So in the end he died a man, at 1 PM alone at home, by hanging. In his blood were high levels of chlorpheniramine (antihistamine drug to be drowsy), escitalopram (SSRI), and dihydrocodeine (opiate). I guess he wasn't confident in being able to hang himself without drugging himself first. It is concluded that it was a suicide and that he attached a rope to the door in order to hang himself.
Which is exactly what he described doing, isn't it?
Byuu's suicide is on Byuu, alone. It always seemed to me at least 98% likely that he was dead as advertised. The "there's no proof/ he's totally just gone underground" perspective never seemed reasonable. The only mystery is why he fixated on the Farms and his short, fairly innocuous thread here that didn't even make him look bad, just sad and in a personal struggle - and in which he engaged. Though I can imagine that having a thread at all was upsetting, it's abundantly and indisputably clear that the thread here was not the root cause, nor even the actual last straw, in his internal war and broader feelings of angst. I perceive his outreach to Josh as a poorly considered hail Mary, flung at the wrong place when unable to cope with broader problems. Given the tone of the published correspondence with Josh - which looked like true and desperate begging on Byuu's part - I can only conclude he'd overfixated on the site/deletion of his thread as the key to relief. His overfixation should never have been turned into what it did.
It wasn't right to lay his literal existence at Josh's feet, though he comes across to me as desperate and sad more than actively malignant. And their interaction seemed at a point to take a potentially positive turn when Josh declined the money and asked for his resume. But it seems Byuu was either merely looking for an excuse or was just so hyperfixated on deletion of the thread as "the one thing" he needed (or both) that he couldn't process a no. In his own mind, it seems he'd made removing one (dim, aged) spotlight on him the decider. That's disordered, obviously, and cowardly. And it's not at all clear that if it had been removed he'd have taken down the contraption and turned back to life. If he had, I suspect it would not have been long before he was back on the ledge again very quickly - because his sadness didn't start here.
The only discomfort I have had on this is, for Josh, speaking about the situation in a way that sounded (sometimes) less like just justifiable anger at being forced into an unfair position/moral dilemma with an actual life at stake, and more like umbrage about the audacity of the ask/ request to compromise an abstract principle and trying to bribe him and then carrying out (or pretending to carry out) his threats, which is all manipulative, and leaving a legacy of wrongful blame; and for some commenters, years of glee and vehement callousness, which is a shade or 10 different than just concluding Byuu was wrong and unfair.
The massive and unfair succeeding impact on Josh and the site fucks up the moral equation, though; Byuu's decision, which was clearly
not about a minor, dead, and relatively empathetic thread that everyone had forgotten for the most part, has had massive implications for one person who played, until Byuu's death, a minor and indirect role, at most, in Byuu's misery, and who offered, while standing on certain principles, to help the man in the form of a fair exchange. Unfortunately, casual perception matters, and so many people (weirdos, obsessives, malignant actors, and opportunists) have leveraged a bad situation. If they think the thread /site or Josh is evil for exploiting people, I'll just assume they hang fabric over all of the mirrors in their homes, because they clearly aren't looking in them.
