#KickVic and The Violet Wanderers Podcast Discusses Strategies to Publicly Label Vic Mignogna as a Sexual Predator to Prevent Future Con Appearances
Spencer Baculi
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Three of the leading voices in the ‘#kickvic’ movement, Renfamous, LJ Montello, and Kaylyn “MarzGurl” Saucedo, urged their fans and supporters to directly contact conventions to prevent any potential appearances by Vic Mignogna during a recent podcast guest appearance.
The three appeared on the 65th episode of The Violet Wanderers, a podcast self-described as “Gallows Humor for the Terminally online queer community,” hosted by Alexis & Ian Filth. According to Alexis, the three appeared to discuss “animegate [and] comicsgate chuds.”
At the top of the podcast, as Alexis speaks to LJ Montello and asks her to introduce herself for listeners who may be unfamiliar with her role in the movement, Montello provides some brief details about herself before immediately pointing to Mignogna as the problem in the anime community that’s taken “front and center.”
[5:00] “I’m old retired con staff and basically ended up coming into 2019 and seeing that we’re dealing with last decade’s problems in anime. Between Vic Mignogna, and a whole bunch of others, but he’s kind of taken front and center. It’s just kind of one of those things where everyone knew about it for some time but it was whisper network, it was, you know, ‘don’t look behind the curtain.’”
Montello then equates Mignogna’s fanbase to a cult, comparing them to the fervent supporters of alleged sexual predator and musician R. Kelly or members of the sex cult ‘NXIVM’:
[5:29] Montello: “Obviously with #MeToo and this blowing up, but then of course, Vic’s spent 15 years being enabled and building a cult. You can compare him to R. Kelly, I swear.. Compare the fandoms.”
Alexis: “He’s the NXIVM of anime?”
Montello: “More or less.”
As the conversation continues, the group begins to discuss whether exposure campaigns such as #kickvic movement will have any lasting impact on convention culture and guest invitation standards, with an emphasis on the prevention of Mignogna from making any future convention appearances.
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Montello and Renfamous state that it’s a matter of “money” and “self-interest,” and that it’s “going to come down to the staying power of the people who’ve criticized him.”
[11:29] Montello: “Ultimately it’s going to keep coming down to money. It’s going to come down to self-interest. It’s going to be about doing what’s easy because it’s, you know, “Well, we have all these fans that are going to come. Asses in seats.” This is how conventions determine who they invite typically, it’s “How many asses are they going to get in seats? How many tickets is he going to push?”
Renfamous: “Whether or not Vic stays gone is going to come down to the staying power of the people who’ve criticized him, staying power of the people who’ve made an effort to ensure that what he’s done has been spread around and that they’ve been putting pressure on the companies, putting pressure on the cons. If people burn out, and they aren’t caring about this as much in a year? Cons will absolutely bring him back.”
Related: Renfamous Responds to Mike S. Miller Getting Kicked Out of Grand Rapids Comic-Con
They also state that Mignogna’s recurring convention appearances were done solely because “People felt they had to bring Vic back because he would move tickets.”
Telling fans that they need to be “vigilant,” the pair then call on “imposing potential financial consequence to the degree that they’re not even willing to risk it” on the conventions through complaints and backlash:
[15:50] Renfamous: “If people are vigilant, it’s not going to be immediate, but once the cons have hardship, once there’s [no longer] that impetus of “Well, yeah, it’s been a couple years, and maybe he’s learned his lesson? He’s really struggling but he still has that ardent fanbase”.
Montello: The threat of backlash needs to have an imposing potential financial consequence to the degree that they’re not even willing to risk it.
Alexis then calls on listeners of The Violent Wanderer to campaign against any potential appearance Mignogna may have near them:
Alexis: You hear that ‘TVW dungeoneers’? If you hear of any conventions having Vic ‘Menage-enage-enage-a-trois coming to your town, you need to get your trans asses off the couch and tell them you were going to show up until you heard this fucking pervert was coming on.
The group then turn to discussing specific tactics that could be used to achieve this goal, including pointing to various Google searches associated with his name and the accusations of sexual misconduct and informing local communities that a “documented sexual harasser” would be around their children:
Montello: They key points to hit are the fact that he has a reputation now, and there’s a documented reputation that he has now, the fact that you can Google his name –
Renfamous: You cannot play dumb anymore. It was playing dumb for a long time, this whole “we didn’t know” nonsense is bullshit. However, you can’t play dumb anymore.
Montello: Right. But having these things in the media that are readily accessible is the way you go to a small local con that has invited Vic Mignogna, go to the local media and say, “Look, your local convention has invited controversial potential child predator, sexual harasser, whatever you want to use because all those words have been used in the media. Look at what our local con has invited upon us and invited upon your children, invited our community. It’s a big deal for a smaller con or a medium-sized con.
Alexis: There is a perverse sense in irony that I have, that I would be able to turn around the “Won’t somebody think of the children?” on some of these right-wing chuds.
Saucedo: News outlets such as Variety or NPR are no small time news outlets, you know? I’d say those are pretty big places to point to and be able to say “This is the kind of coverage this person received. It’s not exactly positive. It’s not just nerd outlets where nerd reporters were reporting on a nerd thing that were happening in the nerd world. It’s in the local paper in Dallas.
Montello: Right, if you have a [hypothetical] con going on in Garland, Texas and the’ Garland Times Herald’ has nothing else to talk about that day, you can get front page news that the local Garland con has invited a documented sexual harasser to attend with your children. That’s the kind of pressure they respond to. They don’t respond well to weeb tweets as well as they do that kind of pressure.
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