How people change...

[Hawkflight]

AidanBionicle1? I haven’t heard that name for years…

For an indication of what behavior led to his being banned, I direct you to this topic, in which he actually asks why people disliked him and got answers. This is a ride, I tell you, beginning with a few members telling him why people have issues with him - he was rude and immature, and attempted to be explicit. and a few people called him out for swearing in a post. He insisted that because it was ‘his’ topic, he got to set the rules for that topic, before staff came and swiftly clarified that it was their site.

From what I gathered reading his response - which I’ll include below to save a few people a click - he still bears a grudge against TTV, and he doesn’t see apologizing for his immature actions as important as maintaining that grudge. The “I did X… but” clause implies to me that he still don’t consider himself worthy of punishment. This isn’t to say that TTV has been blameless, though, as we saw during the incident of Eljay’s firing and subsequent revelations about Kahi.

As for how much he’s changed… I can only hope that he has matured a lot since then. Seeing his old posts compared to how collected his response was in January, it certainly seems plausible. While I don’t think he’ll ever be allowed back on the message boards - not that he’d want to be, likely - I hope he’s truly learned from his mistakes and finds success elsewhere.

Aidan’s response -

@AidanBionicle1

"In retrospect, I was certainly rude, but understandably I was upset to a great deal of a degree that I couldn’t then and still cannot put into exact words now to describe, beyond comparing it to a raging nuclear tornado if such a thing were to exist that is. Still, it was several years ago, coming upon five years now, I’ve seen the many faults of TTV take their toll on the whole of their branding and community, to the point where they (according to hearsay as far as I know) had banned or severely punished members who simply disliked or disagreed with their take of what was essentially their G3 mockup of sorts, with that taint being the scar known to all, that which I had come to bare a similar brunt to many years ago, with all that being said as they stand they are a last bastion of the fandom that once was, despite most if not all now knowing their infamy.

Frankly, it’s just pitiful in the end. Bionicle was a great thing, for people to bicker about it to such the degree that others are punished for ultimately mundane ideas, it really speaks volumes to the true level of immaturity and intolerance on the part of the whole running the establishment of that specific subclade of that remainder of the community to this day, and same goes to anyone else with the will to do equally as such to that or worse.

What had been done to me however was many things, so many things difficult to exactly recount, but now in retrospect of the whole of those events, it is clear to me now that they were all tactics, be them contrarian, to just shut me up or at least to neutralize me, to try and shut me down because I was a fool, that I do admit, but also because I believe I was seen by the staff as quite annoying, which I am also open to admit to, and the fact that I did say some off-color things here and there, but that was coming from an unsure edgy phase of who I was shaping up to be, which never came from a true place of hatred but rather a form of somewhat twisted humor, at least in my minds eye, which I do admit does not fully excuse the few off-color things I said as automatically then being alright, but as stated the responce to such was… mishandled, to put it all lightly. Again, I was young and foolish, but also without the means to self defend or retort, which I still really do not have the will or means to do for myself even today, perhaps it’s my ultimate personal weakness."