Grimes is my favorite artist. I struggle with a lot of things and Grimes, not only listening to her, crying and dancing but also thinking about what she is expressing (and the beautiful impossibility of pinning it down, like Bowie) is sometimes all that makes things ok. I am being too honest, but this is just background. She- not her as a person, her art- means so much to me- and because of that, like many music fans- it angers me if she is mistreated. I honestly don't want to destroy or even hurt Arbutus Records. I have paid them lots of money!! I have supported them in the past. I just can't anymore.

I submitted posts with interviews, videos and song analysis in the Grimes sub for months and participated positively in threads (and I've been on reddit, albeit not a super active user, for years). My long ass posting style may be idiosyncratic, even flawed, but I was usually upvoted or at worst ignored. I was maybe downvoted once or twice for my Grimes comments over the preceding months- a typical redditor, decently tolerated by my fellow users. One of my posts got 80 upvotes. Another in the 20s. Karma really didn't matter to me- point is, I wasn't hated or seen as a troll.

All of a sudden, over the past three days, when I began criticizing Arbutus Records openly (something I had even done more quietly before- and received upvotes since most actual fans of Grimes are united on supporting her and opposing them!) my posts must have attracted someone's attention, because they were relentlessly downvoted and I was bullied in an organized negative way I had never seen on that subreddit, in fact not since the day Art Angels (not an Arbutus release) came out, when (as I later realized, there, and only there, on that Grimes sub) AA was relentlessly attacked as worthless trash with a venom that must have been organized, since nothing of that kind recurred there afterwards (what, 99% of hardcore Grimes fans hated it on day one, and suddenly liked it the next day??). This was especially odd because there was never any negativity on that scale even here, on indieheads, where I would imagine many people had never particularly cared either way for Grimes or may have disliked her. But AA was widely praised here, and generated the typical like/dislike ratio you'd expect. On her own subreddit however, something really odd was going on. These users hating on it (bots? Arbutus five cent army?) just melted away. And this also recalls certain 4chan campaigns I've heard about, to give AA low ratings. Arbutus may have organized those, too, because it has a vested interest in encouraging the "she sold out! the early stuff is better" argument, given that it controls 100% of profits on that.

When the mod deleted my thread at the request of these Arbutus bros or bots, and I called him/her on it (using the same kind of language used against me in the thread) I was banned from Grimes subreddit altogether. Now I can't talk about Grimes here so I'm leaving for tumblr, I guess. Good riddance, right? Wouldn't want any actual fans of Grimes infesting a Grimes sub.