Valerie D'Orazio Vs Chris Sims

I republished some blogs I composed when I had a run in with Valerie that I reacted to by calling out every problem I had with anything she said or did. It wasn't healthy of me to let anything that initially upset me lead me to watch for more things to get upset about.

I have long since let that go. I expressed a sincere interest in seeing Valerie (and her husband, David Gallaher) succeed in the industry. Even expressed joy and wonder at seeing a couple that could share the same dreams and goals like they do.

Valerie is a good person. But she's a human being. She's flawed like all of us. I fully believe that she was being harassed and cyberbullied by a great number of folks. There are unhealthy folks out there obsessed at defending their favorite publisher that probably sent her threats the second her GOODBYE TO COMICS put DC in a bad light. That's the world we live in, unfortunately.

But a good deal of the public negativity thrown her way wasn't from being an innocent victim. For whatever reason, she earned a lot of the animus. She wound up in clashes with other professed feminists blogging about comics. She would let simple mistakes (confusing two bald, black male DC characters, despite being name checked thrice on the page) become unwieldy, ridiculous tangents about the publisher having problems with race and the writer having problems handling his cast of characters, all to avoid owning a simple mistake.

Now, a lot of her behavior could have been borne out of harassment that wasn't in the public eye. When she accused commenters of just being out to get her, rather than actually having a problem with a mistake she made, it might have come from private examples of OTHERS doing just that.

But the problem here is that, while that transference or biased reading is all-too-human of her, her responses and behavior were directly at these folks, who now had a legitimate issue with her and weren't necessarily misogynists.

I don't know what led Chris Sims to dislike Valerie and/or her work. I can't speak to the content of his character, as I do not know him. I do know from personal experience and observation of her interactions with others that one can have issues with her without gender coming into play.