JoCat, creator of the ‘A Crap Guide to X’ series for both D&D and Final Fantasy 14, has announced that he’ll be taking an ‘indefinite break’ in the wake of harassment, as announced on his Twitter yesterday.
In a further thread, JoCat lays out a timeline following the wake of his I Like Girls video—a gender-swapped cover of Boys by Lizzo. The video went viral, gathering over 11 million views at the time of writing. I Like Girls itself was a stream bit he decided to animate: “I decided it could be a fun project to animate the brief stream moment for my youtube audience.”
The video itself is uncontroversial. It’s a cutesy send-up of Lizzo’s original song that similarly celebrates women of varying body types. A year later, JoCat writes that the video “reached outside its target audience”, prompting harassment from communities who made “assumptions about my character, my history, my beliefs, my relationships, and all those of my partner, as well as threats of violence to me as well as my family,” as well as “doxxing attempts”.
While JoCat mentions that most of this had previously been limited to Twitter, he adds that “no small amount has leaked into other parts of my regular day to day that is harder to ignore—private DMs over discord and twitch, suspicious packages being sent to my family.”
As a queer person who occasionally dabbles in makeup: I get a sinking feeling that’s all too familiar. Much of the harassment targeted JoCat’s sexuality and gender presentation, the latter of which is ‘non-conforming’ by societal standards—which can make you a target for a swiss army knife of bigots with an axe to grind.
One major example that’s brought up often is from a since-deleted Tweet that captions the video: “How the hell can this guy making liking women seem so fucking gay.” Considering JoCat started a major charity drive for trans rights charities, harassment of this nature lends credit to the whole “outside its target audience” thing.
Dozens of other streamers and YouTubers expressed both solidarity and frustration at the news of his retirement, including D&D YouTuber GinnyDi, YouTuber and voice actor Gianni Matragrano (Ultrakill), and FF14 YouTuber Pint. At the time of writing, “JoCat” is currently trending with over 34,000 posts. The atmosphere is a mixture of frustration and anger.
JoCat himself has proceeded to quote-tweet a previous statement made back in March regarding an instance on his stream, where he writes: “I do not condone harassing people who do not follow my views … if they are harmful, be helpful.”
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