Learning To Love A Pokemon

I totally get it and I understand the need to vent about something like that. RPG groups can be so annoying when someone tries to control a group like that, from what I've heard. I also know that for the Pokemon fandom (all fandoms, really) there's a tendency to want to gatekeep others from participating in groups if they show an interest in 'shipping' or NSFW stuff because it's a common thing to see "Shippings RUINED this fandom!" Now, personally, I think it's more an issue of writers in general just not knowing how to make committed relationships interesting without making the characters a-holes, but that's a different discussion.

My take tends to be that you don't fight parts of culture that you don't like by screaming at those people and ostracising them, you fight it by making other parts more appealing. I mean, if you don't want people drawing fanart of Gardevoir, don't ban Gardevoir art or make people feel bad for making that kind of art, give them incentives to do other things, otherwise you end up with a paranoid group whose identity is "WE'RE THE NORMAL ONES," while the weirdos will start their own group and likely become the face of the fandom because, well, they're just more interesting than the 'normal' group.

It's an issue with internet platforms in general that should be addressed that it's just easier to get rid of people than it is to try to guide them down a better or more socially-acceptable path. I get it since if you're a mod and you see someone making everyone uncomfortable and you message them privately they'll be like "What?! No, I'm not doing anything wrong," so you need to either be tactful and be prepared to deal with a disagreeable person who thinks they're in the right, or... just click a button, ban them, and never have to deal with them again, hopefully. I don't know for sure what you did or didn't do, but I do hope that things eventually start going better for you and you find something that makes you smile.

Yep, I know, now. It wasn't shown to me as the creator, but some people on my Discord showed me the screenshot.

I did multiple virus scans just to be safe and my computer is clean. I know that I didn't add anything malicious into my projects, so, what I think happened is that there's an Itch admin (or mod, I don't know) doesn't like me because of the way that I upload projects, which is short updates on a weekly basis alternating between projects. It's something that I actually do get crap for behind-the-scenes since the standard way of operating is a big update once a month due to how things like Patreon work.

The way I handle updates actually equals out to about the same, or more, content in my projects than a lot of similar visual novel projects, but it doesn't feel that way if the reader is only getting 100 more images (around 200 now, but 100 is the minimum I set for myself) and 1-2 NSFW scenes every week (sometimes 3-4), so I've had other creators be really snobby towards my projects, until they see the amount of images and it dawns on them how much effort I put into them, even without the fact that I make my own music for them.

But, for this Itch admin, this way of handling updates makes the site look bad and they have tried to get my stuff removed in the past, as well as harassed me to change. From what I've seen of the quarantine thing it seems like a fairly recent thing. So, what I think happened is that this Itch admin who's been a pain to me throughout my time here found a way to successfully block people from accessing my projects, or at least delay the momentum every new project gets, and is doing that, which sucks because there's nothing I can do about it.

Another possibility is that someone, probably the person who downvoted all of my comments one day, reported me and Itch basically was like "Well, we got a report, so this guy must be suspicious. Let's just put him on the list and manually approve or deny his projects being visible on this site."

So, either Itch is being malicious against me, or they're being apathetic in how they handle things on this site, which both suck for me. When I found this out I was hurt that my community didn't bring it up to me, and hurt by it being done at all. If there were other viable options for posting my stuff out there that aren't piracy sites I'd probably leave Itch, and the fact that I can't really leave Itch despite this is a pretty bitter pill to swallow. Though, I feel like if they genuinely think a quarantine is necessary my other projects would also be quarantined, which they aren't, so I think it's malicious on whoever ensured that this is happening, and apathy on Itch's part.

On the plus side, despite the quarantine, just being able to tell people that this project exists through devlogs is enough to get some momentum, which I can't say for Crossing A Line, so it feels nice knowing that people are interested in this particular project.