I know I may get crap for saying this.
But, there's no time like right now to be honest about it.
I know people would often name drop VShojo when I said I wanted a home. Especially after I had the hardest experience of my life 2.5 years ago.
And I never shared the real reason I was more aggressive towards them/shutting down that idea.
2 years ago, on the 7th of February 2023, a kind friend helped me through the insane turmoil and panic I was feeling from being locked out of the accounts I had at the time. They knew Gunrun personally and offered to connect us, because he also thought that he could help me. As desperate and determined as I was to find a solution that would help not just me but others who were still in Niji too, I jumped at this chance.
The 3 of us talked in person and I told Gunrun about everything that that one girl had experienced and seen while in Niji. Everything from the unfairness of staff, the small percentage from merch, how trapped and hopeless it felt for her to fight back or just exist there though she tried so hard.
And then, I pitched my idea.
What if that girl and several others left, and they made a gen of ex-Nijis in VShojo. Would he be willing to help them create a better future together.
To my surprise he said he liked the idea, and asked me, who else did she think would be interested in leaving with her to do this. She honestly didn't know too many of the people there that well in her short time, but she named a few who had been friends to her and she knew in private. She really wanted to help those there, and we spent the night brainstorming and talking about this.
After showing some considerable interest to my surprise, Gunrun then introduced me to one of the managers at the time so I could tell them the same story. Gunrun told me that he wanted to help and that this sounded like a plan, and simply had to wait for Niji and I to part ways. I remember having so many feelings of relief and confidence. I felt like I'd found my hope.
Of course, the one girl was terminated, doxxed, and no help was offered. Even months later, I would reach out to him again and, like we had never spoken, he gave me a surface level response.
I want to apologize to anyone who asked in the past about this, for being angrier than I would have been if this hadn't been the case. This is also where my comment of saying what I did about VShojo as a whole came from in the past. It wasn't the other people's fault. Unfortunately I really just felt trapped and abandoned all those years ago and even now, I remember how it felt.
I hope this explains why for so long, I felt like I wasn't worth "saving", I felt like I had no value, I felt like "why just me, left out?"
I know I dodged a bullet. But part of me still wished I could've suffered together with others that I wanted to be with as allies instead of being a reject.
(To protect the privacy of those involved, I will not share names of anyone. But after that, we only corresponded through an app called Signal that erases the logs of chats after a certain period of time, so I do not have any logs of this nor the contacts due to this being several phones ago.)
