George Squares Drama Explained - The Deterioration Of Echo Project

How the Smoke Room became the Smoked Room

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EDIT 2 (11/25/2024): The Smoke Room has been decanonized from Echo Project and George Squares will continue the project under a new name and IP separate from Echo Project. I talk about it more here.

EDIT (09/22/2024): I added an addendum at the end of the blog which contains more of my general thoughts on the situation but only includes one more minor update to the story. I also made a few minor additions and general improvements to the main blog.

On September 2nd, 2024, it was announced on the Echo Project Patreon page that George Squares, the then writer of The Smoke Room, has parted ways with the Echo Project team and that The Smoke Room will continue development without his involvement moving forward. To say this shook the FVN community would be like saying that the Sun is hot. This not only saddened a lot of Echo fans, as a beloved visual novel now has an uncertain future, but also confused a lot of them as well, wondering why such a consistent and competent writer for the team had been removed. Taking a look at what the FVN community is saying in sites like Twitter or Discord, however, will uncover a lot about what's going on behind the scenes.

What Is Echo Project, The Smoke Room, etc.?

For those who don't know, Echo Project refers to the collaborative team that creates an assortment of different furry visual novels, FVNs for short. Common themes for these VNs are horror and romance, as well as dark themes in general. Their most well known VNs are Echo, Adastra, and The Smoke Room, the last of which will be the center of this story. These VNs are the most popular titles in the western FVN space, garnering attention from all corners of the furry community. The Smoke Room is no exception.

The Smoke Room is a prequel to the team's first project, Echo, taking place in the same town. Originally having several writers working on the VN, George eventually became the sole writer of the project, editors not withstanding. Despite being a prequel to Echo, the tone and style was a lot different. The romance is a lot more prevalent, there's a lot more sexually explicit scenes, the horror itself is written differently, and there's more social commentary and politics involved in the plot. The Smoke Room quickly became one of the most popular FVNs of all time, with fanart and memes coming from almost every corner of the gay furry community. That being said, even though it received a lot of positive attention, there were also a lot of people who were critical of the VN, pointing out the absurd frequency of sex scenes and the weak horror compared to Echo's type of horror. A lot of these criticisms became directed at the author's writing skills, but there were people who criticizing the man not because of his skills, but because of his behavior over the years. Little did he know that this would cause the end of his career.

The Cienie Drama

The story starts with itch.io posting about Cienie on their Twitter account on August 26th, 2024. Cienie is a Mystery-Thriller VN created by ArmoredStranger and BenBinturong. It's a fairly new VN with its first build being released during New Year's Eve of 2023 (according to the itch.io page anyways). This was a big deal for the FVN community as itch.io is basically the hub spot for the community to find and download FVNs. However, itch.io usually doesn't promote FVNs due to how most of them are sexually explicit and itch can't promote NSFW projects. Because Cienie was SFW and labeled as such, itch was able to post about it, finally allowing them to promote a project from the FVN community. 

Look at how many likes and retweets it has. I haven't scrolled up a lot but I couldn't find any tweet from this account that has more likes. The closest are tweets for Married In Red, which was made by someone with over 70k followers, and OneShot: pancake episode, a spin-off of one of the most popular indie games from the last decade. Even then, there's a gap of at least 700 between those tweets and the Cienie tweet. For a project that's not even a year old in a fairly small niche, that's pretty impressive. Of course, part of that attention came from the ensuing controversy, but that's still nothing to scoff at. It's also a quality VN. I haven't read it, but everyone I've seen who talks about it has only said good things about it, including people on the Echo Discord server.

Well, everyone except one.

A day later, George Squares made a tweet expressing his disappointment finding out Cienie had no sexually explicit content, apparently being mislead into believing otherwise. He then made another tweet that day along with some posts on Bluesky the next day, making his own personal observations. He was also complaining about the VN on this topic on the Moontouched Discord server, Moontouched being a werewolf FVN that released about two weeks before those tweets. 

Now, these skeets (I'll use the word "skeets" to refer to Bluesky posts for the rest of this blog) on their own are misguided, hot takes at best. I encourage you to make your own judgement on these comments. But put together, George gives the impression that the Cienie dev team, despite being willing to mislead their audience into thinking they're making an erotic VN by making a bunch of pornographic promotional art, secretly hates NSFW, which is why they're making their VN SFW... which is stupid. The VN doesn't have sexually explicit content because the creators hate NSFW content and the creators retweeting erotic fanart and their own indulgent horny art isn't lying to their audience. He's also using language that often gets used in NSFW vs SFW discussions, which are always heated. Even if he worded these comments in a less accusatory way, it's still inappropriate to complain about a VN from a fellow dev after such an honorable thing like that happened to them. It would be like if you were on the Jimmy Fallon show and then your friend tweets out, "Man, there really needs more attention to people who aren't prudes."

Now, to play the devil's sexy lawyer, I can understand why he'd hold such a position. It is true that NSFW VNs aren't going to be promoted as much as SFW VNs on platforms that forbid NSFW content such as itch.io's Twitter account, which puts erotic VNs in a rougher spot. It can feel like erotic content in VNs are criticized unfairly a lot, especially from the perspective of someone who does put in a lot sex scenes in their own VN. Also, a lot of FVNs are NSFW, so it's not really weird to expect an FVN is NSFW by default, especially when social media for the VN retweets a lot of NSFW fanart. I can see why George would feel like he's been mislead by Cienie even if the dev team didn't actually do anything of the sort. That being said, considering the size of George's following, his skeets could have caused people to unfairly harass the Cienie team.

Rotshild took notice of these skeets and decided to make a Twitter thread about it. Rotshild is the editor of Cienie, as well as the creator of the FVN, Supernova. I've seen him talk on various discord servers and he's a pretty decent guy who's not afraid to speak up for his opinions. In this thread, he says that George attacked the Cienie team and accused them of being liars, while also explaining why they didn't mislead or lie to any of their audience. I do think he is being a tad bit overdramatic, but the points he makes are still true. This tweet blew up, getting over 770 likes and 200k views, as well as 106 quote tweets. Keep in mind, the tweet George made that got the most attention in that group had 88 likes and 2.4k views. Rotshild's thread really extended the reach these tweets got. 

I think Rotshild just wanted to call out George's behavior, but it came with a lot of attention for him and his team, unwanted and otherwise. If I was in that situation, I personally would have made a Twitter thread explaining myself without mentioning George by name. He also worded these tweets in a way that would have provoked George and his fans. However, considering he worked with Lesli-Chu for Supernova, who we'll talk more about much later in this blog, he might have gotten the impression that George was a very dangerous person, so he didn't feel the need to self-censor even if it carried consequences for him and his team. There are ways he could responded to those skeets without this amount of attention, but I don't think any of them would have achieved what Rotshild wanted to do. Also the third screenshot might have happened after the fourth screenshot due to the timestamps on the posts. This has nothing to do with the drama, just something I noticed. I couldn't find any of these skeets on George's accounts, so it seems like he deleted them. However, I don't know if he deleted them before or after the Rotshild thread, so it's hard to say what his intentions were.

George Squares then made a thread listing out erotic FVNs he liked. At worst, this is an extension of his previous skeets and a bit clique-y. I don't think recommending VNs you enjoy under a specific theme is toxic, though it is a bit unhinged coming after the Rotshild thread. There were a few points that were kinda funny though. Firstly, he mentions that Shelter and Demons Within contains AI-generated backgrounds, and that even though he doesn't support the practice, he still recommends them wholeheartedly. This just sounds like a leftist who knows he has to virtue signal to avoid the wrath of his fans, while still supporting the things he likes. He also posts an link to piracy site for Kemo Collesium. Good job supporting the devs, dude.

He then was apparently complaining on other FVN Discord servers, which is just wild. Bro really had the spotlight placed on him only for him to double down on his actions like no one's going to get pissed. There's standing your ground and then there's not reading the room because you crashed right through the wall to get in. I'm not going to join these Discord servers to get screenshots because I don't think they'd appreciate people who haven't read the VN joining solely for the drama.

I looked at the tweet history from both ArmoredStranger and BenBinturong. I might have missed something because those two make a lot of retweets. However, I couldn't find anything about ArmoredStranger mentioning anything about this whole thing. The only thing Benny tweeted that I could find related to this was this reply:

He's not really commentating on anything, he's just making a silly little reply to a silly little tweet regarding the drama, which wasn't that widespread at the time. Do keep in mind that I haven't looked through their tweets after August 31st, so maybe that has changed.

On August 31st, Rotshild made a follow up post with its own document, which further fanned the flames of the controversy. You can read the doc yourself, but in summary, it's mostly repeating what was said in the thread as well as providing even more enforcement on the wrong doings Georgie said, just with more details. There are a few more points made in it though. He makes a point that George's opinion that SFW works shouldn't engage with erotic fanart is absurd. He also clarifies that the Cienie crew never did anything to mislead its audience into thinking it had NSFW content. Also he provides screenshots of comments saying the VN has no NSFW and you could see the amount of down votes they got, which is hilarious:

He makes a point about how even if they did mislead any of their fans, which he believes they didn't, he says that to say they did it intentionally is very hostile. He then mentions that George has doubled down on his comments on other FVN Discord servers, which shows that he doesn't see the writing on the wall. He responds to some comments he got from the thread, saying that it's fine to express disappointment that a VN has no NSFW content, he just felt like George was accusing them of false advertisement. He explains the dev team's had no ill will in making the VN SFW. He also includes a section on his opinions about sex scenes which he admits isn't relevant to the situation. Throughout the doc, he makes it clear that he has no ill will towards people who only read erotica and singles out George Squares for his wrong doing. It's also very notable that he never once said to not harass George either in his original Twitter thread or in this document. I can understand why he wouldn't say that in the thread because he didn't know the drama this would cause, but he's fully aware of the attention he's gotten by the time he's writing the doc. There's a clear intention behind the document. I want to be transparent that I think Rotshild means no ill-will to anyone, I'm just discussing how this come across to the average reader.

Now, you might be reading all of this and think, "Wow, George Squares said some stupid stuff, but why is everyone making a fuss about this? While it's lame and pathetic to insist that a SFW VN is intentionally misleading its audience into thinking it has NSFW content, this isn't something that would reasonably get someone fired." And you'd have a point, hypothetical person I just made up. If making dumb assumptions about SFW novels was George's only vice, then George and the rest of Echo Project could have let the drama run its course and move on with their lives. Yeah, that's a pretty awful thing to do and he's going to make a lot of enemies, but it doesn't matter in the long run when he's making quality work with The Smoke Room, a VN that has a formidable following. Well, if only things were as simple as that. These skeets didn't stir people up because of what George said, or the actions he did, but because it was George "on cap" Squares doing these actions. He's someone who has made a lot of enemies for various things he's done but has never owed up to. When Rotshild put out that tweet thread, everyone who had a grudge against George saw his bad behavior being put out in the public and came out of the woodwork to share their stories, because they collectively decided that enough was enough. Georges^2 had burned a lot of bridges in his career, which ultimately lead to his downfall.

The Undoing of George Squares

The same day Rotshild posted his response, Orion made a tweet saying he'd been mistreated working under George and that he's been keeping it secret for two years. He said he couldn't keep it secret after seeing George harass a smaller dev team. He also said he'd be willing to go further into detail if need be. Orion has also been retweeting a lot of the drama surrounding George Squares. Orion is now the programmer of Remember The Flowers, the most popular western FVN that hasn't come from Echo Project. He's a prominent figure of the dev team, having one of the larger faces on their itch.io page. However, he used to do programming for TSR. I have seen how he talks in Discord and he's pretty kind, chill, and considerate of others. He also doesn't strike me as someone who gets involved in internet drama at all. In this interview by Nero, which was done around the time Orion said he'd been mistreated, (at the 3:05 mark) George thanks Orion for all the programming he's done and (at the 59:25 mark) mentions that Orion cried at one of the scenes in the VN. Now what could have happened to cause someone to go from that to sharing personal information that makes George look awful? Seems like their connection really soured over the years. After George got fired, I've talked to some people who had talked directly to Orion in the past. They said that while Orion never directly talked about George, there was a sense of bitterness from Orion to George. My interpretation is that he'd only speak up if George acted out of line one more time. George did, so Orion spoke. Because Orion was a well-respected creator with a big following in the FVN space, his involvement is what really made the controversy spread like wildfire.

Note: This has been edited to reduce size.

Later that same day, the Echo Project Twitter made a statement apologizing to the Cienie team and saying that they'd be looking into the current situation. The wording of this is oddly professional for an indie group like Echo Project. It seems like even they didn't know how to respond, so they used the most neutral possible phrasing possible, which makes it end up sounding like ChatGPT wrote it. Being serious though, if I had to guess who wrote this, it's probably Howly. The wording of this is consistent with previous statements he's made. In case you liked big numbers, this tweet has over 2.3k likes, over 350k views, 184 quote tweets, and 71 comments. Yeah, there were a lot of heads turned towards Echo Project and George Squares. Needless to say, this caused a lot of unrest for the Echo community, with some people clamoring for George to burn, while others expressed worry that he was going to get fired. On the bright side, at least Cienie got more attention...for better or worse.

Some past allegations towards him had resurfaced as a result of this drama. This Twitter thread by HYENABLOOD, posted the next day, claims that George is transphobic and has a habit of cutting off people for not being cis-gendered men. This thread got retweeted by Orion, which is what caused it to garner attention. Frankly, most of it is just him blasting George and I have heard that this person defended some heinous actions by some bad actors in the community, so the information he gives us shouldn't be trusted. The reason why I'm talking about this thread is because one of the tweets near the end of the thread (posted six hours after the initial thread; Would have appreciated it a bit earlier, buddy) contains a Twitter thread with some damning evidence of George's behavior, so let's check it out.

This is a Twitter thread from December 13th of 2023 by Keenan Marten who claims to have been George's ex-boyfriend from 2019-2021. This thread doesn't include any screenshots, so we have take his word on it. In it, he reveals that George's very controlling in what he describes as "petty fights with McSkinny". He also describes him as being an ass to Redd, basically being the reason why he left writing TSR. He threatened to break up with Keenan in several fights and used his private Discord server to manipulate him and his friends into doing what he wanted. He told Keenan's friends to leave because he was jealous he had a crush on them, and he told Keenan outright that he'd be willing to kick his friends if he didn't like them. That's not everything, but that should give you the gist of what's going on. Keenan mentions this isn't related to the current drama despite the tweet being from December of last year. I wasn't sure about what this was, so I asked someone and they said it was from about a furry twitch streamer vagueposting about George which caused some drama. Keenan also mentions that he can get screenshots if need be, although I haven't found any tweets from that contain screenshots. Either way, this is all toxic behavior coming from George. I'm inclined to believe Keenan due to a friend of mine mentioning that he remembers Keenan being a mod of the Echo Discord server, who had George's support before disappearing suddenly.

And then we wrap back to the beginning of the blog where, on September 2nd of 2024, it had been announced on their Patreon that George Squares had been fired from Echo Project. I was actually surprised by this, I actually thought George was going to apologize for his behavior and try to move on with the drama. Him getting fired reveals a lot about how Echo Project felt about him, however. In any case, it's hard to figure out what's going on behind the scenes, but we can try our best. Let's go more into detail on this post.

McSkinny mentions in the Discord server that these are Howly's words, furthering my guess that the apology tweet two days earlier was written by Howly. The post mentions "irreconcilable differences between George and EchoProject over the past few years". There's a lot going on in this statement, so I'll save it for later. They used the words "part ways" to describe them firing George, possibly to try to not alarm their audience. They mention they're going to restructure the development of TSR. Until then, the VN will be on hiatus. That said, they said that they will have updates on it later this month. This doesn't mean they will have another build of the game, rather it seems to suggest that they will bring news on it by the end of the month.

I'll save the general reaction to these events for later. Right now, I want to from herespeculate a little about happened between Echo Project and George Squares that caused him to get kicked off. And yes, I will be speculating about a lot of things simply because Howly is being frustratingly secretive on exactly why they fired George. This is my personal interpretation on what was going on behind the scenes and while there are some public information I can base these speculations on, a lot of this is just my intution. If you don’t want to hear speculation and just want to see what happens next in the story, skip to the next section (A Split Public Reaction). From Orion's and Keelan's accounts, we know that George has had a habit of being controlling and abusive. However, we can dig a little deeper into the situation to get a better grasp on the situation and see what was happening with Echo Project. I think now would be a good time to start from the beginning.

Echo Project: Behind The Scenes

Echo Project consists of several writers: Howly, who worked on three routes of Echo, Adastra, Khemia, Interea, and Arches, McSkinny, who worked on two routes of Echo, Echo: Route 65, and A Role To Play, and Redd the Shibe, who worked on Echo: Benefits, early parts of one route of The Smoke Room and Glory Hounds. Then there's George Squares, who worked on The Smoke Room and only The Smoke Room. 

Echo was the team's first project, being one of the first FVNs from the Western FVN community to be created and one of the first to get finished, meaning that it had a long time to grow its community. Howly was the one who lead the project. He later met McSkinny through his friend Kudzu, the person not the character, and then decided to recruit him to help him work on the project because he liked his writing. McSkinny also wrote Route 65, a side story to Echo. Another side story, Benefits, was written by Redd, who'd later lead Glory Hounds. After finishing TJ's route, Howly stopped working on Echo to work on Adastra, and once Adastra was done, he created Khemia, Interea, and Arches, the last of which is currently finished. After Echo was done, McSkinny would lead his own project in A Role To Play. Of course, we're missing one project.

The Smoke Room was originally conceived by Howly, which can be seen by some of the main characters appearing in photos in Echo. Originally called 1915, this VN started production around 2017. It was with this project that George Squares joined the Echo Project. The VN initially only had three love interests with their own associated routes: William the coyote, Nikolai the badger, and Cliff the stoat. Murdoch the fox was an addition by George Squares, as he felt like the cast needed a photographer. The original plan for the development of the VN was that Howly was going to work on William's route, McSkinny to work on Nikolai's route, Redd to work on Cliff's route, and George to work on Murdoch's route. McSkinny left before writing started for personal reasons. After only a few updates, Howly left to work on Adastra, leaving George and Redd to work on TSR. Eventually Redd stopped working on TSR, leaving George as the sole writer of the project.

Continuing from that last point, there is evidence to prove that George disliked Redd, and harassed him out of working on TSR. We already have the Keenan Marten thread that touched on this. A friend of mine sent me these screenshots. I couldn't find them on the Discord server so either they've since been deleted or these are from a private channel. These were screenshotted by Redd himself, note how George’s message replying to Redd is highlighted, but I definitely didn’t get these from Redd. If we look at them, we can see George lampooning Redd for making tidbits about his own character in a pretty snarky way. And when Redd sarcastically responds in a sort of "dude, you're taking this way too seriously, just let me have my fun" way, George takes it at face value and says "bless", happy that his "friend" is complying with him despite his protests. Like why would you care so much about your co-writer making details about characters they're writing?

Note: CUMBO’s messages have been deleted.

Here, Redd's explaining a bit about TSR's development, elaborating on the development of the game, which my explanation is based on. He then explains why he left (also spoilers for TSR I guess lmao). It's here where he also implies that he sees George as the more experienced one, which may or may not be true. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then George gives his own explanation for why Redd left. He then insists that this is factually correct and back-handedly talks about Redd's behavior. Why would he feel the need to do this? Shouldn't he trust his peer in explaining his own situation?

In this interview with Redd from 2021, from 8:00-10:05, Redd keeps on stuttering and has a nervous tone of voice when describing the development of TSR, including when he talks about George. He even apologizes for stampering. Listen to the rest of the interview. He doesn't talk like that for most of it. Now he could just have issues remembering what happened, but keep in mind, he was still working on TSR when that interview happened. He shouldn't have issues remembering what George's involvement in the project was.

Going back to the Nero interview with George, from 28:05-30:00, George mentions characters he enjoys writing. He lists out all the main characters (and Yao) with the exception of Cliff. Keep in mind that Cliff is Redd's character. I've talked with some people and they've said that the reason why Redd doesn't want to return to the project is probably because of all the harassment he's gotten from George that made him leave the project. 

It's little things like these that don't mean much in their own, but when put together, paints a clear picture on what's happening between George and Redd. Keep in mind, these are all public. There are even more damning evidence that showcases George's poor treatment of Redd that I can't show due my wish to protect the privacy of people involved. Everyone who was just a tad privy to this knew what was going on. It's not just Redd though.

Couldn’t find the artist’s socials and I want to protect their identity, so they will remain anonymous unless they want to be credited by name.

In my digging, I found this tweet. I looked through the Discord server and found George deleting a fat edit of Murdoch's sprite and calling it fetish art. He's not fatphobic, but this does show his tendency to be controlling towards his own audience.

I'm going to share some private DMs that have been shared with me. I have gotten permission to share them by the people involved. The exception is Lesli-Chu AKA Hop-Skip. I'm not going to censor out his name because his social media accounts have been deleted, so I don't have to worry about people harassing him. Plus, he definitely would have called out George in public if he was still on the Internet because he already did so a few months before this drama happened. And yes, I am aware of why he deleted his social media, you are free to dislike him for any reason, but those reasons are completely irrelevant to the point I’m making.

Here, you can see that George responded to being called out for his bullying by banning Lesli. There's another message by this guy who explains that, prior to this incident, Lesli also called out bad behavior from Howly for getting into some drama, which I'm not going to get into for the sake of my sanity.

The screenshot shows that this deleted user is Lesli.

The orange rectangles refer to George. The person who sent me this message told me to censor out his name.

In these DMs, they are pretty open about George constantly having drama associated with him, as well as how many enemies he had. These were messages in 2023. If you were in the right place at the right time, you had a good idea on what was going on behind the scenes.

Let's go back to that Patreon post: "irreconcilable differences between George and EchoProject over the past few years". This is not something someone would say if they wanted to kick a writer out of their team simply because of petty internet drama. The team had issues with George for years. If there's any one point I want you to take from this blog, it's this. George "NSFW" Squares did not get fired because of some Twitter drama. Not because of Cienie. Not because of Rotshild. Not because of Orion. Not because of some false allegations. He got fired because Echo Project realized that George was going to drag them down if they kept having him. This might be hard to accept. He usually acts pretty nice to the average person on Discord servers and the like. He actually gave me some advice once upon a time:

How could a person like this be the toxic man everyone keeps describing? The thing is, the ugly truth can often be found beneath kind exteriors. He kept mistreating people and cutting people off because he wanted things to go his way. And he could continue to do this because he was allowed to. Because he was in the right place at the right time. The Echo team were able to tolerate, and even support, his behavior because he kept making good work that made a lot of their fans happy. Even if he kept getting into drama and making new enemies, that wasn't going to get in the way of their reputation and strong fanbase...until it did. Once the drama reached a critical mass, once people decided that they had enough, once it spread to the greater swarm of people and tarnished their image, they couldn't let him stay any longer.

And yeah... If you haven't noticed by now, this doesn't exactly paint Echo Project in a good light, does it? More specifically, Howly and maybe McSkinny. Redd got harassed by George, someone who had more control over the project they were co-writing, so it's hard to put any blame on him. McSkinny was responsible for dealing with George's actions, but I haven't heard any bad things about him and he does seem like he was trying his best. He was the one who stripped George of his mod powers on the Discord server. The worst thing he's probably done was inaction, but he might have had difficulty trying to do anything significant due to circumstances we don’t know about. That's just pure speculation on my part, though. So that really only leaves Howly, who I've seen have the most authority of this group. George is responsible for his own actions, but making sure your co-workers are behaving themselves and punishing them appropriately instead of mindlessly having their back is also your responsibility. We don't know exactly what's going on, but the point stands that they shouldn't have let George continue to work on one of their projects if he was going to behave like this for years, regardless of how many people were drawn to his writing. It's a shame that it took this amount of online discourse for them to finally cut him off.

And so, The Smoke Room's main writer had been kicked off the team, leaving TSR without a writer for the time being. Who's going to be the new writer? Redd already has stated that he's not going to return to the project. Howly barely worked on the VN, not to mention he has Khemia to work on, and McSkinny didn't work on it at all. They'll have to get a new writer, but not just any writer. Someone who not only has knowledge of the Echoverse, but also has the same writing style and quality that George had. They also need to have a consistent schedule. Considering the amount of money EP makes, anyone that EP recruits is going to have a ridiculously large stronghold on them. As in, they could literally be as abusive as George and get away with it as long as it doesn't leak out to the public like it did with George. Echo Project should be careful if they're going to recruit a new member. Ultimately, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't want to bother with the project anymore. It's been tainted by too many bad memories of George that its going to be hard to work on it in good faith.

But that's the thing, The Smoke Room was the VN that kept Echo Project relevant. Of the projects that haven't been finished, Khemia and Interea kept getting stuck in hiatus hell, while Glory Hounds and A Role To Play didn't have nearly as many supporters as TSR had. George's output on the project was what allowed it to become one of EP's most successful VNs. Without The Smoke Room, what else is left of Echo Project? Unless Howly starts making more frequent updates on Khemia, they have to continue to work on TSR in order to keep their fans. Regardless, it's clear that the structure of Echo Project needs to be rebuilt now that George is out of the picture.

A Split Public Reaction

Okay, now we can talk about the reaction to the news. As you can imagine, the fandom response was...mixed, to say the least. On one hand, you have people who were celebrating that George left, now that a person they hated has been served justice. On the other hand, there are people who were really sad that their favorite writer is no longer working on a VN they love. Then there are people who are somewhere in the middle, who understand why he left but still are grieving the fact that this happened to a VN they enjoyed. The comments on the post and the reactions from other places like Twitter and Reddit reflect this. The number of patrons they got dipped a fair amount as well. I know a lot of people are dissing on George's fans for siding with him, but you have to understand this: TSR was one of the biggest FVNs out there that captured the hearts of many. You might not like the VN, but these people love it. Since they don't know the full context of why he got fired, they're obviously going to assume that the drama was made in bad faith and his haters just made up lies to make him look bad, especially since a lot of these tweets don't have any receipts to prove this behavior. I'm not defending their actions, or saying that the people criticizing George are in the wrong, I'm just explaining why they'd behave like this.

A couple reactions I want to pick out is this fanart by Burrrnt, which expresses relief that George has left TSR. 

On the opposite side of the spectrum, is this meme that was posted on r/furryvisualnovels, expressing grief on the news. 

Probably the funniest reaction I saw was this comment where they suggested to make The Smoke Room into The Woke Room. I have a broken sense of humor. On the flip side, the most heartbreaking one I saw was this Reddit post that discusses how, despite being a huge part of his life, George was only part of the problem with Echo Project.

The Cienie team also got a lot of harassment and review bombing that they had to close ratings, which just sucks. I will say that while this backlash is undeserved, Rotshild was responsible for his actions. Yes, he just wanted to criticize someone who was bashing a VN he worked on. But publicly directing strongly-worded statements toward someone with a large following is going to cause the most unhinged part of that following to attack you and those you've associated with. Rotshild should have known the dangers this could have brought him and his team when making those tweets. Again, I'm not saying he or his team deserved the harassment, I'm just saying that's the way it is. It's terrible! I wish it wasn't like that, but those are the consequences you're dealt with when you do those actions and you can't pretend that it's not the case.

Not that the George stans are the only people misbehaving. There were also a lot of "gooner" and "coombrain" jokes made throughout the whole drama and like c'mon. Rotshild's document said that he embraces erotica and its fans, he just had an issue with what George said. This type of mockery of George just seems to be anti-porn attitudes disguised as virtue signaling. George was bad for reasons other than his fixation on NSFW, so let's not jump to the coomer label and potentially offend innocent people who also have a coombrain. And no, that's not an oxymoron.

But wait, aren't we forgetting someone? How did George Squares react to the news?

Well…

George's Last Stand

Yeah...On September 4th, in an unnervingly calm tone, he states that he's going to try to claim ownership of The Smoke Room from Echo Project. I call it unnerving because this isn’t something you’d expect something someone who just got fired from a project he’d been working on for over four years to say. That's just insane, he really is trying his best to hold onto this one project he got kicked off of instead of moving on. This tweet also doesn't allow comments, because when the Internet has decided that your time is up, and you respond by saying it's not…yeah, I can see why you'd do that. In my opinion, I don't think much will come of this. Even if he brings this to the court, there's just too much stacked against him for him to actually gain the rights to the project. TSR was Howly's idea and he and Redd wrote parts of the VN. Even after George became the sole writer, the art, music, and programming was done by other people. At most, he'd be able to secure ownership of the parts he did write, while also having to alter things he didn't create, including characters and names of settings. I highly doubt he will actually succeed. Even if he does, he's definitely not going to get the old artists who have worked on TSR to work with him. Still, I'd press Howly, McSkinny, Redd, and anyone else who has worked on TSR to screencap as many private discussions they've had with George in case the worst happens. 

Honestly though, him gaining ownership of TSR might not be the worst thing in the world. None of the Echo Project want to work on it, so they might as well give it away instead of trying to scramble to make something of the IP. The issue, of course, is that instead of punishing George like people wanted, they'll actually give him one of their biggest projects away for him to work on. He's not going to make as much money, but now he'll have full control over the project. I don't think EP wants that. Either way, George seems determined to finish TSR somehow. He said that in the Nero interview, around 1:21:48-1:22:42, that while he's sad about leaving his characters, he hates leaving things unfinished. He really wants to finish TSR his way. The possibility of there being two TSRs, EP's version and George's version, is pretty interesting. This is a joke, but if George does succeed in getting the rights to TSR, EP should make their own prequel to Echo and name it, "Echo: 1915". Regardless, the end result of this legal mess will most certainly be entertaining. And no, I am not going to update this blog with further things George has done concerning this situation. Anything in the world of law takes months to years to deal with and I am not going to sack my mental health like that.

I also want to bring up this now deleted skeet he made concerning Keenan Marten and Orion. Not only does this sound like something a defeated supervillain would say at the end of a story to hint at a sequel, but it also basically confirms that Keenan is his ex. And since he doesn't deny what they've said, this gives more credence to their words. Welp, I also wish them ample karma... because they've done good things and I want them receive good things. And before you ask, Orion did retweet a screenshot of this skeet.

Summary

Here's the TL;DR:

• The itch.io Twitter account posted about the FVN Cienie, which generally got a positive reaction from the FVN community due to it being one of the first FVNs to get promoted by itch.io itself.

• George Squares, author of The Smoke Room at the time, saw this and made a tweet expressing that he felt Cienie mislead him into thinking it had NSFW content when it didn't. He also talked about this on the Moontouched discord server and made a few tweets and skeets saying some hotly-contested statements about how people react to erotic FVNs in the community, which inadvertedly made the Cienie team look like they did untoward actions despite them never actually doing any of them.

• Rotshild, the editor of Cienie, noticed George's tweets and made a Twitter thread discussing how his statements were wrong and inappropriate while explaining that the Cienie team didn't do anything George insinuated. This is when the drama first started.

• George doubles down on his behavior on some Discord servers, insisting that the Cienie team was misleading him.

• Rotshild makes a follow up document in response to George doubling down, reinforcing his initial thread with more details as well as addressing some of the responses he got from the thread.

• Orion, programmer of Remember the Flowers, retweeted several tweets relating to the drama before revealing that he'd been treated unfairly by George while he was working under him. This causes the drama to rise into immense heights.

• Echo Project makes a tweet apologizing for the situation on George's behalf and states they're looking into the situation, further spreading the controversy.

• A Twitter thread made by George's ex resurfaces in wake of the drama, where he reveals that George had harassed co-writer, Redd, out of working on The Smoke Room as well as acting toxic and controlling towards several of his friends.

• Echo Project announced that George had been kicked out of the team due to "irreconcilable differences" over the years and is no longer working on The Smoke Room.

• In response, several of George's supporters started to harass the Cienie team, attacking them on the itch.io page's comments and review bombing the game. This caused the Cienie team to disable ratings on their itch.io page.

• Meanwhile, other fans simply expressed disappointment and confusion on this decision. What they don’t know is the full context of Echo Project's relationship with George and how his behavior, the controversies he's had over the years, and the amount of people he antagonized caused a lot of difficulties for the team and the people around them. Other fans celebrated George getting fired, viewing this as the rightful punishment he deserved.

• George then made a tweet claiming that Echo Project doesn't have sole ownership of The Smoke Room and that "negotiations are still underway", implying that he'll try to take back the VN so that he can finish it himself.

If you only care here to learn about what happened, you can stop reading now. So far, that’s all there is to this story. The rest of the blog will just be me giving my own perspective on this which is more on the subjective side of things.

Conclusion

​This whole situation is a mess. Twitter drama, Twitter threads, long-hidden grudges being revealed to the public, someone's ex getting involved, a public apology, someone getting fired, legal drama, it really has everything. I joked about George being a supervillain, but I don't think there's a clear good or bad guy. There's certainly were people involved who were a lot more at fault, but blindly taking sides isn't the appropriate decision here. It's up to you how you want to judge this situation. While there was some good that came out of this, this really is the worst outcome for everyone. Cienie got more attention, but that included negative attention which caused the team to disable the game's rating system. Echo Project got rid of a toxic member of theirs, but only after years of dealing with him and having their reputation deteriorated. The Smoke Room now has the potential to clear its bad image started by its writer, but is currently in a state of limbo, and isn't yet finished. And George finally got the reality check he needed, but he lost the biggest work he’s ever worked on and that wasn't enough to stop him from continuing his bad behavior. If George was still on the team long enough to finish The Smoke Room, then things could have ended more cleanly. They could have quietly kicked George out of the team and he probably wouldn't have minded since he at least finished a project he considers his own, and no drama would have ensued. Alternatively, EP could have kicked out George a lot earlier when it was clear what type of person he was. There still would have been issues with TSR, but they wouldn't be as severe because George wouldn't have contributed a lot and switching writers wouldn't have hurt as much.

But that's not what happened. George always made sure that things were the way he wanted, no matter how small. He'll cooperate with you if you fit in with what he wants, but he'll never compromise on any of his desires. What led to his downfall was that he burned too many bridges and never owed up to his toxicity. And it's the fault of Echo Project (not Redd, maybe McSkinny, but definitely Howly) for allowing this behavior to continue by keeping him in Echo Project and letting him lead one of their biggest VNs for so long. George was one of the most popular and successful figures within the FVN community whose list of enemies became larger and larger with time, and who couldn't continue his project without the assistance of several other people. This made him a ripe target for people to collectively tear down by the force of online discourse. It was inevitable that people would eventually say "enough is enough" and destroy George Squares. And when they did, the people who had his back to save him when he screwed up previously were no longer there, so now he's trying to scramble to claw back his creation. I hope Howly and McSkinny learn from this, and make sure that they prioritize the well being of both their team, their friends, and their audience over anything else. And I hope this serves as a lesson for you guys to maintain good relationships with other people in a community. You never know what someone will do to you when you cross them. And make sure to own up your misgivings, so you can actually become a better person in life. Otherwise, you might end up like George Squares.

George, if you are reading this, first of all, I am gravely scared about my mental health. Second, I want to thank you again for that advice you've given me. It definitely helped direct me in my FVN journey, even in just a small way. If you want to finish The Smoke Room, that's fine. No one's stopping you. But you have to accept that it's not going to happen in the way you want. You're stuck trying to avoid the consequences of your actions and are trying to get back to the place you once were. Once you learn to move on and accept things as they are, then you can truly grow as a person. I don't hate you. I would hate you if you did anything heinous to me, but for now I don't hate you. Frankly, the world's too chaotic to hate a random guy who writes gay furry porn. This is probably the lowest point in your adult life. I genuinely want you to become a better person. I know it's not likely, but I hope that my words reach you and learn something from this whole mess: Not everything has to go the way you want it to go.

I also want to point out: Look at how long this blog is. 

This all started because the itch.io Twitter account tweeted about Cienie. 

People are weird.

Closing Statement

I'm so sorry that I wasn't able to get this blog earlier when the drama was hot. There was just so much to cover and I kept getting more and more information. It was also extremely stressful because I was deathly afraid of how people were going to react. On the bright side, at least this means that I won't be getting as much attention than if I had posted this when everyone's eyes were on George. But if this blog does well then that means I'm bringing the drama back to the forefront…all's well that ends well? I originally wrote this blog before Rotshild posted his follow up tweet, and the whole message of that initial version was vastly different from what I have here. Hopefully, this blog explains the situation well enough for those out of the loop. I will say that I felt motivated to write this blog because I recently accused a friend of gatekeeping people from liking Echo Project by talking about how toxic it was to his friends. This… was obviously wrong and he had good reason to believe they were toxic. I should have trusted him but I didn't. I apologized to him a week later but ended up saying a bit more than I should have, which caused him to tell me he doesn't want to talk privately with me anymore. It really shook me when that happened, so I felt obliged to write this blog even if he thinks that it’s better to not get involved with this drama. I like to think of this as an emotional debt I have to pay, and I hope this satisfies that debt. Anyways, please don't harass anyone mentioned in this blog. Don't harass Rotshild, Orion, Howly, McSkinny, Redd, Keenan, Lesli, Cap'n, or even George Squares. Harassment is lame and a waste of time. If you harass any of these people, then you're just the worst of the worst.

In any case, I'm glad I got this finished. There were a bunch of things I wanted to mention but couldn't either because they intruded on someone's privacy I wanted to protect, or because it wasn't really relevant to the story. We might be seeing other people come out with their personal stories about George that will reveal more information about this situation in the near future, so it’s better to let them decide what information to share and when to share. God only knows what will happen, though. I definitely recommend you watch the interviews with Redd and George I linked in this blog, as well as this interview with McSkinny that I wasn't able to mention. They reveal a lot about Echo Project and the development of some of their projects. There's also an interview by Nero Valzer of the RtF devs, including Orion, which I didn't watch because it included spoilers and I haven't read RtF yet. Who knows, maybe it revealed even more critical information that is relevant to the story. Thank you to Cap'n who provided some of the screenshots of deleted messages and personal DMs with Lesli. And thank you to everyone who provided me information on this story and provided feedback on this blog. Recently, the Glory Hounds team announced changes to its development plan which includes more frequent updates, which is great news! Even though I kinda dunked on Echo Project this whole blog, I hope they get out quality updates more frequently and be able to fill in the hole created when George got fired. Let me know if there's any inaccuracies or mistakes in this blog, I want to provide the truth to you guys! Also, feel free to post in the comments any potentially interesting pieces of information that is relevant to the story. And don't be afraid to ask for clarifications on some things. Anyways, that's it from me. I wouldn’t be surprised if we never saw George Squares again.

My one request for the FVN community is to make this a meme everyone keeps saying.

Addendum

Hello, it’s been over two weeks since I posted this blog and now I’m making a mini-follow up to this post. I’ve seen a bunch of different responses to this blog and I’ve been thinking about this blog since I published it because I felt like there was something missing from it. I still stand by most of what I said, but also, my opinions tend to fluctuate over time so while there might be minor points I will disagree with in the future, I did believe in them at one point in time. Originally, I was going to edit large sections of the blog and I did end up adding a couple of sentences here and there, although I didn't outright remove or change anything aside from some typos and incorrect facts. However, I decided that I wanted to leave this drama behind because it's just too much. I'm not going to make an entire follow up blog for the time being because I don't want any more attention on this drama. This isn't going to be organized so hopefully it isn't too hard to follow.

First off, I mentioned this before, but I want to stress that EP firing George is actually pretty shitty. There's the fact that they kicked off the lead of their biggest ongoing project after he worked on it for almost five years. He worked so hard on that project only for him to get removed from it. I'm not saying he didn't deserve to get fired, but that still must have sucked big time for George. There's also the fact that they were very vague on why they fired him. I already said that you'd have a good idea if you were in the right time and place, but if you saw what was posted on Twitter then you'd have a lot less of an idea on why George got fired. If you just saw what was completely public, then all you'd see was that George made a few heated tweets, started some drama, and then people threw a bunch of allegations onto him without proof.

This is a decision that alters the development of a project that has a very large following, many of those fans not even aware of the drama, let alone anything else George has done. The explanation for such a decision shouldn't be shorter than the itch.io page for the game. This should have been a thorough explanation that goes into the exact details and motivations of why he was fired as well as informing people unaware of the situation on what happened. I understand if they didn't want to reveal any personal information, but they could have done a better job than what they ended up doing. And like you can't just replace George Squares and think everything will be dandy. The chances that the VN will continue with the same type of writing George brought to the table is extremely low. There's a very good reason for people to be concerned.

Finally is the timing. I already said that they either should have done it either much earlier or after TSR was finished, but they could at least have the decency to not make this decision in the middle of the drama. Why not do it when things calmed down or even after the planned good ending for Nik's route was released? Instead, they made this decision during a time where people were at their most tense. This combined with the former point I made, was what really caused people to go after the Cienie guys and Rotshild. Because when the writer of your favorite visual novel gets fired for vague reasons and the only other clue for him getting kicked off is controversy that a random guy you weren't aware of before got involved with, you can who'd be the target of disdain. I'm not kidding when I said that this is probably the worst timing they could have chosen to fire George. Literally everyone involved came out of this for the worse.

Another thing I want to mention was that a lot of George's behavior, while not appropriate, could have been explained by what he had to deal with. George didn't cultivate an audience on his own, he joined a team that already had an existing audience. The Smoke Room is easily EP's most erotic VN. Echo had a few text-only sex scenes, Arches’ sexual content is very hidden away and is only suggestive, Adastra has two sex scenes, Khemia has one suggestive scene, and the other projects currently don't have sexual content. There was such a quantity of sex in TSR, that there would be updates that added more sexual content than all the sexual content in Adastra to the game. And not only does TSR have a lot more sex scenes, but it also has stuff other than vanilla sex. Drunken sex, threesomes, orgies, dirty talk that gets a bit degrading. Someone who played TSR after playing Echo and Adastra, VNs that are often the only FVNs someone would have played, might have been turned off by the sexual content.

Of course, TSR is not for everyone. Not everyone who liked Echo is going to like TSR. And yet, because it was connected to Echo, that caused people who didn't like sexual content at all, let alone in The Smoke Room, to be unreasonably critical to a game they were never going to enjoy in the first place. Like he was getting shit for being into hypnosis and I'm like, "who cares?". Let the man engage in his own kinks as long as he's not hurting anyone. If you don’t like something, then don’t engage with it. This isn't something you should bother people about. It's especially sensitive since George is a gay man and he values the ability to express gay sexuality a lot. The FVN community is one of the few spaces where gay erotica is respected and enjoyed, so hearing all those fans call him "gooner" or "coombrain" might have affected him a lot. I don't know what was going through his mind, God knows people have been complaining about me speculating enough times, but I believe that those comments were just his submerged frustrations made into fruition in response to Cienie. Just to be clear, he shouldn’t have said what he said, but it’s not hard to guess why he said those things.

I would just like to mention that the big mistake George made was talking about other FVNs in the first place. My mentor told me that talking about your peers in a way that doesn't promote or uphold them just isn't worth it. Words can have a lot of power, especially by those with large followings. When someone in the same space says something about you, even if they mean no ill will, that can affect the way people treat you, and that can be extremely stressful and anxiety-inducing. If someone says that about another creator, how are other creators in that space going to feel safe around that person? It just feels clique-y to do. And yes, I do realize I’m doing the exact thing to George, but I’m also encouraging people to disagree with me if they believe I’m wrong on anything, and I’m not probably not going to talk about other creators in this fashion from now on. Anyways, I personally wouldn't have done what Rotshild did, but I understand why he reacted like that.

That being said, I wouldn't consider what George said about Cienie to be a great offense, but more as a small blunder reflective of a bigger issue. Which is why it's kinda annoying when people overstate how bad this action actually was. Like if Rotshild didn't tweet about those posts, do you think people would treat those actions with as much seriousness? People are also overstating the power gap between the Cienie crew and George. Cienie got 250ish ratings in eight months before it had to close ratings. That's pretty impressive and I've also seen a healthy amount of fanart coming from the community. The Smoke Room obviously has a much larger fandom, but it's not like they were all religiously reading every single tweet George made. The Echo Project Twitter, the Discord server, and the itch.io were the platforms most of these fans were following with only a much smaller portion of people looking at George's tweets. What he did was still inappropriate, but the power gap wasn't as bad as people make it out to be.

I've been seeing people say that the Cienie tweets George made was the straw that broke the camel's back. This is true...but not in the way they probably think. George had his fair share of controversies before this, but all of them were either instigated by people with small followings, like Leslichu calling him out for something he did in the past, and/or were too unreasonable for most people to latch onto, like the drunken sex scene in TSR. Rotshild, however, was a fairly respected person within the community and he was calling out George for disrespectful behavior he shouldn't have done. Orion getting involved made sure the drama was widespread within the community. What makes this the straw that broke the back's camel was that there were likely several issues EP had with George, which made the controversy cause EP to sever ties with George. It wasn't so much that the controversies kept piling up to a tipping point, this was more of a growing problem that happened behind the scenes that spilled into the public eye with this controversy.

You know how I said I wasn't going to update the blog with news? Well...George Squares actually responded to one of the tweets I made about the drama. I didn't realize this until days after the tweet was made so it was fun wondering where the heck I got all this sudden attention. Thanks for the attention, George? I wonder if he's saying I'm making false rumors in the tweet I made or in the blog because it's like...I didn't say anything false in that tweet. "Claiming" doesn't mean he's lying. Anyways, he says here that he does actually own the rights to continue working on the project, he just doesn't own sole merchandising rights. I think he's trying to say that he's trying to negotiate with EP on where the monetization of merchandise should be allocated between them, which is understandable. George made a lot of tweets and skeets after he got kicked off, but I think this is the first time he has mentioned merchandise rights.

If we take this statement at face value, then yes, he owns the right to work on The Smoke Room. That probably means he's going to continue working on it? That still leaves a bunch of questions, however. If I'm not missing anything, why did it take my tweet for him to clarify that when people were reacting with much concern? Does Echo Project also have the rights to continue working on the game? If they do, how is George going to continue working on the game if EP is also working on the game? Could George monetize working on the game? And that's assuming George is not lying. However, I've been bullying George a lot in this blog, so let's trust his words in this instance. It's still going to be interesting to see what will end up happening, but it's probably a lot less interesting than I initially thought it was going to be. And yeah, I was doubting George way too much when I was talking about the legal issues. The truth is that it's a lot more complicated than how I originally implied it was and we can't make any meaningful assessment without more information about how EP handled the rights to TSR. This is another case where we'll have to wait and see what will happen. So I'm not going to speculate any further.

A fan of mine posted the blog on r/furryvisualnovels and the comments were made in very good faith and were purely healthy criticism directed towards me. In all seriousness, there were some comments that actually contained genuine criticism, like this comment made by ragingboniva, but most of them just didn't like it because it was long and I speculated too much. But hey, it's just water rolling off a duck's back for me, even though I don't usually get this type of attention a lot. The biggest criticism of the blog I got, however, aside from the fact that I was speculating too much, was that a lot of it was very against George Squares. A lot of the comments that support George have a bunch of upvotes while the comments that supported me got downvoted by a lot. And to their credit, there were parts where I wasn't giving George the benefit of the doubt when I should have.

However, my opinions about George have mostly remained the same and I don't regret anything I've said. I will say I do wish I was fairer to George. He wasn't acting the best in this whole situation, but things weren't exactly easy for him either. Now there were a couple of reasons why I didn't act nicer to George in the blog. While writing the blog, everyone I talked to who knew anything about him behind the public image of him either disliked him or thought he had it coming, so it was very easy for me to get into the same mindset as them and not think from his perspective. I also didn't want to cause EP, Rotshild, and the rest of the Cienie team to get any more attention than they were already getting at the time of writing. I wanted to make sure I didn't make them out to be antagonists. The final thing is that because Howly was so vague on why George was fired, I wanted to provide my personal interpretation of what happened that didn't involve the Cienie drama, which necessarily painted George in an unflattering image. You can decide if I made the right decision, but those were my reasons.

Lindsay Ellis is someone’s quite similar to George Squares in a number of ways, not all of them good.

The main reason why I wanted to include this addendum was that I felt like the behavior of everyone involved in the drama, including me, felt off. I want to remind people that I still think George should have been fired. But the way he got fired was undeserved and a concerning sign of the community's attitude. We have a tendency to only uphold people with the right politics, the right beliefs, the right ethics, and the right behavior, because we believe that anyone who doesn't have all those traits will hinder the greater society. Any wrongdoings must be repented for or else they'll be exorcised by the community. The thing is though, people aren't perfect. They make mistakes, maybe they were tired, had a bad day, or were uninformed on the subject. People aren't so forgiving for those blunders unless they get an immediate apology. One too many missteps can cause people to get excluded out because, to the greater public, they deserved it. Judgements of people aren't based on nuanced assessments of their personal experience with the person, but a small string of key moments highlighted in bad faith.

So the best way to function in such a community is to...shut up. You can't be ostracized if you never say anything. I mean you can, but it's a lot harder. Now, I don't personally mind this. You shouldn't speak all of your thoughts and opinions out loud. No one's going to give you shit if you want to punch a kid as long as they're unaware that you want to punch a kid. If you really need to talk about opinions that are potentially controversial, talking about it with some good friends is good enough for most people. But for some people, like George, they don't want this. George wanted to express his own opinions to the world. He didn't want to keep them private. He didn't want to keep fearing how other people will respond to him. He didn't care about the potential backlash, he just wanted to say what he wanted to say.

That's why he didn't apologize. He believes it's not his responsibility for how others act. But it is his responsibility. You can dislike it, but refusing to accept it is only going to be the cause of your downfall. Not only that, but this isn't just George's audience, this is also EP's audience. If he was going to stick with EP, he had to take responsibility for dealing with their audience along with his. But he refused to do so and that's why EP cut ties with him. And this isn't unique to our community. I've seen people compare his behavior to what J. K. Rowling did, but a more apt comparison in my opinion is Lindsay Ellis. Lindsay Ellis was someone who cultivated a community that encouraged this type of "all sins must be repented" type of behavior, and she ended up getting destroyed by that very same community because she wanted her voice to be heard. She didn't want to take responsibility over her actions, which led to her getting an onslaught of harassment by her own audience. I think George is in a similar position. He was just not suited to the position he was given.

His fans are also tired of this attitude. They've seen cancel events where the worst transgressions were "someone said something that was kinda racist" and there was no sympathy from anyone involved. They're tired of people getting dogpiled for minor mistakes, of people policing others on how to act, of people joining the dogpile without actually assessing if this was deserved, of people making allegations without any proof, and of people losing their jobs because of drama. I don't think Rotshild or the rest of the Cienie crew should have gotten harassed, but you can't say that Rotshild was blameless, that he didn't do anything wrong. Rotshild engaged in behavior that these people didn’t want to deal with. They just wanted to enjoy what they enjoy without all this noise.

I don’t want this to come across as a generic “We as a community should do better!” but I really hope that you learned something after reading this. I honestly believe that we should be more careful about how we treat others in the community, even if they’re acting moronic. We should try to show empathy and respect for everyone within the community. Treat them how you want to be treated. Like there are some people in this community that I simply don’t like, but I still respect them because I have nothing to gain from disrespecting them. I try to avoid them if I can, but if I have to interact with them then that’s that. All actions have consequences and if you don’t take responsibility then it’s going to drag you down. Stick to your morals and do what you believe is the right thing, but understand that some people will disagree with you and you have to be open to criticism and honest discussions, not burn bridges and create echo chambers. Put yourself into solid friend groups that care about you and are willing to start conversations where you can think through actions before proceeding through them. And if you get harassed for something you’ve done on the internet or something bad happened that upsetted you, just step away from the screen and take a break from it all. I know you don’t want to hear it, but sometimes that’s the best thing to do when things become too much to handle. Or you can see a therapist if it goes into actual mental illness. That would be the appropiate thing to do in such a situation. I hope the community comes out healthier after all this, because it really was a low point for a lot of people.

And that's all I have to say, for real this time. Thank you everyone for reading this long section. If I ever do a real follow up, I'll try to be a lot more neutral and less speculative. As fun as speculating and filling in the blanks can be, it's better suited for more private avenues, which is why I didn't really share this blog around. I do hope I'll be able to interview some of the people involved so we can have an honest discussion about their perspectives. Again, we will have to see what happens. Have a good day and I'll see you later!