Regarding Pyhrrus


I didn't want to do this and still don't, really.

Let's discuss what happened. Pyhrrus's account of what he did that night was accurate, more or less. "Me and Calico agreed to share the couch and I made the wrongful mistake of placing my hand on her leg and touching for far too long to the point of making her uncomfortable" is technically true, but leaves some information out. Yes, the couch was small, but no, he didn't have to rest his arm between my legs. He didn't have his arm there until we'd been there 15 minutes and I seemed asleep. Over the course of the 1-2 hours he was doing this, he rubbed both of my inner thighs and switched his palm from thigh to thigh multiple times. I tend to freeze up in situations like this and was just hoping he'd go to sleep and stop but that didn't really happen. He got up and moved to somewhere else around 5am and I was able to get a bit of sleep before the tournament the next day.

Pyhrrus's statement that "we dealt with the situation, and made amends with it" was accurate when I thought I was the only person he had non-consentually touched. I tend to depersonalize myself and pretend bad things aren't real or damaging or significant when they happen to me and that's why I didn't tell anyone this had had transpired until after the tournament was over. Having to sit next to him the morning after on the 4 hour drive to the venue was really uncomfy, he put his arm around my headrest and I just stayed quiet and tried to forget that anything had happened.

None of this really felt real until I reached out to a mutual acquaintance yesterday and asked if she "knew of any other people who have been non-consentually groped by him" and she immediately responded with "Maddy has been." My acceptance of his apology on the last night he was there was predicated on the assumption that he groped me out of ignorance; from the kinds of questions he was asking me (e.g. "what I did... was that... rape?") I really thought he'd never talked to anyone about consent before. But that's not the case.

After her issues with him, Maddy sat Pyhrrus down and pressed the issue extensively. Learning that I was the third woman in the P:M community he'd done sus shit to really changed how I feel about this whole situation. I had mentally minimized and dismissed its impact on my own life but the emotions I felt reading the other two girls' accounts made my own experience feel real for the first time. Like, fuck, this happened.

The reason we have "no screenshots, or Direct Messages" of our correspondence was because I had never met or heard of him before that night. Unlike the other two people he wronged, I had no idea who he was beforehand. He seemed nice and I didn't want him to have to sleep in a non-reclining armchair or on the floor. I had only been on hormones for about half a year at this point and assumed I was too gross-looking for anyone to want to creep on me. (One thing I am grateful to Pyhrrus for is teaching me that I shouldn't give the benefit of the doubt to strangers; I could have learned that lesson in worse ways, I guess.)

One of the many things that sits really wrong with me about this is the fact that one of the other girls was also about half a year into hormones when he made moves on her. This is, need I say, an extremely vulnerable time in a trans woman's life, and given his past experiences, I believe I was targeted due to this knowledge.

I'm all for rehabilitation but this is made more complicated by the fact that this is a pattern of behavior. Pyhrrus feigning ignorance of consent and apologizing with the intent of getting the victim to keep things quiet are key parts of that pattern, and that's what worries me the most. He did what he did to me because he had zero repurcussions for his past actions and I don't know what would change that in the future. I do believe that people can change but Pyhrrus really made me and Maddy believe that he *had* changed as a result of our incidents, that we had taught him a new and valuable lesson that he would never forget!

I pretty much entirely disengaged with P:M after this event and switched back to Melee. I really liked the people I met at Lazer Lazer 20 (y'all are sick) but my enthusiasm for attending future P:M events was nuked by the knowledge that he'd prob be at a lot of them and that I'd have to pretend that I was cool with that. Mewtwo is the sickest character in existence so I don't want to stay gone forever but convincing myself to attend stuff again is gonna be a process.

I'm not going to ask for any specific action here, but I would like to ask that people be careful. There are multiple cases here instead of just one because Pyhrrus is really really really good at seeming genuinely remorseful and heartbroken for things he's done wrong and makes it seem like his number one priority is changing; he didn't change after consent issues with Maddy and I would venture a guess that he didn't change after groping me. I don't want revenge or closure, I just don't want to wake up in a year to news that he's done something to girl #4.

Please, P:M community, use your best judgement and demand actual demonstrable change from Pyhrrus, not just another wave of crocodile tears and empty promises.

Thank you for reading.

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