With a grain of salt - About TonnKriticY2K, his victims, a witch-hunt and what we should do next · 8:38pm Feb 12th, 2018
I chose this as my first (second if you count my announcement) post, as it is important right now.
For you to know beforehand:
I am no M.D. I don't counsel on professional level and I am no law expert.
And I only can give you one advise - take everything I say with a grain of salt, check for yourself.
Also - I will delete comments, if they are just insults or threats.
I don't mind political correctnes, I don't mind offensive stuff. It's your reputation after all.
But let's try to keep this civil.
Everyone should know by now, what happened with ToonKriticY2K and the situation around all this.
A few days have passed and lot's of statements and videos have been made.
Informations have been spread, victims have reached out and told their stories,
and - all in all, many of us have shown remarkable signs of support.
Alas on the other hand, there are rifts, distress, allegations, hearsay.
Victim blaming, tries to play down the situation, misunderstandings
and so on.
My opinions on this fall roughly into three categories:
About ToonKritic and his victims. I consider Toon guilty.
He hurt a lot of people around him and I am with his victims.
I hope that every victim of abuse has the power to reach out to someone, or to tell the story.
I hope Toon get's whatever he deserves and for the victims to heal and overcome this.
About how people treat his former friends, or what I call 'the witch-hunt'.
I consider the people of the analysis community, who were close to Toon for a long time also victims.
And I stand against every allegtion of 'covering for him' or covering up evidence to keep their career,
or because they don't care about anyone but themselves.
This is appaling to say to people, who not only lost a friend - but had to learn, that said friend is in reality a monster.
And what we can do to help things like that don't happen again.
This is an important point. If we as a community don't take steps to prevent such things in future - it will happen again.
And again. It will not stop on its own. I don't have all the answers on this.
But I hope we can come to some conclusions in the comments.
First of all - ToonKritic - or Zak Kayes as I will refer from now on (because we don't talk about a black and red ponysona,
but a real person), is most probably a criminal pedophile,
involved in at least one act of grooming a minor into sexual acts.
As far as I know, police and FBI have been informed weeks before the whole situation went public. More on this later.
It is said there are more cases, but at the moment I am only aware of the last one.
And I say most probably, because he has addmitted to his deeds and there is a plethora of circumstantials.
As I am no prosecutor - I am not bound by the persumption of innocence.
I am convinced that Zak is guilty of the alleged deeds.
Besides being an alleged criminal,
Zak has shown some really ugly behaviour towards different girls and women.
I don't go to conventions, I never met Zak in real life and I don't have first hand experience in any of his actions.
But many victims of his harrassment or groping came forward to tell their story
and this paints a really ugly picture of him.
This means, until anyone comes with undeniable evidence, that all the allegations are wrong, I stay convinced in this case.
And for all of you, who still try to keep their image of their former hero:
As tragic as it may seem, let go of this, step back, watch the whole picture.
The situation about Zak surfaced January 25 with a
Horse News article
and from this point the situation went haywire.
Short after, it turned out, that the whole thing has happened earlier -
around Sylvester I believe - and someone had leaked the information.
So the first allegations of covering and keeping secrets against his former friends came up.
After this, most of them gave statements regarding the situation either on Youtube or on tumblr.
And maybe on other sources I am not aware of.
(This is about the order I stumbled upon them)
Lightning Bliss Statement
Lightning Blisses comments were open till recently.
And I can say, there were a good bunch of things
you just don't say to a heart broken girl.
Or any other person, for that matter.
Josh Scorchers tumblr dialoge
I suggest to read this dialoge whole.
Since this events lots victims came forward with their stories, too.
I cover a few of them. But you'll find the videos on youtube easily.
The situation escalated in the last days to a point, that makes me personally fear for how bad this could become.
Which brings me to my second point - about the witch-hunt against the former friends and colab-partners of Zak.
The main reason, why people started to accuse the analyst community
(I use this as a wrap up term for Zaks friends, Josh Scorcher,
Mad Munchkin, Dr Wolf, Blissy, Voice of Reason - we know them I assume)
of 'covering up' the situation, was the leaked information.
From there - every single thing they said or didn't say was twisted in the worst way possible,
up to blaming Mad Munchkin for monetizing her vid, which it was the first couple of hours,
due to being the automatic setting and was demotezied, the moment Maddy realised this.
Other accusations were along the line, that they had knowledge about Zaks criminal deeds much earlier.
So they not only tried to cover up the situation now, but knew early on.
I deem all this accusations - until evidence for the contrary - as smearing,
as claims without a base and as fueld by either outrage about the whole situation and the need to vent somehow
(As Zak isn't there anymore), or as a genuine try to hurt them further, using the situation for other goals.
First of all - In Joshs Statment, there is a really convincing (in my opinion) reasoning for why they didn't say anything. In short - tampering with police investigations, by publishing the situation, before the work is done, may lead to Zak being acquited for lack of evidence.
Which is in this case a real problem.
Besides being an asshole in many regards - which isn't a crime - the only thing,
Zak is actually accused of is the grooming of a minor.
This is not like finding someone red handed in a basement full of corpses.
So, this prosecution may not be as well founded as many may think.
I for my part, think, that Joshs intent in this situation wasn't malicious in any way.
He and his friends didn't try to cover anything up.
On the contrary, they tried to help or at least don't be in the way of the investigation.
Also, I can't believe, that people like Voice of Reason for example would act like this - knowing (if we assume they knew all along) that his own girlfriend was one of Zaks harrassment-victims.
The second part of the accusations against them is about 'Why didn't they act earlier' -
as many people knew Zak was an ass years earlier.
To this I say - if anyone of you know how it is to have a false friend,
you might get the gist, why they didn't act earlier.
Friendship is a very dangerous thing. You let someone close enough, to really hurt you.
Base of a good friendship is therefore mutual trust.
Trusting someone has the very positive effect, that you can let your guard down in their presence.
You don't need to look out for problems.
It has however the negative effect, that you let your guard down and you become unaware of problems.
But this negative effect is only a problem if someone is willing to abuse this situation.
Some people used a strawman-argument here because somewhere the words 'master of manipulation' were used.
Which was easy to dismiss by stating, that Zak indeed wasn't that master of disguise and his deeds were pretty obvious
(this is a thing I tell in second hand, so I can't give a source here).
But anyway, you might have heard that argument for yourself.
Thing is here - you don't need to be a master of disguise and manipulation in order to fool a close friend.
It's more like snatching a candy cane from a baby. You only need to be willing to abuse a friendship for pulling such a stunt.
I think it is safe to assume Zak is a person, who doesn't really care if he abuses trust or friendship.
And if we look at how long beaten spouses stay in a real abusive relationship and either don't see the misbehaviour,
or just accept it somehow, how hard must it be to see through the surface of a nice,
friendly and helpful long trusted friend, when said friend shows his evil side just to others?
Heck again, just the video from SegaSister and Voice should be enough evidence for his two sided behaviour...
Fact is, that most of the analyst crowd made their statements,
remind in one or another way that we should care about the victims and in my opinion,
did the right thing as good as they could.
Given, no one of them has experience in 'how to deal, if your best friend turns out to be a criminal pedophile'.
You may think I disregard Zaks victims, by focusing this long on his friends and this witch-hunt.
I don't. If you imagine how you must feel, if you were in the same situation as Zaks former friends -
they were hurt by Zak too.
In my opinion this situation is worse for them, as if one had died in an accident.
This would be a situation to grief supported by everyone, to cope and then to move on.
Now they have not only lost a friend, but learned that they were betrayed, their friend hurt lots of people in his wake and
abused their friendship in every way possible. And they get blamed for this.
As far as I am concerned, they are - not to the extent as the grooming-victim and the girls Zak mistreated - also victims.
I'll keep my third part short and leave it up to discussion:
We have to do something. If we just think it is over and will never happen again - we will be surprised. It will happen again. There are millions of bronys worldwide. Chances are, that there are more criminals and pedophiles.
So - what can we do to minimise the risk?
In my opinion - not much I fear. There is no fandom adminstration, there is no 'police force' - and I am out of here, if we ever think about installing such a thing.
We can, however have an open ear for problems. Heck - we are this loving and welcoming bunch of colourful-horse-fans. We had at a point this crazy idea of being nice to each other. So it shouldn't really be a problem to hear if someone calls for help.
And we can inform potential victims how to behave, what to do and what not to do to either don't become victims or to get the help needed as fast as possible. Don't walk alone with strangers - if someone asks something of you, you don't want to do, say no...
I hope some of you are willing to help me on this - because this is not something we just can ignore and it will go away.
And I hope I can make some more uplifting and happy stuff down the road.
Good night and till the next time
Pankrazius
See I told you so. 27 views I made 5 or 6 to see how many "comments" How many did you do just to check?
This is my private blog - I have 32 followers at the moment and don't know how many of them are still active.
I didn't really expect much dialoge here.
This is mainly to use in youtube chat-discussions about the topic.
You may however, suggest this article to your over 170 followers... just as an idea.
Success doesn't come from expecting things to change and moping if they don't.
One thing I brought up in a few channels was a quick bumper of a few seconds to be put in front of some (maybe a quarter) of brony videos with a quick animation mentioning http://www.netsmartzkids.org/ and a shadowy figure skulking off. I didn't get any nibbles, though, even when I asked if someone would do it if I paid for the animation.
4797576
Actually that's a good idea.
However youtube-commentsections are not the best place to, you know 'get things done'. It's good to get a gist what is going on, to feel a bit, what people think. Maybe to find one or two people who share the same ideas.
But if you want to get this animation thing up and running - then you should contact the youtubers in question directly. Many of them are contactable via PM, many of them have actual E-Mail adresses.
I however don't have a youtube-channel (at least no videos) of my own, so all I can do is encourage you to call out to those who have and who produce videos.
And you should have the animation at least planned out with a length, with how it should look about and such. That then looks like you actually DO something instead of just demanding.
4798102
I'll have to see who does animations in the brony community.
Edit: Contacted one animator without any response so far. I don't want to contact Lightning Bliss about this as it hits a bit close to home for her. I'll find another.
4797074 4797576 4797358
I agree with you full, people who don't know their info will blindly do witch hunts to people like the BA community just because they suspected them of a conspiracy or just have a grudge against them and use the Toonkritic pedophilia to discredit them. One of these people is a youtuber named Vida who released two videos on the subject.
The other is a follow up.
You can see in both videos, he tries to shame the brony analysis community for "waiting" and claims that their strategy was bad. You can also tell this guy has some beef with the BAC, proof is a video released during the Keyframe ordeal.
And this is the video description.
4810368
I wouldn't go so far as thinking that Vida did this just for the attention.
While I don't condone Vidas course of action (as his petition to ban certain friends of Zak as 'enablers', for example), I try to see it as genuine well meant thing, that has gone wrong.
Maybe he has a personal grudge with the BAC-people, but I don't think he tried to use this situation for his advantage or to purposefully damage this people. In my opinion it was more the other way around.
Holding already a grudge, this situation may felt to him as some kind of confirmation of his bias.
The videos are damaging nontheless and wont help much - besides venting some steam on people who aren't ToonKritik...
4799019
Maybe not right away.
But asking people like Lightning Bliss, or maybe SilverQuill (who is a really good animator, as far as I know), may be a viable idea later on, if you don't get another animator.
4811018
Well I found another petition that counter acts his petition. I even signed it as well. Take a look.
Petition
4799019
You might contact one 'Cartoon Gentleman'. He maybe could help you out with the animation.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjL9fHFkbYZf23yQ7pmvgIQ/videos
4811323
Thank you; I'll contact him.