[Dildo Shwaggins]

ever notice how the only people railing against cliques are all friends with each other? friends who back each other up for all sorts of nasty behavior? there is only one group here that displays cliquish behavior. but even that's not really true. my guess is that before you met each other, around 2015, you all had the exact same opinions about the exact same women in gaming, opinions you never grew out of. in other words, your complaint is that people share the same opinions because they are friends with each other. my contention is that people who tend to share the same outlook on the world tend to become friends. that doesn't mean that all people in the same friend group share the exact same opinion on everything, but it does mean that if you see yourself as the perpetual victim, you naturally seek out others who see themselves the same way.

I know you are speaking of a friend group I am a part of and I can tell you this is further from the truth, we call bullshit like we see it, even with each other. We disagree ALL THE TIME but we are all still friends, because we have the mental capacity to think critically about situations and understand that shit ain't serious all the time. I have told my friends when something they said is fucked up and they need to change, and they have done it vice versa. we aren't just a bunch of dick riders who hype each other up.

To add to this, as I know I’ve been associated as well, the idea that everyone has “the exact same opinions of the exact same women” is wrong too. Only speaking for myself, I don’t harbor genuine animosity towards anyone through this whole time. I’ve had vehement disagreements with actions, I’ve disagreed with approaches and actions, but none of it is because they’re a woman. My thing with “cliques” is that I’m totally fine with people having friend groups existing, but the communication on server affairs became so entrenched in adjacent spaces that many things that could have been prevented by talking about them in a common space peacefully (with mediation) didn’t get communicated and the tensions built up until they exploded- everyone taking sides because they only see and hear what the people they hang out with elsewhere feel and say. And this time around anything that happened on discord/forums from April onwards was at a point where it was too late for that and here we are still in a mess.