Deja vu all over again

I wasn't going to discuss the #GamerGate drama with Ralph's little group, but couldn't resist because it SO reminds me of a blow-up some 12 years ago in the Xena fandom. Long story short: I was a forum mod on the Talking Xena board, where there was an extremely vocal and aggressive group of people (in many ways forerunners of modern-day "Social Justice Warriors") who thought that if you didn't support Xena/Gabrielle as a lesbian relationship, or God forbid liked a hetero pairing for either one of them, you were a homophobe and were oppressing lesbians who were fans of X/G.



I was one of the group of people on the board who liked X/G as a friendship and liked the Xena/Ares romantic pairing, and I modded the Xena/Ares fan forum, so these SJW-ish types hated me with a passion. They couldn't really run wild like modern-days SJW fans do on Tumblr because it was a moderated board and flaming was supposedly against the rules, and for a while everything was fine, but then a new admin took over who was totally intimidated by the militants and in a pretty short time they managed to turn the board into a war zone. So my friends and I decided to leave and start a new board, Xena Online Community, from which we pre-banned five or six people who were ringleaders of that clique.



Then one of them starts a thread on Talking Xena whining about being preemptively banned from the new board.



Cue lots of drama and more screams of homophobia.



Drama goes on for three days.



At which point, two board members (themselves lesbians and X/G fans) start dropping hints about the militant clique having its own secret board. One of the ringleaders baldly states, "There is no secret board." I think they also dropped thinly veiled threats to dox those two women.



Then some screenshots got posted.



Turns out that the militant clique did in fact have a private board, which they had ironically named "The Evil Lesbian Alliance," where they strategized and plotted all this trouble they started on the Talking Xena board. Basically I was their #1 target. I have to say I was kind of amused that it took ten or so people to fight me :p



Oh, and the two women who blew the whistle basically had been invited to join this private board "to fight homophobia in the Xena fandom," but then quickly realized that it wasn't about fighting homophobia at all but about targeting people for daring to have a different opinion about the sex lives of fictional characters. Apparently they also realized after interacting with me on the board and reading some of my articles that I wasn't the evil right-wing homophobe they had been told I was.



The shitstorm was pretty massive, especially since one of the ELA board members was also a Talking Xena forum mod. (Since the admin was totally gutless, she was allowed to stay after apologizing and claiming that she wasn't really on the private board that much.)



Another result of this was also that half of Talking Xena's membership followed my friends and me to our new board.



And the moral of the story is ... talking shit about people in private chat groups usually tends to blow up in your face.



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