone else.

PL overall in my opinion I view as a misunderstood person, but at the same time, their actions shouldn’t have excuses anymore as we gave them multiple chances to improve and learn.

VII. Conclusion

If you made it this far, congrats on reading on my perspective of things with PL. I obviously may have forgotten something and I wrote this in haste with little proofreading due to university. I learned my ways throughout being a leader of such a big community, and PL was a major highlight that continues to be a highlight today. It’s a challenge and I realize that I can’t make everyone happy, but I just want to let you, the reader, know I tried my best. I tried my best to make everyone happy and this is how all parties treat each other, it’s sad and disappointing.

I really do have a life, even more so now, I created r/PokemonMasters in May 2019, and I was only 16 at the time. Today is October 2020 and now I’m 18, and I never thought of being in this predicament. I really do want to move on from this drama and hope that we could find a way to resolve this without any more fuel to the fire, because that’s the common trend nowadays, is adding fuel to the fire and even to outside communities. As I keep mentioning, just leave them be, let the artist take care of them or even just report the theft to the artist if your intention of going against PL is solely for art theft. And PL, I know them well enough, they need to learn too, nobody wins in this situation. Let all of this be a lesson to you, especially the people involved in this, you know who I’m talking to.

Anyways, that’s all for me, thank you for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy the Pokemon Masters.

Stay healthy and well,

Mewleon aka Josh.