Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo
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I was getting kind of confused to why it was sounding like Merek was one of the worst examples of someone on games. He’s everywhere, does weird stuff but not even remotely close to what I’ve seen/heard people do. He’s like that crazy uncle that always ends up with a lampshade on his head.
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@icanbeyourmuse Most games don’t enable his more malicious shenaniganery, so he’s just a bit of a dipshit doing dipshit things. When he’s enabled and supported? Fuckery.
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@Pavel This tracks with what I’ve seen on several games, and I side with Pavel; Merek may be a weirdo, but he is NOT benign.
As an example of a supported Merek, I can remember being part of a scene on Star Wars: Rebirth that he was running, and was not completed at the time. It was to be continued, but never was; apparently staff on the game had a talk with Merek on what was and was not allowed in Player-Run Plots, and he never ran another plot. Which is probably a good thing, as his grasp of the Force and how it worked was… painfully not good, which was pretty obvious throughout the scene. As for his gamemastering skills, they could be compared to ‘Deadlands in Cannibal Country with Larry’ (which is hopefully still available on Pinnacle Entertainment Group’s website, and was once under a link titled ‘Gaming In Hell’).
When not supported, he comes across as a rather dim player who never grasps RP etiquette (such as pose orders) and how to be a sneaky, low-profile-keeping bad guy/Dark Sider, in spite of nearly ten years worth of playing. These may be symptoms of the worse issues that spring up when he IS supported.
Most players who decide to give him a chance, or dozens of chances (they must have Biblical levels of patience), learn the error of their ways sooner or later. Everyone else generally avoids him after a few painful scenes.
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@Warlander I legit do not know what about this is not benign? Someone didn’t run a great plot and didn’t finish it?
Merek as a player is more pitiful than anything else. He’s clearly not got the social skills to make the connections he would like, and I know we on another game had to talk to him about not oversharing medical and other woes on public channels, but he was mostly harmless.
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@hellfrog said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
I legit do not know what about this is not benign?
I may have been a little harsh in describing him as malicious, but I think there’s a line between benign pitifulness and burdensome enough to be a problem. And this is a line Marek seems to always cross over.
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This is kinda like sad and just seems borderline uncomfortable to be talking about this person so can we just not?
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I mean, what came up the last time he was discussed in the MSB days was his tendency to make enormously uncomfortable rape kink-related requests from complete strangers who presented as women. He gets shot down and backs off from that specific person, but then just moves on to the next person and does the exact same thing, even though he clearly should have learned better. That’s what puts him in malicious territory.
I know it’s easy to feel a little bad for him for the reasons outlined above but that particular reason is why I don’t, and I do think that does need to be reiterated. We don’t need to keep talking about him though, it’s whatever.
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@Wizz said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
I mean, what came up the last time he was discussed in the MSB days was his tendency to make enormously uncomfortable rape kink-related requests from complete strangers who presented as women. He gets shot down and backs off from that specific person, but then just moves on to the next person and does the exact same thing, even though he clearly should have learned better. That’s what puts him in malicious territory.
I can’t remember this behavior being discussed in relation with him. I’m not trying to discount incidents like this, but are you sure this discussion was about him and not someone else? I know that at least that sort of behavior wasn’t reported about him on Arx, and I feel like I would have remembered an MSB convo like that.
she/her | playlist
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Arx has always had a particularly hard line when it comes to this kind of behavior and a track record for banning people who engage in it, so he’s much more low key about it there, but there’s a reason he has a creepy reputation everywhere else. He might not be pushing that exact kink every time, but he’s a known sex pest.
I don’t have first hand experience so I am willing to let it die, but I do think characterizing him as just some poor schmuck who is getting bullied here is well intentioned but wrong.
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@bear_necessities Agreed. He is a person with cognitive and developmental disabilities who lives in a group home (not telling tales out of school here, he talks about it openly). He’s not the same as whoever had the rape fantasies – worst thing he ever did was have a cat-person droid that creeped people out, but I don’t think it was a sex thing. I’ve been coming across him for years now and all he does is behave in developmentally immature ways that put people off and sometimes gets upset in public, but I’ve never known him to be a sex pest. Granted, I know that there might be stuff out there that I’m not privy to, but in my experience, its his immaturity and inability to interpret social cues that creeps people out.
I am/was tek. If this means something to you, do as you see fit with this knowledge.
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Yeah I mean we just literally banned 2 people for cyber-bullying and this is getting to a point of like - I’m uncomfortable here, I feel bad for this person and I cannot imagine how I would feel being him and coming across this thread. Especially since no one is even sure that this conversation even happened about him on MSB? like lol let’s just not right now.
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@bear_necessities I think that in general, we are a fairly neurodivergent bunch and other forms of neurodivergence that don’t jive with ours can make us edgy and uncomfortable and it’s easy to interpret earnest blundering for manipulation or bad actors. Not that there aren’t neurodivergent manipulative people or bad actors – it’s definitely not an excuse for that behavior, but it’s also easy to confuse the two sometimes.
I mean, I’d rather talk about how Cujo fucked Ektor over until he left the game. Ektor is a genuinely good guy, calm and stable and hard to piss off, just a frankly amazing human who ran all of the Resistance combat stuff. I left before he did and I don’t have the full story there, but you’ve got to be a special kind of asshole or stupid to alienate the dude who is literally doing half of your job.
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@Bessarion said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
He’s not the same as whoever had the rape fantasies – worst thing he ever did was have a cat-person droid that creeped people out, but I don’t think it was a sex thing.
If you’ve got the stomach to go back to MSB and search for him, he is called out specifically by name for suggesting a very uncomfortable rape-adjacent TS request. When I was struggling with him on Arx and griped about him to a friend, she told me she vehemently disliked him because he had made her extremely uncomfortable and described an experience in a similar vein. She didn’t go into detail but I still don’t have any reason not to believe her.
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@Wizz Oof. I was not aware of this.
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@bear_necessities said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
Especially since no one is even sure that this conversation even happened about him on MSB?
I understand why you would be doubtful and why it would be uncomfortable for people to go back and search especially if their accounts are banned, so here is the post.
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@Wizz said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
@bear_necessities said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
Especially since no one is even sure that this conversation even happened about him on MSB?
I understand why you would be doubtful and why it would be uncomfortable for people to go back and search especially if their accounts are banned, so here is the post.
Thank you for linking. I’m not shy about going back onto MSB, but you literally can’t use the search function without an account, so I – can’t search on it, lol. (I can do a Google search with the site: function, but nothing came up for this, so I think maybe the pages aren’t scraped.)
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If part of the point of hashing out these tales in public is to warn people about creepers, should this convo re: Merek be spun off to a so-titled post of its own?
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@Bessarion my first job out of college was managing a group home for adults with cognitive disabilities. It is really important to not infantize adults. Just because someone needs that level of care does not mean that they don’t have sexual feelings and cannot act out sexually. The reality is that I did have to do a lot of coordination with other habilitation counselors as well as occupation folks and also monitor in house with 2 of my guys in particular that struggled with appropriate behavior. And we did not have internet!
I would never dismiss someone capacity to be invasive and inappropriate in sexual interest and communication because they live in an adult group home. Many adults are interested in sex/sexuality is important/they have drive. Just because someone has cognitive or emotional impairments doesn’t mean that they don’t.
And it is very very important that we don’t say to people who have been encroached on that they should tolerate it more because of the person targeting them has a certain life circumstance. Or are they sure that person is capable of it.
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Merek wasn’t enabled on Aoa. If anything he was belittled and ignored. I don’t know about him being a sex pest there or other places.
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@shit-piss-love said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
If part of the point of hashing out these tales in public is to warn people about creepers, should this convo re: Merek be spun off to a so-titled post of its own?
Honestly? From my brief skim of that vague MSB discussion, from three years ago about an event that happened over a year before that, it seems that he had a rather inappropriate request, was rejected, and respected that boundary.
So perhaps we can talk about something more recent, and less vague?
