A recap of what has been happening since the logs were released.
On Wednesday,
chat logs from 2012 were released where Melanie's husband Marl was seen grooming a 15-16 y.o. girl and talking about filming bestiality, attempting to have the girl have sex with his dog, giving her Bad Dragon sex toys in exchange for letting him watch her use them, and a bunch of other damning, disgusting things. The girl had met Marl by inquiring about Melanie's buttons and she visited them in person on at least one occasion and she saw Melanie "all naked" when she arrived.
After these logs began to spread, Melanie went silent on social media while Alex (eevee) pretended nothing had happened before he too went dark.
On Thursday, a moderator of the Floraverse Discord server was shown the chat logs and asked Marl about them,
he copy-pasted Marl's response in which Marl admitted they were real and said he was sorry for causing any harm from his behavior and communications with the girl. Not quite realizing what he had done by confirming the logs were real, the moderator began
trying to run damage control, eventually
banning the person who inquired about them and memory holing the logs. Scrutiny was placed on the moderator and he
nuked all his social media. Various people who
idolized, were inspired by, or
just enjoyed Melanie's Floraverse
began to express their distraught outrage, especially those with
young relatives who were into Floraverse.
The silence from Melanie spoke volumes, but she did
tweet out the update for her porn comic as well as
updated the Patreon while still remaining quiet on her glitchedpuppet main account for hours. She and Alex were also
briefly active in the Floraverse Discord, although both were set to Do Not Disturb status. People had been unfollowing her on Twitter,
cancelling Patreon support, and
fleeing from the Floraverse Discord.
Melanie seems to have made her first sort of public statement in the early hours of Friday morning, posting around 20 tweets on her locked Twitter account, to
which people replied and
provided some context to what she had said. Melanie's long-time supporter Opa-Opa was
seen engaging in Twitter conversations and trying to defend Marl/Melanie while attempting to understand the situation.
Before noon Melanie
began renaming her locked account (
formerly vassalbeleth) and
would continue to rename it while also
purging the followers that had access to it. Around the same time frame, the
forbiddenflora and
glitchedpuppet account was locked and maybe 30 minutes later Melanie issued a
more-public-but-still-kinda-not statement on the
now-locked gltichedpuppet account, accusing the victims of being liars, claiming everything negative about her is "lies and bullshit," and claiming that she was going to "stop posting online" and would not be looking at replies to the glitchedpuppet account.
At least one person
was randomly kicked from the Floraverse Discord, which must have been in chaos. While some Stans were convinced to actually look at the logs and
took back their knee-jerk white knighting of Melanie,
others began blaming "nazis," because of course they would. By the evening, this thread
was surpassing other drama and had the most traffic on this site. Various descriptions of encounters with Melanie and her creeps
continued to come to light.
The
Floraverse Discord now featured a pinned message saying Melanie was "taking a break," and
comments on the Floraverse site were nuked. At some point
commenting was completely disabled on both the Forbidden Flora and Floraverse sites. The moderator who unwittingly verified the logs ended up
apologizing for his earlier behavior and
quit the Discord and said he was leaving the Floraverse community. At some point, the
Floraverse Facebook page was deleted.
ESC Toys, the company that was producing Floraverse dolls including the Kickstarter'd vinyl campaign figures,
replied in an email about the situation and said they were "looking into the matter very seriously" and
suspended all sales of Floraverse merchandise. The Discord chat at this point
was enraged and openly talking about this thread, with one plotting to dox the victim. Alex
'liked' some tweets from a Stan at some point, while he himself stayed silent.
At some point in the evening Floraverse
was removed from Hiveworks' site and the Hivemill store
took down the Floraverse shirt page.
fftopic: least we forget the not to recent case of an artist getting chased off tumblr's platform for drawing an SU character with inaccurate proportions to then be further harassed after an attempted suicide, hopefully none share a similar situation when they go about with their lives and start interacting with other internet circles.
Lord knows they'll need as good of a push in the right direction they can get without too much repercussions.
