Interstellar, the white supremacist who runs the sonic-kin community
Today I met someone for the second time who I’d completely forgotten about, but who seems to know Me very well. You see, My partner had just been banned from a bunch of Discord servers and was having a mental breakdown, right when I wanted to watch anime with it. It was shaking and crying and saying it didn’t know why it had been banned, so I immediately decided to try and leap to the rescue.
In between its stammers, it managed to give Me directions through Disboard to find a server owned by the collective that banned it from a half-dozen servers, and I hopped on. Did the CAPTCHA, made an introduction, etc. It was a The Owl House otherkin server, so I lead with a story about how I know a Hunter fictionkin and dunked on the Belos delusion that sometimes haunts his system. I find that talking about how much I hate fascists is a great way to start any interaction, because anyone who has a problem with that isn’t worth talking to.
After making an introduction, I decided to turn up the pressure a little and ping the admins, who I thought I’d never seen before, and tell them about this little emergency situation with a panicking disabled otherkin.
Well, I didn’t get to hit enter on that message, because I was instabanned. At first I was worried it had been a Faux Pas to talk about saying fuck you to Disney’s witch-hunter villain, but My partner explained what was going on.
Turns out, a year or more ago I got into a fight with some random white supremacist sonickin. Their name is Interstellar, and they run some otherkin communities on Discord, including a lot of sonic ones. Apparently they’re the premier purveyor of Sonic the Hedgehog safe spaces.
They also happen to own Alterhumans Australia, a Discord server which bans the use of any Australian language. You’re only allowed to speak English, the language of our invading army, illegitimate government, and tyrant king, Charles. I know he’s not much of a tyrant as dictators go, but I hate all monarchs with a burning passion. And I hate the genocide of indigenous cultures in Australia including their spiritual beliefs and languages.
In My opinion, representing Australia entails a responsibility to actively work for the rights of Aboriginals. Australia is a stolen symbol; using that symbol involves a responsibility. Especially when the server icon of Alterhumans Australia was, at the time I joined, a picture of the landmass of Australia. That thing’s stolen, you better be making an effort to give it back if you’re gonna use it.
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Well, a year ago or whenever it was, Interstellar banned Me from the Cosmic Interstate for calling that rule white supremacist, and I forgot about them because they’re just one more reactionary bigot. But today, they banned Me for simply being an antiracist. I broke no rules, I didn’t even know them, I came with an olive branch, following server procedures instead of just messaging them, trying to find why My partner was banned. My crime was being in favour of aboriginal rights.
So why was My partner banned? Well, I can assure you that after a quick chat about why we don’t spend time on white supremacist communities, Ivy is wholeheartedly against this kind of colonisation and thus “deserves” to be banned under Interstellar’s racist rule system. But as to the actual reason? It’s because Ivy struggles with boundaries. Apparently some people didn’t want to say no to Ivy in PMs, so they asked Interstellar to give it a panic attack instead.
I’d like to take a moment to talk about saying no. If you know anything about Japanese culture, you know “no”, or “いいえ”, is a taboo to say in Japan. You don’t say no to someone’s face. You can say “apologies”, or “that would be hard” or “maybe…”, but you’re committing a social sin if you outright say it to someone’s face. It’s not an absolute rule, it’s just a cultural norm of conflict avoidance. If you go to Japan and start saying いいえ to people’s faces, they’ll know you’re a rude and ignorant foreigner.
In the Anglic world, we say “no” more often. But we don’t say it all the times that someone’s being inappropriate. I’m sure everyone reading has either used an excuse to get out of a social event, or had the unpleasant experience of dealing with someone who did. Maybe you’ve felt the anxiety of wondering whether your friends are just putting up with you. Aversion to saying no isn’t a uniquely Japanese cultural phenomenon. It’s also white people bullshit.
My partner doesn’t have to wonder if its friends are just putting up with it. It knows the answer is yes. Ivy doesn’t understand “apologies” and “that would be hard” and “maybe…” as euphemisms for “no”, because it’s autistic. Ivy is too disabled to perform the cultural norms of whiteness. And that’s why Ivy was banned by Interstellar. For not being white enough. For being too autistic to perform every social component of white culture.
Interstellar believes that it’s better to enforce white cultural values of not saying no, than to be honest to a disabled person who is struggling and just say “no” to a simple “would you like to hang out”.
And by the way, Interstellar’s homophobic partner, Sparks, has been desperately scrambling to message Ivy’s friends on their servers and call Me Ivy’s friend. Gay erasure much?
This is the kind of person who doesn’t deserve to control any “safe space” for marginalised people. Ivy was heartbroken to lose its “safe spaces”, but why the fuck does it have to rely on a white supremacist’s permission to be on a sonic otherkin server? How is a person like THAT in charge?
So anyway, I’ve encouraged Ivy to make its own sonickin discord server, and to spread this article to everyone on Interstellar’s fake safe space. If you support Aboriginal rights, you’ll tell them to fuck off with their “english only” rule on a server represented by a stolen continent. And maybe send this to some other hedgehogs and join Ivy’s server. Here’s the link: https://discord.com/invite/J9dkgR8MmF
