A few weeks ago the vast majority of authors, publishers and bloggers punched the air when Requires Hate was finally outted – shockingly – as author, Benjanun Sriduangkaew.For those unaware of who Requires Hate was or what she got up to in her spare time, here’s a good summary:
Benjanun Sriduangkaew is a celebrated up-and-coming writer who has been hailed as part of a new crop of diverse voices in speculative fiction.
Her novella Scale Bright was acclaimed as one of the year’s best, her short stories appeared in esteemed publications like Apex, and she was nominated for a 2014 Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Recently The Verge dubbed her “a short story virtuoso.”
She is also – as a shocked publishing world recently learned—a notorious troll with a decade-long history of spewing violent, homophobic, transphobic, racist, and sexist hate speech.
The publishing community has been grappling with the revelation that Sriduangkaew was behind two notorious sockpuppet identities, one a fairly recent review blog and the other a long-standing LiveJournal account known for attacking minorities and marginalized writers and fans.
Liz Williams also summarises her decade-long trolling pretty well:
[Requires Hate] … has had a long history of trolling in the gaming community and has been flung off multiple comms under a long list of aliases for anti-social behaviour (shows up, randomly spews venom at people, is told to go away – typical trollshit). More recently, she’s discovered the wonderful world of social justice, and is now busily blogging away, focusing most of her attacks on white male writers, but also making a point of attacking women, including transwomen and women of colour (referring to one author as ‘a stupid fuck’: this level of subtle analysis is pretty standard).
And an account from author Lauren DeStefano who shares her first hand experience with the blogger:
In light of this, a lot of people have said that this “requireshate” alias would then delete her comments and various handles. While I’ve found that to be true, here’s a small sampling of the days long “attack” (and I put that in quotes because I never felt attacked and I know she has done much worse to others) that she waged on me. I had to dig for this in an email dated June, 2012.
At the time of these tweets, I took this screencap so that I could email it to a few friends, and we laughed about it and moved on with our day. Even reading it back now, my only real reaction is to laugh and say “what?” out loud to my monitor. By day two of this, I finally got so bored of having my feed filled with this nonsense that I sort of glazed over and would skip them as I read my various interactions with my followers. Eventually, I suppose RH got as bored with me as I was with her, and that was the end of it.
Unfortunately, the damage she has done to other authors has been significant, and this here is on the benign end of the damage she’s inflicted. I’m not really posting this to make any sort of point. It’s just that so little exists of her gross behavior that I feel compelled to share what little proof I have. I’ve seen more, but never thought to screencap it, and now, as is always the case with cowardly trolls, it’s gone. But feel free to use this screengrab in any articles or in any way that may help you.
Fantasy-Faction had a couple of minor run ins with Requires Hate over the years, but mainly just observed her disgusting attacks on other people within the industry.
For me, anyone who sets up a blog with the word ‘hate’ in it has too much time on their hands or, worse, something wrong with them. In my eyes, blogging has always been about sharing your passion with other people. I love this genre, fantasy, and I want to connect and talk about it with as many people as I possibly can. I love the interaction with people who are as excited about an upcoming book as I am. I love chatting with people who have enjoyed a book as much as I did; sharing our thoughts and experiences reading it.
To me, it is almost incomprehensible that someone would invest the time and energy into creating a blog and purposely seeking out authors whose work they DID NOT like so that they could attack them. I have about as much interest in doing that as I do walking into an antique bookstore, picking up some dictionaries from the 1800s and reading through every entry searching for a spelling mistake. I guess then I’d not be hurting anyone, so perhaps I could write to the descendants of the compiler of the dictionary, point out the mistakes I find and tell them how stupid their ancestors were. *urgh* I just cannot comprehend investing time into something I really don’t enjoy and then spending more time trying to hurt people – it is pure nastiness.
Beyond that, I won’t comment too much more with my own thoughts, because this blog is a place of positivity. Instead I shall just celebrate the fact that she has made the following blog post:
This will be the last entry on this blog. You won’t be surprised.
…
Yeah, I was an asshole for years and said a lot of crap I regret, only I wasn’t big enough to own up to it and apologize then. It’s a huge accumulation of being shitty, I hurt a lot of people. I’m sorry I didn’t grow up and learn better sooner. I toned down as the years went by, but in the process of that I should have made apologies as I went along, not waited until the end. Unfair yes, shitty yes. Because I was an asshole who just didn’t want to admit she was wrong.
It’s past time for me to own up, and stop being an asshole, and stop making everything about me and my need to look meaner and tougher than everyone else.
Geoff Matthews
Julia Kitvaria Sarene