Regarding Avary (@kyoruyeye) and the Recent Harassment of Shoujo Twitter Accounts

Greetings anitwt, shoujotwt, and whoever else may be reading this. Please forgive me in advance if anything in this document is confusing because I wrote this in two days.

My name is Sori (@soriphee). I am a close friend of Avary. I’m going to keep this as organized and to the point as I can. I’m currently writing this document with the assistance of Avary herself, who is helping me with filling in relevant details and context I might have missed, and our mutual Issa (@boriboomz), who is helping us find relevant screenshots and give me feedback as I’m typing.

I'm writing this document for four reasons:

  • to bring to light the onslaught of vile harassment Avary has received within the past month
  • to clear up any misconceptions and misunderstandings regarding Avary’s actions that may have led to the aforementioned harassment
  • to convince you to possibly reconsider your perspective on how you treat larger accounts, and hopefully decrease the number of larger accounts that have similar harassment experiences in the future.
  • most importantly, to inform this community of an individual currently harassing Avary’s mutuals and other shoujotwt accounts through multiple burner accounts

Disclaimer: a lot of our opinions and reactions regarding these situations will be present in this document, especially in regards to the third task, but we will preface each section by objectively summarizing each incident before injecting our own thoughts. Thank you for understanding.

Relevant screenshots and evidence can be found in the clickable imgur links whenever an image is mentioned, as well as in this rentry.co pastebin gallery containing all images. This is to make for easier and less interrupted reading. It is recommended that you examine both this document and the images for a more cohesive understanding.

As of the 27th of June, this document has been completed with all relevant evidence linked. There are currently no plans to release this document as the harassment has died down and the situation seems to have resolved itself. However, this document will be released if deemed necessary by Avary and me, and I will make note of it at the beginning of this document.

Introduction

As you may know, Avary has an anitwt and shoujotwt account, @kyoruyeye. She frequently posts animanga-related recommendations and tweets expressing her enjoyment of certain media, and this has helped her to amass a considerable following of around 25K followers. As expected, that has made her the target of hate and harassment. Even if a certain amount of backlash is to be expected for larger accounts, quite recently, it has become so frequent and vile to the point where I must speak up about what has been going on.

There are three recent incidents I am going to break down in detail, along with attached screenshots at the end of the document. They include Avary’s “male-gaze” tweets, Avary’s quote-tweet of a Kase-san gif, and most importantly, the recent incident with Gumie, aka @bbgtomoe. Ideally, I’d like you to read what I wrote about all three, but the most important and pressing issue is the final one, so feel free to skip to that using the headings if you’re short on time.

In addition, for the sake of their privacy, I will be blocking out all @s for the tweets I will bring up as evidence, with the exception of @bbgtomoe/@bbyraeliana, a burner account from the same person that is, at the time of writing this document, suspended. Ideally, Avary and I would hope that you don’t go looking for these other accounts, however, we are aware that trying to influence the actions of over 25K people is unrealistic. So, for those who do happen to encounter them, please do not interact with them on our behalf. If you feel so inclined to, block them, but otherwise, please ignore them and move on.

Before I get into the details, I want to state for the record that this document’s purpose isn’t to attack anyone (hence why I blocked out their @s), or to play the pity card for Avary in any way. This document is meant to clear up any misconceptions surrounding Avary and to really put into perspective the harassment big accounts face and how words can hurt anyone regardless of following. Saying mean things to a big account doesn’t make those words any less hurtful to the person behind the screen, and I hope whoever is reading this is able to take that away from this document.

Male-Gaze Tweets

Around early June of this year, Avary made two tweets pointing out the obvious male demographics in certain anime, which unfortunately brought about quite a bit of harassment. There were a couple of others that were in a similar vein but these two were the most prominent ones. See IMG-001 and IMG-002 for the tweets in question.

According to TV Tropes, “Male-gaze” is defined as “a form of Gaze that arises from the assumption that the audience is mostly comprised of straight males, which in turn means female fanservice will appear in some form to appeal to or appease said male audience.”

In regards to the first tweet, it should be obvious that the anime in question is male-gaze. Her comments about it being targeted towards males and that similar traits are found in said media/characters cannot be refuted because they are true; this anime in question is undoubtedly targeted towards males and one can confirm that just by looking at the viewer demographics. In response, people accused her of 1) blindly and unfairly hating on the series, 2) hating romance in general, and 3) being hypocritical in regards to her love for shoujo romance (There’s a lot of them but putting them here wouldn’t really add much, but feel free to check the quote-retweets on the original tweet). This is not true. First, Avary never said anything about outright hating this show, and was just pointing out an observation about the show and the viewers it caters to. Moreover, if you have spent any amount of time on her account, you would know that she doesn’t hate romance at all, rather, she loves romance. Finally, I should not need to mention that shoujo romance is so varied in the way the characters and romance is written that it cannot be boiled down to a single trope. Though you can argue that shounen romance is also just as varied, we aren’t talking about shounen romance; we’re talking about the specific male-gaze, self-insert romances, and yes, this anime is one of them. You can’t deny the fact that these kinds of shows have many similar traits.

In regards to the second tweet, she was again harassed for similar reasons as the first tweet. I’m not going to reiterate those points again as that would be redundant but it should be noted that she never outright expressed her complete hatred of those shows. In fact, she enjoyed Komi-san as shown in one of her replies, and was even interested in giving Takagi-san a try. She mentioned that Komi-san in the original tweet did not really fit and thought it was cute and went beyond the typical male-gaze scope, but that she was ignored. Even though she expressed at a later point that typical male-gaze shows weren’t her cup of tea (which is a completely valid opinion) she never once attacked or criticized anyone else for liking those types of shows. All she did was bring up the irrefutable demographics of said shows.

She received some harassment in DMs because of this tweet, most of which she deleted for her own mental health. However, IMG-003 shows an instance of unsolicited harassment on a random unrelated tweet of hers. Harassing others incessantly because their opinions don't align with your own is not cool. Enough said. It’s a fact of life that people are going to disagree with you. Instead of immediately jumping to harass someone the moment their opinion differs, maybe try having a discussion about your opinions instead. Some food for thought.

Kase-san QRT

On June 14, Avary quote retweeted a captioned gif from the anime Kase-san and Morning Glories. As of writing this, the tweet has been deleted and we don’t have any screenshots, but in summary the caption said something along the lines of “My face when he texts me…” Avary quote-retweeted this tweet pointing out that the character in the gif was a lesbian and how the caption ignored that fact, and jokingly mentioned off-hand how “the hets won’t let us have anything.” Avary has stated that this tweet was not meant to be taken seriously, and a brief summary about what happened can be found in IMG-005.

Her tweet blew up overnight. Later, we found out that the original person she quote-retweeted had received death threats, supposedly on her behalf, and that she deliberately sent her followers to harass this person. The first part of this statement is true. When Avary found this out, she felt horrible and deleted her tweet so as to not stir up any more negativity. She also expressed a desire to apologize to the person in private, but their dms were closed and she didn’t want to stir up any further drama, as shown in IMG-006 and IMG-008. Moreover, she didn’t realize that the OP in question was a minor, believing it to be an automated GIF account, which is why she decided to randomly quote-retweet the original tweet in the first place, as shown in IMG-007. Avary did not mean for the tweet to come off as harsh as it did, and she is sorry in that regard. However, the second part of that statement is false. She never sent any of her followers to harass the OP on her behalf, and any harassment directed at that person was independent of Avary and against her wishes, as shown in IMG-005, IMG-006, and IMG-007.

Following that tweet, Avary received harassment from a burner account. This person replied to all of her recent, unrelated tweets spewing hurtful insults, even going so far as to find her unadvertised alt account and harassing her on there too. See IMG-009, IMG-010, IMG-011, and IMG-012 for those screenshots. We believe that this person in question may be the same person behind the burner account @bbgtomoe/@bbyraeliana mentioned later in this document based on the similar tweeting styles, the similar potential impersonation in the bio, and the lack of activity in the account following this incident. However, we have no way of proving this so we will treat them as two separate people and will keep this harasser’s @ obscured. I quote-retweeted that tweet denouncing that person’s harassment, however, I was quote-retweeted with even more harassment directed at Avary. See IMG-013. I shouldn’t have to explain why this behavior by this anonymous person is completely unacceptable. There were a couple of other instances of harassment surrounding this, but this was the most prominent instance, and other instances were either deleted or the accounts were suspended.

Avary really felt bad about the whole thing. I understand that she wasn’t free from blame either, but a lot of it was unintended and spiraled out of her control. At the wishes of Avary and in the best interest of not dragging this drama on any longer since the other person involved is a minor, I will end this discussion here. All I ask is that you remember that people are human and we make mistakes, even people behind big accounts.

The Gumie Incident (@bbgtomoe/@bbyraeliana)

On June 23rd, Avary received an unprompted harassment from an individual going by the name Gumie tweeting from a burner account @bbgtomoe. We are not sure if Gumie is an alias, but for the sake of clarity, we will refer to them as such. Avary was tagged in a quote-retweet of an unrelated tweet (that will not be posted to retain anonymity and keep things relevant) where she was bombarded with unsolicited harassment and insults. A lot of the tweets were deleted or lost when the account was suspended, but I was able to get a screenshot of the first two tweets in question. See IMG-014. If those tweets are eventually located I will add them to the image gallery and append this section.

I made light of the situation and tried to cheer Avary up by making the first part of that quote-retweet thread into a copypasta that ended up gaining a small following. Aside from a couple of hurtful replies to many of the people coming to Avary’s defense, Gumie remained tame enough and didn’t tweet much more that day. However, the next day on June 24th, @bbgtomoe started replying to some of the tweets that were defending Avary and calling them out for supporting a “racist,” pulling up a falsified tweet of Avary saying the N-word and other hurtful, horrible things. See IMG-015 for that fake tweet. Some people started to believe this person, and to back up their lies, this person claimed that it was from a circle tweet from when they were in Avary’s circle, as shown in IMG-016. This claim, like the tweet, is completely untrue. Not only do I have all notifications enabled for Avary and have been in her circle since the feature’s creation without seeing such a tweet, but the tweet doesn’t even closely resemble Avary’s tweeting style; in fact, it’s much closer to Gumie’s from what we have seen so far. And if you knew anything about Avary personally, you would know that she would never offend anyone deliberately whatsoever and always makes sure that she’s not making anyone feel uncomfortable. Gumie eventually admitted to making up the tweet in IMG-017, a tweet which was deleted soon after.

This incident sent Avary into a horrible mindset and caused her to break down, as shown in IMG-018. I really shouldn’t have to explain how horrible and traumatizing it would be to experience something like this. Around the same time, @bbgtomoe intentionally impersonated their account as my own alt account, as shown in IMG-019. However, they forgot to change their previous bio and pronouns so it didn’t add up. They again incriminated themself with a later cocky reply to me when I tried to announce the impersonation situation to my followers (IMG-020). Not long after, they deactivated their account, but swore to return (IMG-019).

This was supposed to be the end of this situation and the end of this document, however, I am writing once again because on the evening of June 25th, Anya, one of Avary’s other mutuals, experienced a similar situation to what I did. @bbgtomoe reactivated and began impersonating Anya (@noahraeli). They changed their username to @bbyraeliana, linked Anya’s main account in their bio, and even changed their layout to display characters from the show “Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke’s Mansion,” one that Anya is a fan of. See IMG-021. However, the bio still remained the same as the previous @bbgtomoe account, both before and after impersonating me. As the bio has stayed the same before and throughout the multiple impersonations, we can reasonably assume that the details in that bio are that of the perpetrator. Sagittarius, 19 years old, uses she/her pronouns, black, and in the fandoms she mentioned.

Gumie once again repeated the same thread with the same hateful remarks from IMG-014 as before, calling out Avary and Anya to “be better (IMG-022).” …even though Gumie was pretending to be Anya… (The math is just not mathing fr). Anya was offline during this time, but many mutuals of Avary and Anya fought back against Gumie for their continued harassment. I was not present during this incident, but all of this information is what I was able to summarize from what Anya and Avary told me, as well as the screenshots I received. The account was finally suspended around 12PM that day. I am going to end it here for now as this section is meant to be purely informational. I sincerely hope that Gumie does not return in the future to harass anyone else.

Conclusion

So that’s what happened. I’m aware that this document isn’t going to completely end all harassment for good. It can’t really do anything to that account that harassed us so much because it’s been suspended. But I wouldn’t count on them staying gone forever, which is why I needed to tell you all about everything that’s happened.

Twitter is a place of meaningful discussion and communication, and as such, it is entirely reasonable for people to have differing opinions from your own. That’s fine. But attacking someone just because your opinion didn’t align with yours and even going so far as to anonymously harass them on burner accounts is completely unacceptable. It’s just basic human etiquette; if you wouldn’t say it to someone directly in person, maybe rethink what you are typing. (As a side note, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t call out things that are inherently bad, like racism, ableism, misogyny, or homophobia, and others. That’s an entirely different situation).

Finally, if @bbgtomoe/@bbyraeliana ever decides to return to Twitter to harass Avary or anyone else, I ask that you ignore them. Report the account if necessary, block, and move on. This applies to everyone else who tries to wrongfully harass someone in our community. By giving these people more attention, we are fueling the fire of hatred and negativity. I know it’s difficult, and often someone’s words can be so hurtful and so infuriating that you just want to put the person who said it on blast, so that they could feel a fraction of what they made someone else feel. I get it. I’ve done it so many times before. However, for the sake of everyone involved, I think it would be best instead of highlighting the negativity, we stop it from spreading and instead uplift the positive and fun aspects of this community. And as much as we want to harass them back, we shouldn’t stoop down to their level. Feel free to disagree with me, but I love shoujotwt and anitwt, and I hope we can remain an overall positive community where we can all have fun discussing and engaging this shared hobby of ours.

Anyways, thank you for reading this far. This is the last I’ll probably say on this matter. If there’s a couple of genuine questions in the comments I might get around to answering them if I feel like it, but for the most part, both Avary and I would like to put these incidents behind us and get back to tweeting about our favorite animanga as usual. We ask that you please respect our decision to move on from this, and if the harassment continues, to link this document to anyone out of the loop. I hope you all have a good day or night, and thanks for hearing us out.

—Sori <33

Note: If any edits need to be made to this document after it is posted to clear up some misconceptions, I will append such edits below and will make note of them at the top of this document. In addition, I will keep a log of any and all future accounts and usernames associated with Gumie in this document so that you may avoid them. I will update this regularly whenever I find a new one.

P.S. If the individual who’s harassing Aves and all of us is reading this, and you know who you are. Stay madddddd lmaooooo ur poopy baby tantrum harassment won’t stop us from calling you out <333

Gumie’s Account Usernames
@bbgtomoe
@bbyraeliana

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Pub: 25 Jun 2023 21:05 UTC

Edit: 29 Jun 2023 22:10 UTC

Views: 192