The remaining queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 17 confirm that Arrietty‘s lipstick mirror message solidified her as the villain of the season, but they are ready to forgive and move on, and that includes the recipient of the mean-spirited note herself, Onya Nurve.

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly in Las Vegas, where the top six contestants are in town celebrating the 1,000th performance of RuPaul’s Drag Race Live on Saturday, Jewels Sparkles says she didn’t fully process the eliminated queen’s message when she was tasked with reading it at the start of Friday’s episode. “I literally read it and you can kind of see I turned around and everyone’s face was kind of in shock, and I was like, ‘Wait, what does it say?'” she recalls. “Then I had to read it again and I was like, ‘Oh.’ I was just so out of it. I wasn’t really present, so it didn’t click.”

The message left on the mirror in the previous episode by Seattle’s fashion elf read, “As one smelly bitch to another, Onya, please brush your teeth.” What viewers didn’t learn until the the following episode was that the goodbye message referenced a dental condition that Onya had only spoken about off camera because it was such an insecurity for her.

“Is this real?” Lana Ja’Rae recalls of seeing the message, acknowledging that she didn’t think Onya had opened up to Arrietty about her issue. “I didn’t know that they talked that closely that she would tell her that information. Also, I was like, ‘Why would you write that? Why would you make your last moment on Drag Race negatively about somebody else?'”

“That’s just not a good way to go out,” she continues. “It was very sad. I know Arrietty is a sweetheart, and there’s so much more to her drag and her art, but showing that side of her just further confirms that she’s the villain that everybody thinks she is, because I just didn’t like it. I think she thought it was a joke. But some jokes, as we know from the girls, are not funny. That wasn’t funny.”

“It was a belittling moment,” Lexi Love observes. “I don’t think any of us had belittled each other yet. I didn’t feel anybody had disrespected each other. We had all challenged each other. We had all accused each other of stuff, but none of us had actually attacked our insecurities.”

However, the queens say it should not be a defining moment for Arrietty — or one that fans send her hate over.

“I don’t want anyone to think that it was intentional to hurt Onya,” Lana insists. “Because I feel like she genuinely thought she was having a Kiki moment with her.”

For her part, Onya says she “forgave Arrietty right after the incident happened” even before they had a chance to discuss it after filming, but she says seeing it still stung. “Watching it on the show, I had to relive what I felt in real time, and it wasn’t fun,” she admits.

“But the good thing about it is the fans had my back recently,” she says, sharing that viewers have sent her “well over a thousand dollars” since the incident. “So when bad things happen, good things are right around the corner. I forgive Arrietty. She’s a friend and, more importantly, a sister. And life moves on.”

Onya knows firsthand what it’s like to be on the other end of fan reaction after facing some heat herself after two previous indiscretions during design challenges. “The only thing that I was thinking about is, she’s going to have to experience what I experienced, but times probably a hundred,” she recalls, knowing what Arrietty had stepped into. “So I did nothing but feel bad for what I knew she was going to go through, because what I went through is probably just a fraction of the reaction she’s going to get for that incident.”

But the queen jokes that being involved in yet more drama was almost the straw that broke the camel’s back for her, saying, “When that incident with me and Arrietty happened, I literally was like, ‘If another motherf—ing thing happens to me on this motherf—ing show, I’m going to walk myself out the door!'”

The 1,000th show of RuPaul’s Drag Race Live at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas broadcasts live Saturday at 9:30 p.m. PT on WOW Presents Plus, and will be available to stream on the platform after.