Final Statement

Karasu · Feb 1, 2021

*This is a collaborative document and was not written by a single individual unless stated otherwise
*Here is a link to the original Google Document that is unaltered. We added a brief section regarding Tori and made very minor changes and trimmed up the document so it's easier to read. It wasn't long to begin with, it just had a lot of supporting images which inflated the page count.

If you are not aware/don't care, worry not. There is no urgency in reading and it will remain accessible to make a point.

I sort of care. What is it?
It's that time of the year again. Our community is being threatened. The document above contains our final statements on the recent slander thrown against us on Twitter, as well as reminding everyone what our core values and goals as staff members are: by addressing certain repeat individuals who would tell you some very different things about us.

It looks like a callout post...
Don't second-guess yourself. It absolutely is. The document is aptly named Final Statement because we are tired of wasting precious time disproving the lies and slander coming our way every time it happens. Our response is one-and-done as it nips the bud right in the source of all toxicity. You'll surely understand how if you do choose to give it a read.

For those who didn't read through the doc, here's the relevant portion:
Following the release of this statement, Maplemation will be handling the approach on problematic individuals differently.
If we know you are a problem and that you will not reform for the better, we shall not leave things to chance. You're out of here. This community ill needs those who seldom care for self-improvement.
Maple Riot content in any form or fashion will be deleted. You get one warning, and then a ban if repeated.
There will be no discussion on a decision finalised a year ago.

This will be the final document we're ever making on this kind of stuff. We're done. We are setting the record straight.

Final Statement

One thing we want to get out of the way before we begin is that this will not be covering the Tate thing. We are firmly against grooming as we’ve made it clear in our documents and we have not been associated with Tate for other reasons due to the wipe. See “Full Transparency” for that.

In addition to that, we will also not be covering whatever conversations occurred between Suz and Dez in particular, as they do not involve us whatsoever. That’s their business.

We will however, be dealing with the slander/allegations dealt towards Maplemation and its staff by a consistent set of individuals as well as dealing with problems that should have been dealt with a while ago.

Adding this because people hate reading. Jump to the conclusion after this.

Context: Maple Riot was initially an anti-MM group like Project Revival was.

Suz and co. were going on a social crusade and saw a tweet from someone who talked about Neil.

This person did not claim Neil was a predator but Suz decided to roll with it and commit to it (even though it was entirely false).

The slander was severe as it called Neil a predator. Something that is a very serious and very wrong claim to make.

The group made a public deal out of it despite having contact with us to clarify any issues. In fact, they just wanted to socially kill off a guy to shit on a community they had no contribution towards and quench their personal hate boner. All of it was unwarranted and emotionally driven.

Suz downplayed the actions of repeat offenders like Casey: she picks her own targets to suit her personal agenda.

Maple Riot from its outset had staff who were bitter or resented Maplemation, and it showed through their actions building up to this document.

Staff and prominent members were harassing our community, indirectly and directly.

Suz and SunGod (amongst others) perpetuated slander against MM and Neil on Twitter via memes and harmful posts, where it's accessible to pretty much anyone.

The staff of Maple Riot frequently leech off MM whilst also throwing stones at the community, using its branding and members in tags, advertising their content and server in our server, despite them not being affiliated with us. They have broke our rules multiple times.

We have never publicly addressed Maple Riot prior to this incident and any issues we had was handled privately.

We discuss MM's history prior to the current staff even being members (and also being young). It did have a predatory history. Not only did the current staff condemn these predators (where Suz refused to), none of the current staff were in power at the time. Don't hold us accountable for something other people who are long gone did.

Maple Riot content in any form or fashion will be deleted. You get one warning, and then a ban if repeated.

If your content submitted for upload on our YouTube channel contains any contributions from SunGod or Suz, or any Maple Riot branding whatsoever, it will be rejected. Either cut their parts/branding or do not submit.

There will be no discussion on a decision that's already been finalised.

If this Tl;Dr isn't satisfactory enough. Good. Read the whole document if you wish to be informed. Otherwise; eat ass.

To bring you up to speed, following the Tate document, more stories have come to light regarding his repeated predatory behavior which mostly occurred in the Maplestory community.
Two documents have come out which discuss the issue of grooming in the general Maplestory community.

Suz’s document Mirror Link (01/20/2021): In this document Suz outlines her experiences with grooming and abuse in the community dating back to 2013 and later. She makes a disclaimer assuring us that the document is not to incite drama and that the current Maplemation bears no resemblance to the older one. Keep this in mind.

Tori’s document Mirror Link (01/22/2021): In this document Tori shares her own experience in the Maplestory community from 2011 to 2016 and how she had an abusive relationship with Neil. Below will have a statement from Neil. (02/06/2021 update: The misunderstanding was cleared up with Tori in private so we got rid of her screenshot.)

I would like to start off by saying that I owe an apology to Tori. While I didn’t send the pic to Reggie, it doesn’t mean anything. The fact is that I did send them to someone and I wasn’t even supposed to have them either. It was a big fuck up and I’m okay with owning that and I want you to know that I really do mean it when I say that I’m sorry. Not “sorry that I got caught” a while after everything I felt fucking awful. I’ll say it again:
I apologize. It’s my fault that this happened.

Now onto the details of this entire situation(This is not written to invalidate how Tori feels, this is simply to give my perspective):
As I already said, I sent a pic of Tori to someone else. I haven’t spoken to Reggie at all since the first time he saw me in a public chat he shat on me because of my relationship with Tori. Can’t really say that would make me want to talk with him at all. Outside of that I shared a group with him at some point, but it makes 0 sense for me to send it to him.

This is the first time I’ve actually made a comment on this in public although the people above have heard that I’ve done otherwise. I’m a very private person, I don’t like to throw my business out in the open like that as it is MY business. When I heard about Tori’s doc I took a step back and thought about it as well as talked about it among my circle (where even then, I owned up to my mistake) but I have yet to deny anything she said. Not in private, not in public, not anywhere. The only thing that people had to go off of was a tweet of the MM Discord taken 100% out of context, but that’ll be covered later.

Our past relationship is our business, but now it’s out in the open anyways, so I’ll talk about how I felt about it for a second. My feelings on how it went was more “toxic” if anything. Things were fucked up on both ends throughout the time we spent together and we fought quite a bit near the end of our relationship.

Lastly, the fact that I’m being grouped together with all of these other people who have a history of doing extremely fucked up shit to people makes me sick. I’m 21, going into 22 now. I made one mistake nearly 6 years ago (Both Tori and I were 16 i.e. minors) now and I’m held to the same standard as people who have gone out of their way to manipulate minors as ADULTS. To me, that feels pretty unfair. I’m no groomer, predator, whatever. I won’t take accountability for things that I’ve never done and this isn’t a promise to change. I already have.

Tori responded to the document upon initial release and later had a private conversation with Neil where they resolved whatever issues they had and had a follow up tweet (this was of her own volition and nowhere was a follow up tweet mentioned). These are private conversations and will not be shown as it is none of anyone's business besides the two involved.

These fully cleared Neil of any predatory actions, which Suz conveniently chose to ignore.

> No. As shown in this doc, we are firmly against predators and groomers no matter their status. We have not defended a single one for their actions. All confirmed groomers have since left this community and have not interacted in the forums or discord server for years.

Check Casey’s case. We are the only ones that actually named him by name, no one else did… Including Suz! While the Casey thing has been discovered much more recently, Suz deliberately chose not to include him in her document and outright tried to defend/protect him.
The original doc lacked the part about Casey, despite the grooming-prevention server being made because of what he did, which Suz was aware of.

She’s giving Casey a chance that she refuses to give anyone else, especially Neil, whose single offence happened over 6 years ago. Casey had repeated offences. Neil only had 1 offence, and it had nothing to do with pedophillia/grooming.

This isn't to say time nullifies any harm, but instead that Suz picks her targets. She is not benevolent or doing this for the right reasons if she’s willing to overlook Casey, who was a repeat offender.
Neil on the other hand, has changed. He isn’t the same person he was all those years ago and hasn’t even been in a relationship since.

If someone is apologetic and has shown change for their actions, why do they not get the pass she is willing to give a pedophile?

If Suz’s goal is to spread awareness and make sure people keep notice and stay away from these individuals, why would she leave out a very recent menace and go for people who no longer present any danger to the community as they’ve long since detached from it?

We’re glad that the recent events pushed more people into coming out and sharing their stories regarding groomers who’ve been in the community. But if she really wants to drive the point across that this behavior is unacceptable and should be ostracised, don’t pick which of them gets shot and which of them are spared (especially when it comes to people who are popular and therefore have ease of access to a lot of impressionable children). All it does is destroy your credibility towards these topics.

A common rebuttal is “Oh you don’t like Casey”. True. We don’t. What does that change?

>For context, they’re referring to Suz’s post which did indeed get mass reported. However...

Just to show that it wasn’t us.

Keep in mind we can’t have evidence for something that can’t exist, we just got lucky this time. But see, if we didn’t have it, they’re free to throw out ludicrous claims against us that we were the one who silenced them, directly or indirectly. This is their behavior constantly.

> No.

The 2SP thing that Digital is talking about is an out of context screenshot that’s been given false narrative out of bad faith and malintention. It’s a screenshot of people (i.e. his friends) messing around with Neil in the MM server which is a very common occurrence if you just search his name or scroll up in the MM chat.

The 2SP server was made a whole 3 months ago as part of the casual banter (screenshot provided below). We can’t believe we need to explain an inside joke but Shinn got banned as a joke from our friend group server called TSP, he wanted to rebel and make a server without Neil called ‘2SP’, a superior alternative to TSP.

The blurred name is a play-on-slur one of our friends did. It was censored in the Maplemation chat for obvious reasons. Here is what the name actually said if you were that interested.

In respect to the screenshot, it’s just a joke on Neil banning people, just as he did to Shinn jokingly. Interestingly, they cropped out that screenshot that deprives people of that context. You can clearly see the context for the joke which was about banning.

Please bear in mind they had the chance to actually clarify this if it was ignorance since they likely got this screenshot from someone else as they’re all banned from Maplemation currently. But Suz who had Neil added on Discord, removed him and no one even bothered trying to attempt to contact us. They just made a public spat on it.

Incidentally, a similar thing happened to one of the guys involved when our icons were done as an inside joke about Maple relationship icons. We made a generic icon of 2 people holding hands and they rewrite the narratives to make it about themselves when they don’t matter that much to merit icons or servers made about them (more on this including the screenshots will be posted later when we discuss these individual people).

To counter this predictable behavior, we took screenshots of us making the server in advance, to showcase the dates, time and the jokes that led up to it. They’re just that predictable. This doesn’t come from ignorance. It comes out of malice from jumping the gun. How did they even jump to that conclusion when you take the context both above and below? Nothing about that screenshot indicates we are mocking victims. These people will spin narratives to tell whatever story they want people to hear. The dates don't lie.

> No. In case any of you weren’t aware, Dez was banned a year and a half ago for provoking and harassing MM Staff (see Full Transparency). In recent months prior to Suz and the others going on their social crusade, we got into contact with Dez due to the grooming prevention server being made by her.

She’s shown signs of genuine self-reflection and apologised, and this was not told to us but shown through her actions and general conversation. She also never asked to get back in, she didn’t talk to us in hopes of that.

In spite of that, we decided to let her back in. Her account was unbanned months ago, dating back to 2020 and her being back, as well as her bantering with us has no connection or relation to current events happening.

The dates of their claims and what actually happened straight up do not match up.

To reiterate, Suz, the main one perpetuating this idea of us letting Dez in to spite the victims, isn’t in Maplemation. How did she draw this conclusion? Off of what evidence? She didn’t talk to us about it? Therefore, the only conclusion that we can draw is that someone took screenshots of her talking in MM with us and they projected rhetoric onto what they saw.

Given the screenshot that they received was deprived of context, and their discovery of this after they made these callout posts, it makes sense that they could come to this conclusion.

However, if you take into consideration Maple Riot staff’s grudge against MM and its staff (which will be explained further into the document), it seems less likely that this was just a misunderstanding.

> No. The jokes were explained in the '2SP' section.
Neil explained his piece in his section above. Neil's actions are not justified. They were wrong.
The issue isn't the action but how Suz phrased this in a manipulative way. The way this reads is that Neil is an adult actively searching and sending 'CP' when he was the same age as Tori, both underaged. Suz ignored his age to make her argument seem valid.

By putting him in the same line and context as Tate, Reggie, Ain, and Mark Fallen is a manipulative and disingenuous statement to make. This is the distinction to make. It's the distinction Tori made. Neil shouldn't be put in the same group as these guys. These guys were adults preying on children. This isn't to take away blame, but she's making him out to be a predator, when it isn't the case.

It's awkward to phrase it since it seems like we're taking away blame from Neil's actions. We're not, but she's conflating two wrongs of different severities. Suz at every point neglected to mention Neil's age.

As for the ex-pedophiles, who?

Not naming these other people doesn't really help out the community.

Name them, and we’ll sort that out. Just saying “some people” or some vague-likeness does not help. It can’t be the names Suz mentioned since those guys* and guys that are actually responsible for grooming and/or pedophillia are long gone and not in MM anymore and haven't been for quite some time.

*Something we will take accountability for is still having Mark Fallen in Maplemation. While we did not know about him being a predator, upon the release of Suz’s document, we kicked him accordingly so we thank her for bringing it to our attention and have since kicked him.

We initially assumed he was gone since he had deleted his account but it seemed he left his inactive accounts in here too.

PS. Every recent grooming incident brought to our attention has been taken seriously and handled accordingly, we’re not psychics and we do not know what happens in people’s DMs or private servers. That’s why the members must co-operate and notify us.

There is more than just this but that will be addressed later. We just wanted to address the main lies and deceit. We will cover specific individuals behind this slander as well as the details of what they said.

The main purpose of this section is to shine a light on the people mentioned in “Lies and Deceit” above and bring attention to their previous behavior of unprovoked harassment and how much credibility their words hold concerning the community.

This will be the one and only time we talk about Maple Riot. We’ve never once publicly addressed them prior to this nor disclosed anything about them either. The only thing that indicated their feud is when MM staff, either as individuals or representing staff dealt with them as they’re all problem people. The first set of instigators, SunGod, Suz and Digital* are all staff and continued this behavior from their server.

*Digital is no longer staff as of the 6th January 2021 but it should be noted that he is still associated with the staff via their clique and most of the things discussed were during his term as staff. The tweets were not. It doesn’t really affect their affiliation or his participation.

The others mentioned that are not staff of Maple Riot and chose to involve themselves by their own volition while partaking in the slander (both now and prior events) as well. Those individuals are, Blez, SleepyTrystin and Erston.

Let’s make one thing clear, we do not care about the existence of MR itself. There have been similar situations happening prior with Still-Framed, DimmFX, NEXGen, etc. It makes no difference to us. The issue with MR that we have, has been the staff. To be more explicit, the stuff they’ve been doing following the creation of MR. Let’s cover that.

If you asked Suz what MR was made for now, the reason would be something similar to why Still-Framed existed.
A simple alternative made by some people in the community whether that’d be because they want people to try other things aside from Maple or just because they want a shot at running their own community.
But the original purpose of MR was something entirely different.

In their original welcome message to the server it reads this.
From the beginning its purpose was to continue to spread the rumor that MM is just the worst thing ever in an attempt to gain an audience.
Neil had contacted her later for something else and it turned into a conversation about the community where she said “we’re literally all one community” and “Why are you trying so hard to divide it” even though this is the first thing MR says about us. This is their first impression.

So Suz is currently the admin/owner of Maple Riot and was in fact behind its creation. That wasn’t what it was at first though, she underwent the moniker, “Chloe” and used that to run Maple Riot. Something she denied a lot either herself or the others with her.

After quite a bit of time passed, she came out as Chloe and made this doc to explain why she did so. Mirror link. It basically boiled down to making Chloe to prevent whatever image Suz had from tainting MR.
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In this document, she criticised old MM staff for such things. Which we agree with, the old staff were shitty. She reiterated this in her current document too, but it loses meaning considering the tweets followed. Though it’s interesting how they all hold MM accountable for their reputation of the past, yet she was perfectly fine with making the “Chloe” account, to run away from her own reputation.

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Also they’re trying to make it seem like that there’s no beef, but this doc alone should tell you otherwise. Maple Riot (MR) was indeed made because of Maplemation, we elaborate on this in the section on the creation of MR. Also, someone who does not have an issue with the current staff would not post this.

As mentioned before more recently, Suz has come out with a document covering her and a lot of other victims’ stories of grooming, we agree with and support her decision in bringing attention to predators in the community and don’t have much of a problem with it, she has shown a clear understanding of the contrast between the older MM and the current one. Her following tweets and actions however heavily contradict what she said which makes us question her credibility and ability to judge situations.

As covered before, we have already debunked the whole “MM making fun of victims” which was complete conjecture and out of left field. Even if her response was reactionary and out of ignorance, going on social media without having accurate info on the allegations hurts her credibility and the credibility of others’ that matter.
Putting Neil’s name on the same level as other actual confirmed predators just sounds like an intentional attack at this point. She could’ve also talked to Neil or inquired about it just like we did with the N8 situation instead of making her own interpretation.
She has previously talked to him and indicated that she was able to have a civil chat with him. Here’s the cropped image and then the full screenshot.

(The date of this image is 10/22/20)

This is a common habit where she receives screenshots out of context, assumes the context and spreads this misinformation like gospel.

*Suz saying MM is dead, will refer to this later.

This stuff between you and Dez is your business, not ours. We addressed it wasn’t a joke and this doc is evident why it took time.
It isn’t our duty to resolve your misunderstandings.

This is Digital. Someone who refuses to be a part of drama. And it shows what a good character he is, always holding these ideals up.

The following images will be hyper-linked with statements. We’re just gonna lightning round this, it’s not even worth describing something this obvious to see.

Which was cropped, out of context and wrong.
Taking things seriously with memes.
He takes things seriously right?
We’re pretty sure he does.
He doesn’t even like drama
Sign the lease, we don’t wanna live rent free in your head anymore
Posted something on his main, then deleted it to post on a burner account, then back to his main.
He hates drama even if it “is unnecessary” and is getting wrongfully blocked!!
He is very perceptive too and never jumps to conclusions.

As you can see, Digital is a man who dislikes drama, stays in his own lane, is level headed and is a man of strong character. His allegations came from a place of good intention and was in no way fueled by any personal feelings towards MM and its staff.

To be serious for a second, it’s clear he just dislikes MM for whatever reason. He complains about it passive aggressively on a consistent basis both in the MM discord, MR discord, etc.

If you want something that shows very explicitly he hates MM, he uses his “professional” twitter to complain about it in his free time prior to the allegations being thrown out. This was actually how he spent his free time. Twice in this same post! If you dislike MM, don’t be a weasel about it and pretend to be professional, just say it and leave us alone lol.

Rock on Digital.

Sungod has a tendency to take matters personally and get back at people in weird roundabout ways. Like we mentioned before the icon thing was an inside joke in a friend group in which he theorized he was a target.
(click here to see the full context)
(Sungod's DM)

Normally we’d be okay with a misunderstanding but the way he went about inquiring with sneak jabs here and there (Privately DMing Karasu with a tier list making fun/playing along with the joke but publicly asking about it in MM discord when he could’ve asked him then and there, making a whole conspiracy theory evidence board, changing his icon to a screenshot of a staff member’s personal DM which we can only assume was a way to get back at him...) can only make us assume he’s doing it vindictively. He’s been given a verbal warning for it.

Here’s another example of him trying to draw a comparison of the most recent MBR system to the MR one which he refers to as redacted. Continuing to throw snide comments and dancing around it. This was after the staff of MR was told not to talk about MR anymore (see leeching off MM below for more information). It’s also not true, did they forget where they got the MR system from?

Finally, here’s a recent twitter thread:

The general gist of this is that he dislikes specific people rather than the community, whether it’s warranted or not, it is fine. Most of us are already private people and we don’t care what other people say about us in their own little circle. But expressing your distaste by picking on an entire forum they’re part/in charge of only brings a divide to the community. If you come publicly with a personal problem and disguise it as a criticism and complain about the community then not only do you make yourself look stupid, you’re only bringing the divide that you claim you want to “fix”.

While she wasn’t the face of this current stream of allegations, Blez has a history of starting drama and smearing MM in other communities and websites over the years. Claiming that we’re dividing the community while actively fueling the flames and jumping the

gun on every breaking news is damaging her own credibility. The screenshots in lies and deceit pretty much summarise what she took part in besides quote retweeting other stuff by other perpetrators. Honestly, you could just look at her twitter page for all of that stuff but in case she deletes it, here’s a mirror zip of all her and anyone else’s tweets about this. Another zip for it.

It should be noted that unlike Suz, Blez is actually consistent with this as she also reprimanded Casey for what he did, we’ll post those screenshots below since they relate to the next person we’re gonna talk about.

also lol

We already covered him above when he said when we defended a pedo. Now he didn’t specify who but we’re gonna guess it’s Taki, because he had interactions with him and wrote a document complaining about him and leading it into why MM is dying.

First off, we don’t know about that situation of Taki being a pedo, as there has been no verified source given to staff, just hearsay. Even if he was, he isn’t in MM anymore and hasn’t been for a while with no way to contact him currently, and left before we knew about it being a rumour from Blez, so there isn’t much we can do there.

For a little bit of background, Trystin has something against MM because he got caught up with his feelings and committed to a bad faith argument that pretty much everyone disagreed with and then he blamed it on MM. You can read it yourself below, but the tl;dr is Rhys said to a member to just pick a program they’re comfortable with and he interpreted it in the worst way possible and doubled down on his complaint. It ended with Taki calling him out for it.

Higher res image

Later on: Taki, Trystin and Casey got into a feud. Staff even told Taki to stop as you can see. Magna is Neil by the way. Then Casey started escalating it with the staff and the rest of the details are in “Full Transparency” so we won’t get into that. It resulted in Casey getting banned.

Trystin had DM’s with Taki that he detailed in his own document and then brought it over to a member of staff, Heki. Since it was in the DM's, it really isn’t any of Maplemation’s business and Heki gave him legitimate advice as to how to get around it. He claimed that Taki should be banned but as detailed in “Full Transparency, Casey did far more to warrant a ban. Taki instead got a warning. We didn’t defend Taki for being a pedophile or even say he was in the right in this scenario. Our stance was that he shouldn’t get banned for a single offence and got off with a warning.

He dropped a voice recording in feedback-suggestions for some reason where he was complaining about MM and the rest was history. He then was asked to make the doc which we linked above.

Let’s clarify something, we don’t support people being made fun of, but people made jokes about him which were justified. Simply because he double-downed on his point even when pretty much everyone disagreed with it. It doesn’t make what people did right, but it wasn’t out of nowhere. This is the reason why he slanders MM, it’s not for anything like defending pedo’s like he says he does.

Here’s something interesting. Just check the tweet. If it’s taken down, there’s screenshots below a mirror to the streamable. Tl;dr, Keynan was caught as a pedo and guess who’s defending him. It’s just projection with these guys.

Erston joined MM in late August of last year and has had a track record of starting drama and stirring the pot between individuals and different communities. One example is when he started a rumor that the staff members in MM’s Voice Call were telling stories and badmouthing previous members of the community.

These sorts of situations aren’t uncommon, by the way. Most of these rumors and hearsay never comes back to us and we are left with a bunch of people assuming we’re just mocking them publicly. When confronted about it, all Erston had to say was “sorry”.

Not all instigators get caught or called out by the way, a lot of friction that occurs between people can easily just come from a third-party member making up stories. Despite this intervention Erston still continued bad mouthing others in MM calls and fishing for drama to the point that many people started avoiding voice calls because of him.

The purpose of discussing Erston besides posting memes relating to the slander (we’ll go more in-depth below with the screenshot for it) is to show we do not appreciate instigators and will hold them just as accountable as the party they are trying to instigate us with, moving forward.

This section will be brief as it’ll just be putting out the screenshots to showcase the unprovoked harassment that led up to this and their general disingenuous way of going about the things they do. You can see above that they all try to either throw indirect jabs at MM or slander. Let’s go more in-depth on some of the stuff they’ve been doing.

Don’t think the slander was recent. If you ever want an example of these guys taking it as a joke, the very same thing that they accused us of, look no further than these string of screenshots. For transparency, this took place around the end of May 2020. Something to note is that the star before their names indicate their status as moderator, which Digital was at the time. As you can see, both SunGod and Digital joined in on this nonsense. “Do we look like MM to you”, “well of course it isn’t mm”.

As you can see, they didn’t bother taking it seriously from the get go. Here’s the accusations:

It’s very interesting that SunGod makes the comment that we “meme the fuck out of it”. Considering how they treated the situation above in their Discord and what we’re about to post below.

Mirror link for… the edited TikTok (what?) “Professional” indeed, Digital.

Something we’ll cover real quick, MR constantly throws the point that we are dividing the community, etc. We discussed this in the creation of MR a bit more, so scroll up there for more information.

You can find it in the tweet zips posted earlier and the screenshots below.
First off, we didn’t start this divide.

Most of the conversation about how it wasn’t us, but them was detailed in Neil’s DM with Suz.

To give some background, MR has been subtly throwing in slight advertisements which was kind of weird given all these jabs they do and how they claim MM is dead.

First off it started with them advertising MR oddly. First DM’ing random members of our community which is fine since it’s outside the server and doesn’t break our rule on third-party advertisements (unless otherwise discussed). Then they started escalating it slightly with advertising their collabs. With ‘Maple Riot presents’, but again, it’s minor on its own. It’s just the other things that it’s stacked on top of that makes it bothersome, but it was ignored nonetheless.

(Name is blue because a collab was going on)

This isn’t a rule just exclusive to us, it is also a rule they enforce as well. They have affiliates, so using us, a non-affiliate, to advertise their stuff really doesn’t add up.

We kept note of it and kept silent until it got to a point where one of their staff, N8/Moon8, etc. posted their discord link both in their profile post and on their signature.

Higher res mirror

After being confronted about this, they, as usual, started indirectly continuing this such as when Digital had it in his status and he was in MM at the time, it was obviously in retaliation because he did the same thing with “Ode to MM” server link, a server that was made in response to Full Transparency but changed his nickname to that server instead. Same conversation as the one posted above with Digital to verify it is him.

Later, Shaz just kept advertising and talking about his collabs and MR projects, so Neil told him to cut it out since we established earlier after the N8 incident that they no longer have the privilege to advertise their collabs. Again, on its own, it’s minor. It’s the incidents it’s built upon that makes this bad. To reiterate, the issue is not that they were advertising a collab. The issue is that they were advertising Maple Riot.

It's weird that they’d use Maplemation, a place they clearly dislike, say is dead, and aren’t partnered with, as a platform for advertisement. It gets more confusing when they use Maplemation as their tags as well as Kayas from there, using 3 variations of his name. What’s more confusing is this is an animator they both think is bad, so using a bad animator in their tags along with the name of the place they dislike looks weird on their part.

When confronted about it, their immediate reaction was “how could you see that” and did so assuming that tags aren’t visible.

You’ll notice that everything that we do when we have an issue with MR is that we confront them about it privately, not making it a spectacle in public. This also contains Suz also agreeing he should’ve been banned a while ago, confirming he was just doing everything out of bad intentions that were worth a ban.

We’ll link the whole conversation between Neil and Suz for full context.

A lot of this you will find is unprovoked behavior from MR. We as MM have not publicly made any statements or given any opinions on MR. We as individuals have not done so either. All that can be assumed is that they carried over whatever personal issues they had with individual members of staff prior to the creation of MR and just slabbed that over onto MM.

If you recall back in Full Transparency, we detailed how things went with Project Revival, i.e. PR. They started off with indirect comments to MM, that slowly started escalating with a specific group of people moving onto slight harassment to starting a raid and taking it to centre stage and start throwing claims. Sound familiar? Again, just look at the thread should you want the full details.

Wow, it looks like these groups of individuals follow the exact same steps.

Instead of Dez, Vash, Casey, etc.
It’s just Suz, Digital, SunGod, etc.

The contents of the message are different, but what they’re saying is the same thing.

There are a lot more things this group, either as individuals or as MR, have done (which we have screenshots for too). However, we just wanted to get the idea across and the rest are not as relevant to this document/do not matter to us that much and can be seen as minor annoyances. We’re not telling you to “pick a side”. Whether you wish to continue to support Maple Riot or not does not matter to us, we don’t care. What we are saying is that we are justifying why you should not give people like this any power to their allegations (aside from the victims who are actually trying to tell their side of the story).

We are referring to the tweets, not the documents presented when we say not give power to allegations just to clear things up.

So, this is something we wanted to talk about while we’re on the topic. Maplemation is a forum for Maplestory animators and artists that has been around for more than a decade and has evidently been through many changes. We’ve been through dozens of staff members and hundreds of members and now, despite the major dip in population from the game losing relevance, we're one of the very few websites left on the internet and possibly the last standing forum of its kind that still manages to maintain an audience and garner new blood solely from the content put out even without any knowledge of the game the assets come from.

Maplemation has been a home that carried tons of good memories and fostered many talented animators, artists and content creators who’ve moved on and forward to more professional settings. But there were a lot of problems concerning the behavior exhibited in the community (as you would expect from being on the internet back in the 2010’s) including the toxic environment, problematic nature of the content put out and the amount of grooming and abuse that was rampant on skype groups.

Thankfully, as of recent years, we as of the current staff, put so much of that history aside and have focused on making the experience in this community much more fruitful and comfortable. Unfortunately, the current Maplemation has still been a major target of harassment, badmouthing and blame-shifting which has majorly dipped its reputation over the years.

A fair amount of the staff that are here now grew up on the old Maplemation that was run by Tate, Makani and Rumswiller. And it was bad. People were rude. People slinging slurs and epithets at each other was commonplace. A lot of the users were middle school or high schoolers so that didn’t help. There was some unspoken rule that if you were giving someone advice or talking to someone, the meaner you were, the cooler or more knowledgeable you were. We also repeated this behavior, and were pretty harsh in our criticisms back then. Some of these people are/were some of the most talented animators or popular members of the community. If you had a problem with it, you were looked at as being thin-skinned.

We didn’t try to rock the boat and change how things were because we didn’t have the notoriety to do so. We were young, dumb and trying to fit in with the cool crowd when we were just members. Because of that, we accept the blame for participating in that toxic behavior with them such as with “criticism” back then. However, these 'veteran members 'didn’t come to us with this understanding of both parties’ involvement in creating this environment.

Instead, they acted as if they had no fault at all in any of this and that the current staff were the sole reasons for the stain on Maplemation’s name. The only conclusion we can draw from this behavior is that they are trying to pass the buck of having set a standard of immature behavior in the community and creating a long line of people who are modeling that behavior on to us.

This is backed by the fact that the MM nuke has been a collective effort and something these veterans endorsed to avoid their own demons, as well as the fact that a lot of new members who’ve made acquaintance with them and have no history or recollection of how the community was adopt these veterans’ pre-established opinion and distaste to it. They make sure future members inherit their grudge against the community.

The other batch is people with personal vendettas against specific staff members. Their way of getting back at these specific individuals is by spreading misinformation and trash-talking MM as a whole. Normally we would ignore all provocations and remain silent on the matter if it weren’t for the serious accusations they’ve been making recently.

It’s no secret that the maple animation community is divided, which would seem strange to an outsider considering how niche and small it already is. While we use the same assets from the same game, people go about expressing themselves and using them in different ways. It’s no surprise that there are branches of this slightly larger community and it’s not necessary to have one giant forum or server uniting them. When it comes to what’s inside these branches, there is a clear divide from people who’ve separated from MM to make their own maple communities. That’s all fine, but treating the current MM as the toxic hell hole it once was, badmouthing the website to newcomers and people from other animation communities or social media is not.

Despite our own opinions on sub-communities that have been made over the years, we have never made any attempts to publicly sabotage them. We’re not martyrs for people who preceded us. We refuse to take any accountability when it comes to tarnishing the image of the community and segregating its members. That is 100% on who came before us. Our goal is not to rebuild from the remaining pebbles of the old community, but to cultivate a fresh and exciting experience for people to make friendships, memories and projects in a collective environment.

The point of this document is not to analyze or discuss testimonies brought by victims. We're not on a social crusade.

If you want our opinion, we believe that confirmed groomers and predators in this community should be called out and ostractized regardless of their status or position.

Blaming an individual's actions on a whole community causes more dvide.

Getting rid of people like Reggie is a good thing.

Misinformation is detrimental, and we urge those who make any sort of call out posts to handle this information with care.

In regards to Neil, this document isn’t really a promise of him changing, again, he’s already changed from when he was a child. This happened almost 6 years ago and involved no acts of pedophillia or grooming.

Suz neglected to mention his age to supplement her empty arguments.

To the people mentioned in this doc (unless you are an actual victim like Suz), do not associate your petty drama with serious allegations such as these.

You do not contribute to the conversation and consistently spread misinformation. Your gish gallop only distracts from the conversation.

Keep at your social crusade, just don’t involve us in your personal drama. If you are NOT mentioned in this doc, you should still talk to us.

This isn’t to say Suz is innocent. Her doc alone was valid and was needed when discussing predators. It’s just her tweets after that were not.

If you actually wanted to make an effort to make things right and fix it, you really should have talked to us.

And after the lengths they've taken to demonize us for their latest publicity stunt, we are hereby retracting our willingness to communicate with them any further.

The arm and leg we gave out to peacefully coexist with this other community was simply not worth it.

Any issue we had with them, it was always sorted in the DM’s. By making it a public thing, you will get a public response.

This was not handled out of benevolence, it was opportunistic in nature. They ignored talking about Casey outright and made sure what we said could be misconstrued by how they presented it.

One thing we want to address is our silence up until this point.

Us not saying anything doesn’t make any of us guilty. It’s not guilty until proven innocent.

As shown above, this harassment has been going on for quite a while, but we opt for silence since it usually isn’t worth responding to or it is very minor in our eyes.

We’ve never publicly addressed anything prior regarding this. We take our time with our responses to ensure it is not done out of impulse.

We need to back up our claims and get the screenshots to do so, it takes time to get and sort this information.

We want to take these things very seriously. Grooming, allegations and slander are serious things.

We want to make it known that had Suz not tried to connect what Neil did in his past to Maplemation and say he was on the same footing as Reggie and Mark the Fallen, we would not be writing this document.

If she and the rest of Maple Riot’s staff didn’t say that Maplemation houses and protects predators while silencing and ridiculing victims, we would not be writing this.

We don’t want to be known for public executions and putting people on full blast like this. It’s just the two times that pushed us to do it was slander and the forum being nuked.

We’re not going to lie to you and say “we don’t want people to look at these individuals differently and we harbor no ill will towards them.”

We don’t like these people. We don’t have to. Especially after what they’ve been doing all this time.

They’ve always tried to divide the community and held things against us personally as individuals so we already didn’t like them. We’ll be open about that.

They're also very awful peope.

SunGod made the statement that we are pretending to be saviors of the community. Quit projecting your social crusade onto us.

We aren’t and never have done such a thing. We’re not interested in doing so either. We have only ever acted in a way to make Maplemation better than when we took it into our hands and took problems as they come. No more, no less.

Since these things have happened twice in a row (first with PR, now with MR), we’re going to be more authoritarian towards future incidents that start up like this to prevent such documents from ourselves being made.

Any response docs or tweets that may come of this will be ignored like last time with “Full Transparency”. This is a one and done.

Thus, should anyone post/relay such a response either on the forums, or Discord, you will be banned. There will be no exceptions. This isn’t an act of silencing, we’re done with this.

One thing we want to make clear is that we backed up everything we said as much as we could with screenshots with the full context.

On the other hand, these guys keep throwing baseless conjectures and spin things out of context to fit their narrative, or they just make memes about it.

Unless they substantiate their claims, it’s otherwise worthless. Thus, our only wish is for you not to believe them, or us, but to trust your own judgement based on the information provided.

We’re not professional and we’re not trying to be.

Side note, if you believe there are predators/ex-predators in Maplemation and have the evidence to back up these claims, DM a member of staff immediately.

If you have possibly been groomed or encountered a pedophile, please refer to this document on what to do and who to contact when it comes to this.

Don’t worry about seeing another document like this from us again.

We refuse to make another document like this and Full Transparency again, we're done with this and have no further interest in doing so anymore.

Our only priority is making the community grow and releasing more content. In order to prevent situations like this from happening we’re going to take a more authoritarian approach dealing with similar problems and handle it on the spot instead of letting it build up.

We're not allowing any Maple Riot content in any form on either the forums or Discord. If it's a Maple Riot video, collab, etc. If you post it once, it will be removed. If it's done again, you will be banned.
If your content submitted for upload on our YouTube channel contains any contributions from SunGod or Suz, or any Maple Riot branding whatsoever, it will be rejected. Either cut their parts/branding or do not submit.
There will be no discussion on a decision that's already been finalised.

To wrap this up on a more positive note, we’re recently released tutorials and we have more upcoming projects coming up that will surely deliver, so look out for that. Things should go back to normal relatively soon and everyone can focus on their own projects.

Fin.

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Karasu Next Administrator

Karasu Next
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