User:Emma

Hello, my name is Emma. Okay. So this is what I want on my page now. It is going to be long. But it's worth it.

Instead of what I used to have on this page, which is not stuff I really need here anymore, I want to write this little autobiography here instead to tell my true story. My story about what really happened to me and my time at a Zelda Wiki. To dispel the false reputation I have had here for years, and counter fictional versions of events that you may have heard told. I swear, every single word I am going to say is true to the best of my knowledge. I would swear it in a court of law, I'd do it under a lie detector. What I am going to describe is exactly what happened despite what you may have heard to the contrary. Whatever you've been told about me, if anything at all, it probably was a lie.

I provided sufficient proof of my identity (emails from the Wiki that have always been listed on this page before now, direct rips of relevant Skype chat logs from my Skype main.db file, and proof of my current status) to the current staff to verify I am indeed the original person who owned this account and my justification to change the name. I am not returning to edit Zelda Wiki. I am here because I was hurt, badly, by former staff members here, and I need to heal and this is important for that process. I have updated the information in my story to reflect everything I have learned since communicating with the current staff to make sure names and pronouns are current and correct. I have already provided what proof I could, in this same conversation I had in restoring my account, of the biggest things I am going to claim in my story. Unfortunately quite a bit was lost when my computer died in 2016. I have since been better at backing important things up. Skype was only able to recover chat logs of chats I still had access to in 2016 that had chat history enabled and it only went back to October 2010. Anything before then, or between those two times in a chat that didn't have history enabled is lost forever. Particularly in chats I created that I was forced to shut down by others when this happened. The rest unfortunately has to be taken on my word alone. Though I believe there's enough memories people who were here back then have of me and these events, and circumstantial evidence, to sufficiently convince people I am indeed telling the truth about all of this.

Just a fair warning, I'm going to get into my personal issues and there are moments that can possibly be distressing to read. I debated on including them but felt it was important to get people to see my side of the events. Please brace yourself for what you're going to read. I will try my best to keep things professional and clean. But there can be possible triggers including severe trauma, self harm, mentioning of a prominent loss of life that was relevant to what was going on, and... unfortunately, discussion of suicide. Consider yourself warned.

Introduction
And to start my story, I used to be an administrator here back in 2008 and 2009. If you were around anytime between 2008 and 2011 you probably remember me better as Evil Incarnate, as I was reputed to be. Unfortunately this title was not entirely accurate. Cassandra Truth is more accurate. As I repeatedly warned people of serious problems but I was ignored, and labeled a monster for my trouble. Despite me being the most experienced admin there was no sane reason to doubt, and instead people believed much newer, far less experienced people who had a history of public bullying right in front of their very eyes. As for what I actually was known as, I originally was under the name Mjr162006. I then changed it to my real world nickname at the time, which was also four letters and started with the letter M. I don't want to say it here. You probably already can guess it if you knew me, and it's impossible to fully scrub it from the records here or other forks of the wiki but I ask that you please do not use it. I am a transgender woman and that's what's known as a deadname. It is uncomfortable to use and inappropriate to refer to me by it. So please don't if you wish to speak to me. Please call me Emma. It is my name. I am not using a handle here. It's who I am. You can address me with the pronouns she and her.

The Beginning
A little background. I came to Zelda Wiki on April 16th, 2008 because I didn't see my life going anywhere, depressing I know, and I wanted something I could enjoy throwing myself into. I always had fond memories of The Legend of Zelda and I thought of one day being a writer. I also had an obsession with being very detailed and overly thorough, as you'll notice through this because it's going to be very long, but it's what I need to do. Anyway, I thought that Zelda Wiki.org, as it was known then, would be great. I expected nothing, I just wanted to do something creative, but also structured. When I came here, things were not in good shape.

The wiki needed a huge amount of work. I wasn't exactly excited about my current skills at writing, I was terrified people would despise what I wrote and I was mortified at the thought of rejection so I did not write wiki articles if I could help it. Instead, I cleaned things up, reformatted articles, fixed spelling and grammar, went to extremes to make sure all page links didn't go to redirects, I sometimes did images for articles. No one at the wiki knew how to code for making templates or anything else. No one, no regular user, no staff. No one had a clue. Neither did I, but something tedious, requiring mathematical thinking and detail? Yes, please. So I learned. The vast majority of the templates that the wiki used for the next several years were either written by me, based upon templates I wrote, or written by people I walked through creating them so they could learn. I loved it when I successfully taught someone how to make one of these. It felt incredible. Even after I was gone the things I used stuck around until they became obsolete. Which is expected and natural. Had I stayed, I would have kept up with the changes and improved things. Thankfully, someone else always saw the need and learned to do what they had to to make, maintain, improve, and explain to others the templates the wiki required.

I eventually was made an admin (we called it sysop at the time) on November 25, 2008. I kept doing mostly what I was doing. Constant housekeeping, making sure absolutely everything was perfect to an obsessed level. Templating. It was too much for me though. There were lots of staff members technically, but only two admins besides me. One inactive and only occasionally stopped by to do things and never was reliable to actually handle problems. And the other, also overwhelmed and adamant about their desire to quit soon. I made a proposal to the other staff, the bureaucrats, which at the time were also known as the Masterminds. I proposed we add a separate group called patrollers, who would help maintain quality. And then, after a month or two, promote the best ones to admin/sysop. After a short time we had a very full staff and I was able to do what I did best. The wiki here around April 2009 was a night and day difference from a year prior. It was barely surviving when I came, and now it was thriving. Everything looked much sharper and way, way more professional thanks to my template making and housekeeping obsession. And the new people I added to the staff were, at the time, all incredible. Most of them were great writers and we were adding lots of new articles every day. And we got momentum to attract more people to just write stuff. And the larger staff plus patroller team made it possible to ensure that everything was top notch. Things were great.

Problems Begin
Then, that's when things were starting to go horribly wrong. Five people started to cause trouble. Just five. And the rest of the staff let them do it. They did nothing to stop it, often expressed support to them publicly while privately telling me they disapproved. I am not going to name them here. You can probably figure out by the context in the rest of my story if you were here around that time, but for the sake of not stirring things up more than I already am, I will not say their names here. Instead I will label them Crat A, Crat B, Admin A, Admin B, and Admin C. Top villain number one was Admin A. The one to cause me the most pain was Admin C. The one who had the most people supporting them in hating me, at least here on Zelda Wiki anyway, was Crat B.

Sometime around July 2009, Admin A, a very good friend of mine, or so I thought, at the time, came to talk to me. He is outraged that Admin B was a bit less active to take time to write some news articles for the website Zelda Informer. Admin A called this, in his words, treason. He said that someone writing articles for another Zelda website has no place being a Zelda Wiki admin. Despite the fact that Zelda Informer was a member site of Zelda Wiki with a representative on the Masterminds. So it was no problem. Admin A asked me to tell him everything I knew about Admin B: likes, dislikes, history, personal details, any problems he had told me about, any thing he was sensitive to. He told me his plan was to bait Admin B in the chats with these details, provoke him into lashing out, and then using that response to get Admin B removed as an admin.

I agreed to help him. No, wait, I am not a sociopath like him so I rejected him. My response was: “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?! WHY WOULD I EVER DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT?!”. And… Admin A never spoke to me privately ever again, save for one last thing I will get to later. And from that day forward, he did exactly the same thing to me that he just tried to get me to help him do against Admin B. He would constantly do things like start fights with people knowing I was very protective and would defend them, or suggest deliberately bad ideas that were so horrible no one would take them seriously, that would harm the wiki if done. Every time I entered the picture, he'd start pushing my pressure points on my insecurities, which he learned from being my close friend, and keep at it, including insults and whatever he thought would hurt me. Everyone else watching, didn't bat an eye. They let it happen, never stood up to him, never questioned him. They all pretended it wasn't happening. Except for Crat A and Crat B, they frequently joined in on bullying me at every opportunity. Or they would do something like bully someone else, or similarly do something bad which I would respond to, as was my responsibility as the most senior admin, at which point often Admin A would jump in if he was there and join in the festivities to beat his favorite punching bag.

After each of these cases, Admin A would then go around to as many of the other staff as he could and complain how “terrible” I was and how aggressive and hostile and unsuitable as an admin I was. This was nearly a daily thing. As it went on, essentially far too many people believed Admin A, without any doubt in their hearts. Despite witnessing with their own eyes his vicious daily bullying, mostly of me but not always. And me always being on the receiving end of his rampages.

The same day he decided I was squarely at the top of his list, Admin A gave up his plans to hurt Admin B. As far as I know, Admin B never found out what Admin A had planned. Instead, throughout this time, Admin A and Admin B would wait until I suggested something in the staff chat. What to do for an article, how to improve something. Admin A would do his usual thing. Attack me, harass me, make me feel like I wanted to die. And I typically left my computer crying, and I went to do something to calm myself. When I came back, almost every time I found that both Admin A and Admin B had implemented the ideas I suggested and often were discussing it in the staff and public chats as if they came up with it. This happened several times a week. Again, despite knowing this was a lie, the rest of the staff never contradicted them, never tried to stop it. There were times after these episodes where I ended up hurting myself in various ways because I couldn't handle the trauma any other way.

A Bold New Idea
I tried to keep going. I really did. I pushed forward and kept doing my best to improve the wiki. Later that year, on September 29th, 2009, I was in the middle of a big round of housekeeping. I was batch editing a huge number of things. We didn't really have a lot of use of bot accounts to do this kind of batch editing at the time. There was one but it was made by a super inactive admin who was always rude and never gave anyone else access. I hadn't been able to get anyone to agree to set my own up yet so I was doing it all myself. Anyway, I was fixing things like redirects mostly. Making sure as many links as I could went directly to their target.

After each batch, I checked the recent changes for pages that my batch had edited for more ideas of what to batch correct. I was specifically trying to correct things that point to information like a redirect since the target changed since the last edit. In one batch I noticed Zeldapendium's page had a simple correction on it, and I remembered that the interwiki link for Zeldapendium was changed earlier that year on January 10th to be simpler, so I went to check if it needed a batch correction, which it didn't. But, through doing this, I had noticed that we had several cases where some other kind of Nintendo property had to be referenced but we didn't have a great way to do that with no interwiki links set up. I thought it would be a good idea if we could make interwiki links to some other prominent Nintendo wikis. Then we didn't have to rely on our own minor articles or such things to describe non-Zelda Nintendo content that still had to be mentioned in context.

Also at that time I was an administrator on the Wikia (now known as Fandom) wiki South Park Archives. I was in a similar situation there that I was when I started at Zelda Wiki. I joined so I can do wiki stuff whenever Admin A, or Crat A or B were giving me a hard time. I was only one of two admins active and the other was like our original other ZW admin, not totally active and not actually maintaining the place. I tried to do it myself. But Wikia/Fandom undermined me every step of the way. They wouldn't let me change the layout to be editing-friendly, they kept undoing changes I made, they kept turning off patrolling even though I've asked them many times to keep it on. When I needed help from them I didn't get it. Oftentimes they were rude.

Something that was also happening at Zelda Wiki throughout the last year was that Jess, the owner of Zelda Universe and Zelda Wiki's owner and founder, had told us more than once that Fandom had made some repeated offers to buy Zelda Wiki from her but she'd been refusing. Saying she didn't trust them. Towards the end, when I was also having troubles, I piped in that yes they are not trustworthy and they wouldn't allow us to operate the wiki as we see fit.

So, here I am on September 29th, thinking about making interwiki links in articles, when a notification from South Park Archives, that patrolling was disabled, again, got me angry, and thinking. Why just interwiki links? What if we formed a partnership with these other, independent Nintendo wikis? Then we could support each other in lots of ways, interlink how we required, and send a message to Wikia/Fandom that none of us were for sale to a for-profit corporation that thought they could control us. So, considering this was important, I made the proposal to form a wiki alliance, stating my reasons for wanting it, in the wiki admin chat that also had the bureaucrats. I stated my reasons why I thought it was a good idea.

So what happened? Admin A and Admin B did their usual thing. They said it was a really stupid idea. A total waste of time and resources. It's not something they'd ever want to do. And then the usual from Admin A, insults, personal attacks. The same thing he always did. So I did what I always did, teared up, because I always was so on edge and sensitive, and went to play some games to escape my reality while crying my eyes out.

The Night of the Final Day - Twelve Hours Remain
Then, a few weeks later, on October 17th, 2009, came the big day. My last day as an admin.

We had a staff forum known as StoneWatchers. It was for the Masterminds of each member website, trusted staff members from each website who had relevant skills, and for wiki staff to discuss more serious issues and talk about staffing decisions.

Well Crat A wasn't having any of that. I don't know the specific details of who proposed this and how it was decided, but Crats A and B loved it. All non-webmaster staff from member sites were banned from StoneWatchers. And Crat A was beyond thrilled at this. It very likely was either his or Crat B's idea from how they behaved though I of course don't know that for sure. Or at least he made it happen after it was proposed I guess. Because damn was he ever for it. He thought it was the most amazing idea in the history of ideas.

Crat A was bragging about this action in the wiki's staff chat. He was acting as if it was the grandest, most significant accomplishment in modern history and that people should praise his name for having done it. He told the wiki admins that we should consider ourselves lucky we were not included in the ban as we "had no place on StoneWatchers with our low status" and that if it were his decision we'd all be banned too.

How did everyone respond? Contrary to the prior apathy at the near daily torture-Emma-until-she-runs-away-crying sessions, everyone was absolutely livid. Nearly all the admins and the other bureaucrats were outraged at him over his attitude and how he just degradingly insulted the bureaucrats' close friends and all the admins.

Rather than apologize or admit his mistake, Crat A decided the best response was to insult everyone more. Lots of "f-word you", "you're a dumb butt" (only with proper swear words and an inserted f-word prior to that last word), and other colorful, refined, and mature language such as that. About once every sentence and a half for over an hour and a half of arguing.

I was the chat controller that had the only ability to kick people. So around two-thirds of both the admins and bureaucrats currently talking in the chat private messaged me and told me to kick Crat A from the chat. He was viciously attacking everyone there, and I had a majority consensus, so I did.

Things calmed down, the majority thanked me, either privately, or in the chat for kicking him. One of the bureaucrats, I am sorry but I can't remember who, told me they'd talk with Crat A and add him back soon themselves when he had calmed down.

I thought it was over, so I made some food and went to bed. But... It was not.

You Have Met a Terrible Fate
The next day, October 18th, 2009, I go back to my computer and my StoneWatchers account was deleted, my wiki account was demoted, my user page blanked with a gone notice, I have messages from a dozen people, I was kicked from wiki chats I didn't control, and the ones I did all had messages telling people to not talk there and go to someone to ask to be added to new replacement chats then leave the old ones. Everyone did until only I was left. And Crat B was demanding I leave them too because I had "no right" to access wiki chat history and I was threatened with ambiguous consequences he didn't specify if I didn't. I was scared, so I did. And the chats were gone forever.

Over the night, Crat A, Crat B, Admin A, and Admin B declared, by themselves, that I was to be demoted immediately due to my "abuse of power" kicking Crat A from the chat. Despite that it was a majority group decision. They also cited lots of made up offenses I didn't do. Called me a bully, said I was always picking fights. A whole bunch of allegations everyone else knew were lies, as it was all done right in front of them, repeatedly, for months. And they saw the exact opposite was the truth. Didn't matter. No one helped me. No one tried to stop it. I had the post shared to me in a screenshot and at the bottom was a list of everyone who supported my removal.

Included was every single person who asked me to kick Crat A, except Admin C, more on her later. This was a list embedded into the post, not actual thread replies.

Most of the people listed I thought I was on good terms with, that responded to me, swore no one asked them anything and that the supposed "fact" they supported my removal was just as much news to them as it was to me. Not that any of them bothered to point that out to anyone but me. No one challenged it. They just let it happen.

Admin B had deleted my StoneWatchers account, not banned, full on deleted. And he blanked my user page on the wiki, this page here you are reading now, leaving only the template saying I left the wiki.

Despite what they assured me in private, no one challenged this, no one tried saying it was wrong, no one tried to help me. Everything had come to an end. Absolute monsters had won. And everyone else didn't care.

The Plan is Revealed
Interestingly, the person who told me first to kick Crat A, who many others told me had told them to ask me to kick him was…. None other than… Admin A!!! The very same person primarily defending my removal! In his last ever direct words to me. And today he was the one arguing hardest for my removal, constantly saying how unacceptable it was for me to kick Crat A. Not a single person pointed out it was his idea to kick Crat A in the first place. Not a single person publicly stated there was a majority consensus to do so.

I was at a low place. I was crying for days. Admin C was the only person comforting me. She and I were together. She was my only remaining friend. I may have taken my life at that point were it not for her. I had failed out of college because of health issues. Every job application was rejecting me. My family no longer respected me because of it. They were convinced I was lazy, that I just didn't want to learn, that I didn't want to work. Despite my trying desperately and failing anyway. My dreams were gone. The wiki was all I had. And it was just stolen from me and everyone else I thought I could trust refused to do anything. Some may have lied to me, saying they didn't support it when they did.

I tried coming back to the wiki after. That's all I knew. It was my anchor. I was able to get patroller status back. But I continued to be abused regularly. I couldn't go a week without being told I can't be trusted and I didn't belong there. And over time, Admin C slowly stopped defending me. Stopped comforting me when I was sad. And slowly started subtly participating in the routine torture sessions I was subjected to.

On February 14th, 2010 I found out why Admin A and Admin B wanted me out. They wanted the chats I controlled gone. Totally, by giving everyone a big reason to leave them and forcing me to leave them too. To destroy any proof I was responsible for an idea they just took credit for. The Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance, or NIWA for short, was launched. The wiki alliance I proposed that these two said was a stupid idea, they immediately started working on making it a reality shortly after I was removed. Why did credit for this matter? Well for me it mattered because my life was ruined just for this. For them it mattered because they were delusional egomaniacs that thought credit was all that mattered and this was, quite literally, something like the two-hundredth time they'd publicly claimed credit for an idea I had. It simply was the biggest, most impactful one yet that had the largest consequences.

Admin B had copied my pitch to the staff with all my reasoning almost word for word and took it to Bulbapedia to start an alliance. Mario Wiki soon joined. Admin A left active status on Zelda Wiki to found and run his own wiki. Admin B left to pursue a promising career opportunity he was given.

It All Falls Apart
Despite plans to get her away from her abusive parents by getting her into the college in my town, which we almost had ready, Admin C nuked the plans in January 2011, after I caught her extensively flirting with someone else and I said I was not okay with it but I needed a while to process how I felt on it while I was still dealing with the sudden terminal illness of uncle (who was like a father to me). Instead of giving me this time to think about the status of our relationship, she, through changing it on Facebook, revealed she'd been cheating on me for 5 months with a second person, and therefore we were over.

I then get panicked calls from my dad and my sister. Admin C actually messaged every single family member she could and told them elaborate lies about how horrible I was and made threats to get me in legal trouble. My family refused to show me or describe it further. They did say I wasn't who they thought I was and they were very disappointed and they weren't sure how to forgive me. She couldn't leave it with just breaking up. She tried as hard as she could to take away my family too. And she sent similar messages to my friends, most of whom barely spoke to me again.

I tried to kill myself that day. It didn't work, but I tried. I woke up on my floor 18 hours later in agony from the awkward position I was in the whole time. My sister showed up the next night and I never talked. Just went with her, crying. Never stopping. She tried to smooth things over, but I was never considered important enough to be a priority to any of my family ever again. They nearly disowned me before my sister talked them out of it. She never told me if she realized what I tried to do but I think she did pick up on it. Just didn't mention it to me then. And my uncle did die two weeks later. To this day I am an afterthought to them though. Never taken as seriously as I was prior to this.

Admin C spent the rest of her time on the wiki taking Admin A's place as the resident bully who loved to pick on me. By summer 2011, it was back to how things were. With Crat A, Crat B, and Admin C acting as the terrible trio, bullying people all the time. Publicly. Though I remained a favorite target of course.

The Dawn of a New Day
I slowed my wiki participation. I tried to get help to remove Admin C and Crat A and B. I got support! Despite Admin C betraying us and telling Crat B everything we were trying to do, and Crat B's violent temper tantrums trying to stop the removal of Crat A by any amount of insults and personal attacks he could think of, Crat A was removed! His reign of tyranny was over. Unfortunately, furious he didn't get his way, Crat B took his place and considered it his mission to be nastier than ever to get back at everyone for not obeying him. There was not enough support to remove Crat B or Admin C. Both Crat B and new bureaucrat protected Admin C when she was caught, with undeniable proof which was shown to the whole staff, of her sending people to vandalize Zelda Wiki. We appealed to the owner, Jess, to intervene. Told her what was going on. She refused to do anything.

Mases, owner of Zelda Dungeon, a Mastermind, however, was not so immune. Despite being kind, and chronically nice to everyone, Jess decided he just had to go. Mases was using the wiki's community area to document things about Zelda Dungeon. This was a perk Jess promised all the Masterminds in exchange for working together instead of making their own wikis. Jess broke her promise and removed Mases as a Mastermind for using the wiki how he was told he could.

Mases and I were at our wit's end. He was removed for this, yet nothing was done about the bullying. The constant harassment. We were done. We decided to try to buy the wiki from Jess, or make our own if she refused to sell. She did refuse. And Mases was slandered nearly as bad as me. With lots of lies being told about his offer. People tried convincing me the offer said things I knew it didn't because Mases told me all about it and the offer to purchase the wiki was my idea in the first place. I just didn't know Mases would be the one doing it though he showed me when he did so I know for a fact the vile things said about him were lies. I thought we'd have to find someone who could, or pool people together. Mases instead used that money to purchase Zelda Informer, which at a later time was merged with Zelda Dungeon, retaining both teams.

We gave up, decided Zelda Wiki was irredeemably corrupt so long as no one would do anything about these horrible people and kept on believing painfully obvious lies when they are literally witnessing the truth of with their own eyes and believing the lie anyway, and it was going to be impossible for us to use the wiki as we were promised and we were never going to be treated fairly ever again. So we founded the Zelda Dungeon Wiki. I helped get it set up. Building its templates and everything it needed, training new people on what they had to know. I abandoned Zelda Wiki. Fully intending never to return. Never to speak in its chats. Not to say I left, because I felt no one had earned that right with how I had been treated. Just to go quietly. They definitely hadn't earned more than that.

We were all equal at the Zelda Dungeon Wiki. No bureaucrats. Staff were admins and patrollers. No obsession with rank and status. No one thought they were better, and more deserving than other people. No stupid hierarchy where certain staff were elevated above the rest. It was a collaboration. We were all partners. It was a true harmony. I was treated with respect, dignity. People were eager to learn from me. I never was insulted. Drama was non-existent on the wiki. I felt comfort for the first time in ages. A sense of peace and belonging.

We launched October 31st, 2011. Naturally, Crat B was displeased with me. Despite me being totally inactive for quite a while, and it being clear it was over and I had left already haven chosen Zelda Dungeon Wiki over Zelda Wiki, Crat B was furious at my "treason" (they loved that word) and claimed to speak on behalf of all the Zelda Wiki staff. I was told, literally at the same moment he was berating me, that while the others were upset I joined an "enemy" wiki too, no one had given him permission to do this and he acted on his own without there being a consensus yet and he had been told he was not the appropriate person to be the one to talk with me given his history of being biased against me. Didn't matter to him, he thought he was above everyone else so he made pompous demands acting as if he was being generous and merciful.

He demanded I resign from my place at Zelda Dungeon Wiki as a founding admin and insisted that instead I return as a Zelda Wiki patroller. And only as a patroller. He said I was unsuitable to ever be an admin again. And I would never be trusted with it. Acting as if even this much was him being unreasonably generous and that I should be grateful to be allowed into such a lowly position I really had no place being in at all in any case. In the exact same speech he was trying to convince me to leave Zelda Dungeon in. Yeah, he never was regarded as a particularly compelling person. Always the worst choice to speak on behalf of the staff. Not that he realized that. He thought he was the most important person on Earth and that others are foolish to doubt his glory. I called him on his hypocrisy and his lies. Not telling him how I knew he was lying, just repeatedly countering every lie he told with a retort about how disingenuous he was and that I knew it was a lie. And never gave him, or anyone else an answer and I ignored his ultimatum. I just kept working on the Zelda Dungeon Wiki and never said I was formally leaving at Zelda Wiki to anyone. Within a couple years he and the rest of the Masterminds were removed from the wiki by Jess. I heard some stayed on to help normally as regular staff rather than having special status anymore, though I may have misremembered that. Anyway, thanks Jess. I firmly believe that was the right decision. It solved most of Zelda Wiki's problems. I just wish you did that two years earlier when I warned you about all this in the first place and prevented all of this. But it was too late as it was, damage done and it couldn't be undone.

Also, not long after this, the Zelda Wiki staff wised up and realized Admin C was, actually, pretty horrible, and she was finally gone too, left in a mindless rage over something petty about staffing choices that in this case, were not really a big problem and she was wildly overreacting. She only lasted that long because that newer bureaucrat had protected her for so long, in an unrequited crush she took advantage of. The worst people were all gone. Zelda Wiki was free to recover from its dark days. They offered to take me back now that everyone who despised me was gone and no one was left who would fight them on my return. With apologies for not believing me about these people too. I had considered it. But I was never coming back. I was violated here, severely traumatized, and no one cared that it was happening, and so many willingly believed obvious lies about events they personally witnessed and could have seen were untrue and too many refused to do anything to stop it or even admit it was happening. I had to move onto a better place, where I was actually respected. So I refused to return.

Renewed Purpose
I felt free, alive. I had a purpose again. Meaning in my life. Over the next several years, the Zelda Dungeon Wiki thrived while Zelda Wiki struggled. It took them a while to recover from losing most of their staff. Besides those that were removed, a lot got tired of working on the wiki, for one reason or another, and left. Those who remained had to start from scratch. Zelda Dungeon gained huge ground in that time before Zelda Wiki was able to rebuild itself.

In its entire history, Zelda Dungeon Wiki never had the drama, the abuse, the obsession with status, and none of the ignored bullies and victim blaming Zelda Wiki was plagued by. Everyone was equal, status was irrelevant, talent was treasured, kindness was the rule.

The Second Darkness
I had a problem though. In 2016 Friends, very close friends, I made on the Zelda Dungeon Forums started turning on me. Over and over. For no apparent reason. I thought I was losing my mind.

They began behaving like the worst Zelda Wiki people did. By the time the problem was realized, they had near total power over the forums. Mases was too overwhelmed to handle dealing with them. They started bullying me. Trying to convince everyone I was pure evil. They kept demanding I be banned from the forum and wiki. Mases politely told them where they could shove it, repeatedly. Eventually they got so frustrated they all rage-quit and left completely saying Mases was a horrible person for not allowing them to get rid of a monster like me. This coming from people I thought were my closest friends. As a parting gift, one of them deleted my forum account and another forum admin's who was also a wiki admin. That was the push Mases needed. The worst were banned.

Why is this relevant? Because someone showed me proof that that one person coordinated all of this. Convinced people I was pure evil. Tried to destroy what I had rebuilt. It was my ex, Admin C from Zelda Wiki. She had spent nearly FIVE YEARS stalking me, reading everything I said. Observing who I was close to. She spoke to my friends behind my back constantly for years. Slowly poisoning them against me. Convincing them I was so horrible they had to stop at nothing to end me. And that they had to work at destroying Zelda Dungeon from the inside to take me down. So several planned to become forum staff to get into position to do so.

I couldn't believe it, but I was shown proof. And another forum admin helped prove Admin C was stalking my posts despite a force ignore being placed on her account for my protection. She was caught bypassing it with alternate accounts which only had activity recorded by the forum searching for and reading my posts, and had her main account banned. Besides one last case, this is the last time she ever bothered me. Her five-year long scheme failed and everyone got caught and punished.

I never looked her up at all after 2011, but occasionally someone would contact me to discuss it or by chance she'd be somewhere I went without knowing she'd be there and she'd talk about things going on. A lot I learned way after the fact because I am not a stalker like her.

I'd learned for the period of time she was obsessed with hurting me, she'd totally ruined her life with her behavior. Only improving after her stalking and harassment of me was exposed. She went from bad relationship to bad relationship, usually juggling multiple guys at once -- without their knowledge, constantly being horrible to each one. And I later found out she was polyamorous. And she seemed to hate me so much because I was not okay with it. Apparently twisting it into me being some horrible bigot which is how she got so many people to hate me.

However, I never said I was morally opposed to multiple partner relationships. What I actually had said was I didn't want to be involved in one myself, especially with it being kept a secret from me. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with being polyamorous, provided you get consent from all involved, which she didn't with me, the other two guys at that time, or anyone else I heard about later.

One of her exes actually came to me and apologized for not believing my warnings about her and said it was an absolute nightmare. She also failed college in her first attempt, in her case from aggression from what former friends of hers told me, and it took her years to get back to it and finally finish a couple degrees. Good for you, I'll admit that much, you got there in the end at least. Had she focused on that instead of making my life hell every day for five years she could have gotten it the first time though.

And for context, she constantly made fun of my college failure in September 2008 to May 2009. That was not my fault at all. My parents threatened to cut me off and disown me (they loved dangling that threat in my face to get their way) if I didn't take a medication which didn’t help me at all and they refused to listen to me about it. It instead made me zone out so hard I lost hours of time every day so badly I couldn't remember any of it and failed most of my classes because of it. Which she thought was a great thing to ridicule me for. Repeatedly, for years... so karma I guess?

Also she was never able to hold onto friends that I knew of. Maybe that's changed today, hopefully it has. Everyone needs to grow. Still, even those temporary consequences worked for me. You think it's okay to treat people like this, you had it coming. I considered the matter closed. And I moved on.

The Final Revelation
In June 2016, the Pulse Nightclub shooting happened in Orlando Florida. A good friend I made at Zelda Dungeon, who had already profusely apologized for ever thinking the things being said about me were true, lived there and had been to that Club. I had recently encouraged him to move in with a friend of his to have emotional support through his own bad breakup. This roommate was a frequent attendee of the club. Though he wasn't there then. The roommate lost several close friends. One being a previous partner.

This shattered my years of self denial of who I was. The full weight of the truth of my identity came crashing down upon me. I was not a cisgender man. I was a trans woman. No one knew my issues with my gender. At least I thought so. I told no one. My friends accepted it. One other friend said he figured it out a while ago. For months he had been telling me I had to recognize the truth of myself but I did not understand. He told me it was my truth to find so he only encouraged me to look, instead of telling me outright.

I very quickly picked the name Emma. I had been obsessed with it since I saw it in my childhood in the 90s on my dad's wall tapestry of our family tree of a distant relative.

My family wasn't too thrilled though. I was threatened with total disownment, again, and cutting off of all support if I didn't go back to being a boy, so I ended up running away from my parents' house to my apartment, on foot without transportation, at 11pm the night before Thanksgiving 2016 in 20°F weather with snow everywhere in total darkness on a country road. It was going to be an 18 hour walk. I made it 7 before I called a friend begging them to come get me and take me to my apartment.

I didn't know then but I am also intersex. That means I was born with ambiguous reproductive organs and in puberty I developed both male and female features. Like a full beard, a large butt and chest, body hair, slender arms and legs, and an ambiguous voice.

The reason I didn't see the obvious, or rather kept denying it despite being clearly obsessed with it, is because my mom had "corrective surgery" done on me as a baby and spent my whole life policing my gender. Treating me as less than human. A threat that could arise at any time. I was always treated very harshly in every aspect of my life by her. Nothing was ever good enough. I was always a bad person to her.

Self Realization and Personal Growth
That, my friends, is why I was so messed up here. Though there was an enormous amount of lies told about me, I was always on the verge of near total despair. The smallest things could spiral me into a fight or flight panic. I was not as outward thinking of other people's needs and feelings as I should have. I am truly sorry for that part. I just… had no way of handling this and quite literally no one was even remotely interested in my feelings.

I never told Admin C my gender issues and she never seemed to notice. Her final parting gift, the last I ever heard from her, was on my coming out blog post. Which I only shared with Zelda Dungeon. So she still was using alternate accounts to stalk me. She insulted me, said I was faking being trans for attention, and said no one would ever want to be involved with me in any dynamic because of how horrible I was. Never heard anything about her ever again.

In February 2017 I started hormone replacement therapy. In May, I began a relationship with a boy for the first time in my life. It was long distance. I wasn't sure I liked men, but he came and visited me, I visited him, and I very quickly fell head over heels in love with him. In July, with my boyfriend at my side in the courtroom, I got my name legally changed to Emma and my gender marker changed to female. In September, I decided I loved this boy more than anything ever and I wanted to stay with him forever. I still was on bad terms with my family. And my home state was getting dangerously transphobic, obsessively trying to pass laws to make my existence illegal, before it was the popular thing for far-right US state legislatures to do. Mine was the first! So I was scared. We decided it was safest to move me in with him 1500 miles away in Las Vegas, where there were city, county, and state transgender protection laws. And away from my family. Also jobs. After over a thousand job applications all being rejected with no interviews, surviving on increasingly inadequate disability benefits, I was mere months from homelessness in a state that thought it should be illegal for people like me to be alive and my family was not interested in helping stop this. There was no choice and we were in love. I moved in with him.

My family mostly came around then. Not all, some disowned me completely, but enough of them told me they wanted to accept me as a girl to matter, including my parents and all but one of my sisters. They still talked to me. Helped a bit. Accepted this was me now and there was no stopping it. But I still remained a low priority to them all and I was committed, and still didn't have a choice.

I still had trouble getting jobs. It took two years to get a good, steady job in October 2019. Been there ever since, and they hugely respect me there. My boyfriend and I are still living together as a couple to this day.

My Ambitions and Intentions
Today, I am much happier. I have finally a job, I have real love, I am working towards my dream of being a fiction author, making great progress. Zelda Dungeon Wiki is very successful. My original baby Zelda Wiki has fully recovered from all the troubles it has had, with its current team being fully capable and much more well adjusted than the one in my day.

I had spent a large amount of my free time after transitioning and before getting employed acting as a mentor and guide to hundreds of transgender people who had similar situations as me, operating a large transgender support discord server. I'm still there now, though not as active because of my job. But people there I have entrusted do great at keeping it going. And I'm so happy I was able to use my experiences to help people and overcome my biggest flaw of putting my own pain before others and instead actually helping them. By today my server has helped a few thousand. Most leave when they feel complete and that's fine. At least it helped.

As for wiki editing, though my job and personal life have to take priority now, still I have to say I am not going to return here to be a true editor or anything else ever again. My loyalty is always going to be with Zelda Dungeon Wiki. They recognized my worth and respected me at a time when Zelda Wiki showed me nothing but disrespect and abuse. The Zelda Dungeon Wiki kept me alive, literally. It gave me purpose while I worked to discover more tangible, less childish, purpose in true love, a job I like, and a dream occupation to strive towards with real progress being made.

I still want to honor Zelda Wiki though. I poured my heart and soul into this place. Even though bad actors successfully erased my legacy, I know at least my impact made it better, and that influence lives on today. Hopefully I can undo a bit of their harm through this autobiography of sorts I have written.

Conclusion
If you made it here to the end, and didn't just skip down here, thank you for reading my story. If you felt I wronged you in the past, I am sorry. If you disagree with my version of events, you have that right. I merely told what I knew to be true. If the anonymous people I described are people you recognize and you did not think they were like that, then I am sorry if what I said offended you. It is, however, what really happened. I am never, ever going to forgive the five people I gave anonymous titles. But everyone else, though I am still severely disappointed how many accepted what was happening despite seeing first hand, knowing the things they were told weren't true, seeing how these people acted, and doing nothing. It hurt. But I have to move on. I can forgive them. It's been long enough. People grow, improve. And it's not like the rest encouraged this. Being scared to act is not as bad as participating. I'm ready to forgive anyone else outside of those five. And make my apologies where appropriate. But only for things I actually did. Like how snappy I was sometimes. One thing I definitely did was I didn't try to help people who came to me for emotional support because I was too focused on my own pain. I acted selfishly in those interactions and for that I am in deep regret and would desperately like to apologize to whomever I had done that to if I could.

Thank you for your time. I know it was a long read. But I had to do it. I am open to anyone that wants to reconnect. But not to anyone that wants to resume any past grudges against me.