The vote4waifu Incident

This is a document that, truthfully, no one wanted to put together, but we felt it was incredibly important to compile a clear and distinct archive and explanation of the chain of events that led a prominent user/streamer, vote4waifu, to leave the community.

Things aren't what he made it seem like, and over 20 witnesses can back up these receipts.

Charyb

The very first detail that's important to understand about this ordeal goes back into Kart's history by a few months. It's a little ugly, and it's not the point of this doc, but it's relevant all the same.

Back in April, there was a bit of a blowout in dev, because I was frustrated at one of the other devs, Fickle. I made a smartass comment about her in what I idly assumed was a private voice chat, because it was in a small server, but I was very wrong. In fact, vote4waifu was actually streaming that voice call to the Kart community at large, and I hadn't really been made aware at the time.

It was a bad move of mine, and when Fickle heard it, we came head to head about it. Unfortunately no peaceful resolution was reached at the time, and she ended up quitting the team.

Vote knew the details of this, and was very apologetic. Streaming someone without consent is a rather big no-no, but it's not like Vote was a major streamer, and mistakes happen now and then. He should have warned me, but I also should have been more cautious; despite it being a cozy little group, I didn't know everyone in the chat very well.

It's important to know the proper place to vent when things are frustrating you, and recognize when it's not appropriate to vent. That wasn't an appropriate time, and I felt pretty bad that Fickle had to feel my hot air.

I didn't hold this all against Vote, because it was an unfortunate mistake, and I figured it wouldn't happen again.

This was our first significant interaction, but after it was said and done, vote4waifu ended up becoming very close -- and the extent to which we became close will be relevant later on.

Unfortunately, on September 19th, another incident like this happened; not one where I said anything imprudent, but one where I ended up being streamed without warning again.

https://youtu.be/kqBDjykHQqE?t=481

It was nothing major. I joined and flirted with the two of them in the chat (Vote and Runa) and when they talked a little bit about the game he was playing, it made me confused and I had to ask them if I was talking onstream. Receiving an affirmative, I sort of fumbled around a bit, tried to chitchat, and then felt awkward and left. I was just getting off work when it happened, and wasn't sure how to feel about it. I dmed Wolfy (the other admin) about it and we created a specific voice channel for streams in our little server to mitigate the problem in the future..

I didn't think I needed to discuss it further, but after some consideration, I realized I was a little bothered by it. Nothing super major, but worth telling him my concerns. We were close, after all, and I felt like he should probably be a lot more careful for several reasons. I conferred with a few friends of mine (who don't even know Vote) who also stream, and their reactions to it were pretty much a universal "Woah, that's kind of a no-no when it comes to streams. That can get you or them in deep doodoo."

I tried to make it a little lighthearted, to show I wasn't super angry about it or anything, just a little concerned, but I realized after the fact that it didn't come off well.

When he said "I honestly don't care, it makes me uncomfortable," I began wondering if he was just deflecting what I had to say. Never in my life have I ever had anyone tell me that it's wrong to ask an uninvolved friend about a problem I'm having with an unrelated friend.

Knowing what I know now, I was right to feel a little iffy.

In the end, this entire exchange left me feeling very iffy. In addition to the additional deflection -- and reading this all, you should be able to see what I mean -- I felt as if I was being gaslighted. "Literally never knew about it, never had an issue doing it, and never heard of anyone feeling that way." I didn't hold it against Vote for what had happened the first time, but it was very concerning to have him try to act like such a big deal hadn't happened.

I thought that perhaps he had been having a rough couple of days. After all, I did kind of approach him out of nowhere about it, and I believe it's important to make sure people have the emotional energy necessary for important conversations. So I resolved to make sure I got that right in the future.

Wanting to be sure I wasn't overreacting to this all, I went to Chromatian to ask him what he thought of the discussion.

I talked with him a little bit about angle of approach for a response, and to make sure I wasn't overreacting. About three days later, I went to Vote again and tried to bring the topic back up.

Alright, bear with me for a moment. Assume you're Vote, and I approach you this way. How are you gonna respond? Let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

Let's say I'm overly anal and paranoid. Let's say I'm insecure and kinda getting on your nerves. I come to you and am like, "Hey, what you said made me feel this way, I didn't expect you to say those sorts of things, it made me feel a little uncomfortable."

How would you respond? Genuinely, how do you approach a situation like that? Would it be anything like this?

I went into this feeling like we had communication problems that were making things more tense than he meant, and they could be worked out. But now, this just made me mad. Because this, this here, this is more gaslighting. It made me realize that there was some real problems afoot, and that he didn't seem too keen on getting them cleaned up. So I told him how important this was to me. I didn't want a hasty response; I wanted his full attention when he had that attention to give.

I never wanted to believe what I wanted; I wanted to know what he really meant. To hear this from someone you are... very close to, is WILD.

That's where my friendship with vote4waifu, and any potential romantic relationship* that the future offered, ended. We never talked to each other anymore after that, and that should have been the end of it. Unfortunately, it was just the beginning of the ordeal.

(An out of the blue comment he made to Lat' in a conversation of theirs that was unrelated to me entirely.)

_{*I promise that one will come up in detail
in just a little bit.}

Porter

Unfortunately was right, because just a few days later, Vote began talking about Charyb in a very negative light on stream, for everyone to hear; I can personally attest to this, as I was on some of those streams with him in VRChat when he talked about Charyb.

We all saw Charyb trying to bring this up to him after the fact, but Vote didn't seem to care, and ignored it outright.

My involvement with Vote during this past month was when I reached out to him about the dispute that him and Charyb had been having amongst themselves. While I tried to hear out both sides, since I knew what happened was a big misunderstanding on both of their parts, one was more open to discussing this than the other.

Charyb was very open to talking about the situation, would show me evidence as to what went down (including some seen earlier in this document), and opened up to me on why he felt the way he did in said situation. Vote, on the other hand, refused to tell me exactly what happened, flinging insults about Charyb, and straight up lying about what Charyb was doing, claiming "Charyb's been stalking Fickle" and that personal information was being shared. Charyb was very open to knowing what Vote meant, but all Vote would say is that Charyb watched a few streams, and that proof of personal info was withheld because of "privacy".

The logs Vote sent were sent to me early in the morning, after a stream in which I told him that we needed to talk privately so that this issue could be resolved. He brought up the topic out of nowhere, when I still hadn't planned on talking about it yet. Though I played devil's advocate during this, he still refused to prove his side, or be truthful about his claims.

After this, I decided to distance myself from him. This was due to not only my own feelings at the time, but also the general bad feeling about the way Vote was having problems with some of our other friends, too. It just didn't sit right with me.

Since I was a bit uneasy around Vote, I became cautious, but still talked openly when Vote was around, even joining in on his streams. There came a point, however, when I didn't feel good around Vote, so I and a couple of other friends decided to join a separate call while still playing the game with him. For a while, it was fun, but after his stream ended that day, Vote joined our call and the uncomfortableness came back. And that's when the worst happened.

During the call, I made an offhand comment on Vote's insistence on switching maps on a whim, his only reasoning being that it was HIS servers, (even though TAG owned them, and should be the one to maintain the rules of the server he laid out when making them), and that he could do what he wants because TAG likes him. There's evidence to support his tyrannical behavior, even if he claims he doesn't do this. See this exchange with Wolfy. Although it came later, it's important to see how much his story changes depending on who he's talking to.

See the line "Kicking players to open slots? Uh hello? I only did so once (that I was opening a spot for myself, not kicking someone for a spot)"

Now have a look at this:

For context on this next point (Wolfy speaking in this text):

Vote's response:

This, as you've seen, is a blatant lie.

He's also said:

And his response to Runa:

While it's not HARD evidence that Vote actually DID reset the server, I'd like you to take a look at the wording. "East started resetting; Servers being shit" and now "I [...] restarted East" Maybe it's just me, but it's VERY suspicious. Either way, as I said, he does whatever he feels like on these servers, and will flaunt that fact.

After bringing up the issue about how he was handling the servers once more, he began to become agitated, saying things like "Porter, shut the fuck up and grow a pair, alright?!" and after I sighed from his switch of a map, he let off on me, reciting multiple attempts at personal insults, including having no life, no job, no money, that I lived alone, that I was fat, etc, etc. While I don't have logs of these events, considering it was in a voice call, there were multiple witnesses, including Griff, Ibuki, and Gunla, some of whom have pieces later in this document.

Later in the same call, Vote apologized saying "I shouldn't have said those things, I hope you can forgive me" and I just kinda went silent and said "It's whatever, man." in a very faint, defeated tone. He admitted he said those things to purposefully get under my skin, and that rubbed me the wrong way, so I was conflicted and still pissed off about it.

After this, Vote proceeded to send me an "apology" in DMs. To this day, he harps on the fact I never replied to him. But I want this to be made clear: I already gave him his answer in the voice call.

This was what was sent:

[Personal details of Vote's life have been censored out for privacy reasons.]

First, notice how he doesn't claim his abuse of power is real, encasing "abuse" in quotations.

Second, he makes a slight-of-hand comment on how it was still MY fault for what he said.

Third, he mentions how his personal life has made him get to this point. I'd like to bring up that this ALSO was a lie, and that he's said this to Runa:

Fourth, that line about not turning off invites because of me or anyone else? Well, remember that line on Wolfy's post?

He basically admitted he lied to me as to the true intent of his actions, just for me to trust him more. Finally, he makes an off comment how he cares about me, quote "Much more than many of the people in that group" framing everyone else as not being either as trustworthy, friendly, or someone he even likes, which is still fucked up either way.

All of this makes it really clear that he DID want to avoid me, and that's okay, he has a right to. But if that's what he's doing, he shouldn't lie to me about it.

Another point is that when talking to Maple, she revealed Vote said this:

As you could tell from the actual apology he sent me, he did not "apologize like crazy". I also find it funny how he says at first he's "not going to say sorry for something I don't know about" even though he knew full well what he did. And even if the insults weren't what he meant, I made it clear to him why I was upset.

After this exchange, I wanted nothing to do with Vote, and would ACTIVELY avoid him at any turn, only really talking when another streamer friend of mine was streaming if Vote was around, since I still wanted to talk to my friend. During this time, Vote would spread slander about me to his friends on VRChat, who he introduced me to, and that I had been getting along with.

Knowing about this and all of the other shit he'd said about others, and TO others, I decided, in a fit of worry and uncertainty, to message that streamer friend (whose identity will be kept anonymous), warning him about Vote's actions, and what he might do.

The timing of this next thing is important, because it came, chronologically, after Wolfs had spoken with Vote and we had all taken up our concerns with him. When I messaged my friend, he told me how Vote came to him crying, wanting to find some way to make amends. Out of the hope that Vote would change, I told them about the ultimatum Vote faced, and that all he had to do was apologize to EVERYONE, not JUST me.

Instead, a call was made between my friend, Vote, and I, and while I still felt uncomfortable, I held faith that this could all be resolved. However, Vote refused to apologize to everyone else, saying the others shouldn't have been involved and that I shouldn't have told them anything, even though he was lying about these people behind their backs. He said that it should be done privately, instead of talking to everyone like he should, and any attempts to get this point through to him were left with pure deflection. Vote also lied about Runa's involvement, saying that she was just playing along, and didn't care about what we were saying. This is clearly not true.

The call was one-sided, and my friend was only trying to patch things up between the two of us, but they didn't know the bigger picture. At that point, I knew I couldn't fight them, as I was too shaken, so I left the voice call.

Runa

My role in all of this is a little different from everyone else's, considering that from around the end of August to late October, I was romantically involved with vote4waifu.

I've seen their highs, their lows, the way they conduct themselves around others, how they handle stress, disagreements. I'm intimately familiar with all of it.

As such, my position is a unique one, having been privy to most of Vote's inner thoughts for a much longer time than most other people.

With regards to the Charyb situation specifically, I had first heard about this in a group call with Vote and Fayt. Distinctly feeling that what Vote had said about the conflict was... uncomfortable, I decided to mute and type out how I felt to them in text.

During this convo they had tried to play off Charyb's actions as if they were unreasonable and incomprehensible. I kind of.. saw through that immediately, but still wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt.

While Vote didn't seem to react a whole ton to the way I felt at the time, in a later call they had something of an outburst and admitted that me saying this really got to them. And while I thought the way they handled the Charyb situation was immature, at the time I mostly brushed it off, considering that as far as I knew, this was the first time they had acted like this.

I say mostly, because even though things, for the most part, continued on as normal from there, Vote would keep on bringing up the conflict in conversation, and had started to become pettier towards the others in our group, often venting to me about the way they complained on stream, their seeming dismissal of Waifu's skill, among other things.

[Personal details of Vote's life, and the name of an uninvolved party who left the community for mental health have been censored out for privacy reasons.]

Tensions eventually rose to the point where others had started making passive jabs at Vote behind their back. Curious, and ultimately fearing the worst, I decided to message Porter, asking about what exactly was going on.

He told me to ask Wolfy about it, so I decided to do that a few days later.

A note from Boins: Hi, I'd like to interject that I have no idea what vote's even talking about here - since Barkley was invited in he's been welcomed with open arms. I don't know why Vote is saying I used to join calls when I've never been part of his streams or shared more than two words with him - and I really don't know why he's using me as an example here. Or Sev. Especially Sev. He doesn't even know Sev enough to know that nobody calls him "Seven".

A note from Sally: The only reason I don't talk in public as often is simply because the community only gets bigger & more difficult to keep tabs on, not at all to do with me disliking it or anyone in it. I was just proof-reading this document and I did not know anything about this until after it was over, so I'm kind of weirded out that I'm being used as an example by Vote here.

What's up it's Sev. I started muting most servers I'm in because it's hard to keep track of everything and everyone. I didn't stop participating because there was some kind of problem I was having, I just barely knew anyone outside of Krew there and preferred speaking with Krew in the development server. I'm still in the server and check it on rare occasion, just really don't have enough context on anyone in there to interact much. So...sorry my silence played into this? I don't understand what I had to do with anything. Vote never talked to me about it, so...

My talk with Wolfy ended up being extremely illuminating. Because up until that point, Vote had neglected to mention to me that this wasn't the first time Vote had Charyb on their stream without his permission. Nor had they mentioned that the falling out between Fickle and Kart Krew involved that. Learning what Wolfy told me made me feel a little more... miffed, about Waifu's behavior.

On top of what Wolfy told me, seeing this behavior in particular from Waifu really rubbed me the wrong way, so I decided to confront them about it.

[The name of an unreleased and WIP mod has been censored out at the request of the author.]

(The apology, in case anyone needed a reminder.)

The next day, after some more back and forth between the two of us, they end up deciding to talk to Wolfy themselves, to hopefully settle things and come to some sort of understanding. You can see for yourself how well that went in the next section. I'll have more to say later.

Wolfy

Hello, I'm Wolfy, you all are probably familiar with me from the community and Kart dev team. I'm the admin of the friend group mentioned in everyone's accounts of the situation, Bump Neps. It's a small Discord for me and my friends. All of the issues here occurred between members of this group, and as the one moderating it, it was my responsibility to make sure things were settled.

My position in this ordeal is very different, as I was not directly involved in any personal altercations with Vote. I was first made aware of problems involving him when he and Charyb had an argument over stream privacy, as outlined earlier in this document. Ultimately, Charyb was in the right here, but at the time I still considered Vote a good friend. I didn't wanna throw him under the bus so soon. Sure, Vote made himself sound like a total asshole, but I was willing to forgive it because sure, nobody likes being lectured, even when the lecture is totally justified. Unfortunately, this is only where the problems began.

Over the next few weeks, I started noticing more and more problems were popping up. These things ranged from arguments, to server admin abuse, to annoying/disrespectful behavior altogether, and had one thing in common: Vote was at the center of each incident. I'd given him a pass the time before, but after several incidents it became enough of an issue to where I couldn't continue ignoring it. At this point I still considered him to be a friend, so I communicated with the others and tried to figure out what could be done to solve things here. Vote's preferred strategy was just to leave, come back the next day, and act like nothing happened, but that wasn't gonna fly with me.

Three of the people from our group (those who have already spoken in this document) tried to settle their issues with him privately. In each instance, he either lied, denied what was being said, deflected it, or blamed someone else.

I was the last person to try and settle things with him privately. He confronted me at random asking why Porter was telling people to talk to me about him, and I decided to be upfront and honest in my response.

Apologies for the wordiness, but there's a lot in this conversation that really sets the scene.

[Personal details of Vote's life have been censored out for privacy reasons.]

This much is wild. "I don't know Porter at all." If you read what Porter said at all, they've been hanging together a lot in VRChat, even introducing each other to new friends. Way to disown your friend.

Again, he repeated the same string of bullshit from before: lies, denial, deflection, and the blame game. I wasn't having any of that, so I decided to try and formulate a last-ditch effort to potentially fix things.

After talking with the others in the friend group, we all decided to confront him once more, this time in a group setting. My rationale was that he'd be forced to accept that he'd done something wrong if he was shown that this wasn't an issue that a few of us conjured up, and that it had very much affected the entire group.

Here is what they said:

Vote decided not to honor us with a response to any of the points raised. He instead decided to confront Porter privately in voice (despite being completely resistant to his text confrontation the first time) with a friend to back him up. Said friend tried to act as a mediator, but due to being fed false information by Vote, could not fulfill this role. Vote decided to repeat the same list of shit that got him into this situation: lies, denial, deflection, and blaming others.

At this point I'd had enough of him. The things he'd said and done in the past month were already bad enough, but this consistent refusal to accept that he might've done something wrong sealed his fate. I accepted that this former friend was now a lost cause, and removed him from our group. We were very forgiving to him and willing to help him work out his issues, but you can't help someone that won't help themselves. Keeping him around would just lead to further altercations and discomfort among the group, and I found this unacceptable.

As someone who used to be his friend, comprehending the full scope of his betrayal is just... Painful. It hurts to see someone you thought of so highly sink so low.

I had no intention of kicking him out of the Kart Krew Discord, but I was definitely ready to if his actions persisted there. However, at the time of this writing, he had left the Discord.

Runa, part 2

After the group confrontation, things ended up getting a lot uglier, at least privately.

By this point, I had ended up confessing to the group that Vote and I had been in a relationship. We had initially kept knowledge of it on the downlow, for fear that certain people (namely TAG) wouldn't take it well, but ultimately when this all went down I felt that coming out about it would be for the best.

Then Charyb drops this bomb on me.

We were told to take this to private conversation, so that's what we ended up doing.

To give some background, Vote and I officially became a couple on August 27th, 2019. The reason I know this specifically is because, while we were flirting a ton beforehand, and saying that we were wanting to call each other boyfriend / girlfriend, this was when I decided to put their @ in my bio on twitter, as seen here:

Of course, at the time I had known Charyb and Vote were close, very close, but the exact nature of their closeness wasn't made apparent to me until when Charyb showed me the below logs.

As you can see, this was just a few days before we got together. All the dates from here forward are dates after Vote and I had gotten together.

A note from Charyb: Vote and I flirted like this a lot, and talked erotically with each other, too; this was the norm for us. We were not officially dating, but we HAD discussed the issue of romance. We had both acknowledged that we were in a phase of getting to know each other, and might date in the future, but neither of us felt comfortable officially dating before we'd at least met in person once. I did not know he was dating Runa at this time; he had never told me.

While I know that Vote is (and they've even admitted this themselves) a very flirty person by nature, the language used here ("I mostly want Charyb, I ignore people pairing Runa and myself"), and their acceptance of Charyb telling them that he wanted a relationship with them should set off multiple red flags. What Vote's intentions with this were remain a mystery to both me and Charyb to this day. Whether they were just leading Charyb on, whether they actually wanted a relationship with Charyb, whether they actually wanted a relationship with me, who was already their girlfriend by this point, I can't really say for sure. Granted, Vote and I had kept knowledge of our relationship on the downlow, but even with that, Charyb had no idea they were anything but single.

Of course, that wasn't the only ugly thing that had transpired. Vote and mine's relationship ended up taking... something of a turn, after everyone had confronted them, and things only got worse after they were booted from our group.

[The name of the previously uninvolved person has been censored for privacy reasons.]

At this point, my desire to save our relationship and my feelings about this whole situation had begun to really clash. I still loved Vote, even despite my growing annoyance with the way they were handling this.

[The name of the previously uninvolved person has been censored for privacy reasons.]

The :hellatails: usage here really bothered me, as you can probably tell.

My growing annoyance ultimately took a backseat to my fear of upsetting Waifu. More and more these conversations started to feel like walking on eggshells, and it made me uncomfortable to the point where I started venting more about it in the friend group itself.

Things eventually came to a head on October 30th, the day of Waifu's last stream.

For a brief moment in time, you find yourself in a different time. It is August, 2019.

And so, the cosmic string vanished.

Griff

In comparison to what my friends here have dealt with, I haven't actually been in much of a rough position involving vote4waifu. He never did anything to me (directly, anyway), and I never did anything to him; we both realize that. We were seemingly on good terms for almost the entirety of his stay in the Kart community. However, one could argue that fact makes my words on this matter just as important, because I am speaking as someone that's almost never been in conflict with him for any reason. For the longest time I saw him as a genuine friend, and yet, here he was, in the last few weeks of his time with us, completely turning my expectations around and losing my trust regardless.

So, I'll cut to the chase. In Porter's statement, a particular call is mentioned, the one revolving around Vote's actions as a server administrator. I was a direct witness to it, and I'm here to say that his description of the call is true.

Vote ended up resorting to unnecessary insults and a disturbing attitude at the peak of his exchange to Porter. Yelling, constantly swearing, constant "fuck off"s and "grow a pair"s, letting out very strong words you would never expect him to use like "cunt"; just completely absurd behavior that I didn't anticipate at all out of vote4waifu of all people.

Now, you've likely noticed that this was mainly between him and Porter. I haven't been directly involved at all. The reason this has anything to do with me is because Vote topped all of that off with one more insult towards Porter, one that effectively altered the dynamic of the friendship I thought I had with him and changed my views on him as a person.

I don't remember the exact wording, but it was basically something like this: "You don't have a life, you don't get out, you don't have a job, you're too afraid to get out of your room and do anything, just fuck off, grow up."

When he said that, I felt my heart sink incredibly low. What he described with that statement isn't presumably just Porter's life, it is also mine. It's not exclusive to him. Hell, it's not exclusive to me, either; countless people in the world, possibly even including some of you reading, may also currently be in this situation of not knowing what to do with their lives, or being too afraid of the world.

Wolfy's server has a channel that is made for more significant venting, and I happened to be a more frequent visitor. Due to this, Vote most likely already knew about my position in life prior to that insult; most of my friends do. I knew from then on that if I ever got into an argument with him myself, he would very likely say the same thing to me. If anyone else in a similar position got into an argument with him, he might say the same thing to them.

The other witnesses weren't exactly thrilled about it either, based on their responses in the voice-text channel immediately following the insult. (Runa was in the call with us, but temporarily bailed after hearing this.)

Also, he went on to say this to Runa a few days later. (Full text here)

After comprehending his insult to Porter and eventually learning of everything else he had said and done to other people, reading what Vote said about me was the final nail in the coffin, even this long after the situation had passed. I failed to realize that he apparently wasn't having fun around me in his streams. I would've been more than happy to adjust myself to appeal to his standards (or simply not join his streams at all) if he said anything to me about this, but for whatever reason, he chose not to; he just kept me around regardless, acting like he was enjoying my company, when in reality, this thought was possibly on his mind the whole time.

This is kind of ironic considering he wanted everyone else to come to him in private about their issues with him; and that isn't even taking into account what he said about everyone else in this log.
_{(Except Dankies. Everyone likes Dankies.)}

I genuinely appreciate the "usually great" comment, at least. Being nice to my friends is my passion, and I was certain Vote was one of them; it was just a huge shame to see him turn on everyone like this and insult me twice in the process, regardless of all of my efforts to treat him well as a friend.

Ibuki

This is mostly my take on this case since I used to have a neutral stance over it, but that changed due to a discovery of lies, manipulation and slander made by vote4waifu.

I don't need to go over what Porter already said, but yeah, I was there for it. Near the end of the session when Vote suddenly decided to change the map again, upon which Porter, being annoyed of his attitude, sighed annoyedly about it. Vote started to lash out a lot of insults to Porter, calling him a cunt, grow a pair, telling him to fuck off, telling him to grow up, etc. But after that he said this out of nowhere:

"You don't have a life, you don't even drive, you don't have a job, you're afraid of getting out of your room, fuck off and grow up."

This completely shocked me and it made me wonder if this was the same person that I used to know 4 months ago. After that incident I was a little bit more wary about Vote in general.

I was asleep when Wolfy conferred with us about our concerns with Vote's attitude these past couple of weeks, due to him deflecting all of these with "Nobody tried to talk to me in private" (this is another lie) and everyone is more in the wrong than him. After waking up and getting the gist of the situation, I decided to post my concerns with Vote.

We got no response whatsoever from him even a day after posting our messages. That is, until the situation with Porter and the private voice call happened, and resulted in him being kicked from the private server.

The same day, as I was getting ready to sleep, I decided to check out Vote's stream out of curiosity. Unexpectedly, he broke down on stream while he announced that his next stream would be the last, not acknowledging what got him into this situation in the first place, and not taking full responsibility for his actions and his attitude towards us. He said one thing that is really important before his last stream and it was:

"I'm going to get kicked from the Kart Krew server anyways." That wasn't true.

Later, on the 29th of October it was his last stream, which I didn't participate due to my disappointment with him. After going to bed and waking up, I saw everyone on a voice call, and I thought, "Something bad really happened after his last stream." Sadly, I wasn't wrong. I checked out Vote's VOD and skipped most of the stream except the last 5 minutes or so, and what I saw was constant lying, sweeping Porter (who, by the way, got banned from the stream) and Lat' under the rug, full blown denial and a lot of accusations against the Kart Krew dev team.

After that was when I learned about the situation with Charyb and Vote, him cheating on Runa, him trying to manipulate Fickle and so on. Honestly, I couldn't believe what I saw: the same happy, friendly guy that I met from joining the Kart community being dishonest and overall a manipulative jerk.

Barkley

My overall relationship with waifu prior to all this nonsense was that of common online friends, or at least I viewed it as that. My involvement in the events that transpired is fairly minimalistic, mostly being someone in the background compared to those in the main event.

I suppose I should start with the outburst Waifu had towards Porter in a Discord voice chat. Now, Porter isn't always the best when it comes to handling his frustrations and anger, but his complaints about what Waifu does involving the Race DX family of servers is valid for the most part. During this vc session (if i remember correctly, i believe it was Griff, Porter, Runa, Ibuki, Gunla, Waifu and me in it), Porter had brought up that Waifu had been messing with the server a bit too much during the stream prior, and Waifu went absolutely off on Porter, telling him he's a loser with no life, no job, no future, ect. This was obviously uncalled for and it took everyone extremely by surprise, myself included, and the vc sorta stagnated with no apology from either side by the time I left (moreso from Waifu obviously.) I didn't know at the time but this is probably why Waifu dm'd me asking why people were avoiding them, as I didn't put two and two together.

A few days later during another vc call, I noticed that the vent channel in our server had a massive post by Charyb asking Waifu what their problem is, why they keep being a dick in general to people in the group, and basically asking for a big apology. Then, over the course of a few hours Runa, Porter, Griff, Telos, Ibuki, Wolfs, etc, all had big posts basically saying the same thing.

I was completely blown aback as they were bringing up stuff that I had never even heard about and all I had known that Waifu had done wrong was that outburst towards Porter a few days back. Waifu dm'd a little bit after all of this asking what to do in this situation. I, seeing what i thought was a mob mentality from all the posts in #heavy-shit, just told Waifu to chill, be rational, and wait till they cooled down as i thought responding during this would just lead to people making judgements based on emotions and not logical conclusions.

At the time, I truly felt like Waifu was being falsely accused and everyone was way over the line, completely overreacting. That is, until I joined a vc later that had everyone involved, including a few devs. In this vc, everyone poured out their side of the story with actual dms to back their sides up. What I saw in these dms was a complete 180 on the story Waifu gave me.

For starters, the apology they gave Porter was ABSOLUTELY trash, basically blaming Porter for Waifu's actions instead of just genuinely being sorry. Along with that, I found out that Waifu had been stringing along Runa, Tag, Charyb, and lastly Fickle emotionally, with Fickle being fed lies that people hate her guts on the dev team. It just...really put me aback that Waifu was like this, and that they would lie so fervently instead of just owning up and settling matters that didn't have any reason to get this disastrously intense.

The worst part was seeing dms of Waifu shitting on people behind their backs. People like Griff and Porter just getting roasted in dms instead of just going to those said people and trying to iron out these frustrations. Hell, they even said in a dm that the group was MUCH worse off when I joined, and despite that, they went to me for advice on how to deal with everyone trying to make them stop doing all of this.

It really just...makes me not want to deal with this person anymore as, up to this point, they have made zero attempts to defend themselves with actual proof nor try to make amends for the seedy stuff they said about people instead of just talking it out.

General information from Kart Krew

This much testimony and receipts from people on this is nothing to scoff at, but there's a little more that needs to be covered here, and that's regarding the last point, manipulating an old dev member into attacking the team.

That dev member was Fickle, and the extent of how emotionally charged he got her over it is evident in this following tweet, which she sensibly deleted and took back later.

In order after we caught this post: Fickle asked D00D64 to confirm if "dev hated her", which of course turned out to be complete bullshit (though he couldn't provide many other details, as he was barely up to speed with the situation). She reached out to Wolfy, then VelocitOni as well for further clarity. Oni ended up giving her the full story, initially via Toaster as a middleman, to let her know that she was definitely being played. Charyb's involvement in Vote's departure was minor at the end of the day, and his disagreement with Vote had NOTHING to do with him being a prominent LGBT community member.

The possibility from our point of view was that Vote knew Fickle had a bad history with Charyb, and was making him out to be the "leader" in order to stoke the coals and get her fired up and quick to take his side. Due to the recent falling out between Charyb and Vote, it might've been easy to move from venting about a "common enemy" to an easy hook for Fickle.

That was when she deleted her initial tweet and posted this one, instead.

Everything below could have, at most innocent, been nothing more than two people with a common enemy venting back and forth...

But this is the point where it dropped any semblance of just mutual venting, and plunged into flagrant dishonesty.

It was absolutely preying on Toaster and Fickle's insecurities.

Fickle has a complicated history with Kart Krew; that much everyone knows by now. But at no point have we ever made a determination to take that dirty laundry and air it out in the open. There's no need to. In fact, our actual stance on this was quite the opposite.

Fickle left Kart Krew and the community for a period of time to cool off after the incident. There was no war going on behind the scenes at all. She merely took her leave and it was left at that, nothing more came of it. If she had tried to make a scene, spill a story to the Kart community at large, cry onstream... you know. It might have been different. But that never happened.

Our determination regarding Fickle was that what happened between the devs (and several beta testers) had no need to go anywhere else. The only result of that, we figured, would be potential immature community members hunting down Fickle to heckle and harass her. None of us wanted that.

Oni even pushed for 1.1 because he didn't want her work to go to waste.

If we were to say anything at all, it would have been nothing more than a simple statement that she left the team, without going into too many details of the fuss behind it. Here's a log from May '19 of Wolfy and Charyb discussing this. It accurately reflects the sentiment we had at the time, although it should be obvious that in the end, we didn't find it necessary to do even this. Things quieted peacefully on their own.

Finally, after Toaster and Fickle had a good grasp on what was really going on with Vote, things began to become a little more clear to everyone. Everything that follows comes after they had figured out.

(Oni note: Fickle's reaction to realizing just how many times Vote can mention Charyb's name in one sitting for quick attention)

And here's a larger version of that log.

That's about it, here. Fickle explained a little bit about why she had responded so readily to his bait, and apologized about it.

There is one other important element here that has yet to be addressed, and that is the involvement of ThatAwesomeGuy173, otherwise known as TAG, in this whole mess.

Both vote4waifu and TAG were considered friends by the group until recently. While TAG was not responsible for the same lies and manipulation that got Vote banned, his actions after the fact do not paint a good picture.

We discovered that he was leaking information from our server and others to Vote, in addition to private conversations from over 6 months ago.

Both Vote and TAG were given some sensitive information regarding dev at the time, and they've shared this (with the timestamps cut off, no less) in an attempt to make more trouble with Fickle, as recently as a day ago as of the writing of this.

vote4waifu

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