FF14 and D&D YouTuber JoCat announces 'indefinite break' after receiving harassment—including 'suspicious packages' sent to his family
JoCat, creator of the 'A Crap Guide to X' series for both D&D and Final Fantasy 14, has announced that he'll be taking an 'indefinite break' in the wake of harassment, as announced on his Twitter yesterday.
In a further thread, JoCat lays out a timeline following the wake of his I Like Girls video—a gender-swapped cover of Boys by Lizzo. The video went viral, gathering over 11 million views at the time of writing. I Like Girls itself was a stream bit he decided to animate: «I decided it could be a fun project to animate the brief stream moment for my youtube audience.»
The video itself is uncontroversial. It's a cutesy send-up of Lizzo's original song that similarly celebrates women of varying body types. A year later, JoCat writes that the video «reached outside its target audience», prompting harassment from communities who made «assumptions about my character, my history, my beliefs, my relationships, and all those of my partner, as well as threats of violence to me as well as my family,» as well as «doxxing attempts».
While JoCat mentions that most of this had previously been limited to Twitter, he adds that «no small amount has leaked into other parts of my regular day to day that is harder to ignore—private DMs over discord and twitch, suspicious packages being sent to my family.»
As a queer person who occasionally dabbles in makeup: I get a sinking feeling that's all too familiar. Much of the harassment targeted JoCat's sexuality and gender presentation, the latter of which is 'non-conforming' by societal standards—which can make you a target for a swiss army knife of bigots with an axe to grind.
One major example that's brought up often is from a since-deleted Tweet that captions the video: «How the hell can
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