I'm going to piggyback off Jay here a bit, but I want to preface this. I don't post in the Cosplay section, I haven't had any conflict with Pez, and I've pretty much watched this whole drama explosion from the sidelines. There are people being dicks on both sides (and it wouldn't be Halforums if there weren't, let's be honest), but a lot of the points in Jay's post match what I'm seeing and feeling from this.
Basically, I know that Pez's work has drawn a lot of views, a handful of regular posters, and he deserves a lot of credit/praise/hugs/what-have-you for that. He's brought, and continues to bring a lot to the community here. That shouldn't go unsaid. At the same time, I completely agree with Jay and Gas in that I don't feel that he's done anything to warrant being a mod over his own section, particularly when the approach seems to be to push for all cosplay-related content to be in that section.
The biggest thing here is the way he's conducted himself throughout all of this drama-stuff. Jay says that a mod should be held to a higher standard than a regular poster; up to this point, they have. That's the reason Juski isn't a mod anymore, isn't it? But over the past week Pez has been going thread to thread spamming "Disagree" and/or "Really? Really?" over everything he doesn't agree with, and insisting that unless the people he's flagging have specifically asked him which line, implication, or word choice he's cherrypicking out of their post, any response they make is based on their own bias and he's completely blameless for their reactions. It's gotten to the point where fishing for his tags is a new forum meme, and somehow it seems to have been spun into him being the victim of bullying and trolling. I don't get it.
Following from that, his rules/future of this section post in the cosplay subforum is legitimately baffling. There's a point dedicated to "if you guys aren't nice to me, I'm going to stop posting stuff for you" or, as it was put on the playground when we were 5 years old, "I'm taking my ball and going home". Is that seriously the behaviour expected from someone who's modding his own section? I can accept that there need to be rules, I can accept sending PMs to people to tell them when they're crossing a line, but that's just childish. And combined with the fact that he locked someone else's thread because he didn't like being called out on what appeared to be a hypocritical comment, and his defense was "no, that's the line I was intending to draw on these comments all along, I just hadn't gotten around to telling you all before I said it..." I'm honestly just waiting for the content in his subforum to mysteriously disappear when he decides someone's been too mean to him.
Finally, if Jay's representation of PM conversations between the two of them is accurate, I don't even know how to respond. He may not have called anyone a cancer, but responding to someone wanting to discuss his rules by telling them to go fuck themselves is pretty much the definition of inflated-ego internet moderation, isn't it?
I dunno, I'm not about to pack up my shit and leave because of any of this, but I don't think this reflects any better on the community we have than the sniping, aggression and bullying that other people are being accused of.
