No More Idols
Here’s a question for you to ponder for a minute or two. How many days in your life meet the following criteria:
- It was over 5 years ago.
- You can recall some specific memories from that day - what you did or saw.
- You can recall the exact calendar date without looking it up.
- Not a birthday (of yours or a friend / family member).
I thought about this for awhile last night, and I think my answer is seven. Among those 7 dates in my life I can pinpoint: the passing of a loved one, 9/11, one especially stressful day involving parental drama, the day I started dating my first partner.
There’s one in particular that stands out as a strange date to remember. Many of my friends will remember the event, but not the exact date. In this post I’m going to recount the day my idol was outed as a rapist, the events that led to them becoming an “idol”, and what I’ve learned in the time since then.
This is a long and deeply personal post. Skip to the last few paragraphs for the actionable advice, if you want.
January 17, 2014
It’s Friday. College classes resumed this week. I have my first chemistry lecture of the semester at 9 AM, then more classes and work afterward. I grab a quick breakfast and check Twitter on my PC before heading out the door. Lots of people are talking for this early in the day. Seems like something serious happened. I scroll a bit further. Something to do with… Renard? I check their private account.
They admitted to sexually assaulting their partner, who just came forward with allegations of said assault.
The first thing I notice is that these tweets outlining their admission have a number of “favorites” (they were still called that in 2014). Favorites are a weird quirk of social media in situations like these. Are their friends applauding them for their honesty? Is this normal now? The replies confirm that, no, this isn’t normal. This is completely fucked. Admission of guilt here is the last thing anyone wanted to read. But it does make one thing crystal clear: the allegations are true. There’s no denying that this is real.
I’m late for class and I need to get moving. My day away from home is a blur. I only have 3 tweets in my archive to fill in the blanks.
gonna try to get through today without breaking down
gonna fail probably
left work early
I get home and cry for hours. I talk online with a friend who’s been through this situation before. Her words don’t make me feel better, but they help me think clearer. I end up explaining the situation in more detail than I would’ve liked to my dad, who was understandably concerned about my behavior. Sometime in the evening, I remove Renard from all social media and online music platforms. They had already lost a quarter of their ~200 followers on their private account, which they would delete shortly after.
i hid all of their music from my bandcamp collection and now it’s less than half its original size
Before I sleep, I listen to one of Renard’s recent songs. I feel guilty in doing this, like I’m betraying their victim and everyone who stands in solidarity with them. For the next five years, I wouldn’t choose to listen to Renard’s music once; I would only hear it in dance game arcades against my will.
i want to wake up and find out this was some fucked up dream but that’s not gonna happen
Before I continue, I should talk about why this day had such an enormous emotional impact on me. This could have happened to any other musician and it would be a footnote in my memories by now.
Before January 17, 2014
It’s hard to describe the impact Renard had on my life up until this point without going into unwarranted detail about my entire online presence as a teenager, but I’ll try to sum it up in a few paragraphs.
I was 15 years old when I was introduced to Renard’s content through “Mungyodance 3”, the final installation in a series of rhythm games (themed StepMania clones) for which they led development. This was 2008, less than a year after I started playing FlashFlashRevolution and only months after I had started making StepMania simfiles myself. Thus far, a smattering of early StepMania & Newgrounds content was the full extent of my music knowledge. Mungyodance 3 shattered everything I knew. The game content was split up into a number of broad genres like “Chiptune”, “Drum & Bass + Breaks”, “Hardcore”, plus an “Originals” folder at the start, exclusively for Renard’s own music. There were nearly 1000 songs in total.
This furry-oriented PC rhythm game was how I was introduced to the broader scope of electronic music. Pendulum, Noisia, The Flashbulb, Gammer, Aphex Twin, Infected Mushroom… and two dozen aliases of Renard. All equal in my mind. At first, I didn’t know the aliases all belonged to the same person. I just accepted it as the creative output of a team of talented producers who loved rhythm games. Finding out that it was all one person elevated Renard to a sort of deity level in my mind. One half of my musical tastes was more-or-less copied from Renard’s tastes. The other half was Renard’s own music.
When I started to build up a proper music collection, I meticulously archived everything Renard had ever released that I could get my hands on. I listened to all of it. At the time, Renard’s music accounted for about 25% of my Music folder by disk space - by this metric, no other artist was even in the same solar system. Every new album they released was an instant buy for me. In retrospect, it was absolutely an unhealthy degree of obsession, even disregarding the fallout that was to come.
Besides the music, a lot of my mid-late teen years were spent in the vicinity of Renard’s social circle. I joined the Mungyodance forums in 2008 (now long gone, with no archive for reference), then Tumblr in 2009, and Twitter a year or two afterward. Renard was my first follow on Tumblr and one of the first ten on Twitter; to this day, most of my early follows on Twitter are people from that same friend group, only thinned out by the passage of time. Renard would eventually follow me back on both Tumblr and Twitter, which shouldn’t be the kind of detail that I consider relevant to this story, but I can’t deny that the gesture fueled my obsession with them and their work. I thought that they were a friend.
Online and in person, Renard was always an exceptionally open and amicable person. Between their creative work and their outgoing personality, they united a lot of people from different backgrounds across social media. My first partner and I met through Renard, as did so many other friends and partners on the periphery of their social sphere. I imagine a graph of the social network that had formed around this one person would have a sort of explosion of lines coming from Renard themself, with innumerable weaker links forming a circle around this epicenter, like a ring around a planet.
What would happen if that planet at the center of it all collapsed?
After January 17, 2014
It’s the day after the sky fell down. I post a lie to try to make myself feel better:
feelin’ better this morning. i’m not sad anymore, just angry. i can deal with anger
For the most part, I try to keep myself distracted. I know there’s no going back to the way things were before. This is made difficult by the surfacing of additional allegations from Renard’s prior partners and ex-friends. There’s another report of sexual assault committed by a long-time friend & collaborator of Renard, who I had also become mutuals with recently. Somewhere in the course of the weekend, a third acquaintance of mine (not in the same social sphere, but someone from Tumblr) disappears in a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations. The first three “friends” of mine who were accused of abuse have all been outed in the same weekend, which I’ve come to refer to as the Weekend From Hell.
I felt guilty for talking about how this impacted me in public for a number of reasons. First, I’m not the victim of any of these abusers - and Renard’s victim and I were Twitter mutuals at the time. It seemed wrong for me to do anything in this situation but provide support to them. Second, as time progressed, people moved on. Understandably; no one wanted to keep talking about what had happened forever. What needed to be said had already been said, by the people who needed to say it. What little place I had in this conversation expired by the following week. But it didn’t take a week for me to move on. It took years.
I don’t think I’m alone in these feelings. Renard was important to a lot of people, even if not everyone went through the same obsessive phase as me. This was made abundantly clear in the months that followed the callout, as friendships that had formed around Renard dropped left-and-right. Sometimes it was directly related to the situation at hand: not all of Renard’s friends pre-2014 abandoned them, and schisms formed between their supporters and detractors. Other times, friends & partners simply found that without the common interest they had in Renard, there wasn’t enough glue to keep the social link from falling apart.
Turns out when you take the planet out of the picture, its rings collapse.
I’m writing this in 2019, more than five years after the trauma Renard caused was publicized. They’re still making music. I don’t listen to it, and I don’t even wonder what it sounds like. I think this, above all else, is the signal to me that lets me honestly say I’ve “moved on”.
They post on Twitter as @HECKSCAPER now. A number of my mutuals follow them. I’m not upset with those who do. A lot of them probably don’t know what happened, or don’t understand how serious - how irrefutably damning - the rumors they’ve heard are. And while I have personal reasons to doubt that Renard has addressed their past behavior in any meaningful way, I can’t make any objective claims about them as a person today. Only who they were in the earlier half of this decade.
The one person I can speak for today is myself. How would I have addressed this situation better? And what advice do I have to young people on the Internet today?
First, control your obsessive impulses. You can enjoy an Internet creator’s work without idolizing them. What counts as idolization is tricky to define, but if you find yourself thinking about them on a literal daily basis, you’re probably in too deep. If that sounds like a ridiculous amount of mental bandwidth to assign to one creator - good!
Second, and more pertinently, know your true friends. It’s fine to think about your friends on a daily basis, but you need to clearly delineate “friends” from… well, people like Renard. “Microfamous socialites”, maybe? This phenomenon is so recent, so inextricably bound to the modern Internet, that we don’t yet have a word for these kinds of lopsided social relationships that form between creators and their fans. And social media collapsing all of these relationships into a single construct - “Friend”, or maybe “Follower” - certainly doesn’t help the issue.
A Tweet of mine from earlier this year:
every social media site has an incentive to maximize engagement, blurring the boundaries between friends, acquaintances, and people who just have shared interests. don’t let twitter convince you they’re all one and the same
The subject here was allegiance to particular fandoms, but it’s just as salient in the context of idolizing creators. There’s no easy solution to this problem: it takes serious introspection and establishment of personal boundaries to overcome. Think about who matters to you, and why. Do they deserve the amount of attention you show them? How much do they reciprocate? Do you think there could be any ulterior motives for their reciprocation? Is there a power imbalance at play, online or otherwise? It might sound needlessly defensive, but these are questions you should ask and answer yourself honestly. Renard wasn’t the first online creator to take advantage of their fanbase, and they’re far from the last.
Take care of yourself, and the people who truly care for you.
- ash
Here’s a question for you to ponder for a minute or two. How many days in your life meet the following criteria:
- It was over 5 years ago.
- You can recall some specific memories from that day - what you did or saw.
- You can recall the exact calendar date without looking it up.
- Not a birthday (of yours or a friend / family member).
I thought about this for awhile last night, and I think my answer is seven. Among those 7 dates in my life I can pinpoint: the passing of a loved one, 9/11, one especially stressful day involving parental drama, the day I started dating my first partner.
There’s one in particular that stands out as a strange date to remember. Many of my friends will remember the event, but not the exact date. In this post I’m going to recount the day my idol was outed as a rapist, the events that led to them becoming an “idol”, and what I’ve learned in the time since then.
This is a long and deeply personal post. Skip to the last few paragraphs for the actionable advice, if you want.
January 17, 2014
It’s Friday. College classes resumed this week. I have my first chemistry lecture of the semester at 9 AM, then more classes and work afterward. I grab a quick breakfast and check Twitter on my PC before heading out the door. Lots of people are talking for this early in the day. Seems like something serious happened. I scroll a bit further. Something to do with… Renard? I check their private account.
They admitted to sexually assaulting their partner, who just came forward with allegations of said assault.
The first thing I notice is that these tweets outlining their admission have a number of “favorites” (they were still called that in 2014). Favorites are a weird quirk of social media in situations like these. Are their friends applauding them for their honesty? Is this normal now? The replies confirm that, no, this isn’t normal. This is completely fucked. Admission of guilt here is the last thing anyone wanted to read. But it does make one thing crystal clear: the allegations are true. There’s no denying that this is real.
I’m late for class and I need to get moving. My day away from home is a blur. I only have 3 tweets in my archive to fill in the blanks.
gonna try to get through today without breaking down
gonna fail probably
left work early
I get home and cry for hours. I talk online with a friend who’s been through this situation before. Her words don’t make me feel better, but they help me think clearer. I end up explaining the situation in more detail than I would’ve liked to my dad, who was understandably concerned about my behavior. Sometime in the evening, I remove Renard from all social media and online music platforms. They had already lost a quarter of their ~200 followers on their private account, which they would delete shortly after.
i hid all of their music from my bandcamp collection and now it’s less than half its original size
Before I sleep, I listen to one of Renard’s recent songs. I feel guilty in doing this, like I’m betraying their victim and everyone who stands in solidarity with them. For the next five years, I wouldn’t choose to listen to Renard’s music once; I would only hear it in dance game arcades against my will.
i want to wake up and find out this was some fucked up dream but that’s not gonna happen
Before I continue, I should talk about why this day had such an enormous emotional impact on me. This could have happened to any other musician and it would be a footnote in my memories by now.
Before January 17, 2014
It’s hard to describe the impact Renard had on my life up until this point without going into unwarranted detail about my entire online presence as a teenager, but I’ll try to sum it up in a few paragraphs.
I was 15 years old when I was introduced to Renard’s content through “Mungyodance 3”, the final installation in a series of rhythm games (themed StepMania clones) for which they led development. This was 2008, less than a year after I started playing FlashFlashRevolution and only months after I had started making StepMania simfiles myself. Thus far, a smattering of early StepMania & Newgrounds content was the full extent of my music knowledge. Mungyodance 3 shattered everything I knew. The game content was split up into a number of broad genres like “Chiptune”, “Drum & Bass + Breaks”, “Hardcore”, plus an “Originals” folder at the start, exclusively for Renard’s own music. There were nearly 1000 songs in total.
This furry-oriented PC rhythm game was how I was introduced to the broader scope of electronic music. Pendulum, Noisia, The Flashbulb, Gammer, Aphex Twin, Infected Mushroom… and two dozen aliases of Renard. All equal in my mind. At first, I didn’t know the aliases all belonged to the same person. I just accepted it as the creative output of a team of talented producers who loved rhythm games. Finding out that it was all one person elevated Renard to a sort of deity level in my mind. One half of my musical tastes was more-or-less copied from Renard’s tastes. The other half was Renard’s own music.
When I started to build up a proper music collection, I meticulously archived everything Renard had ever released that I could get my hands on. I listened to all of it. At the time, Renard’s music accounted for about 25% of my Music folder by disk space - by this metric, no other artist was even in the same solar system. Every new album they released was an instant buy for me. In retrospect, it was absolutely an unhealthy degree of obsession, even disregarding the fallout that was to come.
Besides the music, a lot of my mid-late teen years were spent in the vicinity of Renard’s social circle. I joined the Mungyodance forums in 2008 (now long gone, with no archive for reference), then Tumblr in 2009, and Twitter a year or two afterward. Renard was my first follow on Tumblr and one of the first ten on Twitter; to this day, most of my early follows on Twitter are people from that same friend group, only thinned out by the passage of time. Renard would eventually follow me back on both Tumblr and Twitter, which shouldn’t be the kind of detail that I consider relevant to this story, but I can’t deny that the gesture fueled my obsession with them and their work. I thought that they were a friend.
Online and in person, Renard was always an exceptionally open and amicable person. Between their creative work and their outgoing personality, they united a lot of people from different backgrounds across social media. My first partner and I met through Renard, as did so many other friends and partners on the periphery of their social sphere. I imagine a graph of the social network that had formed around this one person would have a sort of explosion of lines coming from Renard themself, with innumerable weaker links forming a circle around this epicenter, like a ring around a planet.
What would happen if that planet at the center of it all collapsed?
After January 17, 2014
It’s the day after the sky fell down. I post a lie to try to make myself feel better:
feelin’ better this morning. i’m not sad anymore, just angry. i can deal with anger
For the most part, I try to keep myself distracted. I know there’s no going back to the way things were before. This is made difficult by the surfacing of additional allegations from Renard’s prior partners and ex-friends. There’s another report of sexual assault committed by a long-time friend & collaborator of Renard, who I had also become mutuals with recently. Somewhere in the course of the weekend, a third acquaintance of mine (not in the same social sphere, but someone from Tumblr) disappears in a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations. The first three “friends” of mine who were accused of abuse have all been outed in the same weekend, which I’ve come to refer to as the Weekend From Hell.
I felt guilty for talking about how this impacted me in public for a number of reasons. First, I’m not the victim of any of these abusers - and Renard’s victim and I were Twitter mutuals at the time. It seemed wrong for me to do anything in this situation but provide support to them. Second, as time progressed, people moved on. Understandably; no one wanted to keep talking about what had happened forever. What needed to be said had already been said, by the people who needed to say it. What little place I had in this conversation expired by the following week. But it didn’t take a week for me to move on. It took years.
I don’t think I’m alone in these feelings. Renard was important to a lot of people, even if not everyone went through the same obsessive phase as me. This was made abundantly clear in the months that followed the callout, as friendships that had formed around Renard dropped left-and-right. Sometimes it was directly related to the situation at hand: not all of Renard’s friends pre-2014 abandoned them, and schisms formed between their supporters and detractors. Other times, friends & partners simply found that without the common interest they had in Renard, there wasn’t enough glue to keep the social link from falling apart.
Turns out when you take the planet out of the picture, its rings collapse.
I’m writing this in 2019, more than five years after the trauma Renard caused was publicized. They’re still making music. I don’t listen to it, and I don’t even wonder what it sounds like. I think this, above all else, is the signal to me that lets me honestly say I’ve “moved on”.
They post on Twitter as @HECKSCAPER now. A number of my mutuals follow them. I’m not upset with those who do. A lot of them probably don’t know what happened, or don’t understand how serious - how irrefutably damning - the rumors they’ve heard are. And while I have personal reasons to doubt that Renard has addressed their past behavior in any meaningful way, I can’t make any objective claims about them as a person today. Only who they were in the earlier half of this decade.
The one person I can speak for today is myself. How would I have addressed this situation better? And what advice do I have to young people on the Internet today?
First, control your obsessive impulses. You can enjoy an Internet creator’s work without idolizing them. What counts as idolization is tricky to define, but if you find yourself thinking about them on a literal daily basis, you’re probably in too deep. If that sounds like a ridiculous amount of mental bandwidth to assign to one creator - good!
Second, and more pertinently, know your true friends. It’s fine to think about your friends on a daily basis, but you need to clearly delineate “friends” from… well, people like Renard. “Microfamous socialites”, maybe? This phenomenon is so recent, so inextricably bound to the modern Internet, that we don’t yet have a word for these kinds of lopsided social relationships that form between creators and their fans. And social media collapsing all of these relationships into a single construct - “Friend”, or maybe “Follower” - certainly doesn’t help the issue.
A Tweet of mine from earlier this year:
every social media site has an incentive to maximize engagement, blurring the boundaries between friends, acquaintances, and people who just have shared interests. don’t let twitter convince you they’re all one and the same
The subject here was allegiance to particular fandoms, but it’s just as salient in the context of idolizing creators. There’s no easy solution to this problem: it takes serious introspection and establishment of personal boundaries to overcome. Think about who matters to you, and why. Do they deserve the amount of attention you show them? How much do they reciprocate? Do you think there could be any ulterior motives for their reciprocation? Is there a power imbalance at play, online or otherwise? It might sound needlessly defensive, but these are questions you should ask and answer yourself honestly. Renard wasn’t the first online creator to take advantage of their fanbase, and they’re far from the last.
Take care of yourself, and the people who truly care for you.
- ash
