Posted 2024/12/22
(Note: This blog post is very long, please scroll to read all of it!)
This will be a more serious blog post regarding the behavior of Pastarru and my experience with them. This is not necessarily something I want to recount, but I feel it is necessary due to the nature of their behavior. If you are unaware of who Pastarru is, I will introduce them briefly. They are a 22 year old animator who has been a part of the animation meme community for around 8 years.
As of writing this, my friend Arsène has released a video covering his experience with Pastarru and providing proof of their inappropriate behavior. The video is linked here, and I highly recommend watching this video first, since I will be elaborating on topics that are introduced in this video.
I will be structuring this blog post similarly to how Arsène structured his video, first describing my own relationship to Pastarru, then moving onto the things that stood out to me personally regarding their behavior and the people they allow into their community (namely "Jeffery"), and finally I'll go over my own thoughts and reflections on my time as their friend and how I was treated. I want to stress that this is not meant to be a response to my friend's video.
So, first off, who am I? Online, I am known as V1V1SECT1ON, or Viv, as it's frequently shortened to. You may also recognize me as Catfish or Catfish Nigiri. I was never a part of the animation meme community, but I was a huge fan of the community from as young as age 12, or 2017-ish. I became interested in Pastarru's channel and animations somewhere around the summer of 2019. Towards the start of 2020, I lost interest in the animation meme community, and subsequently, Pastarru's animations. However, I started becoming interested again towards the end of 2023.
This is when I joined Pastarru's Discord server, and I was fairly active in there. Around June of this year, Arsène invited me to his server, where I became more acquainted with Pastarru, since we had only spoken to each other in conversations in their server. I was 19 years old for the duration of my time both in Pastarru's server and as their friend. I was not Pastarru's friend for long, only a couple of months, but I knew them long enough to be able to wholeheartedly vouch for Arsène's experiences with them.
In terms of their behavior, I feel I cannot give my own experiences with anything inappropriate I experienced since I was an adult when we were friends, and I did not and do not view that kind of behavior as inappropriate when directed towards me in the same way that Pastarru directed it towards minors. However, I can vouch for how money-hungry they were and how heavily it influenced their relationships.
In retrospect, Pastarru and I never talked much with each other directly until I commissioned art of my character Nigiri from them on July 6th of this year. After this, they began instantly treating me as though we were much closer friends than we were before. I can't give specifics, but they gifted me 2 weeks of Discord Nitro on the same day. They drew several different drawings of Nigiri for me for free after this. I didn't think much of this in the moment, since I didn't really connect any dots. I just thought we were getting closer as friends.
All of this treatment towards me stopped around the middle of September, when my midterms started. Without going into too much detail, I was very inactive on almost all of my social media for 2 months, starting then, because I was studying and preparing for all of my midterms, and I did not have much free time outside of that. When my midterms were finally over, I was so relieved and excited to catch up with my friends after 2 months of barely talking to them, only to notice Pastarru was no longer speaking to me. It would remain this way up until the present day.
Even after everything, I'm still not sure what to make of it. I was quickly roped into their circle, perhaps due to being a financial asset, and discarded when I wasn't able to be online all of the time and entertain them in VC or text messages in Arsène's server or whatever. I do believe this is around when Pastarru started ditching their other friends in favor of "Jeffery", though.
...Speaking of that motherfucker. I use the name Jeffery to refer to him for continuity's sake, because that is how Arsène refers to him in his video. I want to reiterate that this is NOT his real name.
I am not fond of him, though. His presence and behavior in Pastarru's server alone made me so viscerally uncomfortable that I felt unsafe engaging in the server even as an adult. I also stated in Arsène's server that the way he spoke reminded me of "when I learned internet safety, how older people would talk and act like younger people to try and lure them", as well as how I had a nightmare about him.
It's important to keep in mind that Pastarru and I were friends at this point in time, so they were more than aware of how he made me feel. The rules for their server also stated that people would be kicked for making others uncomfortable. I know I was not the only one uncomfortable with Jeffery's behavior. He was never kicked from the server because he made Pastarru a lot of money.
A common piece of advice that is given is that you should never meet your heroes, and I agree. Many people, from celebrities to any stranger you meet, will never present themselves as they truly are. Everyone will present a different version of themselves in public and behind closed doors, and it can be incredibly easy to forget that. Not to mention the fact that it would be incredibly hard to set aside any idolization you hold towards them and be able to have a genuine and healthy relationship where both parties are of equal standing.
Of course, I cannot speak on my own experiences to the same degree that others can, especially regarding inappropriate behavior towards minors, but these are my own and only my own experiences, and I wanted to get them off of my chest, as they had been weighing on me for some time.
I am aware that, as of posting this, they have released a statement on their YouTube community posts about my friend's video. I will refrain from addressing that now, and instead wait to see if they release a video, then I'll update this blog post talking about both.
Update as of January 13th, 2025: I have decided, for the sake of my mental health, that I will not be covering their apology. Even thinking about Pastarru has been extremely stressful for me, and I would rather move on.
However, with the way they handled everything, I feel it would be negligent to not provide some sort of update, however small it may be, so I will be providing links to many of the things that they deleted, as well as back up links to some of these, since given their track record of deleting everything, I wouldn't be surprised if they deleted these too. I have an archive of the Salem account on TikTok, a screenshot of their statement on the Youtube community tab, a link to their response document, and a back up of the response document.
I really have nothing else to say, except that I'm disappointed in how terribly they handled everything.