Thread by @danikaharrod

After seeing Aaron’s “I’m thankful for” thread, I have been feeling like I need to speak up more. I am really exhausted but this is SO IMPORTANT!

Lulu and I (and others) suffered workplace abuse, sexism, misogyny and more at Wonderstorm. We were never taken seriously.

Myself, Lulu, and others there brought our concerns not only to Aaron directly but to Aaron in a group setting with other execs, to execs individually, and to each other privately. This was not a rare occasion, this was happening all the time.

People have been saying that Lulu and I didn’t need our opinions on the show heard because we weren’t writers. Lulu did more work on that show than people could possibly understand, and the community was my job and life the entire time I was there.

Being able to be part of the writing process even in as minimal of a way as being present for brainstorming sessions and able to provide feedback (which was asked of me and others within the company often), would have been incredible if Aaron genuinely wanted our feedback.

But more often than not he only invited me into the writer’s room to agree with ideas he was putting forward, not only about the show, but about the marketing, which WAS my job. If I ever agreed with him I was either completely shut down or had sarcasm thrown at me.

People do not understand that the end of 2018 and up until I left (and then Lulu) things were hellish. Does Wonderstorm have an amazing writing team? YES. Are the VAs, animators, and others who played a part in TDP amazing? YES. Aaron and the other men at the top ARE NOT.

I cannot stress enough how often people are treated terribly in the work place and no matter what they try to do NOTHING works. We fought for things to improve despite the fear of losing our jobs. We are still fighting.

Aaron never took us seriously whether it be about concerns for the show, concerns for marketing the show, concerns for our treatment and treatment of others internally, or anything else that made him out to be less than perfect, and he does not take us seriously now.

Aaron has made it 100% clear that no matter how loud we are, no matter how big of a risk we have taken in stepping forward, he feels he did nothing wrong. I have no reason to believe he has or will ever change and I truly believe he should never be in a position of power again.

I want to reiterate how thankful I am for the TDP community and how proud I feel to see people come together for positive change. Aaron denying things, tweeting as if nothing happened, and blocking people holding him accountable only makes me want to be louder.

There are so many industries so negatively affected by men at the top who treat their marginalized employees like trash. Aaron fired two people then immediately trash talked them, he trash talked Mike and Bryan from Avatar. This is how he manipulates and gets ahead!

Men like him cannot be at the top running things. I said before I left he should not be managing and he needs someone above him. We’ve been fighting this fight for a long time, I promise.

Aaron will never take responsibility and if he does now, he’d be lying.

Sorry for this super long thread and thanks again for all the support people have given us. Trying to handle this internally at Wonderstorm never went anywhere, ever, and I am still so overwhelmed with the outpouring of support we’ve seen here. Thank you.

MEANT TO SAY DISAGREED HERE****

I also want to bring up one example of shutting down LGBT+ voices despite him needing to hear them, now that season 3 is out.

If you’ve seen the show, you know that episode 3 of season 3 is wonderful for a lot of reasons. Devon and Iain wrote that episode and it’s beautiful.

If you remember some of the final season of Voltron’s marketing, you’ll remember that some of the assets of the Netflix platform had Shiro’s previous husband who appeared in a flashback episode on those assets, one even had a rainbow on it. It made no sense and was exploitative.

I brought that up multiple times because it made even me, someone who’s never watched Voltron, upset.

When we got early drawings back and had to choose which ones we’d send to Netflix to use, Aaron REALLY wanted to use Runaan and Ethari, he fought me on it.

I told him how exploitative that was, especially because he’d seen community response to the Voltron Adam marketing. He KNEW. Instead of listening to me and asking me questions, he presented it to the rest of the room as “Aren’t we PROUD of this episode?! We should show it!”

After I left the room he approached my desk and said, “So what, Danika? No gay? Hahahah” and laughed at me as if I’d overreacted for feeling terrible about the idea of using Runaan and Ethari as public marketing materials. This is one specific example. There are many more.

This isn’t a joke to us it is real life and it’s fucking scary, and the idea of more women going to work for him is fucking scary.

This wasn’t a one time thing, he’d present us hypothetical questions about lgbt+ rep as if he cared when all he wanted to do was argue for himself.

It sucked and it’s the entire reason I started therapy AND got on SSRIs back in January (both of which I’m super thankful for). This really messed us up, please, please take it seriously. Thank you.