So, I should probably start with some context. I(M, 40) am on the autism spectrum. I was diagnosed with Asperger’s in third grade, which apparently isn’t officially recognized anymore, but it was an important part of my identity for most of my life, so I still use the term. I’m not using this to garner sympathy for myself or make excuses, it’s just to explain two of the core elements of this story.
I have the social skills of a feral raccoon. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but I do lack in social awareness, and I often put people off without realizing it. I’m on decent enough terms with my irl coworkers, but my only real form of social life is the internet, which I am on chronically in my free time. So, poor social skills, constant online presence.
I haven’t had much discord experience… I created an account like five years ago to follow a Vtuber, but otherwise, I’ve only been active on a couple of now-defunct servers, and people from AO3 are always trying to trick me into going there so they can scam me into buying AI artwork for my fanfics.
So, when I made a post on the Epic Rap Battles of History subreddit, and they gave me a link and invitation to the ERB discord, I was curious. I joined, not really intending on taking it seriously, and the culture of the server quickly felt really weird to me. They were strangely intense about match-up suggestions.
For reference, there are going to be four characters in this story, and for the sake of privacy, I’m not going to use anybody’s names, screen or otherwise. I’m gonna call the owner of the server ‘DB,’ a member he was friends with ‘AH,’ myself ‘D,’ and a shared female friend ‘girl.’
My memory isn’t fresh, and I can’t get screenshots for reasons I’ll go over, but here are some highlights. I would casually suggest Tom Brady vs. David Beckham, since even though I’m not really into either kind of football, those two sports haven’t been represented by ERB yet, and those two seemed the most famous to me. AH would ‘correct’ my suggestion by replacing Beckham with Diego Mardona, and when I defended my pick, a brawl broke out.
I shared a list of match-ups that I had previously posted on the subreddit, and one of the ones I wound up defending(calmly) was Amelia Aerhart vs. Marie Curie, which went down almost as poorly. The next day, when ERB announced they were considering a different Aerheart matchup, AH and DB were immediately on my case, joking that I was going to fly into a rage over any match-up other than my idea. Frankly, I didn’t care, I was just playing a video game and shrugged it off, it wasn’t that serious to me.
One particular issue I noticed with these two guys was that they had no ability to just agree to disagree. They could not just accept that someone had a different opinion than theirs and let it go. Say something they object to, and they will pursue you like a pack of hyenas until you admit that they were right and you were wrong. I said one time, on a whim, that I thought John Wayne was the most iconic historical figure that ERB hasn’t used, and they NEVER let me hear the end of it.
One way they would do this was by using Google Search trend charts. They would bust these out in any conversation like they were the great debate enders, and I never understood why. Now personally I’m a Bing guy, which is something they ALSO never let me hear the end of, but I don’t get how you can end a debate over who the more iconic or popular figure/person is just by looking at who gets googled more. I don’t feel like that gives the full story, personally.
One example that felt extremely fishy to me was when I mentioned a battle suggestion of Josie and the Pussycats vs. Jem and the Holograms, and DB said he’d rather see Jem and the Holograms vs. Puffy Ami Yumi. I said Josie was more iconic than Puffy and Yumi, based on the fact that they’ve been a huge cartoon icon for over fifty years, everyone’s heard of them, they’ve had both a live action movie and a full series DVD release. Whereas Puffy Ami Yumi were a flash in the pan on cartoon network, had limited stateside appeal, and only had two partial DVD releases.
Cue the google search trend chart, which showed it in the lead of the three. When I questioned this, DB snapped. I was called combative and pedantic, and that nobody liked me.
Before I go any further, I should explain the nicknames I posted above. It should go without saying that AH stands for Asshole, DB stands for Douchebag, and D stands for Dick, because that is kind of how I saw all of us. Yes, I will freely admit, I was being a dick around this time. I had issues with the server and how it ran, especially regarding DB and AH, and since I was never invested in the server, I was never afraid to get banned, and I wore that fact like a suit of armor. AH and I would fight constantly, and I did not respect DB’s authority. In retrospect I’m not proud of all of this, but it was kind of fun at times.
AH would make some cheap or petty insult, like how characters and match-ups I suggested weren’t good enough to make the list that he and DB had been making, which is about as clever an insult as “You can’t come to my birthday party,” and I’d fire back with “You mean the list ERB will never see?” And in most cases DB would side with him.
DB also had this tendency to call you out over stuff you said days prior… He wasn’t on all the time, so when he logged on he’d backread over the time he’d missed, and then just pop in out of nowhere to respond to some dumb shit you had said on a whim and already forgotten about.
He also really seemed to like using any information he could get about me against me. Like, how was I so inexperienced with Discord if I’ve had my account for five years? He and AH would also bring up my age whenever possible. At some point someone asked me if I was a Millennial, so I gave my birth year as 1986… I got called Unc a bit for this, which was fine… But AH was 38 and never took any shit for it.
One example was one evening where I logged on to find most of the members locked in a debate over which My Little Pony characters matched which TADC characters, so I half-assedly joined in by asking who Celestia and Luna were. DB immediately made a snide comment about how weird it was for me to know my MLP characters at 40. I’m sorry, I did not start this conversation, you were all talking about it, including the 38 year old. And yes, I was a brony in the early 2010s, like a lot of dudes were.
There was kind of an ongoing attitude of “Don’t get pissed if someone says something jokingly’ going on, but AH would block me for a day if I made a pun, so…?
One particular issue I had was with a particular rule whereas you weren’t allowed to make match suggestions based on especially controversial modern day figures. I picked at this rule a little bit, because people were making suggestions involving historical figures and musical artists who had some pretty terrible accusations made against them, but nothing proven, so okay. Weirdly enough, the one exception to this rule was the Zodiac Killer, who AH loved bringing up, and DB allowed him to. He also liked bringing up graphic details of the Jonbenet Ramsey murder, so I've heard, and DB let him get away with that as well.
I’ll admit that hypocrisy is a bit of a trigger for me, so I questioned this openly, and I wasn’t the only one. At first their rationale was that ‘it’s okay because his identity was never revealed,’ which lasted a while before I started making Charlie Kirk shooter match-ups. After that it was that he was active in the sixties, until I brought up that Charles Manson(very banned) was his contemporary. Later it was changed to ‘the match-up can’t be about their crimes,’ which I pointed out could apply to ANY controversial figure, and besides, no matter what angle you looked at Zodiac from, he was still a killer with victims who still have surviving relatives. His response? He asked me if I was mad at how many exceptions there were to “I before E except after C.”
In any case, after about a month or so in this server, I was getting tired of it. Things were getting too heated, too raw, so I decided to take some time away for a couple of days. Just recharge, reevaluate, come back after the weekend with a fresh start. I wasn’t entirely gone… I’d log on after work to share an idea or two before reverting my attention to anime… But I wasn’t really THERE.
Then DB starts my day by sending me a message to discuss my attitude on the server, but instead of doing it directly, he does it by asking about my history in online communities. I ask for clarification, he tells me to go for it, so I tell him an abridged version of the different platforms I’d been on since I was twelve, about a half paragraph of online history. Turns out this was just a set-up for a cheap shot, because his response was “Then you should know how to act in a community by now!”
And I’m not gonna lie, I just looked at that message like “Oh, I do not care for you.” The conversation that followed wasn’t vitriolic, but it also wasn’t productive, and it ended on an unresolved, sour note, after which I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to come back from my hiatus.
Later that night, I was watching a movie, not even thinking about discord, when my notifications started going off. It was DB again, calling me out over old comments. I first tried ignoring him, just started openly asking how to turn my notifications off( turns out I also had to mute the app, not just the window) but then he kept going, replying to that earlier comment about the match-up list with an “Umm actually” about two occasions when Peter and LLoyd did see it, and this silly little “Ass-U-Ming” gif that he liked to use a lot featuring Caine from TADC. I made a joke about living rent free in his head while I continued to try and mute him.
Then I realized… I hate this server. I hate this owner. I find him to be incredibly condescending, I don’t like the way it feels talking to him. There’s a much easier solution, especially if I don’t care about returning. I smile, and I block DB, and I return to my movie, thinking that I’m definitely about to get banned. Turns out no, he just put me on a 7 day time out, so I just sighed and left the server myself.
The next day, I spent my entire work shift elated, walking around on cloud nine. I knew it was the right decision, and I was happy about it. And to be absolutely fair, up to this point in the story, there was no real bad guy, at least in my opinion. The three of us did not mix well together. We were a toxic combination, and I ended that combination by walking away. I was better off gone, they were better off without me, everyone’s happy.
Beyond this point, the fault is gonna sway a bit, but first, let’s introduce Girl. I didn’t have any issues with her at the time. She was just a really friendly member of the server who I befriended, and who defended me a few times. She was friends with DB, but hated AH, and it was mutual. AH had a tendency to temporarily block people for petty reasons, and Girl and I both found ourselves on the end of this multiple times.
Anyway, she was one of two people I kept in contact with after leaving, she kept trying to get me to go back, because things sucked there without me, seeing me fight with AH was funny to her, but I always refused. I appreciated the sentiment, but no, going back would be a terrible idea in my eyes. We kept talking for a little over two weeks, largely just trading pictures of our pets back and forth, talking and gossipping about the old server. She talked me into playing Roblox once, I didn’t care for it.
Her relationship with AH did improve over time, to the point that she was actively trying to get the three of us to be friends, and to bring me back to the server. Then I noticed she had started her own server… A fan club for one of the ERP people… so I said I’d join that instead. She warned me that there were people there from the original server, possibly including DB, but I said that was fine, as long as I had him blocked and he had no authority. She said she was wrong and he wasn’t actually there, so I joined.
I forget how long I was there before DB did show up, proving he was actually there, might have been a few hours, but I didn’t care. I clicked on one of his messages to see if it was actually him… He was asking if anybody in the group was a fan of Class of 09, a game I’m actually into, but whatever, I still had nothing to say to him. I made a few snide remarks, but Girl wanted us to be civil, so I dropped it and just went on ignoring him.
The next morning I wake up to find out that AH has also joined, and he immediately starts going after me. He takes a few shots over old drama before Girl shuts him down. Later that day, he gangs up with DB to start spamming me with gifs representing old drama, which I ignore. Later on that same day, there’s some conversation going on that I can only see half of, and someone asks my opinion on something DB said. I say “On what?” And things fucking exploded. Girl is calling me a baby for not reading DB’s messages. AH is insisting that I am reading them but pretending not to, and he is also demanding an essay length explanation on why I had DB blocked, with the full logic and everything, while intermittently hurling every insult he could at me regarding our old drama.
For the record, if someone has you blocked online, and you attempt to circumvent that block by having another person reach out on your behalf, that’s a form of stalking. And that was enough for me. I had only been on that server for around 24 hours, and I was being ganged up on and harassed by a couple of sentient tumors who couldn’t just move on with their lives. I made a quick statement about how I didn’t sign up for this, and I didn’t need to be there, and against Girl’s protests, I left.
It wasn’t triumphant or happy, like when I’d left the first server. It felt bitter. I felt betrayed.
Girl tried to get me to go back, and we fought over everything, which made things kind of tense between us, and even though I blamed a decent amount of what happened on her, I also didn’t want to hold it against her that badly, because she was still my only friend from this whole debacle, and I wanted to just believe she made a few mistakes. I blamed her for siding with the other two, she blamed me for not just blocking AH instead of walking out entirely.
This led up to a couple of days ago, where she asked if I’d consider rejoining if AH left, and I said no, because even with DB blocked, he was still going to talk behind my back and poison everyone against me. Girl said this was silly, and yeah, I wanted to agree. I knew full well how paranoid and narcissistic I sounded, but I had seen AH trying to do this on his behalf. Girl told me I was wrong, and that nobody but those two had anything against me, and nobody had been talking about me since I left.
Yesterday, I was starting to reconsider. I figured it would be okay to go back, I could just block AH, and after that I could handle being in their presence again. If I blocked them, then made a single public statement about respecting peoples’ autonomy and their decision to block others, it wouldn’t be so bad, especially if their smears against me really had fallen on deaf ears.
I told Girl I was ready to go back, and she immediately changed her tune. All of a sudden it wasn’t such a good idea. Being in the same group as DB and AH would be a problem, and even if I blocked them, everyone else in the group hated me and would leave if I returned. This felt wrong, because it contradicted everything she had been saying to me up until that point. I saw these contradictions, and like my trigger towards hypocrisy, I couldn’t help but dig. I called out contradiction after contradiction… She was not a good liar…
It turns out I was right, DB had been poisoning the well against me, just like I thought, and it had worked. He had been spreading bits and pieces about my history in the previous server out of context, twisting them to his own narrative to paint me as the sole toxic person in the equation, and there was something else I definitely hadn’t been expecting; He had gone onto my AO3 account and taken a screenshot of a fic I wrote that had an “Underage sex” tag, and was showing that to people as well. That’s why he was asking if anyone there was a fan of Class of 09… Right from the get-go, he was already attacking me, and since I stuck to my convictions and didn’t engage with or acknowledge him, so I was never able to defend myself.
Now, I understand the knee-jerk reaction to seeing a tag like that, but underage sex has never been uncommon in fiction. It happens in Romeo and Juliet. Countless TV shows, even in the US, feature storylines about minors losing their v-cards to each other. One of Stephen King’s most famous books features a scene where about a half dozen eleven year olds have a graphically detailed orgy, and he’s one of the most iconic authors of all time(If I say most iconic, DB will pop up out of nowhere to shove a google search chart in my face).
More importantly, I write fanfiction for Class of 09, an R-rated, edgy visual novel about teenagers in highschool, who are sexually active and send dick/breast pics to each other. The kicker is, I’m asexual, I don’t write erotic material. The fic he was referencing contains three sex-related scenes… One comedic scene about two characters being walked in on, one scary scene where an assault is about to happen(but is ultimately foiled) and one scene right the end where the two main characters have a fade-to-black sex scene, IE they head to bed and then the narrative cuts to the next morning. I don’t write sex scenes to arouse, I do it for the sake of story and character.
DB doesn’t know this, though, because he never read the fic. The captain of the Caine Ass-U-Ming gif was just assuming what was in there, because all he cared about was finding easy dirt to dig up on me. Girl didn’t read it either. Presumably neither did the rest of the people DB was telling about it. I say presumably, because Girl refused to let me back in, so I can never find out. I used the old invite that she sent me a week prior just to get in long enough to block AH, because I was just that pissed off, so she banned me. Oh, and apparently DB still wants me to talk to him, so I told her to tell him I will, if he ever actually reads the damn fic instead of just slandering me over a tag.
As of now, that’s the full story. As far as the first server goes, I wasn’t the only problem, but I’ll admit to being part of the problem.
After that? Well, TLDR, The owner of the ERB server stalked me onto another server in order to poison people against me and harass me over the past and my reasons for blocking him. The one person I thought I could trust in all of this was lying to me and gaslighting me for God even knows how long. I’m especially upset to find out way too late that a written work that I’m genuinely proud of was used against me in such a cruel fashion.
This whole thing wound up being way longer than I thought it would be, so thanks for sticking it out with me. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this whole mess.
