What's up folks? I never started a blog with this greeting formula, I should probably get one and always use the same but I'm too fond of unpredictable messiness. Anyway, it's 2025 so happy New Year!

This blog entry is going to be an upsetting read. My intention is to open up and reveal the true reasons behind my Instagram departure which were introduced in this video but I didn't go into details (well there's a villain cameo):

To be fair, Instagram was ruining my mental health and exposing me to harmful people while making me waste time on top of that. I was clinging to the app thinking to myself it was good for keeping up with a couple of indie musicians and to stay in contact with friends but honestly, I could easily do that without Instagram. Once I decided to uninstall the app, I simply subscribed to those musicians' newsletters and added my friends on Discord, which is a way more peaceful place than Instagram and doesn't allow doomscrolling of short form brainrotting content. You can also easily stop interactions with ill-intentioned people on Discord, it's actually unsettling how easy it is to "spy" on people on Instagram even if you have been muted or limited by someone. Unless you make your account private, you should accept gossip and spying will happen on Instagram. 

Shesvii, that sounds hella paranoid. Yeah, I know but it's the truth.

You know the viral TikTok/Instagram Reels audio that goes "you post a picture and get 10 likes, you post a story and 100 people see it. This means not everyone likes you but they're watching"? It's true. I experienced it and you probably experienced it, too. My posts averaged 60 likes with 1420 followers yet my stories had 100-110 viewers. Am not whining about statistics, I'm providing evidence to prove my point. Mind you, those who watch but don't support don't have to be ill-intentioned, they could be real life acquaintances that follow you to keep up, or simply people who swipe on stories fast to clear all the new stories. Been there, done that. 

However, some individuals are really watching only to keep tabs on you and stay informed. Why? Dunno, they must be boring individuals who suffer from a lack of real life problems. What I know is they're chronically online, hate-fueled unstable people and usually obsessed with some sociopolitical cause. This kind of people pushed me far away from Instagram. 

If you want the whole story in TL;DR format, open the link this text leads to.

If you want in-depth tea, visit the blog this text links to. 

Enough with the introduction 🌚

Sfarda L. Gül the harasser, bully & mud-slinging liar

First, let me clarify that the influence of persistently negative online interactions was affecting my mental health and creative process way before I considered leaving Instagram. Radicalised acquaintances & friends in the art community had been impacting the themes I'd talk about in my stories and art to the point I was censoring myself when drawing (for example, I would dodge certain motives to avoid being accused of a certain phobia or sociopolitical sin) and straight up stopped talking about my original characters, afraid I'd be judged and cancelled. There was someone in particular who made me dread making posts and stories.

Then I was harassed and stalked over a frankly silly disagreement by the same radicalised individual who was causing all this dread. Who? Sfarda L. Gül, currently known as @solastalgic._ on Instagram and Anarchy on Page on YouTube.

We could also refer to Sfarda as the Russo-Australian Freydís Moon. The similarities are uncanny.

The author Sfarda L. Gül is a serious case of chronically online sociopolitical activist. She's a white Russian girl posing as SWANA behind a nazar face mask, bling bling that covers her eyes and heavy eye makeup, rejecting her Russian roots since the Ukrainian invasion started. How do I know? I followed her on Instagram in early 2021 when her handle was @lacrima.mortis and she posted goth illustrations with pretty cool whimsidark vibes. She also talked about her childhood in Russia, her grandparents in a remote rural Russian area and would occasionally post illustrations related to Russian mythology/culture or Soviet history. She eventually started posing as SWANA and claiming she was a PoC after Russia started the war against Ukraine. 

Her racial and ethnic identity is still going went on a long journey: from Russian, to Tver Karelian, to Pontic Anatolian, to Laz, to Greek, to Turkic, to Anatolian Homshetsi, to Armenian, to Assyrian... So basically Pokémon SWANA/Middle East/West Asian. Some people claim Sfarda has been conveniently erasing all online traces of her past now that her goal is to cosplay races to up her sales.

Now that context has been provided, let's get down to business.

Chapter I: rift & harassment 

Before the rift, I used to care about Sfarda deeply. I considered her a dear friend until she lashed out on me for correcting her regarding modern Greek phonetics. For context, she has studied something related to the medical field & laboratory analysis [citation needed]. I have a degree in Slavic linguistics and a Masters degree in language and linguistics. What was the disagreement about? Sfarda claimed mainland modern Greek has no voiceless [s] sound as in 'toss', according to her mainland modern Greek pronounces s as sh, which is flat out wrong and I told her so on DMs. She lashed out on me and posted a couple of Instagram stories calling me a whitesplainer who whitesplained to her a language she speaks. I admit I felt hurt by her unexpected public callout, I wish she had addressed it on DMs like you'd expect from a friend. 

I thought "maybe I'm wrong?" and asked two people about the mainland modern Greek /s/ sound: someone who has studied modern Greek in university (my dad lmao) and a native Greek speaker who has received formal Greek education.

They both agreed that in mainland modern Greek, the s is pronounced [s] aka a fricative voiceless alveolar s as in 'toss'. The cherry on top: when I posted about this on my Instagram stories, a couple of people living in Greece and native Greeks DMed me to say Sfarda was speaking bullshit about the s being pronounced as sh.

Bonus cherry on top: I have spent a quarter of my childhood in Greece talking to locals and befriending Greek kids while Sfarda has never set foot in Greece. Also my real life name is Sofía, a Greek name with said voiceless [s] sound in it.

I blocked her after she posted Close Friends stories vaguing¹ me behind my back and painting me as some kind of racist know-it-all whitesplainer². 

A couple of months after this stupid argument happened, Sfarda sent me an odd DM on Pinterest that rubbed me the wrong way. 

When someone blocks you it's to prevent contact, so the mature thing to do is not to try to reach out. Trying to contact someone who blocked you is harassment and it's especially bad if you send obscure vague images instead of a clear upfront text message. She immediately ran to her stories to paint herself as the victim while claiming to feel isolated.

For those oblivious to the context behind these stories, Sfar would be perceived as someone struggling with friends that don't reciprocate her generous martyr-like efforts. And who knows... Perhaps in her head this was a harmless reach out attempt... But it's still harassment, block evasion is hostile. My reaction would've been vastly different had she sent a message such as "Hi, Vii. It's been a while. I know we didn't leave things in good terms but I hoped our next conversation would be a friendlier one" aka something that weren't a cryptic image with a hundred possible meanings.

Immediately after blocking her on Pinterest, I panicked and logged into Ko-Fi to block her there as well as I had forgotten about it. I discovered she beat me to it.

I thought this was the end of our story. Boy was I wrong... 💀

Not even 20 days later, a new Instagram account popped on one of my reels, leaving hate comments and making fun of my fanart. The account, now deleted, looked like this:

Nowadays I know it was Sfarda. She harassed me on Instagram with that sockpuppet account for a month and only stopped when I DMed the sockpuppet asking them if they were Sfarda/Lacrima Mortis (her former username). The sockpuppet account was deleted after reading my message, as the screenshots show. Notice how the sockpuppet has a pretentious pseudo-intellectual Greek sounding username.

Interesting how they deleted their account after I asked whether they were Sfarda L. Gül or not. To my friends, this was a confession: I caught Sfar and she chickened out.
Lo and behold, Sfarda has a YouTube channel where she has criticised other authors for creating sockpuppet accounts to harass former friends! 💀 THE IRONY. 

That's a comment I left under her video essay criticising the writer Cait Corrain for *ahem* creating fake accounts to harass former friends and low rate their books which is something Sfarda has also done.

Chapter II: Sfarda's feud against real PoC authors

Sfarda is known for harassing black women in the writing industry. And brown men, let's be real. In general, she seems to hate PoC when their skin is dark or they're visibly PoC unlike her, who's white and LARPing. She has called Taiwanese people "white adjacents" for being diaspora and living in Western countries... Yeah she's a Russian girl living in Australia who looks down on diaspora. 

Regarding her extensive smear campaign against the author Camilla Andrew, I will simply leave a link to the document she made public for everyone to judge. Long story short, Sfarda abused Camilla while they were friends and left humiliating insulting comments on Camilla's book draft when Sfarda was her beta reader. Later on, Camilla decided it was enough after constant aggressive vaguing and unfollowed Sfar which infuriated the SWANA beacon and made her go on a crusade against Camilla's books: Sfarda left fake reviews on Goodreads low-rating Cammie's books but she didn't stop there, she started a smear campaign against Camilla portraying her as a racist & vile black woman.

Since 2023 after a few people dared to call Sfarda out. More and more BIPOC & white authors have surfaced with testimonials of mistreatment, gaslighting, constant hostile vaguing, abuse and overall horrible experiences with Sfarda. Sfarda posted an Instagram status claiming that "the whites were after her" after I called her out on Instagram and no less than 10 people reached out to me and started speaking up. She has allegedly blamed this all on a trans man author that I connected with thanks to Sfarda. (Shout-out to Liam, he's amazing!)

Hayley Anderton, author and host of the Hauntfest event for writers, removed Sfarda from the Hauntfest 2024 edition due to Sfar's vile acts and racist behaviour against fellow authors.

Around the same time frame, Sfarda was removed from yet another indie author project listing for the exact same reasons. Because actions have consequences.

At this point people were starting to grow tired of Sfarda's unhinged behaviour and constant racism (not just anti-blackness, but also obsessive anti-whiteness) on her stories. She continuously conflates being US Western with being black while simultaneously openly shitting on people from the US. She's also claimed that black people "make everything about themselves". She only says this because she has not experienced the racism and discrimination black people experience because Sfarda is the same shade of white as me. I've had endless conversations about this with black authors and PoC artists where I've listened to their concerns about Sfarda's racist takes and blatant anti-blackness. One of those BIPOC authors pointed out how:

“It's also worth noting that Sfar's advocacy for the black folks in the "global south" is performative. I can't count how many times I've seen people like her who claim to be leftist/progressive suddenly turn on BIPOC individuals for not agreeing with their opinions or politics. It's the new white man's burden/savior complex.” A. W.

There's also a significant amount of classist and xenophobic takes that Sfarda shares daily in her stories targeting the Anglosphere aka people in the US, UK, Canada or Australia. She's openly mocked English speakers by implying they're intellectually inferior just for their Anglo background:

“No wonder the Anglosphere is so dumb it can't even speak its own language.” Sfarda L. Gül.

She will also go to great lengths to appropriate people's pain in order to make the situation about herself; she's also an alleged race faker. However, that's a different story that speaks more about her personality than it does about her mud-slinging and abuse. Still exhausting. She may post stories claiming this is slander or defamation. People are free to read all the documented evidence and reach out to the multiple people affected by Sfarda. Who's telling the truth and who's lying? Are fifteen people from different backgrounds and communities who didn't know each other before Sfarda orchestrating a witch hunt like Sfarda pretends to portray?

All in all, both her violent unstable personality and the abusive acts she's inflicted on me and my artist friends made me consider deleting Instagram for good. After reflecting on my experience with chronic online harassment and the toll it took on my well-being, leaving Instagram sounded like the best option. The pros outweigh the cons. Sure, I didn't straight up delete my account but I did uninstall the app and stopped worrying about it.

If you're wondering, I feel much better. Deleting Instagram was a fantastic idea, not only to dodge pesty individuals, but also to cut such a censor-prone community out of my life. I will probably install it again to post a reminder here and there with links to my discord and website, but it will be a quick thing to let people know I'm not dead. My intention when posting this on my art blog was to bring attention to how relentless harassment will be detrimental to your mental health & creativity; to show how it's important to stand up for yourself and walk away from toxic people if you have the chance. Luckily on social media it's pretty easy, you're free to block those who harm you or your loved ones. Hopefully this also serves a greater purpose and can help those who are struggling with Sfarda see they're not alone.

Thanks for reading. Stay safe, remember to stand up for your friends and never be afraid of calling out harmful people!

¹ vaguing refers to the act of referencing someone without explicitly mentioning their name/username with the intent to criticise, mud-sling, bad-mouth, gossip or shit talk with low risk of being confronted about it.

² interestingly enough, back when we were friends Sfarda told me she considered me non-white/ethnic because I'm half Euskalduna (Basque), half Celtic Berzian (from a remote region very close to Galicia). I'm very obviously white but I still wanted to point out how Sfarda's obsession with blood quantum only favours you when she likes you. If you fall out of favour with her, you'll be downgraded to whitey (or white adjacent if you, unfortunately for Sfarda, are a PoC).

Bonus meme because comedy is the best tool to criticise insane blood quantum & racial obsessions.