I go to the con in question and am in the facebook group where everything melted.

The problem was NEVER ABOUT THE X-CARDS OR SPECIFIC SAFETY PRACTICES. The X-cards have been revisited in a few conversations, often to clarify their function, but are not the focus. The X-Cards have been used for the last two years and no one cares. There was some initial grumbling but the organizer was clear that they weren’t going away, and it worked fine. I’ve never seen them used but no one objects to their presence, at least publicly.

The catalyst for the meltdown was that the ORGANIZER linked to a blog post from a woman who wrote about her experience at the con where another player was making her uncomfortable by obnoxiously describing his own character’s massive, swinging tits. She felt she was visibly and noticeably upset but the guy wouldn’t stop, and no one else at the table said anything. This might have been before x-cards were available, I’m not sure. The offending event was that no one spoke up for the woman. People say SHE should have said something, others say the GM or other players should have said something, most arguments sprout from those two opposing ideas. It has very little to do with the content of a game.

So, the organizer caught flak for not having tools in place for people to use to handle situations like this, and for being willfully unsupportive and deaf to people’s calls for action. Dozens of people joined the group and gave their two cents, dogpiling onto the organizer and the con, despite never going there or being in the community. Lots of people came to the organizer’s defense, but many of them were edgelords, some of whom also did not actually live in the community or go to the con, all who did nothing but validate the complaints. Anyone who defends the con and the organizer are hatemongers and bullies, everyone who calls for action are whining social justice warriors.

The organizer began deleting threads and banning people when conversations got out of hand and not helpful, which were many, and did not help his image.

It is my humble opinion that the con has adequate tools, more than most other gatherings of strangers in public, and that the organizer has always worked to improve safety and comfort by making X-cards mandatory, putting a full page anti-harassment policy in the pamphlet, etc, and was in fact the person who linked to the inciting blog post in the first place in an effort to show the community that harassment still happened. The complaints are extremely unfocused and no actionable items are brought up, only that things need to “change”. Someone said they were getting death threats and that the organizer should be ashamed that his community was doing so, but when the organizer asked to know who sent them, the accuser refused to share them.

So again, it has almost nothing to do with X-Cards, game content, and more to do with the fact that other people did nothing when this woman was distressed, and the convention appears reluctant to do something about it.Those who call for change have not offered concrete items they want changed, at most they link to other conventions’ anti-harassment policies and procedures, many of which exist at Phantasm anyways. I keep looking to have my opinion changed but I am not convinced.