soleil || #ACAB || WRATH MONTH ⚡ · @tomefaired
8th Jul 2020 from TwitLonger
I no longer accept Mangs's apology. This is my story.
I’m getting straight to the point. Mangs used his influence as a popular Fire Emblem YouTuber to manipulate and coerce me into sending him suggestive photos. He groomed me into sending him more suggestive photos as time went on, and verbally abused me when I spoke out to my friends. He apologized a year later and promised to change, but it’s clear now that he hasn’t done that at all. And that’s why I’m coming forward.
-EVIDENCE-
Putting this right at the start so no one has any doubts about this. In my opinion, the evidence speaks for itself. I now feel safe to come forward with all the evidence I have, joining the voices of so many in the gaming community who have dealt with sexual harassment, assault and abuse- but most importantly, because of Goosaphone’s courage in speaking out about her experiences and the support she received from the FEtuber community.
Below is a link to the text logs of our entire conversation, from start to finish. I encourage you to read all of it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aTlc63M1glgm4V92giIoDRxfAr1GdFmp/view?usp=sharing
I have a few Skype screenshots as well, which are also linked below. They will be posted again in this document as part of my story if you choose to read it. Some of these screenshots have been posted before, sometimes in Ft. Mangs on Facebook and sometimes Discord- so they may be familiar to some of you.
*September 2016*
Logs that were shared previously:
https://imgur.com/a/g8P9j1B
https://imgur.com/a/EUD6Vw7
https://imgur.com/a/V9szc5N
Logs that have not yet been shared:
https://imgur.com/a/6GGPpTl
https://imgur.com/a/guMd9Oq
https://imgur.com/a/BU4eFMq
Part of my convo with lovelylatias, another girl who was part of the “Mangs Harem”:
https://imgur.com/a/ZszC5Ga
*June 2017*
Mangs reaching out to me again:
https://imgur.com/a/mygBI9q
I contacted lovelylatias to find out why he wanted to speak to me, and this is what Mangs passed on:
https://imgur.com/a/t8K5Nmg
Our conversation after accepting his friend request:
https://imgur.com/a/Z69InVq
I had shared the logs with the second blacked out name, a friend who I trusted. He shared it with another friend, someone who later broke his trust- this was how the logs got out.
*August 2017*
Masoneliwood’s tweet calling out Mangs:
https://imgur.com/a/FAjy2ld
My replies in which I told my story, though without posting the logs:
https://twitter.com/tomefaired/status/893870795033915392
This led to a Reddit thread, linked in the imgur album below, where Mangs (and Mekkah, though he served as a neutral third party here) admitted the logs are real. You can also view these live on this web archive linked below. However, you will need to stop the page from loading partway through, otherwise the page will disappear. I have no idea why it does this, but the page is still intact. I suggest reading my story for further context on the Reddit thread.
https://imgur.com/a/Bkw6oIk
https://web.archive.org/web/20190111221431/https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/6rz6st/about_the_accusation_of_mangs/
In the current version of the page, Mangs has deleted his apology:
https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/6rz6st/about_the_accusation_of_mangs/
https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/6rz6st/about_the_accusation_of_mangs/dl8zmpc/?context=3
https://imgur.com/a/dUpgIOM
You can make your own judgments from here and stop reading if you wish. Here is my account of what happened.
________________________________________________
-HOW IT BEGAN-
4 years ago, in September of 2016, while participating in Mangs’s Corrinquest playthrough, he asked for “the ladies” to add him on Skype. Mangs was 27. I was new to the Fire Emblem fandom at the time so I was looking for role models. And I’d rarely seen content creators actively reach out to their audience in such a direct way, offering one-on-one conversations. I knew that Mangs was very much interested in the sexual aspects of women’s bodies, but I thought I could look past that if it meant I could talk about Fire Emblem with him.
I was 19 years old, just starting my sophomore year of college. It was my first time living in a dorm by myself, away from my parents. I was emotionally immature and I was in a very vulnerable place in my life. I was also dealing with the effects of compulsory heterosexuality- in other words, I felt like I had to have some kind of attraction to men because society expected it of me, despite identifying as a lesbian and having a supportive family. I’d also dated men before coming out, which only added to this feeling of doubt.
One of the first things that Mangs noted when I posted a selfie was that I looked younger than my actual age. I didn’t question Mangs thinking I was 16 because people in real life, including family and friends, often said that about me; and I was actually proud of this fact, since it allowed me to be more flexible with cosplays. (search “cuteness” in the logs, first result)
While my priority was to get to know a Fire Emblem content creator and talk about our interests, Mangs had other ideas. He would constantly ask me for suggestive pictures, asking me to wear clothes that showed off my breasts and ass. This was the only way that he would actually talk about Fire Emblem or anything normal with me. Pics first, conversations later. It felt like he didn’t care about my interests or me trying to talk about Fire Emblem with him. He would just give short answers before asking for more pictures. I liked the compliments, they made me feel good about myself. There was always this underlying feeling that the conversations felt wrong, but I continued talking with him because he was a popular Fire Emblem YouTuber, and I liked the gratification of talking to someone with that amount of influence in the community. At first, this was simply Mangs asking for pics, but as he normalized the “pics for conversations” transactions, manipulating me into accepting it, I sometimes ended up initiating, as you can see in the second screenshot. We could then talk about normal things from there, once he was finished commenting on my body.
https://imgur.com/a/g8P9j1B
https://imgur.com/a/6GGPpTl
The “conversations” (if you can call them that) kept going for a while. Mangs eventually set up a point system for the photos which he called “Mangs Points”. I could trade these in for voice chats and other things, depending on how suggestive the picture was. This included my character “Silver” being revived in Corrinquest, as the last screenshot shows:
https://imgur.com/a/guMd9Oq
https://imgur.com/a/EUD6Vw7
https://imgur.com/a/BU4eFMq
I had no idea how far this system went or how many “points” I even earned. I was skeptical. It seemed like an excuse to get me to send more photos, but the rewards were promising, if he intended on delivering on them- Mangs can clarify that himself if he chooses. Mangs and I talked about me being part of a “Mangs Harem”; there was one other girl who I know was part of it with me. She went by lovelylatias, though I referred to her as “Riviere'' in the text logs (the name of her Corrin in the stream). She was around the same age as me. Mangs claimed that lovelylatias had a lot of “Mangs Points” which expressed the intent to set up some kind of competition between myself and her. This is part of my conversation with lovelylatias proving this, where I expressed my skepticism, but my intention to keep going:
https://imgur.com/a/ZszC5Ga
To my knowledge, lovelylatias later ended up dating Mangs. I hold nothing against her and I considered her a friend during the brief period of time that we talked, even congratulating her when I learned she was dating him.
I also felt pressured to lie about my sexual orientation in order to get Mangs to keep talking to me. By this point it was clear to me that he only answered to pics. So when he asked me in the middle of a normal conversation, “are you attracted to guys?” I was shaking. (Relevant part in the logs: search “Emmeryn”) I said I was bi, but “not normally” attracted to guys. I mentioned the boy I dated in the past as proof of this. As mentioned before, the fact that I dated this boy in the past was still causing me to doubt my lesbian identity, despite having broken up with him after coming out.
One pic Mangs asked me for frequently was a bra pic, which he said would earn me a lot of “Mangs Points”. I resisted for as long as I could but I eventually caved. I was afraid that if I didn’t send it, he’d stop talking to me and I wouldn’t have that kind of contact in the community anymore. But that didn’t change the fact that I felt disgusting for doing it.
Eventually I grew sick of this, wanting to find a way out. It was clear that I wasn’t going to get actual conversations from him like I had originally wanted. I was constantly fearful that if I didn’t sever ties properly, Mangs would get angry at me and do something with my photos. And if I told him upfront, I was afraid he would accuse me of leading him along. The stress was so overwhelming, and I posted some of the screenshots on my Tumblr so my friends could see what was going on. At the time I only had 13 followers. I had shown Mangs my Tumblr before, so that’s likely how he found out about it (though he claimed it was from a fan). But it wasn’t going to reach a whole lot of people, I had only posted it there for my friends who followed me on it. This was Mangs’s response before we blocked each other.
https://imgur.com/a/V9szc5N
He used demeaning and manipulative language towards me. I wasn’t trying to spite him or defame him. I wasn’t jealous of lovelylatias at all; I was a lesbian who didn’t feel any attraction towards men. I just wanted to get my frustrations out there because I was scared, and I wanted to let his actions speak for themselves for the few people who got to see my Tumblr post. He brought up the possibility of spreading the logs around, that the only reason he wouldn’t do it was because he wasn’t “a fucking idiot”. He made me feel guilty for speaking out, and tried to make me think that I was in the wrong, planting the idea of blackmail inside my mind. (Search “douchebag” in the logs) Even as I was preparing this very statement, I feared that he somehow still had the photos and would use them to harm me in some way. I unfriended him, trying to imagine if it could ever have been resolved amicably, and we parted ways.
-SPREADING OF LOGS-
In June of 2017, almost a year later, I was greeted with this.
https://imgur.com/a/mygBI9q
I was nervous, to say the least. I decided to reach out to lovelylatias to find out why Mangs wanted to contact me, and she sent me this message from him:
https://imgur.com/a/t8K5Nmg
Notably, Mangs mentioned that he didn’t want me to be seen as some kind of “victim”, even though that was exactly what I felt happened to me at the time, and how I still felt before Mangs messaged me.
Between the time of the incident and June 2017, I had confided in my friend who I will call H. I shared the logs with H, trusting that they wouldn’t be shared with anyone dishonest or malicious. Unfortunately, this was not the case, and the screenshots were posted all over Ft. Mangs, both Facebook and Discord. I would have been perfectly okay with the logs being shared if it meant that I could talk to the people spreading them beforehand. I wanted to have control over how my story was told instead of the logs being posted with no context.
I accepted Mangs’s friend request and talked it out, having already been briefed on the situation from his message via lovelylatias. He mentions my friend H here. Mangs is very much concerned with people “bringing him down” by making his manipulative behavior public:
https://imgur.com/a/Z69InVq
I expressed disapproval about the logs being spread around, repeating almost verbatim what Mangs said in his message via lovelylatias. I didn’t want to be used as a pawn for people to attack Mangs for the sake of it, since it would invite more harassment towards me, and the logs were also being posted without context. Considering how angry he was when I just posted them to my extremely small Tumblr account, I was genuinely afraid to see what would happen if the logs were shared around again, even if by my own hand. So I was determined to make sure they wouldn’t be spread anymore. This was how he manipulated me into not wanting to share the logs, and downplaying what happened to me.
In August of the same year, Twitter user masoneliwood made this tweet about Mangs:
https://imgur.com/a/FAjy2ld
I decided to share my story in the thread because I didn’t want masoneliwood, my mutual, to feel alone in his thoughts on Mangs. I was still of the mindset of not wanting to share the logs thanks to Mangs though, so it was understandable that people would be skeptical of my story. I hold nothing against those who were respectful in their skepticism. My comments are still visible and I have no plans to take them down. I was much more frustrated here than I sound right now because the incident happened around a year ago.
https://twitter.com/tomefaired/status/893870795033915392
After this Twitter thread got spread around, a Reddit thread was made inquiring about the claims. Mekkah reached out to me over Discord and asked me about what I experienced. He then gave his interpretation of the events.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190111221431/https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/6rz6st/about_the_accusation_of_mangs/
I have always believed that Mekkah’s statement here did not accurately represent what happened:
“Mangs’s behavior was toxic and creepy, but it was not blackmail or coercion”
It wasn’t blackmail, but it was certainly coercive. And I never saw it as a simple “flirt” either, considering my intentions to simply talk to him about normal things from the very beginning of our conversation.
I don’t hold anything against Mekkah for this though, and I appreciate the fact that he tried to get my side of the story.
In fact, he was perfectly willing to cut ties if Mangs’s behavior was as bad as the rumors were saying. At the time I just wanted the community to calm down so I could stop receiving harassment. Mekkah came into the conversation hoping that things were not as bad as rumored. This was the first time I had ever spoken to Mekkah. I was also still remembering Mangs's frustration with the logs being spread around, insistent that I wasn't a victim. So these feelings played out when I described the events to Mekkah, downplaying what happened to me. Thus, my initial tweets on the matter were my raw feelings before I felt the pressure to placate the situation. Note that I never sent the full chat logs to Mekkah out of pressure from Mangs's conversation with me, so he didn't get the full story from start to finish.
After Mekkah's post, Mangs then apologized to me. He acknowledged that the logs being spread around were real, and that he wasn’t using his power and platform responsibly. I wanted to believe then that his apology was genuine since he acknowledged the abuse of power in that situation, but I also wanted this ordeal to be over and the harassment to end. Part of me was still hoping for a moment when I could feel safe posting all the evidence on my own terms, and that time is now.
Because if you look at the webpage now, Mangs’s apology is gone.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/6rz6st/about_the_accusation_of_mangs/
https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/6rz6st/about_the_accusation_of_mangs/dl8zmpc/?context=3
My comment is still there, as well as Mangs thanking me for accepting the apology he later deleted. https://imgur.com/a/dUpgIOM
If Mangs truly cared about taking responsibility and being more careful with his platform and influence going forward, he would not have deleted his apology. And it’s clear that he didn’t mean a word he said in his apology, because he went on to behave similarly towards Goose. After 4 years, his behavior towards women is still manipulative, deceitful and exploitative. This is why I am coming forward again, to make sure that people are aware that Mangs’s actions towards Goose represent a pattern of behavior and not an isolated incident, as well as spreading awareness about his behavior to those in the Fire Emblem community. I don’t want anyone else to be hurt, and I don’t intend to “cancel” Mangs, either. I also have no interest in communicating with Mangs in an effort to “resolve” things again. By sharing my story once more I am considering it resolved. I have found a loving, supportive community and I’m not looking back.
What you decide to do from here is up to you.