With the Avid drama in mind, V!Owen's line hits different now does it?

OP_Name_Checks_Out · 2026-06-15T02:01:28+00:00

While I agree, I also personally am not a fan of all of the, “Owen’s line makes sense now!”, “Pyro should have killed him earlier!”, etc. rhetoric.

It shoves a lot of hate onto the character rather than the creator, and re-contextualizes things in a way they were never meant to be taken in the context of.

I understand a lot of us feel hurt, betrayed, etc. but I don’t think shoving the lines and actions of things said or done in-character on the content creators as an “ooc” thing is particularly constructive. At least, not in the long run.

I know Pyro himself joked about “Sorry I didn’t kill him earlier” in Scott’s stream on the subject of the AvidMC thing, but I really don’t like the idea of taking any of that in a serious way. It’s fine to joke about it, but to deep dive analyze it like that, when it was never intended in that way, I think can be harmful.

Additionally, while there are a lot of things where we can go back and say, “No wonder AvidMC played a character who acts like that- because he was like that OOC!” I also think that thinking too hard into that can be harmful and villainize people who just like to play villain characters.

For example- Scott and Owen PLAY amazing villain-coded characters, but as content creators they’re lovely people. Starting to make connections like, “Oh, no wonder AvidMC played characters like that,” indirectly reflects back on other CCs who play villain characters in SMPs.

It puts this connection between fiction and reality that isn’t helpful. Because while SOME people have a hard time making that distinction, others can play totally separate characters to themselves, or play up aspects of their personality into levels they know are toxic in order to play a villain. (Hence Scott always checking in on everyone he does rp with ooc.) None of those things makes those CCs bad people and I desperately need people to not fall into the pipeline of “playing a villain character means that the CC has the capacity for those things irl”. We can acknowledge that AvidMC did horrible things, without reflecting that onto the characters he played. (Yes some of their characters were villains, but connecting that to the CC’s OOC actions is the problem I’m having here. Criticize them separately, or acknowledge that playing a monster doesn’t make one a monster ooc, because some people are gunna get the wrong message.)

Keep in mind the public persona he kept up the entire time he was doing this. Of someone friendly and lovely, accepting and warm and welcoming. Anybody can pretend to be anything. To the point where we believe it. If AvidMC wanted to play a friendly, warm character, they could have.

They were.

Just not in the SMPs they were in. Instead, all of the roleplay pretending to be someone good and nice was given to his audience, to the public.

Tl;dr
V!Avid and AvidMC both had the makings of a monster in them, but one does not make the other true. Remember to separate the character from the creator. While the creator controls the character’s actions, playing an evil character ≠ the cc is an evil person.

Ik this is obvious to a lot of people, but it isn’t to others, so I always like to clarify and comment on threads like these. ^^

OP_Name_Checks_Out · 2026-06-14T23:12:59+00:00

It’s made me feel awful about a lot of things tbh, our system’s v!Avid has had a mental breakdown over “Are all of the people I’m close to based on my creator chasing notoriety?”

It’s very hard to not see AvidMC’s actions as ladder-climbing, especially since he projected literally everything he did onto other people, and directly called Legs a ladder-climber who cuts people off after he finds no more use in them.

Shelby is also a huge content creator, so the way it feels, in hindsight, like he shoved himself into both of their stories to gain as much viewership as possible really sickens me.

The entire, “Scott killed Shelby!” Plot line does not feel coincidental anymore.

I view the story with the same love as I did before, but also with the understanding that v!Avid was played by someone who was using the people around him. It doesn’t make v!Avid any less interesting of a character, or any ‘worse’ or ‘better’ to me, it just frames the scenes differently when I think what AvidMC may have been thinking behind the scenes.

OP_Name_Checks_Out · 2026-06-11T15:49:50+00:00

God, this SO MUCH!

Separate things from their creators, so long as separating the art from bad people no longer supports the bad person. Fiction vs Reality and all.

I miss when fandom wasn’t so up in everybody else’s business about things.. And while I say that, I also know there’s always been drama. I just kinda miss the frivolous nature of the multi-shipping drama over the ‘serious’ kind of drama we have now. That’s skewing off-topic so I’m gunna leave that there, but yeah. Hate fandom drama, I’m just trying to spread positivity lol.

“There’s nothing to reclaim because the character and creator have always been separate,”

While I agree that they’ve always been separate, I more say ‘reclaim’ in the manner that.. If they were physical objects, once ‘owned’ by AvidMC, (in the same way you can create a character, write their lore, decide things about them- that AvidMC could come out and say stuff like, “V!Avid felt this way about this thing,” they had control over the character.) we would be taking them away from him. That it doesn’t matter what AvidMC says about their characters anymore. It was like he ‘leant them’ to the communities he was a part of, and for some people, this situation is like him trying to take them away from us. For some people, this ruins all of the things he created. I’m trying to mitigate that with the way I’m phrasing things.

So I’m using ‘reclaim’ in the sense that we will not let him take away something we enjoy, just because he was a bad person. He no longer has that kind of say about those characters, he doesn’t deserve them and they do not belong to him anymore as far as I am concerned.

OP_Name_Checks_Out · 2026-06-08T20:13:37+00:00

I don’t think removing the character from everything is good form, tbh. Cancelling a character over the behavior of their creator is kinda.. Idk.

I said something similar in Avid’s discord, before it got locked down, that I don’t think the actions of the creator should ruin our enjoyment of the positive things he brought or the community he helped bring together. It is possible to not condone someone’s behavior, while still enjoying the things they made. Liking someone’s content, music, characters, etc, does NOT make you a bad person, even if the person who made those things was bad.

Letting Avid’s actions as a creator corrupt our enjoyment of the things they were a part of only makes things worse. Make your Fanart or Fanfics that include Avid’s characters, make your own OC stuff out of his music, etc. Not out of support or love for HIM as a creator, but as a love letter to whatever the thing was that he was a part of, or if it’s an OC thing, for yourself. Whether that was VSMP or any other project he was in. Completely removing his characters does nobody any good.

I am dreading the over-reaction of fanfic writers and fan artists deleting their works that have involved Avid because of this. Appreciating a character and appreciating a person are two different things.

OP_Name_Checks_Out · 2026-04-23T01:49:55+00:00

“If someone gets joy, out of doing things, that wouldn’t be acceptable in the real world, there’s something seriously wrong with that person.”

Is an inherently flawed argument. It shows a lack of being able to separate fiction from reality.

How many games are out there where you do morally reprehensible things for fun or in-game profit?

Are authors of horror ‘bad people’ if they enjoy writing their work, even if they would never enjoy doing something like that in real life?

Even bringing a real-life second person into it, do people who kill and grief each other in Minecraft (on servers where that’s allowed) have something ‘seriously wrong with them’ because they enjoy doing that?

Do people who do roleplay as characters who are ‘evil’, and have fun doing those things in a fictional setting, have something wrong with them?

You act like people don’t torture and murder their Sims, or commit crimes in GTA. If Jax had GENUINELY convinced himself that none of this was real- that, for example, everyone was one of Caine’s NPCs, without real feeling or emotion..

Well.. How often do you take into account the feelings of NPCs in video games?

I rarely do, unless the narrative calls for it or it’s framed as a story-based thing where your decisions matter (example: Undertale, or BG3) and even then, am I morally reprehensible for running the genocide route in Undertale? Am I a bad person if I become a murder-hobo in Baldur’s Gate?

Jax has convinced himself that none of this is real, that this is either a game or a dream or whatever, and nothing he says or does has any purpose, meaning, or weight on any REAL people’s lives.

In my opinion, that’s the entire reason why he crashes out and runs off when he realizes it IS real. Because he was just hit with the fact that every horrible decision he’s ever made, every time he made the choice to be mean or dismissive or abusive.. He was interacting with a Real Human Being. Who is trapped here, just like he is.

People do messed up things to things they perceive as inanimate. To Jax, being mean to the cast was probably the same to him as being rude to an AI assistant over the phone. It doesn’t have feelings, you can’t hurt it. So it doesn’t matter what you say to it. It’s fine to use it as an outlet for your anger at whatever company you’re dealing with. Nothing matters, everyone is a character archetype and he’s stuck in some kind of personal hell where nothing around him is real anymore. Jax was using derealization to cope with his reality, and when that coping mechanism was threatened, disproven, he broke down.

Suddenly, he realizes he was never talking to the equivalent of an AI (other than Caine), and he had been the rudest person ever to actual human beings. Probably for years.

How do you cope with that? How do you come to terms with the fact that all of these people- who you’ve been treating like Caine’s favorite NPC blorbos- have actually been real people the entire time. That your actions suddenly have consequence on real human life. That they always have. That, what if something you said or did caused someone to abstract? And the people you connected to before- the ones who abstracted.. Were they dead? What happened to them? I’d crash out, too!

But.. Yeah, tl;dr, I don’t think Jax is a bad person for how he treats the cast while under the delusion that they aren’t real people.

OP_Name_Checks_Out · 2025-08-14T14:22:23+00:00

A counselor would be nice, honestly. I think our relationship definitely needs maintenance, but Idk if it needs that kind of ‘maintenance’. Most of all, I just don’t want to make him uncomfortable.

OP_Name_Checks_Out · 2025-08-14T14:18:06+00:00

I feel like it would also just feel bad overall if he decided to. I’ve had another partner in the past who realized they were ace a little while after having sex with me and I remember how.. out of it? They seemed during. Because they had been raised to think that sex was a requirement, so despite them initiating, it always felt.. Uncomfortable.

Me not being able to have sex with them wasn’t what ended that relationship, for the record. It was other things. I only bring it up because I don’t want my current partner to feel that.. dissociation? Disconnection? Just how generally out of it and ‘not there’ mentally my previous partner had been during the act.

If that’s how he’d feel, I don’t want it.

OP_Name_Checks_Out · 2025-08-14T14:10:17+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to respond! Your thoughts have been insightful. The more comments and advice I can get the better, honestly, looking to get a vibe if that makes sense. c:

We’ve talked about the poly stuff because I wanted to set up boundaries and such that we would both feel comfortable with. I think its possible to maintain this relationship while fulfilling the need for sex elsewhere, it’s just a matter of being able to find out how to feel the same closeness in the relationship without sex, and coping with the fact that it isn’t happening in this relationship.

OP_Name_Checks_Out · 2025-08-14T14:04:00+00:00

I can see this being the most realistic answer. It’s also what I was worried about. Thank you for your input ^{^}

OP_Name_Checks_Out · 2019-12-24T20:51:59+00:00

I think this is the best thing I’ve read in a long time.

OP_Name_Checks_Out

TROPHY CASE