Kate Mitchell
| Name: | Kate Mitchell |
| Also Known As: | |
| Pronouns: | she/her |
| Occupation: | |
| Medium: | webcomic |
| Works: | Pesterquest, Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon |
| Official Website(s): | https://www.ssstudio.org/kate |
| Fan Website(s): | |
| On Fanlore: | Related pages |
Kate Mitchell is a former controversial BNF in the Homestuck fandom known for her eventual work as a writer for the franchise itself. She is noted to be a big fan and defender of the character Vriska Serket.[1]
After substantial controversy, Mitchell stepped back from What Pumpkin and involvement with the series around June of 2020.[2] Her departure was due to the harassment she received from the Homestuck fan community as well as the toxic working environment behind-the-scenes.[3][4]
Fannish Contributions
- Wrote Vriska Serket's route in Pesterquest
- Former writer and director for Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon (listed as Director Emeritus[2])
- Host of the Homestuck podcast The Perfectly Generic Podcast
- Marketing copwriter for Hiveswap Act 2.
Controversy
Twitter Behavior
Feud with the Homestuck subreddit
In Retrospect
Since Mitchell's departure, some members of the Homestuck community have described her as a scapegoat for the fandom's dislike of the series' direction post-canon.[3] [5] [4] In 2021, tumblr user homestuckexamination commented, "Kate’s rude attitude made her the perfect Scapegoat for people to Harass, because she was an autistic trans woman, and it turns out bigots will latch onto any chance they get to feed on the flames of hating someone like that. So people kept trying to find ways to throw her under the bus, putting her as the like, Source of All the Post-Canon Evil, and eventually endangered her life and that of her real-life friends while she was out protesting last Summer, which led her to quitting WhatPumpkin."[3]
TVTropes user Sixthhokage1, a former mutual of Mitchell's who discussed the controversy with mutual contacts, reflected in 2024:
I feel I can pretty safely say that she [Mitchell] left the team for Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon due to a combination of:a multi-year harassment campaign emerging out of the pan-fandom purity culture that had developed on Tumblrnote over the preceding few years (which had a massive moment of breaking containment just a few months before the Epilogues happened due to, ironically enough, the Tumblr porn ban) that targeted her because she pushed back against "i saw goody proctor dancing with the devil"-ass accusations of the Epilogues' authors; and union busting from the corporate types involved in the Homestuck brand at the time. This is also the big reason why HS^2 had multiple hiatuses under the original team.
The HICU is essentially what the HS^2 team was fighting for, not that the public would have known that at the time considering the fucking NDAs they were under. And with that shit going on behind the scenes at the same time as that horrendous harassment, no fucking wonder she reached a point of "fuck this shit, I'm out".Sixthhokage1, 28 January 2024 https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=dokqadcgjuslxm0wsbqrzpau&page=10193
References
- ^ https://ouroboros.cafe/articles/vriska
- ^ a b https://forum.homestuck.xyz/viewtopic.php?t=862
- ^ a b c https://homestuckexamination.tumblr.com/post/651453333783101440/what-was-the-deal-with-kate-mitchell-the-only
- ^ a b https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=dokqadcgjuslxm0wsbqrzpau&page=10193
- ^ https://homestuckexamination.tumblr.com/post/613382975350079488/a-statement-on-kate-mitchell