Hero to Zero in Just a Few Short Months

Hello there. My name is Dreadfury, and if a lot of you reading this Twitlonger are familiar with the broader Smash community you most likely know me (if you know me at all) not by my own merit but because for a very long time I was affiliated with one of the most notable figures in the community. I was for upwards of two years a Twitch and Discord moderator for ZeRo; I started back when he was still a part of TSM and continued well into his sponsorship with Tempo Storm. Unfortunately, as of relatively recently a lot of that has changed, for better and for worse; I'm not affiliated with ZeRo or his brand in any capacity anymore, and after this extensive post I hope I never have to be associated with him ever again.



The chances of anything good coming from making this post are slim to none, but a lot of people well aware of my old status as one of ZeRo's most active and outspoken mods have been asking a lot of questions as of recently. Hopefully this answers more questions than it poses. Hitting the "Post It" button on Twitlonger is going to have a massive impact on my life going forward, and it probably won't be a very positive impact.



Well, I never thought I'd be seriously Twitlongering ANYONE, but here we are right now, Twitlongering someone I had idolized up until a couple months ago. For the intents and purposes of this post, I am going to be leaving out information about any other parties involved out of respect for those many people - many of whom I consider friends. They have nothing to do with this. Lastly, I fully acknowledge that I'm almost certainly going to get into a HUGE amount of trouble - including trouble of a LEGAL nature, potentially - for posting this because he is apparently notorious for coming after people with lawsuits.



As some among you may remember, several weeks ago I made a very vague post on Twitter in which I essentially said something along the lines of "never meet your heroes; you won't like who they are beneath that mask." It got a little traction, and it attracted a bit of skepticism and criticism, but there was indeed a great deal of context behind that incredibly vague subtweet: prior to Tweeting that out, ZeRo had personally kicked me out of a server I had spent two years moderating without receiving neither a dime nor a "thank you" in return, in spite of all my contributions, because of what I guess you can describe as somewhat of a mutual disagreement.



The reason for getting kicked? Well, another one of ZeRo's Discord mods had joked that he had moved to Twitter because at that point in time his streams were extremely infrequent and he was posting a lot of motocross-related content on Twitter; I immediately retorted with a message along the lines of "yeah, that's why I unsubbed," which ZeRo clearly didn't take a liking to. About a day or so later one of the Discord's higher-ups - NOT ZeRo himself, although at that point in time we were Friends on Discord and he could've easily DMed me personally - contacted me telling me that ZeRo told them to tell me that he really hates when people make jokes about unsubscribing and to apologize for making such a rude joke. Well, as he'd find out, it wasn't a joke and I wasn't laughing.



The screenshot of my full response, which he relayed to ZeRo - and which singlehandedly got me kicked out of his server without any comment, question, or "thank you," can be found here:



https://imgur.com/a/RqIeN9G



A few folks might call out some of the potential inconsistencies present within these screenshots and therefore dismiss this message as fake or edited. The entire message is present within just two screenshots, but my third screenshot exists to dispel any sort of rumors that the image is doctored solely because it says "TODAY at X:XX" even though the messages happened on October 29th. I did indeed screenshot this in the middle of a WoW session after my evening class that night. Ironic, I know. But it's an incredibly important detail to include here nevertheless: within roughly two hours of sending this message to this admin I was kicked, and it was by none of the Discord admins as they confirmed it with me thereafter.



So yes, I did indeed unsubscribe from ZeRo after a 28 month streak. Folks that knew me several months ago would be absolutely SHOCKED at a revelation like that, considering how much of a fan of him I used to be. But this whole thing made me realize something almost immediately, and something I know for sure a lot of people will struggle to accept: if you aren't providing ZeRo with any sort of monetary gain, he doesn't give a rat's ass about you no matter what you've done for him in the past. The instant you stop providing him with a cash flow, you are irrelevant to him. Many folks who frequented his Twitch chat and many folks who frequented his server know that, for better and for worse, I did a lot for ZeRo and the community. There were points - particularly in mid-2018 or so - where I conducted myself as a bit of an asshole on his server due to my position as an admin at the time (I'm not afraid to admit that nowadays because I've made a legitimate effort to change since then; a lot can change in a year and a half, and hopefully he can be proof enough of this fact if I'm not), but I still made a lot of contributions towards that stream, that server, and that brand.



But wait! There's more! There's so much more!



People that were in his Discord server might be familiar with something that happened several months ago, albeit rather vaguely: all of a sudden, without any explanation or buildup, half of his Discord moderators vanished from the server, myself included. I'm going to protect the identities of the other guys, but what basically ended up happening was that ZeRo received an anonymous donation from someone unaffiliated with our Twitch moderator team threatening to "expose" ZeRo for not caring about his fans. That donation contained a screenshot of something ZeRo had posted in our Twitch Moderator channel in Discord. In ZeRo's message he said something to the effect of "I hate my community sometimes" or something along those lines.



There's just one catch: THIS WAS A SCREENSHOT TAKEN DRASTICALLY OUT OF CONTEXT. As one of his moderators, I can most certainly confirm that he said it immediately after having a pretty miserable Super Mario Galaxy 2 stream, in which he clearly wasn't enjoying the game and his Twitch chat was being unreasonably toxic towards him. Given this, I genuinely don't blame him for saying something like that; the problem was, without context it looked extremely bad.



The reason why I'm bringing this up is because of ZeRo's reaction to the whole incident; because this was a message he had posted in a channel that was only accessible to his Twitch and Discord mods, someone on the team back in January had clearly either anonymously posted the message or had posted the screenshotted message somewhere else and someone had saved the screenshot and attached it to this donation. With absolutely zero basis for his accusations besides suspicion alone and without consulting the entire admin team, he ended up kicking several of his Discord mods from the server (or demoting them) and started coming after someone who had long since unaffiliated himself with ZeRo and his brand (out of respect for that person I'll be keeping their identity a secret). At some point he realized that I was in separate servers with these guys (even though I was relatively inactive in most of them) and ended up kicking me off the mod team after a short discussion. This whole thing was ultimately resolved a bit later - it involved another person who was admin at the time losing his status, which turned into a hot steaming mess in and of itself - but most of the mods - excluding myself - were not given their roles back.



At the time this had happened I was absolutely livid. ZeRo had been one for impulse decisions regarding a server he has decidedly limited involvement in despite being the owner - for example, on impulse he deleted the entire Sub Lounge channel because of some incident involving two folks subbed to another big Smash streamer getting really annoyed about how some of our guys were conducting themselves without consulting a single admin or moderator - but for the first time I was directly involved in one of these, even if my outcome was much better than that of the others.



This whole thing gave me some pretty big trust issues afterwards; I told ZeRo I'd only rejoin the server and his mod team if he promised to never make a single impulse decision like that ever again. He did, and that can be seen here:



https://imgur.com/a/pkYUgpf



I screenshotted this a lot more recently than I did the others; I've since blocked him on Discord (I blocked him on all other social media about a month ago) because after this, to reiterate, I don't want to be involved in any of this shit anymore.



Now, what about more of this "monetary gain" stuff I talked about earlier in this post? It's an incredibly bold assertion to say that ZeRo doesn't care about anyone if they don't provide him with any sort of monetary gain, but hopefully this next album sheds a bit more light on that claim of mine:



https://imgur.com/a/Dlq1v8q



This probably doesn't need too much additional context once you've read it, but I'll summarize it anyway. ZeRo found out that a town in my state had a Mom and Pop store that broke the street date on Kingdom Hearts 3 and was selling it well before its official release date, and he basically wanted me to go all the way there (it was very far from where I was at that point in time and I didn't - and still don't - own a car or have a driver's license) and buy a copy and ship it to him.



He was very hesitant to tell me why he wanted me to go to this store until he told me he found out that it was selling KH3 early; I was never a fan of KH3 but I was a bit excited about it initially, despite being unable to really help him out there, until he asked me if I had a friend in that area who could pick a copy up. As soon as he said "they cant know its me homie" I started growing a bit suspicious about this whole thing. I got a friend of mine to go to the store regardless - I just told him that KH3 was being sold there since he's a huge fan of the franchise and the store was closed anyway - but in hindsight this should've been a MASSIVE red flag considering he straight-up told me that this was illegal in the DM and the means by which he wanted me to get this copy to him felt like something out of a drug deal in a Hollywood movie or something.



In hindsight, though, I realize that I would've potentially gotten into an ENORMOUS amount of trouble for this whole thing and he was all too happy to let me take the fall for it if it meant he'd get a copy of the game before any other streamer. Note that this was in January and he still had a HUGE amount of subscribers from the Ultimate hype. So yeah, I guess I was basically just cannon fodder there, wasn't I?



Anybody familiar with the whole "duck vs. dick" message (tried talking about eating duck but I made a very crucial typo because "i" and "u" are right next to one-another and I didn't proofread) I posted in ZeRo's Discord back in April last year and the aftermath of that whole thing might expect me to bring that up right now, but I'm gonna be honest; I got what I deserved there and I basically forgave every single person involved in that server raid fiasco. It was over a year ago; I was a different person back then and so was he (for better and for worse).



So let's jump back to the present. As of very recently ZeRo has garnered a considerable amount of criticism for some incredibly insensitive Tweets he posted on his personal, secondary Twitter account. The one that immediately comes to mind is his whole "I think therapy is a waste of time and money" Tweet, which even some of his biggest fans and closest friends criticized him for. I'm gonna be blatantly honest: that isn't the ZeRo I used to idolize. I didn't subscribe to ZeRo because I wanted to hear him incessantly bitch about Smash Bros. all the time when everyone knows damn well that he wouldn't have gotten ANYWHERE without being successful at Smash. I didn't subscribe to ZeRo to hear him overshare about his sex life. I didn't subscribe to ZeRo to always see a laundry list of edgy and nihilistic posts about depression and therapy sucking and how terrible his childhood used to be or anything like that. I've heard it all before: I have no reason not to believe it all, but at this point it feels like he's just milking all his problems.



I want to conclude this extremely long post with this: if you're currently subbed to ZeRo, that's fine. I may not agree with your decision, but you're free to spend your money however you see fit and you're free to support whoever you want and I can't and won't try to directly change your mind. If you like whatever sort of content he posts on his Twitter accounts, then good for you! At least you see more merit in them than I do.



Thank you to anyone who managed to read all the way to the end of this tirade. I've noticed as of recently that I've been getting a HUGE amount of followers on Twitter after my most recent post related to this whole shit-show, and while I'm grateful that some folks were appreciative of my take on this whole thing my social media presence is probably going to end up being extremely low going forward, depending entirely upon whether or not this post ultimately gets me into the trouble I fear it'll get me into.



And since I know with absolute certainty that if this ends up gaining some level of traction ZeRo himself will find this, I have a message for him, too: stop pretending you give a shit about your fans when you and I both know you don't. If the person Tweeting from your personal account is who you really are then please, for the love of God, never be real with your fans again. I've blocked you and everyone directly and closely affiliated with you on all social media outlets I'm active on yet I still manage to see 50% of the garbage you post on that account, and every time I see one of those posts I feel genuinely disgusted to have ever been affiliated with you and your brand. Considering that I was a downright ENORMOUS degenerate on social media throughout 2018 and am admittedly still a bit of a jerk today, that says a lot.

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