It’s been weird how devicive saying. He shouldn’t have talked to underage girls like that, and dogpiling people at their lowest isn’t great either.
Also damming how there were clips of the week before Comicsgaters like EVS were joking about Ed killing himself then the next week acting like the moral police. Which comes back to us needing accountability.
I should note too Ed did a bad thing. I wasn’t a huge fan or anything but he seemed generally ok. He was talking to girls he should have online. Again not good, but in everything I’ve seen nothing physical ever happened. Those girls were right to call him out, and comparatively to stuff we saw years ago ME TOO has allowed for them to call it out earlier. That’s a kind of progress, and I think Ed was totally at a place where some counseling would have gone a long way.
On a much smaller scale, I’ve been dogpiled. Given that was happening as his whole life blew up I can see why he took his life. It was short-sighted, but he was also right in that he was never going to recover from this. He could have gotten better and released some things but this was always going to haunt him.
Seeing the reactions of some of the people called out in the letter shows that the comics community is wildly emotionally stunted. Very few calling for Ed’s victims to be shown empathy while also also showing empathy for Ed. A lot of defensive reactions and finger-pointing. Though some of that was useful via what I said about EVS earlier too. IDK. It’s a mess, a sad state of affairs. Also we seem to learn nothing.
What kills me the most is pedophilia in comics, pedos in the gaming space, pedos in Hollywood, pedos in the church, pedos in the boonies. Clearly, it’s more widespread. We always treat any intro to pedophilic action as a level-one criminal offense. I get why but we have to stop. We have to let these people discreetly come forward somewhere and get some fucking help otherwise this shit will never stop.