…but it was back in 2014, so what can I do about it?
Last week, while going through an old external hard drive, I found a treasure trove of my art commissions from that era. At the time, I’d draw nearly anything for $5 or more, so there’s a lot of fanart of the Winchesters, Dr. Who, and short-lived show called The Librarians. There were also a decent amount of “fursonas” (people’s Furry characters) and OCs (an “original character”, in case you don’t frequent quite the same part of the Internet I used to.) And then one commission in particular, which brought back a flood of memories.
I’m just going to describe it, since I don’t want to accidentally break a rule by posting the picture on this subreddit. But imagine a naked dude being ravished by what I can best describe as a bubbly tentacle creature. Oh yeah, I said to myself when I saw it, that was Gummy Bear Mike! What a dude.
Gummy Bear Mike, you see, was the nickname me and a bunch of other artists had for one of our more memorable clients. He wasn’t a big enough spender that anyone was making rent off a single one of his commissions, but he reliably paid for things in the $30 range and hit up a lot of us regularly–I think, towards the end, it was multiple artists in a month. He had some very detailed commission requests, but always paid us promptly, so we put up with it.
We called him Gummy Bear Mike because of an infamous Tumblr post of his, which was a photo of a bunch of gummy bears in the dirt with the caption “Gummy bearssss…” and a drooling emoji. Later comments confirmed he had, in fact, eaten one off the ground.
How was that post even real? I wondered.
That’s why, in a fit of nostalgia, I broke into my old Tumblr account and started looking through my post archive for 2014-ish posts. Tumblr’s porn ban obliterated some things, but I’m surprised how much is still there. In addition to remembering good times with some of my old online friends, I was able to relive more of the reasons why GBM was one of our Tumblr “mutuals” despite his questionable food choices (at this point, it seems simpler to give him an acronym than to keep writing his whole nickname out).
GBM was…how should I put this? Back then, we’d call him “random”, or a “disaster gay”, while today we’d call him “struggling with familial rejection and possibly undiagnosed ADHD.” His Tumblr blog was one of those tell-all personal blogs where posts like “nothing like a 12 hour nap” and “CAN YOU STILL EAT TAKEOUT IF YOU LEFT IT ALL NIGHT ON THE COUNTER???” alternated with semi-nude selfies, memes, and gay porn gifs. He was also a gigantic Kesha fan. Since 2014 was the era when she was suing her producer, Dr. Luke, GBM also got to indulge his other favorite pastime: sniping at other people for having incorrect opinions about his favorite pop star.
I thought, Didn’t GBM get into an argument with me and a lot of my friends at one point–?
And then I saw it: a text post in an extinct Word font that read, “WHAT MAKES A MONSTER WORTH FUCKING?”
I mean, I did start this off by saying I drew a commission of someone being intimate with a tentacle monster, right? It wasn’t just me: there was a loose group of us artists known for drawing “the good stuff” on Tumblr in the semi-early aughts, and I am proud to say I was known for doing it well. (If you were in some of the more obscure corners of the Winter Soldier fandom, you’ve probably seen some of my work.) I’m not ashamed of anything I drew then, and I’m not now–in fact, I met my current girlfriend through one of the artists in that long-ago group. It was all fictional, all in good fun, and it made me happy at a time when I didn’t have much else going on in my life.
Anyway, back to the “What makes a monster worth fucking?” post. It had gotten thousands of likes, comments, and reblogs, and I felt myself heave a resigned sigh just looking at those numbers. There’s a certain number of reblogs after which pretty much all Tumblr posts devolve into people screaming at each other, and this post had been no exception. It was a post that should have spawned hundreds of comments where people rhapsodized about their favorite fantasy partner’s attributes, but instead it seemed to bring out the very worst in people.
Naturally, GBM got really, really into rebutting other comments on this post. Some people, for instance, liked a big tentacle with suckers on it, while others were more into pseudopods. GBM was like a dog with a bone, reblogging six other people’s comments just so he could argue that a lot of “monsterfucking” art was just “really big octopuses” instead of “real monsters”. He claimed it showed a serious failure of the imagination on behalf of most tentacle artists to not draw tentacles in other ways, and that what turned him on was superior.
(Reader: I was definitely one of the artists who preferred to draw Really Big Octopuses, which we referred to as RBOs in my friend group after this. I even made a keychain design about it, which had a red octopus with the legend “SUPPORT RBOs” underneath.)
While chasing down the threads of this argument and laughing about how serious it got, I found the first of GBM’s selfies that gave me pause. It’s a picture of his own back, taken with the use of a mirror. GBM seems to have been a naturally pale guy, but his back is covered in huge red splotches, like he got a really unusually shaped sunburn. The caption reads “Kisses.”
Nine years later, I have no idea why I reblogged this photo. I certainly didn’t leave any comments on it. But seeing it now, I had questions: what kind of “kisses” was he possibly referring to? Or was he somehow offering “kisses” to whoever might be perusing his blog for selfies?
The next post of GBM’s I reblogged was of my own art. I’d forgotten I’d made that drawing. It was a silly little sketch of Captain America having his uniform taken off by a Really Big Octopus, styled a bit like the Hydra logo.
Underneath it, GBM wrote a single word: “RAPE.”
What the fuck…?
Even almost a decade later, reading that stark comment underneath my art gave me a cold feeling. I remember that I was really proud of that picture when I drew it–it got a couple thousand likes, which was huge at the time. Seeing it re-contextualized like this disconcerted me.
Back in 2014, I’d reblogged GBM’s post with his comment so I could respond. I’d written, “What do you mean?” underneath that single word. It was a little bit of a cop-out, but I don’t think I knew how to articulate all the questions I really had at the time.
GBM had replied, “IS IT JUST BECAUSE HE’S A DUDE THAT YOU DON’T SEE IT?”
Staring at his comment, I remember how I shut my laptop directly after reading it. I may have even gone for a walk, which was an unusual response to reading negative comments on my art. While I can’t claim to remember my exact headspace in 2014, I could guess the reasons why I’d felt so rattled: how had my silly striptease art led, even inadvertently, to a response like this? What the hell did he think I was promoting?
Faintly, I also remember being worried that GBM would somehow be able to sue me for my art. I don’t think that’s actually something he could have done, but Tumblr was always a weird place and, well, I’d been 23. I don’t know if the adage about the human brain still developing until 25 is true, but at 23 I’d still been surprisingly gullible, especially about things that I read in the echo chamber of Tumblr. People also really did things like send all their followers to harass a person, or dox them, and I had probably been worried about that too.
That strange comment exchange is why I also clicked through and tried to read GBM’s personal blog from the beginning. Big chunks of it are missing due to Tumblr’s off-again, on-again porn ban, and a lot of what remains is incredibly basic Tumblr stuff: scans of Spider-Man comic book panels with funny out-of context sayings, posts about going to a Kesha concert and nearly passing out from not drinking enough water, posts about being on Tumblr at 2am and feeling lonely. Cryptic personal text posts like, “have you ever tried photographing something transparent” and “I miss going to Wawa.”
The outdoor pics, mostly of a lake and clearly taken with a cell phone, start sometime at the end of 2013 and go on through 2014. At first I thought he was trying to create an “aesthetic” Tumblr, though it would have been deeply out of character for his usual run of Pornhub gifs. But then again, there’s a picture of a lake with the caption, “Reminds me of when I was a kid.” In response to a comment, he replies, “I used to spend all summer in the swimming hole near my house.”
This is also when he starts posting a bunch of information about his OC, “Ropy”, including the picture he paid me to draw of it. (Don’t ask me what “Ropy” means. No fiber rope was ever involved.) I pulled up the commission emails I got from GBM so long ago, and read through them. This is the description he wrote of Ropy:
“Ropy is a tall, jello-like figure, but he’s completely clear. There are two sort of cloudy areas near his surface (his eyes), and a darker one deeper inside (maybe a brain?). Because of the way his body is, he can form two or more arms–or dicks! >:) Or drill-like shapes.”
All this was somewhat unusual for an OC, but then again, I’d also drawn people’s re-imagined Sonic characters. In response to my query for more details, he wrote “Roapy doesn’t really have a head or a torso–he’s more like a blobby ball with eyes, but he can make lots of tentacles and often has two stumpy ones for ‘legs.’ He can come some way out of the water, though, so please draw a picture of me half in and half out of the lake with Ropy touching me with some of his arms and fucking me with some of his other ones.”
Back in 2014, GBM has posted another cell phone picture. It’s of the bottom of a bathtub, presumably the one in his apartment, and there’s a splotch of…something…in it. Before your imagination goes too far, the splotch is completely clear.
I do remember this photo, as it’s a classic gross GBM picture. At the time, I thought one of his hookups had spit in his tub. This time I tried to enlarge it, to really look at the substance in his bathtub, and I don’t think it’s spit. There’s way, way too much of it, and it looks sort of chunky despite being clear. It also has some weird black flecks in it.
Another photo, this one of a stretch of bedsheets in GBM’s bedroom. Around the edges of the photo, you can see that his bedroom is incredibly messy, with piles of clothes and wrappers. The only ornamentation seems to be a gay pride flag and some Christmas twinkle lights, which was pretty standard bedroom flair for Tumblr user.
The bed has a huge–and I mean huge–wet splotch on it. Bigger than the average human torso. The caption says “Good morning!” A text post after that reads: “how do i stop sweating in my sleep?”
This is when I started to feel guilty, despite reading something nearly a decade old. Between this and the “kisses” post, I wondered if GBM had been sick, and the rest of his Tumblr mutuals had been too annoyed with his shenanigans to notice.
Then again, when GBM was posting this evidence of possible illness, I was only a year and a half out of art school. I was still doing things like stealing toilet paper from Starbucks when my group house ran out, eating ramen and diet coke every day, and having really horrible flings with men before realizing I was a lesbian. (I’ll let you guess how many Tumblr posts I made about being an ally and how important that was to me even though I was sure I was straight. It’s about the same amount of fan art I drew of Poison Ivy tying up Harley Quinn with vines.)
With that as my baseline, I’m sure even some of GBM’s more unusual posts wouldn’t have looked too strange to me. I’d found him equal parts titillating and annoying, an out gay boy liveblogging what seemed like a fast urban life in a big city. Now, having come out to my parents, gotten a 9-to-5 and a steady girlfriend, GBM’s “lifestyle” posts come off very differently. Based on his posting frequency and the amount of times he mentions being broke, I wonder if he was working temp jobs or was unable to get a job at all after leaving home to live on his own (there’s no mention of college, but there are links to places like Clips4Sale.) He seemed unable to cook, and was often confused by seemingly mundane tasks like how often you should clean a toilet or how to use an oven (one of his most popular photos shows a frozen pizza in his oven, burnt completely black.) He also sometimes posted about how his mom alternatively told him that she was praying for him and never wanted to see him again, but that was such a depressingly common thing to read on Tumblr in the early aughts that I don’t think it would have really stuck out to me at the time.
One post is a cell phone photo of a toilet filled with…bubbles? They’re clear, with black flecks in them, like the stuff in his bathtub. The caption says, “Sitting on the can the day after.” I note with amusement that a couple “aesthetic” blogs reblogged this picture without the caption.
A text post: “the frogs are so loud.”
Another photo is one of those mirror selfies where the person uses flash. I can barely see GBM in the glare, but it also highlights the weird, clear goop smeared on the corner of his mirror. There looks to be some threads of yellow and red in it. Someone with slightly more awareness than I had in 2014 reblogged this photo to comment, “What the hell is that?”, but GBM never replied.
A text post: “im peeling.”
GBM started posting less frequently after that. The flood of personal musings dried up, but there is a cell phone picture of grass at the edge of a lake. The grass looks white-ish, heavy with dew, except for a large patch where it’s darker green. The path of someone who has passed through the dewy grass? The body print left by an animal sleeping by the lake, like a deer? Or, like the bedroom photo, does it show where GBM slept the night before?
A text post: “i feel better after going back.”
Then I see one of the most-reblogged Tumblr posts of all time: the Harkness Test comic. You’ve probably seen this post even if you weren’t on Tumblr in 2014, but if you’re unfamiliar, this is a simple, two-panel comic where the artist lays out three rules to tell if the non-humanoid being you want to sleep with is sentient enough for it to be ethical. The rules are: “Does this character have human intelligence (or greater)?”, “Can it talk or otherwise communicate with language?”, and “Is it of sexual maturity for its species?”
As you can imagine, on a website where people idolized shows like Dr. Who–where one of the subplots is about a lesbian who falls in love with an alien lizard woman–this comic went viral more than once. It especially got a lot of engagement in my corner of Tumblr, where I think 99% of my tentacle art mutuals commented on how much they loved it.
But in GBM’s case, seeing this comic being merrily reblogged by me and my artist friends seems to have triggered some kind of meltdown. His first reblogged reply reads, “YOU RBO BITCHES DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE FUCKING TALK [sic] ABOUT THIS IS SO DANGEROUS.”
I remember me and some of my friends DMing each other after this post, mostly to say variations on “What the fuck?” While none of us really knew what was going on, there was a sense that GBM’s response was something different from his usual hunger for monster art “discourse”. I don’t think any of us replied to him in the moment. We digitally huddled together, like small animals that sense one of their burrow-mates has been infected with madness.
I read another reblog of the Harkness Test, this time from another artist friend of mine. GBM’s reply reads, “YOU BITCHES THINK THIS IS A SAFE FUN TIME! YOU THINK IT’D BE FINE IF VENOM ASKED YOU IF YOU WANTED TO HOOK UP BUT IF THAT REALLY HAPPENED IT WOULDN’T BE WHAT YOU IMAGINE”.
Another reblog, this time with the comment, “NONE OF YOU COULD STAND IT I CAN’T STAND IT ANYMORE.”
Another reblog: “IM RAW INSIDE.”
(Some psychopath reblogged this post in turn with the comment, “Aren’t we all?”)
Then another reblog, this time going after someone who playfully asks what to do if the being you’re thinking of hooking up with doesn’t have a mouth. GBM wrote, “TELEKINESIS IS NOT CONSENT”.
This comment, naturally, went semi-viral on its own. “Telekinesis is not consent” became a minor meme in my corner of Tumblr, lasting for about a week before disappearing into the ether. This is also where I suspect my 2014 self unfollowed GBM for good.
In the present, I continue to read GBM’s blog and see that there’s about a three-day period where he was reblogging tentacle-and-other-monster artists solely to post hateful comments on their work. He seemed to have been going after people who did some of the least mainstream fetish art, such as “ovipositor” art (where the OC is impregnated by an alien or other being) in addition to general monsterfuckery. On post after post–even work by people GBM had formerly commissioned for artwork of his OC, Ropey–he writes, “THIS IS ABUSE.” Other times, he writes, “THIS IS RAPE”, or sometimes just “RAPE.”
I started looking at the blogs of people GBM reblogged after this, but it looks like a lot of them were deleted. In a reblog of a reblog made by someone a few degrees away from my mutuals, I find a post where an artist complains GBM is sending her threatening DMs. She was thinking about going to the police about it.
After all that, GBM doesn’t post anything for about a week. Then a single text post says, “i feel out of control i tried to call mom but she didn’t pick up.”
Another, the next day: “im still peeling”.
A photo: a picture of a hand, presumably GBM’s hand, with something semi-transparent and yellowish laid over it. If I saw it at any other time, I probably would have just been confused, but now with the previous context I think it looks alarmingly like the skin that comes off after a bad sunburn. The piece is so large it trails off his hand, which is mottled and red-looking, and there is no caption.
Something about that being the final post on GBM’s blog scared me so much, even nine years later, that I had the wild thought that I should call someone. Who, though? Clicking through to GBM’s bio shows he was 19 in 2014, way too old for child services. And if I called 911, saying I had evidence of a decade-old Tumblr feud that included words like “ovipositor” and my own tentacle art, they’d laugh in my face.
It’s probably nothing, and GBM just flounced off Tumblr after he annoyed one too many people. But I keep thinking about my own college experiences, like the time I went through my finals with walking pneumonia because I was too dumb to know the signs and too poor to go to the doctor. There but for the grace of God, etc. GBM, with his unsupportive parents, unstable income, and burnt pizza, seems to have gone through something much, much worse than the average 20-something’s self-destructive phase.
Should I try to contact him? Do I owe him something, after all this time?
Update, 6/21: I tried to email him and it bounced.
Update, same day: I suddenly remembered GBM had asked to buy a sketch I made of Venom, and since it wasn’t digital I had to mail it to him. His last known address is still in my Tumblr DMs, so I picked out a card at CVS and sent it to him. I’m not going to transcribe it for you, but I basically said I’d been thinking of some of my old Tumblr friends and wondered how he was doing, and included my email if he ever wanted to talk.
Update 7/7: I think I fucked up.
I got the card back in the mail today. It was marked as undeliverable, but there was a strange watercolor-looking stain in the middle of it, in browns and blacks. Out of curiosity, I opened the envelope back up and discovered something…biological…had been put inside the card. On its journey through the post office, it had been crushed, then dried, eventually becoming one with the paper.
My girlfriend thinks it looks like a smashed tadpole. I put it through the paper shredder when she said that.
Update 7/8: Woke up at 3am because I heard a weird shrieking noise outside. My girlfriend says it’s “spring peepers”, which she heard all the time as a kid growing up. She doesn’t understand why I started panicking when she told me that spring peepers were a kind of frog.