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the whole ursula/alix exchange truly reads like a cross-examination in ace attorney it's insane

So like, I think the moral of the story is that there's only a total of twelve real people on the Internet, and they're all fighting with each other with dozens of sock puppets.

as an actual Indian lesbian named Izra this was WILD

12:03 absolutely losing it at the caption "sleepy hijabi" with a photo of someone who has clearly just tossed a blanket over their head

One important detail: Years before "Israa" started writing Hamilton fics, she was writing fics for Hetalia and posting them on AO3. And according to the timeline of her life story, she wrote all of these Hetalia fics... while stuck in the Indian brothel.

as a tumblr user since 2014, i've seen a lot of bullshit, but reading "Alexander Hamilton is George Washington's sugar baby" felt like getting hit by a sniper

"They were beefing hard; they were debating the morality of daddy-kink jokes" is the most Tumblr sentence ever spoken aloud.

Being known by a Tumblr mistake IRL is a fate worse than death.

If we tried explaining this to a founding father it would kill them a second time

i’m gonna be vulnerable for a minute and share this ~ i both read and enjoyed to scale the blue sky when i was a high school freshmen. i made playlists and mood boards. there’s one chapter in the fic where the main characters make red ribbons for aids awareness and pass them out at school, so i spent an entire night safety pinning together red ribbons to pass out at school on world aids day. i kind of faded out of the hamilton fandom after that and did not know about this whole situation until your video. which means i have spent 7 whole years thinking this fic was just a quiet blip and that israa and naj were real people. i say all this because i need you to understand how insane it feels hearing all this information now. i feel like a victorian child eating a warhead

Even after all this time, the line "I am not here to give you absolution, I am not the arbiter of morals" fucking slaps so hard and should be remembered forever.

What’s wild about this is that Alex would have gotten into infinitely less trouble if she just wrote the fanfic as a just white hiv negative weirdo lol

Calling real-life history "source material" is both accurate and awful

The truly astounding thing about it to me is that the fic didn't even do that well. A couple hundred kudos in a fandom as active as Hamilton at its height would have been pretty average.

Listen, i can see Israa's story being real... If she wasn't a teenager... It reads off like an 80 year olds recounting of her life throughout the years, not something a 17 year old would say happened in 2 or 3 (?) Years.

coming back to this again; alix claiming to be "chinese/pakistani" while saying her family is from "xinjiang" is especially a giveaway that she was lying. for context occupied east turkestan is referred to as "xinjiang" by the chinese government but uyghurs(the people of east turkestan) do NOT refer to it as such, and uyghurs almost never call themselves chinese

Obviously what Alix did was terrible, but I also can't let Ursula off the hook for being like "doxxing is illegal and immoral" and THEN JUST DECIDING TO DO IT ANYWAY

i don't agree with ursula on a moral level but "I have been [the Hamilton cannibal mermaid freak] for years" is a POWERFUL statement

While obviously Alix is the main villain here, there's also something really unseemly about the way Ursula acted in response. She can say whatever she wants about her intentions and interests; there is BARELY concealed glee at having her nemesis so thoroughly over a barrel on display, both in the chat log and in her subsequent posts.

Ursula was acting like she was L in desth note with that interrogation 😭

hamilton is a great musical show, questionable take on history, and an INCREDIBLE impact on society i am THRILLED that we have done this to the founding fathers

i genuinely laugh every time i think about the fact that thomas jefferson helped to establish this country and "fought for the freedoms of it's citizens" (excluding anyone that wasn't white men) just for, over 200 years later, someone to make the miku binder thomas jefferson art. i think that is incredible

I think that last post hit one particular nail on the head- it isn’t that an HIV positive queer Muslim sex trafficking victim couldn’t exist, go to college, and meet a trans lesbian they want to have kids with all while living or planning to live in places that actively would love to see them dead. It is absolutely possible for a pair of human beings to check that many “marginalized group” boxes. But those people would NEVER spend their internet time writing that much Hamilton fan fiction or publicly talking about the intimate details of their lives, ESPECIALLY back then. When I read a story, especially a Tumblr one, where someone checks 26 of those boxes and also talks about it constantly my BS alarm does go off, just because it does feel like thats not what someone would do if they were. I hit a few boxes myself, and I do discuss them sometimes, but it’s not like every message, post, and story I write ties back to one of them and I tend to downplay them.

My disgust for the actions Alix took aside, it's absolutely mind-boggling to me that she was in *college* while doing all this. I feel like this is the kind of thing someone should grow out of by the time they're 15. To continue doing it until your late teens/early twenties is absolutely wild to me, I can't even begin to wrap my head around the mentality behind it.

hearing Ursula ended up doxxing her KILLED me. After all that, after all that "i would NEVER EVER DO THAT unlike YOU" and "I am not an arbiter of morals", they ended up doxxing Alix still. This is truly the "everyone sucks in their own way" tumblr story.

as much as we laugh at miku binder jefferson, the fact that he is represented as a queer black man would absolutely enrage the real Jefferson and i for one think that’s something worth celebrating

It is kind of funny that she lied about literally every aspect of her identity, yet apparently she was above using someone else's pictures

My aunt died of AIDS when I was 10. I recently found her panel in the blanket we had made back when she passed. The size of that blanket as a whole is mind blowing. It’s huge. So many lost lives.

Fun fact: I interacted with allolesbean, sort of. She jumped onto one of my posts about being ace and called me a pedophile because I said that I started to realize I was different around 16 years old and she thought that asexuality should be strictly 18+

The apparent "real photo of Israa" is something else to behold. It literally looks like someone threw a blanket over her head pretending to be hijab and cranked down the gamma, it is not a selfie I think anyone could be proud of unless they were intentionally trying to hide their identity

I'm a queer nonbinary person who is survivor of a form of sex trafficking, and happily married to a trans woman. I am not hiv positive or a person of color so I cant imagine how those people feel but this whole story made me so annoyed. Like Alix honey if you want the trauma that bad you can have it. Its not fun, it's not interesting. It actually sucks.

"Naj", aka Alix, made a huge mistake by trying to appease Ursula during the initial confrontation, bending over backwards to explain away every inconsistency in her story. "Naj" should have maintained that self-righteous tumblr attitude we all know and love, and instead of trying to play defense, turn the tables and get deeply offended that Ursula was questioning her identity and prying into her personal life. Then Naj could have turned the whole thing into a "what gives you, a stranger on the internet, the right to question the identities of me and my partner?" type situation, then angrily block Ursula without answering any further questions. If anyone asks you about it later, say that Ursula was harassing you with baseless accusations and invasive questions about your finances and living situation. Then your followers will have your back and shun Ursula for being a creep, which will make her accusations seem meritless by default. Ya know, just some tips for aspiring catfish and grifters out there.

Absolutely screaming at the fact that Ursula repeatedly assured Alix that they weren't going to dox her because it was wrong, and then going back on their word and doxxing not only Alix, but their parents as well by revealing their full names. Like Alix isn't a good person, but Ursula sure ain't winning the moral high ground

ursula telling alix that "tumblr isn't as a big of a deal as you think it is" and then going off to email alix's university about tumblr drama expecting them to give a shit is some insane energy like what

"Not all stories have a point to them. Sometimes they're just sad and disgusting from beginning to end." I feel like that summarises this pretty well tbh

I thought Ursula was handling the situation okay, if not a bit too heavy handed on the ‘apologize’ rhetoric. But then you hit me with the ‘Ursula later made a post doxxing Alex’ and I have never frowned so hard in my life. The fact that Alex was BEGGING not to be publicly doxxed, and Ursula PROMISED she wouldn’t, and then she turned around and did it. I’m actually disgusted. Why does it seem like every ‘atone for your actions’ keyboard warrior is secretly just as morally bankrupt, if not even more so? I want to believe there’s some good, reasonable people out there who solve discourse, but god, it just seems like everyone ends up the villain in the end. Hypocrite culture tears me apart inside.

As soon as I heard the alleged backstory, my first thought was, "You're a teenage white girl, aren't you?"

Ursula was absolutely 100% in the wrong for doxxing Alix, but god that initial confrontation was wild. The fact Alix's initial response to being accused of faking multiple identities online was "nonono, they're real people, I just *stole/mimicked the identities of people I know IRL* to fake multiple identities online" is BONKERS

This is very much an Everyone's Shit Here situation. Alix is obviously awful, but honestly, so is Ursula. Doxxing is almost always wrong, and this is certainly not a case where that thorough of a doxx was ever needed. Plus the fact that the reason Eldena DoubleCa5t took down her video on this is because she didn't want to be associated with Ursula after Ursula tried to get her to distance herself from her friend Sarah Z. because Sarah criticized Ursula's TERF friends.

I misread the title as "Hiveliving" and I was hoping for a funny video into people who pretend to be ants or other insects blogging about what its like to live in a hive but instead I got hit in the face with a story that is absurd, infuriating, kinda sad and kinda funny all at the same time

"Israa was a 19 year-old Chinese-Pakistani Muslim, with a wife named Mukta who was an 18 year-old (part?) Somali trans-lesbian Catholic raised in America" Me, a history/world religions researcher with a girlfriend from north India, and thus very interested in the complex history between China/India/Pakistan: 𝗢𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗴𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗮 𝗯𝗲 𝙜𝙤𝙤𝙙.

So between this, MsScribe, Sarah Z’s Toby video, and Hbomb’s Tommy Tallarico video, I think “video essay unraveling someone’s years of lies” is a new favorite KZfaq genre for me

ursula: are you sure that you have hiv, are a poc victim, and 3 different people? alix: im not just sure, im HIV positive.

this isn’t related to the drama, but lizdexia (the author of the hamilton/washington fic) made fun of supernatural last year, and a fan exposed how she wrote explicit RPF about harry enten & nate silver (of 538 fame) before she went after and dated harry enten. she continued to write RPF about him even after getting with him and even had a reddit account where she talked about fantasizing about harry enten and nate silver together, along with a a lot of other details about their sexual relationship. so yeah, not a single normal person in this story 💀

I'm beyond floored that anyone thought Alix would like,,, be publicly reprimanded by their college over this? Especially in 2020. Like, yeah, what they did was shitty, but the idea of a REAL ASS UNIVERSITY publicly speaking out against Hamilton fandom drama is INCREDIBLY silly to me.

I saw someone on tumblr call out a "pedo ship" where the younger person was 30.

I feel like a lot of the bizarre Tumblr fandom discourse of this era ended up serving as fuel for early incarnations of the reactionary "anti-SJW" movement, which is both a shame and fundamentally misses the point of what actually made these sorts of sagas so crazy. These sort of sagas don't come about because of some ideological flaw in identity politics or social justice or whatever, they're the result of weird, overzealous fandom types discovering those concepts and immediately trying to use them as a cudgel to win arguments about who Severus Snape was fucking.

Ursula: “Doxxing people is illegal and immoral” … Ursula moments later: “I doxxed her.”

The fact that Ursula was chased off of the internet not for fully doxxing a teenager WHICH IS VERY MUCH MORE ILLEGAL THAN WHAT HIVLIVING DID, but for writing problematic fanfiction will never not be peak fandom tumblr to me tbh

issra adding new plot points to her backstory to win arguments is hilarious

The Hamilton fandom feels like that Community meme where Troy walks in with the pizza and everything is on fire.

something abt ursula still doxxing alix knowing how absolutely petrified she was of it is so fucking evil imo

Maybe a controversial opinion but most people are boring, and that's ok. You really don't need to come up with an elaborate backstory or fake minority status for Tumblr cred.

I can't believe that Alix kept going to the same school until graduation. If I got outed as having faked every single minority identity at once, to PEOPLE I SEE EVERY DAY. I would simply leave forever

Alix is manipulative, but Ursula is a whole damn sociopath and learning she was later outed as a TERF puts all of this in a different light

I don't respect Alix but watching Ursula try to be the "hero" here is incredibly annoying. Telling Alix its not a big deal because it's "just Tumblr drama" then proceeding to doxx her and reach out to people she really knows? like, she's making it worse

I was nodding along, completely on Ursula's side as they dug all this up and confronted Alix, right up until they went back on their word and *actually* doxxed her. That just tainted the whole thing.

now I want a fight between Alix "im going to make up trauma and exploit it" and Onision "here's my actual traumatic childhood and how im VERY NOT TRAUMATISED AT ALL BY IT"

Revisiting this now that I exist outside pro/anti-ship talk I cannot help but feel like Ursula was less interested in getting Alix to admit what was wrong and more interested in some kind of fandom justice. The chatlogs really rub me wrong. Alix is disgusting, sure, but like. Girl you need to touch grass too

having heard about all this after being in the hamilton fandom at the time is like learning you were inches away from being hit by an intercontinental ballistic missle

If Alix just lied about being a trafficking survivor and HIV positive they probably never would have gotten caught, but they went for a BIG lie and it was too much for them

Telling this story to a founding father would kill them.

I'm honestly confused what Ursula expected Alix's school to do about the situation. Lying about your identity on the internet isn't illegal. What Alix did was super shitty, but she didn't break any actual laws except possible financial fraud, and that would be well outside the jurisdiction of the university police force (and from what I understand, the amount of money she actually gained from it was too small to qualify as a felony). The most the university could say was that Alix broke the code of conduct somehow, but this whole situation was so bizarre that I doubt a university acceptable internet use policy would cover it.

I think Strange Aeons should be classified as an eldritch entity. She keeps exposing innocent mortals to horrifying knowledge that drains their sanity

My 46 year old mother overheard me watching this and I tried to explain it to her but it required so much context that I think it just made her more confused 😭 like no mom I can’t explain miku binder Jefferson to you I’m sorry

as someone who was neck deep in the hamilton fandom in 2017, I somehow missed all of this by the skin of my teeth and I will never be grateful enough.

whenever ai art discourse comes up i bring up thomas jefferson miku binder bc no machine could ever create something like that. truly the pinnacle of human creativity

The entire interaction between Ursula and Alix is so weird when I really start to think about it. Like Alix completely drops her entire persona so fast, before she admits to any lies she just bends and folds. Because she was a very young person very scary of being doxxed, because these tumblr identities were really really important to her, so having them in jeopardy must have really crippled her ability to come back and defend herself with her usual snarky tumblr girl bullshit. It’s just SO weird to see her go from a character who’s hyper fixated on discourse and dialogue on identity politics, and then as soon as the veil of those identities comes under scrutiny, she just completely flops, either unable to understand the severity of her situation or purposefully playing dumb and making herself seem small and vulnerable and like “someone who didn’t know any better uwu” and honestly I feel like… that’s probably intentional. I think people like this are serial liars and don’t know who they are or what they actually stand for, so they’ll take whatever approach they think is going to get them the best outcome. And on that note, Ursula is honestly not that different in the sense that she claims continuously to be staunchly against doxxing on PRINCIPLE so for her to then turn around and doxx her…. So unnecessarily… I fail to see that as anything other than her initial private interactions with Alix all being very “reading from the tumblr script”, painting a picture of someone desperate and pinned against a wall with no other choice but to doxx this person. Like, she knew she was going to doxx Alix when she had enough information. She wanted to. She just said that she didn’t over and over again so that when she finally did, she would (theoretically) look like less of an asshole. I’ll be honest, her messages don’t read like she’s writing with the intention of posting the conversations publicly, so I don’t know if that was always the plan or if she even had a plan. But either way, she couldn’t at any point threaten to doxx Alix, lest Alix take a screen shot and use it against her. Basically, both these people are fucking weirdos and I think the overall weirdness of these interactions comes from those big obnoxious contrarian tumblr personalities clashing in the dumbest way possible, and weird and manipulative people who learn to use the language of their victims in order to blend in always makes for WEIRD content.

I think I'm a little too conditioned for horrific twists in these stories, because I genuinely expected the next part of the story to be that Ursula *was also Alix and "found herself out" so she could get out of this scott-free and continue online as a hero as Ursula* before they ended up doxxing her

Alix was in the wrong and there’s no doubt about that, but saying you’re not going to dox someone because it’s a crime and reassuring them repeatedly that their identity is safe and then proceeding to dox that person anyway just makes me really uncomfortable with portraying Ursula as if they’re in the right. Exposing Alix WAS something that had to be done as their lies obviously hurt people but they really didn’t have to commit a crime to do that.

This is a solid example of why the line is “listen to people of color” and not “never question what a person who calls themselves poc says”. Listening to poc means giving value to undervalued voices where you can, not just blindly accepting any old stranger on the internet. Also, this is deeply crazy and I feel less stable for watching this video, and I believe that a goblin may yet climb out of my phone.

I used to be in a Hamilton Facebook page. I asked if a line in a song was meant to be a fat joke. I got absolutely crucified that LMM would never make a fat joke, that he was too wholesome. I said he didn’t, the character did. Someone said LMM would never write about something he didn’t support, like fat shaming. I mentioned in the same song he writes about stealing a horse and buggy and plays its off as a joke. Someone tried to argue back that making a bad fat joke was worse than basically stealing a car. That vehicle theft was a normal teenage milestone but a fat joke was absolutely unacceptable at any line and I was an awful person for even interpreting it that way. That’s when I left the fandom.

If Alix's profile was correct and she was 24 at the time of her being exposed... Idk, there's an extra layer of creepiness of this 22+ year old manipulating a bunch of teenagers. I feel like a lot of people missed that detail lol.

If I had a dollar for every time a fanfiction author used an array of sockpuppet accounts to generate a cult of personality among a fandom's it-crowd and harass users that produce content they find objectionable and then got exposed by an early victim, I'd be quite wealthy, because it keeps on happening because nobody ever learns anything.

this entire scandal can best be summed up with "Now this might strike some viewers as harsh, but I believe everyone involved in this story should die."

once had a japanese girl in our discord server who only came on at certain hours and claimed to be sleeping the rest of the time. i pointed out that implied she was sleeping 20 hours a day and the other members informed me it was because of a heart condition or something. "she" ended up being some guy in ohio or whatever idk anything about him really. they were close to the other people in the server since they were from an older group. this was going on for *years*, one of the members was particularly close to this sick girl persona and felt really bad for her and ended up spending a lot of money on her over the years. he himself was mentally ill (all of us tbh) and not raking in a lot of cash as a night security guard. when this dude fessed up and got kicked out our server lost like 4 members, dude made up like 3 other people too 💀this was way before discord had that feature to let you swap between accounts easily so idk how the fuck he was keeping this up

I actually listened to a podcast about fandom drama and one of their episodes was about HIVliving and the scandal and they actually read "To Scale a Blue Sky" and apparently it was A) was FAR MORE explicit than tagged/rated on AO3, B) had some weeeeeeeeeird portrayals of race C) was NOT accurate to the queer/poc experience in the 1980s at all and D) was generally mid af

Seeing Ursula snap and doxx Alix was like seeing your favorite character turn evil and commit the worst atrocities, like Cmon I was rooting for you! You are the chosen one! You were supposed to destroy the toxic, not join them!

ursula's insistence that nobody with israa's "backstory" would spend her time writing hamilton fanfiction isn't quite accurate. there are some fiction writers out there who have absolute bonkers backstories. sometimes you gotta channel all your experiences into something lighthearted or compelling, either as a coping mechanism or just a fun distraction. i've known trans polyam CSA victims who wrote youtuber fanfiction.

Tumblr drama is so fascinating to me because it always goes down exactly like a “Big Lie” episode on a children’s TV show.

Men making eye contact = soulmates

"participated in ace discourse" I knew at that point shit was gonna go wild

NOT THE ACE DISCOURSE....... as an ace person i literally lose years off my lifespan every time i remember this

This is definitely one of those "everyone involved is a loser" kind of situations

My first exposure to this story was a "how well do you know tumblr culture" style quiz, where one of the questions was "Which of these did tumblr user hivliving claim to be? Select all that apply:" followed by this astronomically long list of names, ages, races, nationalities, sexualities, relationship statuses etc. I was Afraid™️...

as someone who went through a very long hamilton phase, i will say that thomas jefferson miku binder honestly felt not that far off from the musical. some of the songs slap, but i can’t say that i love its take on history now that im older and understand more. it did get me into musical theatre which saved my life though, so it will always have a special place in my heart.

I have a core memory of finding out about this drama while drunk as a skunk at a Halloween party in college

I truly can't think of anything more hellish than being in a group chat with teenage Hamilton fans. Alix deserves the insanity plea.

HIV living is one of my favourite niche internet scandals and whenever I try to talk to people about this they think I’m insane. Not even a Hamilton or Theatre girly

I am absolutely loving this series of “Internet Drama for People who have never even seen grass” videos as someone who falls into that category

Isnt it CRAZY THO that Ursula was like btw doxxing is illegal and i would never do it THEN DOXXED ALIX AND SENT TRANSCRIPTS TO ALIX'S MOTHER???

the fact that people even thought somebody with such a complex cocktail of identities and such extensive trauma and lore would just casually be on tumblr writing hamilton fan fiction 😭😭😭

I used to nanny two kids (7 and 9 years old) who loved Hamilton and thought it was all true and their parents didn’t correct them AND they went and visited Alexander Hamilton’s grave to pay respects 😬 so just that alone makes me VERY wary of the Hamilton musical LMAO

man i was so on ursulas side throughout that whole ace attorney-style conversation with alix and then she just took a giant dive off the moral high ground by doxxing alix. like she said one million times she wouldn’t do that??

You know when a tumblrite drops the "Honey." and isn't referring to bees that something *bad* is happening.

As someone who's survived trafficking, most trauma survivors don't post extensively about it online, ESPECIALLY IF THOSE WHO TRAFFICKED YOU COULD POSSIBLY FIND YOU FROM IT. WTFFF.

You know, when the When Posting Goes Wrong version of this story went up, there were a lot of commenters (myself included, regrettably) that painted Ursula as some kind of hero for their efforts. Looking at the situation now, I'm glad the comments section is willing to re-evaluate that stance in a more balanced light. Obviously I think what Alix did was supremely fucked up, but I don't agree with Ursula's decision to doxx her

Ursula really came in with goofy fanfics and ended fully prepared to commit social murder

From a perspective of someone who works in higher ed, the idea Alix would face consequences from her university is wild AF. 100%, if it was brought to their attention, their PR person AND general counsel would've advised them not to comment. It puts a major liability on the school and sets a horrible precedent.