PicoBlog

Who the hell is Freydís Moon?

Freydís Moon (they/él/ella) is a bestselling, award-winning author, diviner, and creator with an affinity for quirky, speculative storytelling. A lover of culture, mysticism, history, and language, they constantly find themself lost in a book, trying their hand at a new recipe, or planning a trip to a faraway place.

-Goodreads.com as of 4/21/2024

Just a few days ago, Freydís Moon was a Latinx nonbinary author in the indie book scene who focused on queer eroticism spun with what was thought to be serious and emotional inspection of the author’s diaspora Latin American heritage. Their books were (allegedly) written beautifully and almost every review on GoodReads or BookTok (Book TikTok) is littered with effusive praise of not just the writing style but the intense emotions the literature evoked in Latinx readers who could feel a deep connection with the cultural allusions therein.

On April 20th 2024, every brick in this facade came tumbling down to the ground.

Though there had been some rumblings of the earth beneath Freydís‘ feet before, most notably in 2021 when they were mentioned in several tweets as being suspected of having been a fraud, the final blow took several more years to come and when it did, it was devastating. Twitter user porterotica laid out in a series of tweets and a Google document “evidence that shows a direct link between Freydís Moon and Taylor Barton/Taylor Brooke/Jupiter Wyse.” But for those who looked up to Moon and were sometimes even coached by them or given advice in publishing by them, many of these names were completely unfamiliar. Who was Taylor Barton?

According to an article on FanFicable, Taylor Barton was a transgender author in the Science Fiction/Fantasy community who used multiple different pen names, most a variation of their first and middle names, to publish within that sphere. Though it seems to be incredibly difficult to acquire screenshots of Taylor’s alleged toxicity, manipulations, and abuse, they were accused of and apologized for several instances of racism in 2020, and several of their alleged victims are still on Twitter chatting about their negative experiences. After Taylor’s career was affected by their statements on Twitter and their past indiscretions, they decided to invent a new person named Jupiter Wyse. In this chapter of Taylor’s saga, Wyse was not exactly…wise. There were too many hints that Jupiter and Taylor were, in fact, the same person from their star signs to the backgrounds for their instagram photos. What did Jupiter have that Taylor didn’t?

Brown skin. To Taylor, it was obvious: if you don’t want to be called racist and if you want to have an instrument to take down your detractors, all you need is brown skin. In some kind of twisted logic (in some cases this actually functions which is a rather horrid indictment of some Leftist spaces) Taylor determined that if they were not white and were instead brown they could use that status as both a weapon and a shield. Avoiding pictures of themselves, they hid behind brown-skinned picrews (for the uninitiated, a picrew is a type of avatar-builder) and made tweets suggesting that they were of Latinx descent and part of the Latinx Diaspora. They went so far as to pitch in a Latinx Pitch Day event on Twitter and were relatively successful in doing so and, even more egregiously, had been collaborating with a genuine Latinx author on a book about immigration and Latin culture. This castle, built upon sand, predictably crumbled. Sloppily executed and ill-advised, Wyse was washed away by the sea of those who were on the look out for Taylor and found them in all the small things that were just a little off about Jupiter Wyse.

Confidence Men Them, nevertheless, only learn from their failures. They keep what they believe worked and lose what they believe did not and then…well…the grift goes on. An account on Twitter called AlertsBarton which was made specifically to point to suspicious accounts that may have links to Taylor Barton made a hit in September of 2021, pointing to talented and outspoken Latinx author Freydís Moon. In their thread, they point out that Freydís’ birthday month did not line up with their claimed sun sign, balloons on their Twitter rising up to be popped on the 20th of August which would have made them a Leo, not a Pisces. When Freydís shot back at this observation that they identify more with their moon sign than their sun sign, the AlertsBarton account countered again that their moon sign was not Pisces either—it would have been Capricorn. Now, this by itself does not seem like much but Taylor was also born in August of 1991 and was previously caught masquerading as a Latinx author and even actual people with their real names attached to their account such as Anna Zabo were voicing suspicions. Back in 2021, user rmvirtues (who has also been in other booktwt dust ups) criticized the account for leveling accusations against Moon, suggesting that lives could be ruined over allegations such as these and inadvertently played directly into Taylor’s prediction that their perceived race would act as a passive boon, causing other POC to immediately jump to their defense. However, it seems that should someone have investigated earlier, quite a few hearts could have remained unbroken by the inevitable reveal. Naturally, rmvirtues recently retweeted a tweet by sdreidwrites which stated: “I hate that people are being like ‘Oooh book drama!!’ like it’s juicy entertainment when this is actually people’s lives and trust that have been broken, what’s wrong with you”

Most of what makes this so interesting, especially to white onlookers is that especially in Leftist spaces, there is no open and explicit white solidarity in which folks will immediately jump in to protect each other. It does happen, of course, but there is no “white community” (why would there be? they’re literally everywhere) and people in leftist spaces aren’t generally going in and claiming “anti-whiteness” as a point of contention because, well, even if there was anti-whiteness, who would care? Taylor picked up on this, deciding that it was more beneficial to be a part of a marginalized community within the indie publishing sphere than to be white. Due only to their talent for writing and their incredible ability to lie successfully and use social justice language to bully detractors in order to undermine any investigations, Moon got away with it…until now. Until porterotica, who was in a Discord server with them read a snippet of a “new” work they had shared and suddenly remembered it from somewhere.

porterotica’s suspicions sent them down a rabbit hole wherein they found that documents that had been shared with them by Freydís were shockingly similar to those which had been shared with them by a person who had been close to Taylor’s previous alias, Jupiter Wyse. Peering even further in, into places the layman may not even care to go, porterotica opened the metadata both on the Jupiter Wyse files and the Freydís Moon files to find that the metadata had recorded the author of every file as Taylor Brooke, a well-known alias of Taylor Barton. As the metadata has acted as a smoking gun, porterotica has stated that “there are simply too many coincidences” for them to believe that their friend has no connection to Taylor Barton.

So what’s the take-away from this? All these people who have supported Freydís Moon in their career, been given advice and have given in return, who have found themselves deeply entrenched in the completely fake life of this completely fake person are sent reeling into a sense of ultimate betrayal. The ramifications for marginalized communities could be great—a general mistrust of each other, a possible heightened suspicion within a community, and worst of all: the knowledge that their own identity politicking was successfully utilized as a weapon that harmed their own community worse than it harmed anyone else. The truest victims of Freydís Moon are the Latinx readers/writers/etc. in the indie writing spaces who are left with the fallout and confusion of a great pretender. It used to be that it was easier to exist in spaces if one could pass as white but there are some places where now the opposite seems to be true and the results of this are events we’ve yet to grapple with to mitigate successfully. Where does the Latinx community go from here? Can they do the difficult thing and remain steadfast with a sense of love and open hearts toward authors who claim to be Latinx Diaspora? Or is this to mark the beginning of a subtle shift toward seclusion?

To those who have thought to do something similar in the past: you will be discovered. It will not be worth it. You will fail. And when you do, you harm far more than just yourself. This is an act of racism.

To finish off, a non-exhaustive list of Taylor Barton’s aliases:

If Taylor happens to read this: Honey get better hobbies.

ncG1vNJzZmiZpJ7BorPAoqVnq6WXwLWtwqRlnKedZL1ws86om6ehl53BbrLRnrCdoaNiurC7zQ%3D%3D