I know I might not come across like I do, but I really did need someone to tell me that. Thank you.

It’s genuinely just depressing having put hours of my life into that video to have it undone like this by (primarily) a half-baked thread by someone who admits to shipping Nishitani and Shishido and not wanting to see Nishitani as a sexual abuser specifically because it would get in the way of their enjoyment of the ship.

Never mind that they’re slaveowner-and-slave and that Shishido’s lifelong conditioning makes it impossible for him to ever enthusiastically consent to anything Nishitani would want from him. Never mind that Nishitani’s only personality traits are being uncontrollably horny and sadistic, but oh no, he would never lay a hand on or even so much as think an impure thought about the person he enjoyed tormenting the most out of anyone we’re shown.

That’s SO much harder to believe than the idea of a victim “defending” and “going back to” their abuser (an extremely commonplace occurrence in real life, one that is part of my day-to-day), which barely even applies here because Shishido is ultimately doing all of that to get ahead by any means necessary.

The irony isn’t lost on me either that I spent so long meticulously censoring every username from the tweets featured in my full video that I had to delay the video for a week, that I repeatedly emphasized that the reason I made the video was a harassment incident and to not harass anyone, and then I get QRTed twice and harassed nonstop even across platforms. I get everything I say and do scrutinized to the smallest detail. I get accused of “[wanting my] little oriental babies to get raped bc its [my] fetish.”

It is depressing. It’s depressing to feel like trying to shed light on this issue has only invited more scrutiny and disbelief than ever. It’s depressing to feel like I should never have opened my mouth and should simply have stuck to using my “”“platform”“” to post silly snippets with no substance, things I ACTUALLY do “for clicks,” rather than even try to speak on a topic that means something to me. It’s depressing to feel like this is being buried simply because people want to absolve their problematic fave of being THAT problematic, or they (understandably) want to live in the comfort of believing their favorite character hasn’t been through such an awful thing, or both. It’s depressing to see this become a “he-said-she-said situation” in a grim recreation of real-life rape culture, just as I’ve been drawing parallels to the entire time.

Most of all it’s depressing to lose a character as precious to me as Shishido to all of this, because all I can think is that, in failing what I set out to do, I’ve failed him. I can’t listen to songs that remind me of him. I can’t listen to his themes. I can’t look at him. I can’t even picture him without my mind blocking him out of the image unless it’s a scene from the game. One of my best friends sent me cute chibi fanart to cheer me up and I broke down crying. I couldn’t look at it unless my eyes were unfocused.

So, again, I know I might not come across like I do, but I really did need someone to tell me that. Thank you.