I’ve been a game developer for 15 years, but my persona as Mica Moondog is only a couple years old. That’s because my past isn’t pretty, but people are curious about it now that FriendOS is doing well. I’ve never actually made a reflection over my past, so now’s not a bad time to clear the air.
(This is my most personal blogpost, and it’s very sensitive, be warned. But friends have asked me about this topic, so I wanted to put it all in one place.)
I used to volunteer for a game studio called Toontown: Corporate Clash. I joined as a moderator in 2020 before becoming a gamedev and composer by 2022. Having been responsible for many of the game’s major features (including the majority of the work/infrastructure behind their guilds and groups), I ended up being the team’s linchpin for all of their major productions.
As it turns out, becoming the lead developer of a fandom project at 19 with no work experience and yes neurodivergence is a recipe for disaster. Even though I could meet a lot of Clash’s ambitions, having to interact with 30+ channels daily and waking up to DMs from 10+ people every morning was suffocating me.
I really loved game development, so much that I would frequently skip my college classes just to work on Clash. I skipped most meals as well. I would wake up at 6 AM and work on GUI until 8 PM, operating off of campus coffee every day for years.
I was getting so much done and thoroughly enjoyed being able to do so much work for the project and community, but it was very isolating for me as well. As I mentioned, I was younger, neurodivergent, and even emotionally stunted — ah, hm, what do I mean by that?
Growing up with divorced parents and living with a needy, narcissistic parent left me very confused over what ideal relationships were supposed to look like. I struggled with the difference between platonic and romantic connections, and I (most assuredly) had no idea what the point of a relationship even was.
For a long time, I didn’t have any knowledge of the contracts implicit to relationships that everyone else seemed to understand. Relationships for me weren’t about “building a shared future with someone” as much as they were “an emotional slip ‘n slide I would have with people that I considered to be really good friends.”
Similarly, I never really developed the ability to say no to people. My relationships had been characterized by people using me for things I didn’t understand, since I was convinced that fulfilling other people’s needs took priority over my own comfort, and that “other people being upset” was something I had the resources to help with all the time.
These flaws were the complicated underlying factors going into my last relationship on the project, wherein I was 20 and dated a 17-year-old artist. This started in August 2022, and my life experience then suggested that this was not an inconsolable age gap (the drum majors I looked up to in high school were dating college students), but I had enough awareness to know that part of the project’s fandom would find it concerning by itself.
I ignored that, since this artist was someone I felt I had genuinely gotten along with really well; we were, mutually, really good friends. One night, our emotions spilled, and we became partners. I brought up all of my fears and concerns with them, and I made a promise to not lean into anything they didn’t want. From that point forward, I did my best to provide care and support for them, based on the patience they requested from me.
They had originally become attracted to me by reminding me to eat food — something I had thought was a considerate reminder on their behalf (considering my Crohn’s disability) — but was actually just their fetish. When they confessed this later, I believed that it was OK to engage in further roleplay with them. After all, it happened once on their own terms, and they wanted more from me, and I never said no to things that would benefit someone else. (In other words, they messed up by fetish mining me, I messed up by thinking it was okay.)
Eventually, the relationship had developed into constant emotional caretaking for them. They told me that they were suicidal, pressuring me to appease them more actively and frequently. They attempted to overdose after I got promoted to Clash’s Creative Lead, since they felt as though they deserved it more. I had contacted the authorities in case they were in danger from overdosing (since they stopped responding to me for over 12 hours). They resented me for calling the police and told me that I just needed to put up with them the way they were. After this, I ended up hospitalized from anxiety several times.
Eventually I blocked them in April 2023 when their dependency on me grew too large. They would get mad when I didn’t respond to their messages within 30 minutes, and would unload a torrent of insults and rage towards me whenever I said no to them. After blocking them, they started stalking me on social media begging for my forgiveness, while simultaneously telling others that I had groomed and abused them.
There was more, too. They pretended to be Korean and disabled in order to message me again after blocking them (thus causing me to be perpetually afraid/anxious of talking to new people that I got along with for years), they had been pushing me to transition because they had a preference for it (thus causing me to later detransition), they even sent me evidence of them fetish-mining a 26-year-old as well. The list goes on, it’s all backed up.
But look, this was back in 2022, and it shouldn’t reflect on who they are today. A lot of their behavior is easily explained by them being immature at the time, not by them being ontologically evil or deliberately cruel.
Don’t give them hell about it, thanks.
Eventually, October 2023 came around, and they dropped a major callout document against me, describing how I had coerced them into a relationship, yet I was still a Clash Lead.
My mental state collapsed then and there. I could tell that their allegations were confabulated, constructing horror stories around cherrypicked screenshots, excluding specific messages from the same conversations that would contradict their story.
But I had no energy, no evidence, and no reputation to persuade people of my innocence, especially whilst being dogpiled by a massive fandom. And besides, who was going to listen to me, the Adult, who most certainly should have Known Better?
Well, good news. I was 20 then, and I’m 24 now. I do know better now.
Since then, I spent years in deep rumination, trying very hard to dissect and work out why I had felt okay committing into that relationship in the first place, processing what had happened, and figuring out why things had turned out the way they did.
Despite how my ex treated me, anyone well-adjusted would have had no business being in a relationship like that to begin with.
The simple truth is that I just didn’t understand the point or function of relationships by then. The idea that they were supposed to be about people that could support each other was an idea that had never entered my head. The concept of building a future with someone was a completely foreign concept to me. This was a part of my life in which I had learned nothing about, yet others seemed to know by default.
With careful reflection, a lot of support from my friends, a safe IRL environment after moving in with my family, and a clear head after being exiled from the work that was consuming my life, I was finally given good space and time to rehabilitate and figure things out.
Once I started viewing relationships as a structure for mutual support, I realized that online relationships made absolutely no sense for me, so I stopped investing into those altogether. I became very focused on transparency, frequently reminding those around me that I needed them to let me know whenever I did something wrong, letting me build up trusted support groups that knew that I sought to do everything right. I’ve also met a trusting, secure partner in real life that’s helped me with working on myself, too. Also, therapy kicks ass.
In other words, I’ve done the best I’ve could to seek personal redemption and comfort since leaving Clash :>.
The best way for me to keep moving forwards is to ensure that the mechanisms behind my mistakes are known, yet no longer represent my character. I’m very comfortable with people knowing about the allegations and issues that were levied against me; nothing wrong with being an example to be a better person.
Unfortunately, I genuinely cannot make myself apologize to someone who got away with abusing me, even though it might be better for my reputation to do so.
But, I can still take the lessons I learned from that relationship and move forward without ever making those mistakes again. That’s the best I can do in terms of an apology. I know it’s not fantastic, but it’s the best my brain lets me do right now.
With regards to my ex’s claims about me, I can’t apologize for things that I know for certain I never did. I can only address my own issues that were consistent with my own experiences.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t more work for me to do. But it is very challenging to sort through traumatic memories and extract one’s own mistakes from them, so please be patient with me.
After the FriendOS Demo released a few months ago, the community surrounding Clash quickly fell in love with the game, up until those allegations got rehashed into the public eye. Actually, I was completely expecting this, since my ex figured out who I was after I changed my identity back in 2024.
I watched as new allegations from that community showed up on my doorstep. I witnessed some… pretty odd claims going around for a bit, implying a lot of malice behind my character and FriendOS, like me supposedly making FriendOS as a honeypot to groom more people (what???).
Many of these claims are just inherently bizarre, or they’re a really unforgiving interpretation of someone who was still learning how to be an adult, or it’s just completely untrue, et cetera.
It doesn’t feel particularly useful for me to dig into people’s theories about me when they’re based on a view of my character at its mental worst years ago, so I won’t. It’s quite sad, but I understand why people feel the way they do.
I was inadequate in a lot of ways when I worked on Clash, and I got into relationships where I had no idea what I was doing, magnified by an unbelievably hardcore work ethic that was defined by me excluding myself from several essentials.
I don’t really mind if my past makes people too uncomfortable to engage with my work. My reputation isn’t too important to me, my needs in life are met regardless of if strangers are upset with me or not. I just wanted to write about this from my perspective, for my friends who’ve been out of the loop.
Me and my friends made FriendOS because we felt a creative void in our lives after we left Clash. We liked making games together, so we came back to make more games together: simple as that.
(We’re gonna be removing the Clash homages, though… no point in making references for a community that clearly doesn’t like us.)
My emotions and feelings over this situation have calmed down a lot over time. If you find the original responses I wrote in 2023, you’ll find a lot of zealous, defensive language, consistent with the level of stress and anxiety I felt at the time. But it wasn’t allowing me to process the situation in full, which is why space has helped a lot since then.
These are the cards I’ve been dealt, and I’m sure everything’s going to be okay. I’m doing my best to heal and move on, and it’s understandable that some folks doubt me; trust is easier to break than it is to amend.
My closest friends have been long aware of my past, and we’ve spent many moons discussing it in detail. The reason they’ve chosen to stick with me — despite the harassment they face for being associated with me — is because they care about me and recognize my potential. They wanted to see me recover, because I used to be able to create really cool things for people. I don’t see any issue in wanting to get back to that.
I’m really, really glad to have been offered a second chance, both from my friends and from my communities. I would like to prove that it was worth it.
Thanks for reading,
Mica Moondog