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Night in the Woods, Part Six
Aug. 31st, 2019 09:16 amIt's important to be sympathetic to people suffering from a mental illness, because of course it is. Sometimes, however, you have to make difficult choices.
This is from the Night in the Woods development blog on Kickstarter regarding the recent accusations against Alec Holowka and Scott Benson's difficult working relationship with him:
It's important to support people suffering from mental illness. Once mental illness begins manifesting as abuse, however, you have to make a choice. You CANNOT be friends with someone who's being abused and their abuser at the same time. To the person who's being abused, this is particularly upsetting, as you're indicating to them that you don't value their worth as a human being enough to care that they're treated in this way.
Throughout most of his career, people were apparently sympathetic toward Alec Holowka, as his mental illness was clearly visible and resulted in tangible public behavior. Because of this, the people whose mental illnesses were exacerbated by Holowka's abuse, including Scott Benson himself, were deemed unworthy of sympathy because their suffering was more internal and private - or because they were in a vulnerable place in their career and felt pressured to keep quiet and be "positive."
It has been my experience that, except in rare and extraordinary cases, people's sympathy will always be for the mental illness of the abuser, if only because the people who are abused are silent - and sometimes even dead. I'm sitting on a few cases like this, but I know better than to come forward, especially when I know that the mental illness of the victims would be blamed for somehow triggering the mental illness of the people who abused them. I guess I'm waiting for someone like Zoë Quinn to step up, because not everyone can be an influential public figure like Zoë Quinn; I never ended up becoming a Zoë Quinn myself, unfortunately.
Anyway, there goes my plan to write an essay about Night in the Woods. Bad timing, I guess.
ETA: This story developed in a deeply unfortunate direction. I thought about deleting this, but I still stand by what I wrote. Scott Benson's full post, which has been archived on Reddit, makes the circumstances of what happened a bit clearer. I respect the emotional labor Benson put in through the years, as well as the decision he ultimately had to make. As I wrote, these decisions are difficult but necessary. It currently seems as though Gamergate 2.0 is in full swing, and my main concern right now is that the vulnerable people who have suffered because of the events of the past week (and the past ten years) are supported and cared for, and that their own mental illnesses are treated with sympathy and compassion.
This is from the Night in the Woods development blog on Kickstarter regarding the recent accusations against Alec Holowka and Scott Benson's difficult working relationship with him:
But about a year or so into the project we began realizing that Alec was a bit unstable, often lashing out at people he lived with. We heard through him and some others that he had some pretty volatile dating relationships. Nothing that said /abuse/, just hey there's a lot of drama here. During the next couple of years Alec's instability would lead to his leaving the indie house space in Vancouver he'd been a part of for years and heading to Winnipeg. We took the brunt of this as well. Things got very bad with both him and NITW development and we were honestly making worst case scenario plans by the end of 2015. The story of how NITW was saved late that year gets very personal for me and is all too close still. I'll tell it someday, maybe soon. I don't tend to talk about my own trauma shit often. But it was then I started having very bad no-joke-actual-medical-issue panic attacks daily, which happened on and off until mid 2017, and with one exception haven't returned. Until the past week.
It's important to support people suffering from mental illness. Once mental illness begins manifesting as abuse, however, you have to make a choice. You CANNOT be friends with someone who's being abused and their abuser at the same time. To the person who's being abused, this is particularly upsetting, as you're indicating to them that you don't value their worth as a human being enough to care that they're treated in this way.
Throughout most of his career, people were apparently sympathetic toward Alec Holowka, as his mental illness was clearly visible and resulted in tangible public behavior. Because of this, the people whose mental illnesses were exacerbated by Holowka's abuse, including Scott Benson himself, were deemed unworthy of sympathy because their suffering was more internal and private - or because they were in a vulnerable place in their career and felt pressured to keep quiet and be "positive."
It has been my experience that, except in rare and extraordinary cases, people's sympathy will always be for the mental illness of the abuser, if only because the people who are abused are silent - and sometimes even dead. I'm sitting on a few cases like this, but I know better than to come forward, especially when I know that the mental illness of the victims would be blamed for somehow triggering the mental illness of the people who abused them. I guess I'm waiting for someone like Zoë Quinn to step up, because not everyone can be an influential public figure like Zoë Quinn; I never ended up becoming a Zoë Quinn myself, unfortunately.
Anyway, there goes my plan to write an essay about Night in the Woods. Bad timing, I guess.
ETA: This story developed in a deeply unfortunate direction. I thought about deleting this, but I still stand by what I wrote. Scott Benson's full post, which has been archived on Reddit, makes the circumstances of what happened a bit clearer. I respect the emotional labor Benson put in through the years, as well as the decision he ultimately had to make. As I wrote, these decisions are difficult but necessary. It currently seems as though Gamergate 2.0 is in full swing, and my main concern right now is that the vulnerable people who have suffered because of the events of the past week (and the past ten years) are supported and cared for, and that their own mental illnesses are treated with sympathy and compassion.
