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Look at any social media discussion of the most overrated books, or critically acclaimed books that people hated, or the worst books that have become popular in the last ten years, or any similar topic, and there's one book you're very likely to see: Hanya Yanagihara's 2015 novel A Little Life. Google Yanagihara's name, scroll past her Wikipedia page and Instagram, and the first thing you'll see is an article comparing her novels to poorly written Wattpad fanfiction. The 2023 Pulitzer Prize in criticism went to the author of an extremely harsh negative review of A Little Life. It has an average of 4.3 on Goodreads, but 4 of the top 5 most popular reviews there are one star, with one of them literally starting with the words "Fuck this book". The internet is full of absolutely scathing reviews of A Little Life, from professional critics and random social media users alike.

And yet when it initially released in 2015, A Little Life was massively acclaimed by both audiences and reviewers, with various critics calling it "the great gay novel", "the most beautiful, profoundly moving novel I've ever read", and "an epic study of trauma and friendship, written with such intelligence and depth of perception that it will be one of the benchmarks against which all other novels that broach those subjects (and they are legion) will be measured". Review aggregator Book Marks lists 34 "rave" reviews, 9 positive ones, and only 3 mixed and 3 negative. On top of this, it was a massive bestseller, won the Kirkus Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award. So what happened to make this critically acclaimed Great Work of Literature into such a widely criticized, highly controversial topic?

So What's it Actually About?

A Little Life was written after the release of Yanagihara's first novel, The People in the Trees, a critically acclaimed but relatively obscure novel about a fictional scientist based on Nobel Prize winner and convicted child molester Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. The theme of child molestation is one that continued heavily in A Little Life, so if that's something you'd rather not read about (or if you just don't want spoilers), maybe skip this plot summary. (Just as a note, I haven't actually read the book, and this is just based on various other plot summaries online. So if I got any of the details wrong, let me know.)

A Little Life is about Jude St. Francis, a disabled lawyer traumatized by his horrible childhood. He is surrounded by a circle of incredibly understanding and loyal friends: Willem, Malcolm, JB, and his adoptive parents Harold and Julia, none of whom he is initially willing to confide in. Much of the novel consists of Jude self-harming, being traumatized by his past, and gradually revealing the events of his childhood. And they are very grim.

You see, Jude was raised in an orphanage run by priests, who were all pedophiles and sexually abused him. One of the priests helped him escape, then sold him to pedophiles who sexually abused him. He was eventually rescued by the police, who sent him to state care, which was run by pedophiles who sexually abused him. He eventually ran away and was taken in by a psychiatrist who turned out to be a pedophile and sexually abused him. And also ran him over with a car.

Despite the love and support of his friends, Jude's adult life is also absolutely miserable. JB becomes addicted to meth and mocks Jude's limp, ruining their friendship permanently despite his many apologies. Jude dates a cruel, abusive man named Caleb who sexually abuses him, beats him nearly to death, and mocks him for using a wheelchair. After this, Jude ends up in a happy romantic-but-not-sexual relationship with Willem, but then needs to have both legs amputated. Then Willem and Malcolm are both killed by a drunk driver and Jude kills himself.

A Slathering-On of Drama

Most of the initial reviews, as I've already mentioned, were highly positive, but one that definitely wasn't was Daniel Mendelsohn's review in the New York Review of Books, the oddly-titled A Striptease Among Pals. It foreshadowed a lot of the criticisms that would later be widespread: the lack of character development, the carefully diverse but boring cast of token minorities, and most of all the general distastefulness of a book that centers around a gay man suffering for no real artistic or literary reason, an "unending parade of aesthetically gratuitous scenes of punitive and humiliating violence". He also suggested that the target market for the book were college students without the life experience to see how absurd it was, and who see themselves "not as agents in life but as potential victims".

This led to an angry response from the book's editor, Gerald Howard, who said that he had heard from many "readers of, ahem, mature years" who loved A Little Life and that college students were too broke to afford a $30 novel anyway. Which, y'know, he's not wrong. He referred to Mendelsohn's review as "an invidious distinction unworthy of a critic of his usually fine discernment", which he claimed was upset less with the book itself and more with the idea that the wrong people would enjoy it. This led to another response from Mendelsohn, in which he quoted Howard as having criticized the novel during the editing process for many of the same things Mendelsohn had talked about in his review, and referred to the book's style as a "slathering-on of trauma...a crude and inartistic way of wringing emotion from the reader".

That was where things stood for about six years, with A Little Life's reputation still enthusiastically positive outside of some drama around the few negative reviews. In 2019, it was included in The Guardian's list of the 100 greatest books of the 21st century. But in late 2021, another notable negative article was published: Parul Sehgal's "The Case Against the Trauma Plot". This wasn't specifically about A Little Life, but rather about the tendency for modern fiction to focus on its characters' trauma above all else, treating them less as people with their own intrinsic personalities and more as blank slates whose character traits are determined only by their tragic backstories, with books and films populated exclusively with "Marvel superheroes brooding brawnily over daddy issues".

But her example of the ultimate trauma plot, with all the associated tropes dialed up to 11, was A Little Life, starring "one of the most accursed characters to ever darken a page". She refers to him as "this walking chalk outline, this vivified DSM entry", whose trauma "trumps all other identities, evacuates personality, remakes it in its own image". But Sehgal's criticism would look downright complimentary compared to the next negative review that came out.

Childlike in its Brutality

Andrea Long Chu's Pulitzer-winning article on Yanagihara's books--at least partially a review of her then-new novel To Paradise, but focusing more on A Little Life--is one of the most entertaining negative reviews I've ever read. I highly recommend reading through the whole thing, but I'll go through it anyway.

By the time you finish reading A Little Life, you will have spent a whole book waiting for a man to kill himself.

This is the opening line, and it's one of the less critical parts. Yanagihara herself is "a sinister kind of caretaker, poisoning her characters in order to nurse them lovingly back to health", a writing style close to "Munchausen by proxy" with a view of love that is "childlike in its brutality". Chu quotes widely from Yanagihara's writing for fashion magazine T, in which she writes about her trips through Asia, her love of fine jewelry, and exactly the sort of fancy food that the characters in A Little Life constantly eat: "from duck à l’orange to escarole salad with pears and jamón, followed by pine-nut tart, tarte Tatin, and a homemade ten-nut cake Yanagihara later described as a cross between Danish rugbrød and a Japanese milk bread she once ordered at a Tokyo bakery".

In fact, as Chu points out, parts of A Little Life, such as

“[He] turned down an alley that was crowded with stall after stall of small, improvised restaurants, just a woman standing behind a kettle roiling with soup or oil, and four or five plastic stools … [He] let a man cycle past him, the basket strapped to the back of his seat loaded with spears of baguettes … and then headed down another alley, this one busy with vendors crouched over more bundles of herbs, and black hills of mangosteens, and metal trays of silvery-pink fish, so fresh he could hear them gulping.”

are a slightly rephrased version of the articles Yanagihara wrote about her own vacations for a fashion magazine:

“You’ll see all the little tableaux … that make Hanoi the place it is: dozens of pho stands, with their big cauldrons of simmering broth … bicyclists pedaling by with basketfuls of fresh-baked bread; and, especially, those little street restaurants with their low tables and domino-shaped stools … [The next day] you’ll pass hundreds of stalls selling everything for the Vietnamese table, from mung bean noodles to homemade fish paste to Kaffir limes, as well as vendors crouched over hubcap-size baskets of mangoes, silkworms, and fish so fresh they’re still gulping for air.”

As Chu puts it, "Luxury is simply the backdrop for Jude’s extraordinary suffering, neither cause nor effect; if anything, the latter lends poignancy to the former. This was Yanagihara’s first discovery, the one that cracked open the cobbled streets of Soho and let something terrible slither out — the idea that misery bestows a kind of dignity that wealth and leisure, no matter how sharply rendered on the page, simply cannot."

"The first time he cuts himself, you are horrified; the 600th time, you wish he would aim."

Chu's essay also talks about To Paradise, Yanagihara's more recent novel, an odd set of three mostly unrelated narratives set in an alternate-history 1893, a realistic story in 1993, and a sci-fi story in 2093, in which, "in a desultory bid to sew the three parts together, Yanagihara has given multiple characters the same name, without their being biologically or, indeed, meaningfully related." In the third part of the book, centering around a deadly virus in a totalitarian fascist future, Yanagihara is able to depict "pure suffering, undiluted by politics or psychology, by history or language or even sex. Free of meaning, it may more perfectly serve the author’s higher purpose."

Unlike the mostly beloved A Little Life, To Paradise received generally mixed-to-negative reviews, and although there were some highly positive ones, Chu's criticisms matched to what a lot of other reviewers were saying. One aspect of the book that was especially poorly received was the odd decision to set part of it in an alternate-history 1800s in which everything is essentially the same except that gay marriage is legal, with no real reason or explanation for why except that she wanted to write a story set in 1893 but still feature sad gay men as the protagonists.

And Yanagihara's obsession with writing sad stories where miserable things happen to the protagonists, who are almost always gay men, is another aspect of her work that Chu, and many later critics, have focused on. A common thread in criticisms of A Little Life written in the last few years is that it basically reads like fetishistic hurt/comfort fanfiction; as Chu puts it, Yanagihara's portrayal of Jude and other gay men revolves around "exaggerating their vulnerability to humiliation and physical attack", then "cradling him in her cocktail-party asides and winding digressions, keeping him alive for a stunning 800 pages". (There are rumors that Yanagihara wrote omegaverse fanfics before becoming a published author, but they really are just rumors with no evidence that I could find.)

And that's essentially where the book's reputation stands. It remains extremely popular, especially on TikTok, but at this point, it's far more common to tear it apart in any review than it is to praise it, and even positive discussions inevitably have to comment on the massive shift in its reception. What's interesting is that nothing about the book itself has changed, and despite the various dramas around it (along with what I mentioned here, Yanagihara has made some questionable-at-best comments about therapy) there was no single, massive scandal that suddenly caused it to become hated. Did the general public just wise up about what was always a terrible book? Did the early reviewers who loved it just all happen to have terrible taste? Did it only ever appeal to a small audience, and so others who were only exposed to it because it exploded in popularity hated it? Did popular culture just change to the point where this kind of grimdark realism became more laughable than horrifying? It's hard to say.

And although this whole writeup probably makes it sound like I hate this book, I really don't. Reading about it to make this writeup, and especially reading the various quotes from it that I happened to find, made me genuinely interested in it to a degree that I wasn't before (though, admittedly, probably not enough to actually read it). Although I do find the negative reviews entertaining and pretty convincing, they've also made me kind of want to see what the book is actually like. I think it's quite possible--and it would be very interesting if this did happen--that in another five or ten years its reputation will change back to the opposite extreme, from the Worst Book Ever to an unfairly maligned masterpiece, torn down by oversensitive readers who demand that all stories be happy and cute and by snarky edgelords only interested in giving the harshest, most negative reviews possible. I'm curious what any of you who've read the book thought, especially people who actually liked it.

There's a bit of drama that is just wrapping up in the world of Roller Coasters, but this will feel like a hobby history post while I set the stage.

##1880 to 1960: The First Roller Coasters

In the early history of amusement parks, while roller coasters were a popular and common inclusion, they were rarely ever the star attractions that drew crowds. Coney Island style parks billed themselves around more carnival-like attractions, like light shows, live animals, and circus performers. Also common were Trolley Parks, usually owned by local trolley companies to create business on the weekends, that commonly featured gardens, dance halls, and live music in addition to their assortment of rides. The few coasters that did gain attention usually did so with a reputation for shody construction, uncomfortable rides, and unsafe operation rather than any positive metric. (A prime example of this is the Flip Flap Railway from 1888, whose first-ever vertical loop caused more whiplash than cheers. At a whopping 12gs, that's four times more forceful than a space shuttle launch.) This was the state of amusement parks up until the opening of DisneyLand in 1953, which focused heavily on putting the "theme" in the newly coined "theme park". However, one of the construction companies involved in the construction of DisneyLand would go on to have a different, but equally monumental impact on American amusement.

##1960 to 2005: Arrow Dynamics and the Coaster Wars

While designing the Matterhorn at Disney Land, rides manufacturer Arrow Dynamics had an idea. If you heat a steel tube you can bend it evenly around a turn with mathematical precision. This precision, combined with new insights into [how not to break someone's neck going through a vertical loop[(https://twistedsifter.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Why-roller-coaster-loops-arent-circular.jpg?w=1024), radically increased the safety, smoothness, and reliability of roller coasters. To this day, while wooden roller coasters remain popular for their rumble and jank, steel coasters remain much more versatile in height, speed, and complexity. The current record for number of inversions (the part where you go upside down) on a steel coaster is The Smiler at Alton Towers at 14. As of 2024 the most number of inversions on a wooden coaster is 3, found on Outlaw Run at Silver Dollar City. Both The Smiler and Outlaw Run were huge deals when they first opened. The Smiler even got its own themed hotel room. Throughout the last few decades, even non-record-breaking coasters are considered the major draw to a number of amusement parks around the country. So what changed?

In 1989, Arrow Dynamics designed and built Magnum XL200 at Cedar Point. At 205ft tall, and 72 miles per hour, it was the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world at the time. Marketers coined the term "Hypercoaster" for coasters over 200ft tall, and for the next 5 years Magnum XL200 was the only Hypercoaster in the world. Cedar Point set record attendance numbers in 1989. Park execs and guests the world over had one question: Holy SHIT how can I get one of those?

Arrow Dynamics was more than happy to oblige. Steel Phantom at Kennywood got up to 80mph with the help of dramatic landscape and The Big One at Blackpool Pleasure Beach creeped up the height record to 213ft. Soon, though, other roller coaster companies (with better math) also started to push what coasters could do. In 1997 Swiss manufacturer Intamin would hold the height record on a technicality with the 416ft tall Superman: the Escape, which would use electromagnets to launch a coaster car up a vertical tower at 100mph....and then let it fall back down again. Many coaster records list "complete circuits" separately, as Superman:The Escape famously doesn't actually reach the full height. (The title of the linked post is what we call "subtle foreshadowing"). Major franchise rivalries also added fuel to the fire, in the US between Cedar Fair (headlined by Cedar Point) and Six Flags, and between Fuji-Q Highlands and Nagashima Spa Land in Japan. Each of these park companies would hold the height record at one point or another between 1995 and 2000, which when you consider that building a coaster can be as complicated and time consuming as making a movie, really shows you the speed at which the competition was going. Another important benchmark along the way was Millenium Force, built at Ceader Point in 2000 by Intamin. Coming in at 310ft tall for a full circut, Millenium Force was given extra attention with the invention of the phrase "Gigacoaster" for coasters over 300ft tall. Tall enough that normal chain lifts wouldn't be able to support their own weight and maintenance takes an elevator to the top of the lift hill. This record would last all of 3 years before it was beaten by another coaster in the same park, Top Thrill Dragster. With an Intamin-designed hydraulic launch, Dragster captured the overall height record at 420ft while also allowing guests down the other side of the tower. Marketing once again tripped over themselves to invent new words, this time calling it a "Stratocoaster". Now roller coasters are expensive [citation needed], and while the bump in attention was still strong, that bump would only last until someone else took the crown. And with Dragster only holding the crown for 2 years, and the designs getting more and more ridiculous to make records possible, most companies were running out of steam by 2005. However, Six Flags bet their future on one last giant green middle finger.

##2005 to 2020: The Reign of Kingda Ka

456ft, 128mph

Opened at Six Flags Great Adventure in 2005

Basically the same layout as Top Thrill Dragster

Six Flags files for bankruptcy in 2009

Needless to say the game did not pay off financially, but hey, the thing was built. The coaster wars are over and Kingda Ka won. Cedar Fair never tries to top it, and instead pivots for smaller, cheaper, more forceful experiences. Maverick opened in 2007 to much critical acclaim (and my personal preference), and much of the excitement around roller coasters since then focused around Rocky Mountain Construction's Hybrid Re-designs. The height and speed records were neglected, but never forgotten. Kingda Ka remained a pilgrimage in the community, a bucket list item to some, an initiation of sorts to others. People would tag their posts with "The King" and we would all know what they were talking about. The years pass, and the giants age. A few latecomers to the party include Red Force at Ferrari Land in Spain, but at 315ft it's viewed more of a younger sibling then a claimant to the throne. Time was rolling on as normal in the traditional "1st world" areas of the world.

Now, quick side tangent, but if you know anything about land development in the UAE you may be aware that in the Middle East are some very rich people that like to prop up their very big egos with very big, very expensive feats of engineering that in all fairness look very cool if you don't look into the labor conditions.

##HOLY SHIT

What the FUCK is that?

540ft?!?!

The roller coaster community is floored. Flabbergasted. Perhaps a little in denial. Falcon's Flight isn't real, Falcon's Flight can't hurt you.

Falcon's Flight will probably be down for maintenance a lot....wait what? And what's that about "Intamin Hydraulic Moment"?

##The Kings Are Dead

Around the same time as the announcement of Falcon's Flight, more and more reports were coming out of old Intamin-built launch systems having trouble. After 15 years they were having trouble getting up to speed reliably, and each failed launch would result in the train rolling back down the launch and potentially damaging parts of the system. A very complicated system that was already showing its age. Top Thrill Dragster went first. After some lengthy downtime, a rear spike was added and the hydraulics swapped out for a slower magnetic launch. "Rollbacks" were now a feature as trains were sent back and forth in a U-shape until they could clear the top. Less acceleration -> less stress -> less maintenance. The conversion was done by Zamperla, a company with plenty of experience in flat rides and a history of making the worst coasters ever. So far, the transition has been rough. After a brief opening day in 2023, TTD2 has been closed for the entirety of 2024, and while everyone is hopeful for 2025, there is no clear sign as to whether it will be possible. The technical term for this painful limbo is "Standing but Not Operating", which is like calling someone in crutches "Standing but Not Walking".

Earlier this November, we got more bad news. Kingda Ka is closed, permanently. The King is dead. Mourning had began from the moment we started getting rumors, and continued in a number of remembrance posts, from fans and companies alike. And the record for tallest operating roller coaster got rolled all the way back.....to 2017. Hilariously, Superman: The Escape was also down for maintenance when the news broke, so the record briefly passed to the little brother, Ferrari Land's Red Force. Superman will reopen before 2025, though, and with Falcon's Flight not finishing construction until next year, it will regain its title for the first time in over 20 years. The old magnetic launch system being ever so slightly more reliable than the hydraulic launches, there are no plans to demolish Superman anytime soon despite regular long stretches of repairs.

And that's where things stand today. A special thank you to u/Then_Hurry9200 for his very old post that helped me keep the timeline straight. Any information not already sourced comes from the various wikipiedia pages for the rides mentioned. For those interested in further information, r/rollercoasters is the main "thoosie" hub in Reddit, and channels such as ElToroRyan on Youtube are good for more in-depth analysis on rides and news.

You've probably heard of the incident before. At the 2009 VMA's,19yo Taylor Swift wins the "Best female video" award for "You Belong With Me", she takes the stage ready to celebrate her first VMA win when a wasted Kanye West stumbles on stage to let everyone know that Beyonce should have won before walking off, robbing Taylor of her moment.

What you might not know about is how this feud continued to develop from that moment on and how for the last 15 years both Kanye and Taylor have kept the flame alive and made sure everyone knows they will never get over that moment.

Background:

On November 11th, 2008 Taylor released her sophomore album "Fearless", which would skyrocket her to fame after the album debuted at #1 on multiple charts, including the hot 100 and sprung 2 of the biggest hits of her career in the form of "Love story" and "You belong with me".

Meanwhile, 13 days later on the 24th, Kanye released his 4th studio album "808s & Heartbreak", his first release since the passing of his mother and the end of his engagement that saw him experimenting with a new sound with which he continued his careers upward tragetory.

A month later we see the first public interaction (for lack of a better word) between the two, when Taylor spoke about her desire to work with Kanye during an interview with allure magazine:

I had this dream that Kanye West called me and said "I wanna rap one of your songs". Then i woke up and was really mad that it was just a dream (source)

The 2009 VMA's:

On the night of the 2009 VMA's, Taylor showed up to the award ceremony looking straight off a disney princess movie in a carriage, while Kanye showed up late with a half empty bottle of Hennessy.

Later in the night, the "Best female video" category was called and Taylor won her first VMA over Pink, Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, Lady Gaga and Beyonce. As she started to make her speech the mic was snatched from her hand by Kanye:

“Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish. But Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!” (source)

He said before giving the mic back and getting off stage as the camera panned to a booing crowd and a surprised Beyonce before cutting to comercial.

Immediatly after, the producers had to scramble to figure out how to move foward with the night as Kanye and Beyonce were still nominated for a number of awards that had not yet been called and Taylor was expected to perform live from Times Square.

Dave Sirulnick, one of the producers of the show, had a heated discution with Kanye in which he asked him to leave the building, meanwhile, Van Toffler, then president of Viacom, went after Taylor and her mother, both of whom were crying, to apologize and promise that they were going to make things right for her to prevent her from leaving before her performance.

After that Van went to talk to Beyonce, who was also crying to her father, and in order to stop her from leaving, let her know that she was going to win the "Video of the year" award and "wouldn’t it be nice to have Taylor come up and have her moment then?". And so it happened (source)

Taylor performed "You belong with me" and soon there after, Beyonce won the big award of the night and asked her to come up on stage and finish her speech (source)

At the end of the show, while talking to the press, Taylor said of the incident:

I was standing on stage and I was really excited because I'd just won the award and then I was really excited because Kanye West was on stage … And then I wasn't excited anymore after that,

Of Beyonce she said:

Um, they told me to stand by the side of the stage. Um, and I didn't really know what was gonna go down, but I thought it was just so wonderful. and gracious of her to do what she's always done. She's always just been a great person.

On his part, Kanye released an "apology" to his blog (probably while still drunk) that was quickly deleted (source)

I'M SOOOOO SORRY TO TAYLOR SWIFT AND HER FANS AND HER MOM. I SPOKE TO HER MOTHER RIGHT AFTER AND SHE SAID THE SAME THING MY MOTHE WOULD'VE SAID. SHE IS VERY TALENTED! I LIKE THE LYRICS ABOUT BEING A CHEELEADER AND SHE'S IN THE BLEACHERS!................I'M IN THE WRONG FOR GOING ON STAGE AND TAKEN AWAY FROM HER MOMENT!.................... BEYONCE'S VIDEO WAS THE BEST OF THIS DECADE!!!!! I'M SORRY TO MY FAINS IF I LET YOU GUYS GOWN!!!!! I'M SORRY TO MY FRIENDS AT MTV. I WILL APOLOGIZE TO TAYLOR 2MRW. WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD!!!! EVERYOBODY WANNA BOOOOO ME BUT I'M A FAN OF REAL POP CULTURE!!!!! NO DISRESPECT BUT WE WATCHIN THE SHOW AT THE CRIB RIGHT NOW CAUSE.....WELL YOU KNOW!!! I'M STILL HAPPY FOR TAYLOR!!!!!! BOOOYAAAAWWWWW!!!! YOU ARE VERY TALENTED. I GAVE MY AWARDS TO OUTKAST WHEN THEY DESERVED IT OVER ME,,, THAT'S WHAT IT IS!!!!!! I'M NOT CRACY YALL. I'M JUST REAL. SORRY FOR THAT!!!! I REALLY FEEL BAD FOR TAYLOR AND I'M SINCERELY SORRY!!! MUCH RESPECT!!!!!

He followed this up the following day with a second apology:

 "I feel like Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents when he messed up everything and Robert De Niro asked him to leave. That was Taylor's moment and I had no right in any way to take it from her. I am truly sorry." (source)

Immediatly after and in the days following the incident, a number of public figures came out in defense of Taylor and condemmed Kanye's behavior.

Pink called him a piece of shit, Donald Trump asked people to boycott all things Kanye, Barack Obama called him a jackass, Joe Jackson called for him to be blackballed, and Kelly Clarkson questioned if he didnt get enough hugs as a child (source)

The next day, Kanye was scheduled to perform alongside Jay-Z on the Jay Lennon show, however, he requested to talk before the performance in order to apologize again:

It’s been a difficult day. I’m just dealing with the fact that I hurt someone or took anything away from a talented artist or from anyone, because I only wanted to help people … I immediately knew in this situation that it was wrong … It’s someone’s emotions that I stepped on. It was rude, period. (source)

Days later, on the 19th, Taylor gave an interview to The View in which she addressed the situation once again:

I’m not going to say I wasn’t rattled by it. I had to perform live five minutes later, so I had to get myself back to the place where I could perform. … All the other artists who showed me love in the hours following that, I just never imagined there were that many people out there looking out for me. (source)

In November, Taylor had the "last" laught during her first appearance on SNL where she joked about the incident during her opening monologue:

You might think I might say/something bad about Kanye/and how he ran up on the stage and ruined my VMA monologue/but there’s nothing more to say/because everything’s okay/I’ve got security lining the stage.

Meanwhile, due to the intense backlash Kanye decided to leave the lime light in order to get himself together and figure out a way to come back from this. According to one of his collaborator, while he was working on his next album in Hawaii, Kanye was worried that the incident might have cost him his career which led to him creating G.O.O.D Fridays, a weekly free music release ahead of the release of his fith studio album "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy"

After the infamous Taylor Swift moment, I sort of did a little self-exile, just to get away from paparazzi and to have people not, you know, just fucking with me constantly. I went to Hawaii and took all the creative energy that I wanted to express and we put it into an album called My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. (source)

Innocence vs Runaway

On September 12th, 2010, Taylor and Kanye would return to the VMA's to debut their new songs which both reference the incident.

Taylor went up first to perform "Innocent", a song in which she tells Kanye that he's not what he did, he can still find the right path and after all, he's still an innocent:

It's okay, life is a tough crowd

32 and still growin' up now
Who you are is not what you did
You're still an innocent

She would later go on to say that the song was about forgiving someone for what they did to her and that she wanted to write a song to Kanye and not about Kanye (source)

Meanwhile, Kanye closed the show with his performance of Runway. The song doesn't directly reference Taylor or the incident, nor is it an apology or explanation, but more so Kanye admiting to being a douche

And I always find, yeah, I always find somethin' wrong

You been puttin' up wit' my shit just way too long
I'm so gifted at findin' what I don't like the most
So I think it's time (so I think it's time)
For us to have a toast

While promoting his album, Kanye was asked why he interrupted her and he said:

I feel in some ways I’m a soldier of culture. And I realize no one wants that to be my job. I’ll never go onstage again, I’ll never sit at an awards show again, but will I feel conflicted about things that meant something to culture that constantly get denied for years and years and years? I’m sorry, I will. I cannot lie about it in order to sell records.

War is over:

For the next couple of years the two mostly avoided the topic but Taylor referenced it a couple of times in a way that made it seemed like she was past it, for example on March 2012, Taylor wore a shirt from Kanye's clothing line during her photoshoot for Australian Harper’s Bazaar (source) and a year later she reference the incident in the label of a jar of jam she gifted Ed Sheeran (source)

Meanwhile, Kanye was asked about it during the promotion of his album "Yeezus", he said that he didn't regret what he did and probably wouldnt take it back if he could:

[The Taylor VMA incident] only led me to complete awesomeness at all times. It’s only led me to awesome truth and awesomeness. Beauty, truth, awesomeness. That’s all it is.

You know what? I can answer that, but I’m — I’m just — not afraid, but I know that would be such a distraction. It’s such a strong thing, and people have such a strong feeling about it. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was my long, backhanded apology. You know how people give a backhanded compliment? It was a backhanded apology. It was like, all these raps, all these sonic acrobatics. I was like: ‘Let me show you guys what I can do, and please accept me back. You want to have me on your shelves. (source)

In 2015, both seemed to have fully put the entire feud completely behind them as they started to interact publically starting at the 2015 Grammy's where the two of them, plus, Kanye's then wife Kim Kardashian, were seen hanging out together through out the night (source)

The next day Kanye gave an interview to Ryan Secrets and he said:

Taylor Swift came up to me right after [Beck won the album of the year Grammy over Beyonce], like literally afterwards, and tells me I should have went on stage. This is the irony in my life.

She wants to get in the studio, and we’re definitely going to go in. Any artist with an amazing point of view, perspective, fanbase, I’m down to get in the studio and work. I don’t discriminate.

Months later, Taylor talked about their new friendship in an interview to Vanity Fairs:

I feel like I wasn’t ready to be friends with him until I felt like he had some sort of respect for me, and he wasn’t ready to be friends with me until he had some sort of respect for me — so it was the same issue, and we both reached the same place at the same time.

I became friends with Jay-Z, and I think it was important, for Jay-Z, for Kanye and I to get along. … And then Kanye and I both reached a place where he would say really nice things about my music and what I’ve accomplished, and I could ask him how his kid’s doing.

We haven’t planned [any collaboration] … But hey, I like him as a person. And that’s a really good, nice first step, a nice place for us to be. (source)

Then, at that years VMA's, the two shared a full circle moment when Taylor presented Kanye with the "Vanguard Award":

I first met Kanye West six years ago — at this show, actually!. It seemed like everyone in the world knew about our infamous encounter at the VMAs. But something that you may not know is that Kanye West’s album College Dropout was the very first album my brother and I bought on iTunes when I was 12 years old. … I have been a fan of his for as long as I can remember because Kanye defines what it means to be a creative force in music, fashion and, well, life. So I guess I have to say to all the other winners tonight: I’m really happy for you, and I’mma let you finish, but Kanye West has had one of the greatest careers of all time!

On his part, Kanye went on stage and gave a 13 minute long speech in which he rambled about a number of things, including announcing his run for president in 2020 and of course, the 2009 VMA's incident:

If I had a daughter at that time, would I have went onstage and grabbed the mic from someone else’s? ...You know how many times MTV ran that footage again because it got them more ratings? You know how many times they announced Taylor was presenting the award because it got more ratings?...I’m conflicted bro. I just wanted people to like me more. (source)

And a few days later he sent her a floral arragement. Taylor posted a photo to instagram with the caption: "Awww Kanye sent me the coolest flowers!! #KanTay2020 #BFFs."

"I made that bitch famous":

The friendship would quickly come to an end on February 12th, 2016, when Kanye released the infamous song "Famous" from the album "Life of Pablo" which contained the lyrics:

For all my South Side niggas that know me best

I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex
Why? I made that bitch famous
(Goddamn!)
I made that bitch famous

A few hours later he took to twitter to clearify that he was not dissing Taylor and that she knew and approved of the lyrics during a phonecall:

I did not diss Taylor Swift and I’ve never dissed her...I’m not even gone take credit for the idea… it’s actually something Taylor came up with … She was having dinner with one of our friends who’s name I will keep out of this and she told him … I can’t be mad at Kanye because he made me famous! (source)

Immediatly after, through her publicist Tree Paine, Taylor released a statement in which she states that she did not know he would call her a bitch and he didn't call to ask for approval

Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single ‘Famous’ on her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message. Taylor was never made aware of the actual lyric, ‘I made that bitch famous.' (source)

3 days later, at the Grammy's, Taylor became the first woman to win 2 AOTY awards and during her speech referenced the situation by saying:

And as the first woman to win album of the year at the Grammy's twice, I want to say to all the young women out there, there are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame. But if you just focus on the work and you don't let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you're going, you will know it was you and the people who love you who put you there, and that will be the greatest feeling in the world. Thank you for this moment.

Things were pretty quiet from both sides for the next few months until in July, Kanye's then wife, Kim Kardashian, gave an interview to GQ magazine in which she said that Taylor approved of the lyrics and that there's video of the phonecall to prove it:

totally gave the OK. Rick Rubin was there. So many respected people in the music business heard that [conversation] and knew. I mean, he’s called me a b—h in his songs. That’s just, like, what they say. I never once think, [gasping] ‘What a derogatory word! How dare he?’ Not in a million years. I don’t know why she just, you know, flipped all of a sudden. … It was funny because [on the call with Kanye, Taylor] said, ‘When I get on the Grammy red carpet, all the media is going to think that I’m so against this, and I’ll just laugh and say, ‘The joke’s on you, guys. I was in on it the whole time.’ And I’m like, wait, but [in] your Grammy speech, you completely dissed my husband just to play the victim again. (source)

In response, Taylor's team released a statement she understood that Kim had to stand by her husband but the two of them were lying. She once again said that she and Kanye only talked once, that he didnt call to ask for permition but to ask her to promote the song, that he never told her he would call her a bitch and that she heard the song for the first time at the same time as everyone else.

A few days later, in an episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians, Kim said that she was tired of people talking shit about Kanye and that she was going to do whatever she needed to do to protect him:

Kanye is always so honest and speaks his mind. When we were first dating, everyone would talk s–t about me and he always had my back. At this point, I really don’t give a f–k so I’ll do whatever to protect my husband.

[Taylor] legitimately, quote, says, ‘As soon as I get on that Grammy red carpet, I’m gonna tell all the press I was in on it. Just another way to play the victim. Definitely got her a lot of attention the first time.

3 days later, Kim took to snaptchat to share a short video of the phonecall in which Taylor seems flatered by the line "i think me and Taylor might still have sex" and grateful that he called to ask for her approval, however, there is no mention of "i made that bitch famous" (source)

In response, Taylor took to twitter and said:

Where is the video of Kanye telling me he was going to call me ‘that b—h’ in his song?” she wrote, per a screenshot of a note. “It doesn’t exist because it never happened.” She added, “While I wanted to be supportive of Kanye on the phone call, you cannot ‘approve’ a song you haven’t heard. Being falsely painted as a liar when I was never given the full story or played any part of the song is character assassination. (source)

A few months later during one of his concerts, while he was perfoming Famous the crowd broke into "fuck Taylor Swift" chants (source) and at the 2016 VMA's he once again stated that he called and asked her for permition (source)

#TaylorSwiftIsOverParty:

Unlike in 2009, this time the public and the media mostly sided with Kanye after the video was released and Taylor was branded a snake after Kim tweeted celebrating international snake day (source)

It's important to note that Taylor's "downfall" had been on its way for at least a year before this happened. After the release of her album 1989 in 2014, she became probably the biggest artist at that time and she was incredibly over exposed. She would be seen by the paparazzi almost every day and her every move was reported by the media.

From 2014 to 2016, she had already been at the center of a number of controversies that primed the public and the media to see her as someone who played victim and was secretly a mean girl.

One of these incidents was her feud with Katy Perry. The two had been friends for years but Taylor accused her of trying to ruin her tour and as retribution she wrote the song "Bad Blood" which was promoted with a music video in which Taylor featured all of her friends getting ready to destroy Katy.

Katy would later claim that what happened is that she asked two dancers with whom she had worked before and were working at the time with Taylor to put in their two weeks notice if they wanted to go on tour with her again but when Taylor found out she fired them. She tried to reach out to Taylor to fix things but she refused. Katy responded to the Kanye situation by comparing Taylor to Regina George (source)

Another one was her team leaking to the public that she had ghost a song for her ex boyfriend Calvin Harris. He responded in a series of tweets calling her out for trying to make him look bad and "bury him like she did Katy" (source)

She had also been branded as greedy for taking her music off of spotify because she felt that they didnt pay artist enough, threatening to sue her old guitar teacher for starting a site called "ITaughtTaylorSwift.com" and sending cease and desist letter to etsy shops that used her likeness.

Soon after the phonecall video was released, #TaylorSwiftisoverparty trended worlwide on Twitter and Taylor's instagram was floded with snake emojis (which would later prompt the app to add a feature to hide comments).

In response to the backlash, much like Kanye in 2009, Taylor dissapeared, kind of. She still had a number of appearances during this time, she just reduced them by a lot in comparison to how exposed to the media she had been prior to the phonecall being leaked. (source) It's possible that this would have happened anyways because she had said she wanted to take a break after the grammys, but this decrease of public appearances was influenced by the backlash.

Reputation:

On August 18th, 2017, Taylor deleted all of her posts from all her social media channels. 3 days later, on the 21st, she uploaded 3 videos of snakes (source) and on August 25th she dropped the first single of her 6th studio album "Look what you made me do"

In the song Taylor accuses Kanye of being a liar and framing her as one, she also makes reference to the stage of his tour in which the crowd chanted "fuck Taylor Swift", she also says that he (and her other foes) will get what they deserve and that "the old Taylor is dead". (source)

2 days later, on the 27th, at the 2017 VMA's, Taylor released the music video for the song. In it there are references to a number of people and controversies that she had over the years, but at the end of the video theres a group of Taylor Swift's standing in line which include the one from the 2009 VMA's asking to be excluded from the narrative. (source)

A few months later, on November 10th , she released her 6th studio album "Reputation" in which she references Kanye in multiple songs, however, the only song that is entirely about the situation is "This is why we can't have nice things":

In the song she directly calls him out for "ruining her party", stabbing her in the back after she gave him a second chance, "mind tricking" her on the phone, not being the only friend he lost as he fell off with Jayz and Beyonce around the same time and in the bridge of the song she laughs at the idea of forgiving him. (source)

Keeping the feud alive:

For what i can tell, there was no direct or indirect response from Kanye nor Kim to the release of the album, probably because at this time he was going through his very public mental health crisis, so they had way bigger fishes to fry.

Jumping to 2019, after staying silent, Kim said during an interview that she was over the feud and they had all moved on, however it doesn't seem like Taylor got that memo as she continued to reference it multiple times for the next couple of years.

Firstly, in August for the promotion of her album "Lover", Taylor released some of her diary entires. In the one from the 2009 VMA's she wrote:

Let's just say, if you had told me that Kanye West would have been the number one focus of my week, the media, and my part in the VMAs, I would've looked at you crossed-eyed,If you had told me that I would win the award I was nominated for, I wouldn't have believed you, And if you had told me that one of the biggest stars in music was going to jump up onstage and announce that he thought I shouldn't have won on live television,I would've said, 'That stuff doesn't really happen in real life.' Well... apparently... it does. (source)

While in the entry from the summer of 2016 she simply said:

This summer is the apocalypse (source)

Later that year, in a statement about her music catalog being sold, she also brought up the phone call video and the mv for Famous, as evidence that she had been bullied at the hands of Scotter Braun and his clients:

Like when Kim Kardashian orchestrated an illegally recorded snippet of a phone call to be leaked and then Scooter got his two clients together to bully me online about it, (Justin Bieber posted a photo with Kanye with the caption Taylor what's up) (source)

Or when his client, Kanye West, organized a revenge porn music video which strips my body naked. Now Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work, that I wasn’t given an opportunity to buy. Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it. (source)

In September of 2019, during an interview with Rolling Stones, she said that they reconected because she really wanted his approval and respect but she ended up realizing that he was two faced and would talk shit about her in public to look cool:

He can be the sweetest. And I was so stoked that he asked me that. And so I wrote this speech up, and then we get to the VMAs and I make this speech and he screams, ‘MTV got Taylor Swift up here to present me this award for ratings!’ [His exact words: ‘You know how many times they announced Taylor was going to give me the award ’cause it got them more ratings?’] And I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body. I realized he is so two-faced. That he wants to be nice to me behind the scenes, but then he wants to look cool, get up in front of everyone and talk s–t. And I was so upset.

So when he gets on the phone with me, and I was so touched that he would be respectful and, like, tell me about this one line in the song,” she continued. “And I was like, ‘OK, good. We’re back on good terms.’ And then when I heard the song, I was like, ‘I’m done with this. If you want to be on bad terms, let’s be on bad terms, but just be real about it. (source)

She also talked about both the 2009 VMA's and the phonecall in her documentary "Miss Americana". She said that she originally though that the crowd was booing at her and that the incident affected her in a deep level because her entire life had revolved around people liking her. She also said that the cancelation was hard and that she desided to dissapear because she though that was what people wanted and that once people hate you there's nothing you can do to change their mind.

Taylor's vindication:

On March 21st, 2020, the full video of the phonecall. The video is 20 minutes long and finally vindicated Taylor as it shows that Kanye never mentioned that he would call her a bitch and in fact, Taylor explicitly says that she was worried he would and even asked him if the line would be mean.

She also seemed apprehensive about the "i made her famous" line and overall, didnt seem excited about the situation at all. Also, it showed that Kanye did call to ask her to promote the song and she was the one who asked him to tell her the lyrics. (source)

Following the release of the call #TaylorToldTheTruth, #KimKardashianIsOverParty and "KanyeWestIsOverParty, started to trend on twitter.

Taylor addressed the new recording on an instagram story in which she said:

Instead of answering those who are asking how I feel about the video footage that leaked, proving that I was telling the truth the whole time about that call (you know, the one that was illegally recorded, that somebody edited and manipulated in order to frame me and put me, my family, and fans through hell for 4 years)… SWIPE UP to see what really matters (source)

Meanwhile, Kim posted multiple tweets in which she said she though it was self serving to talk about this in the middle of the covid pandemic and that the only issue she had with Taylor was that she claimed he never called to ask for permission and that the problem was never about the word bitch but whether he called or not and the tone of the call because she lied when she said that she cautined him about releasing a mysoginistic song. (source)

In response, Taylor's publicist took to twitter to re post their original statement in which they pointed out that Kanye had called to ask her to promote the song on twitter, not for her approval (source)

The feud continues tho:

Despite having won the feud, Taylor would continue to refence it in her music and talk about it in her interviews.

In 2020, in her albums Folklore and Evermore, she mentions them in songs like "mad woman" in which she calls Kim (and others) out for doing the dirty work for her husband, "peace" in which she calls Kanye a clown and "long story short" in which she tells her past self that he nemesis will destroy themselves before she can do it.

Meanwhile, in her 2024 album "The tortured poests department" she dedicaded two songs to Kim.

In "thanK you aIMee", Taylor compares Kim to a highschool bully, says that it wasnt a fair fight between them, that her mom wished she were dead and that one day her daugther will go home singing a song only the two of them will know is about her. (Kim's daugther North is known to be a fan of Taylors". (source)

Meanwhile, in "Cassandra" she sings about the video of the phonecall and compares herself to the Trojan priestess who was fated by Apollo to say true prophecies but never be believed (source)

About these songs, Kim's team said that she was over it and didn't understand why Taylor was still talking about it:

Kim has moved on from the Taylor feud and doesn’t care about her song ‘thanK you aIMee.’ She has put it in the past, especially since their drama happened so long ago. Kim respects Taylor as an artist but doesn’t have a strong desire to settle their differences right now. (source)

During her concert in Mexico in 2023, after she had to stop talking because of how loudly people were cheering she referenced the 2009 VMA's again, saying:

It’s the best way to be interrupted, by the way, just people chanting your name,It’s really the only way to be interrupted, and I would know. (source)

Her most recent mention of the feud was in her 2023 "Person of the year" interview in which she accused Kim and Kanye of trying to destroy her career:

You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she says. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.I thought that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life. (source)

Meanwhile, the last mention Kanye did of Taylor was in a song from his latest album "Vultures 2" in which Lil Wayne said:

I twist my Taylor spliffs tight at the end like Travis Kelce.

Also, Vultures 2 became Kanye's first album to not debut at #1 since his debut album as it was blocked by Taylor's album.

Conclusion

That's it, for now anyways, they'll probably reference the situations at some point again cause they just cant help themselves,

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MMA? Great guy, never meddum

What is MMA? MMA stands for Mixed Martial Arts, a combat sport in which two fighters use a variety of striking and grappling techniques to try to defeat the other. As the name suggests, MMA fighters will adopt and mix techniques from a variety of martial arts during a fight. Common ones include: Boxing, kickboxing, judo, wrestling, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu (“BJJ”). The specific rules and regulations for fights vary depending on the organisation (or, specifically – the athletic commission in the jurisdiction the fight takes place. However, that's too much detail for this post). Since this drama takes place during Ultimate Fighting Championship (“UFC”) events, we shall only discuss and explain how fights work in the context of the UFC.

What the hell is the UFC? The UFC is the largest MMA promotion in the world. Many people often use UFC and MMA interchangeably, although this is not strictly the case. There are many other notable MMA organisations in the world. Rizin and One in Asia. KSW, Oktagon, and Cage Warriors in Europe. As well as PFL/Bellator in North America. However, UFC is undoubtedly the biggest and most notable, and is the focus of this post.

A UFC fight consists of 3 five-minute rounds (5 rounds for a title fight), with a one-minute intermission between rounds, during which the fighters rest, get advice from their coaches, and have any cuts cleaned by a UFC 'cutman'. There are quite a few ways to win a fight, but the most common are:

• Knockout, if a fighter is unable to continue;
• Technical knockout (“TKO”), when the referee stops the fight on a fighter's behalf;
• Submission, when a fighter admits defeat, usually by tapping on the opponent's body; or
• Decision. If a fight has not ended by the end of the last round, 3 judges will decide who won. Each judge will decide who won each round, the majority of rounds won on each judge's scorecards wins that scorecard for that fighter. Whichever fighter gets 2 out of 3 scorecards wins. In practice, there can actually be draws, but that's not relevant for this post so I won't explain how (there are quite a few, albeit, rare circumstances in which this can happen).

Now, to the two men who are the focus of this post. Despite being two of the most exciting fighters of their generation, in many ways they could not be more different to each other. These differences are somewhat the cause for the dramas we will discuss today.

Conor McGregor is the biggest star the sport of MMA has ever known. He transcends the sport in a way that no other fighter has. If you were to ask your parents, who in this hypothetical scenario, have no interest in sports, to name an MMA fighter (if any), it would be a fair assumption that the one fighter they might be able to name is Conor.

The reasons for Conor's meteoric rise in popularity are really twofold. Firstly, he was loud, brash, and charismatic. Secondly, he could back up his trash-talk in the cage. Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1988, he became a 'double champ' (more on this later) in the European Cage Warriors promotion, simultaneously holding both the featherweight and lightweight championships, before signing with he UFC in 2013.

Conor's rise to prominence through the UFC rankings was legendary. Primarily a boxer, he used incredible speed and timing to win most of his fights by knockout.

Adding to his legendary status were his post-fight interviews and press conferences, where his charisma and confidence shone through.

By November 2016, Conor had again achieved Double Champ status, this time in the UFC, again holding both the featherweight and lightweight championships. He was also a household name by this point, and to capitalise on his fame, he would take a two-year hiatus from the sport of MMA, to have a very lucrative professional boxing fight against Floyd Mayweather, you may have heard of this happening. This left a Dagestani-shaped hole in the lightweight division, which by the time Conor returned, would be filled by a certain Khabib Nurmagomedov.

Khabib was also born in 1988, in Dagestan, a then-autonomous republic of the Soviet Union, now treated the same as any other Russian republic. A rural, mountainous area, its dominant religion is Islam, which Khabib himself adheres to.

Khabib is one of the most dominant fighters of all time. Known for his relentless, brutal wrestling style. He would smother his opponents, take them down, and pepper them with vicious 'ground and pound'. Khabib was raised as a wrestler his entire life, including growing up wrestling bears. Yes, really.

Unlike Conor, Khabib was not known for his interviews or press conferences early in his rise. His English was rather broken early on in his UFC career, and even when a translator was used, he was humble and respectful of his opponents. However, by the time of his 8th UFC fight, his English had improved to a decent level, and he turned his attention to Conor. Incidentally, this was the same event at which Conor won the lightweight title, and also Conor's last fight before his boxing hiatus, but Khabib wasn't to know this at the time.

UFC 223 – when even your drama has its own drama, it's dramception

UFC 223 took place on Saturday April 7 2018 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. It is one of the most cursed events of all time, and where our drama really starts. Perhaps the most anticipated fight in the UFC at the time was Khabib vs Tony Ferguson, another dominant star in the lightweight division. They had been scheduled to fight 3 times in the few years prior, but all had fallen through for a variety of reasons. The two were scheduled together again at UFC 223 - 4th time's the charm, as the classic adage goes. Due to Conor's hiatus, the UFC had indicated that Conor would be stripped of the lightweight title, and the winner of the bout would become the new lightweight champion.

Fight week arrives! Both fighters are in New York, and are healthy. There's no way it gets cancelled again, right? Right? Tony Ferguson tripped over a cable during media obligations and tore ligaments in his knee, and is therefore out of the fight. If that sounds too ridiculous for you, do also note that Tony's injury was announced on 1 April. Yep. Fans naturally took this very well, with one of the best-rated comments on the relevant r/MMA thread stating: "I'm going to light myself on fire".

Featherweight champion and legend of the sport Max Holloway is put in as a replacement. The fans love Max. This wasn't the fight they had been expecting, but it was still hype as hell.

During his weight cut, Max was declared medically unfit to compete and told to stop cutting weight. The UFC are now really scrambling to save the main event. Another lightweight, Anthony Pettis was supposed to be fighting on the card, but his fight had been cancelled (we'll get to that, I promise). On weigh-in day, Pettis fails to make the championship weight limit of 155lbs, he's out. Paul Felder offered to step in, but the New York State Athletic commission declined as Felder was not officially in the UFC lightweight rankings. This is going well.

The eventual opponent is Felder's original opponent, Al Iaquinta. Khabib beats Iaquinta in a very one-sided decision victory and becomes the UFC lightweight champion. Everyone's happy, UFC 223 drama is over, let's all move on with our lives.

Dear reader, this isn't even the real UFC 223 drama. This is the warm-up act, the complimentary glass of champagne you get before a sit-down meal at an event.

One of Conor's friends and teammates, Artem Lobov, was also scheduled to fight at the event. He had given an interview to Russian media, in which he criticised Khabib for pulling out of fights. On Tuesday in fight week, Khabib runs into Artem in the hotel and has a friendly chat and slap.

It is reported that Conor is in Dublin when this makes the rounds on MMA media, and that he is not pleased at the situation. He rounds up a group of friends, charters a private jet and makes the short trip over the Atlantic. Given what has been alleged over the years about Conor's hobbies, what comes next should perhaps not have been as surprising as it was.

On Thursday of fight week, some of the event's fighters are on a bus in the bowels of the Barclays Center after a day of further media obligations, waiting to head back to the athlete hotel. Conor's troupe arrive at the venue and find their way inside, whereby Conor picks up a metal dolly and launches it at the side of the bus, breaking a window in the process. This is in an apparent attempt to force Khabib off the bus, to confront him over the earlier altercation with Conor's teammate Artem. Conor and friends fled the scene, but turned themselves into police later that night. Conor is hit with multiple criminal charges as a result of the incident.

There were ramifications to several fights on the card. Michael Chiesa, the original opponent of Anthony Pettis, pulls out of the fight due to cuts sustained from broken glass. The fight between Ray Borg and Brandon Moreno was scrapped after Borg started getting issues due to glass in his eye. Artem Lobov's own fight was scrapped due to his own involvement in the situation.

The event occurs without any further drama. A few months later, in July, Conor avoided jail time after reaching a plea deal. The stage is now set for the biggest event in UFC history. As mentioned above, Khabib and Conor had been talking about each other for a few years, and now a metric tonne of gasoline had been poured onto the fire. Even still, nobody could have predicted the extent to which UFC 229 would go down in MMA history. For its cage fights? No, not for its cage fights.

The press conference that was very hard to watch, but one that so many people couldn't look away from

UFC 229 was put in the calendar for Saturday October 6 2018, in Las Vegas, the fight capital of the world, headlined by Khabib and Conor. A few weeks beforehand, on September 20, a press conference was held between the two fighters, moderated by UFC president Dana White. Unlike most press conferences, this one was specifically held without a crowd of fans in attendance. This was probably the right decision, even if it did add to the agonizing atmosphere in the room. Outside of the room, the whole MMA world was watching. Many of those people would end up wishing they weren't.

It's a really awkward, uncomfortable watch. I wouldn't suggest watching the whole thing, here are some 'highlights' for those interested. During the press conference, Conor is very...animated, drinking whiskey throughout, and Khabib remains calm and stoic. I started by copying out certain quotes from the press conference, but frankly, there was too much to include. The essence is that Conor relentlessly insults Khabib, his family, country, and religion, including calling him a “mad, backwards c*nt” when Khabib turns down a glass of whiskey (remember, Khabib is Muslim and does not drink alcohol).

Most UFC pre-fight press conferences are, quite frankly, boring. Fighters are asked rote questions such as 'so how are you feeling going into the fight?' and produce boring answers in return. They don't tend to get much engagement from hardcore MMA fans. Earlier this year was UFC 300, a landmark event for the promotion and one of the best fight cards all year. The r/mma discussion thread for the pre-fight press conference has, as of writing, 630 comments. And, again, this was a big event. The thread for the UFC 229 press conference discussed above has 9,643 comments. The level of hype for this 229 was in another stratosphere. This was now very personal, Khabib and Conor absolutely hated each other. It was clear this wasn't going to be boring. And it wasn't, none of it was boring.

UFC 229

The day has arrived. It is the UFC event with the highest domestic buy rate of all time, with 2.4m buys in the US. More eyes are on the UFC than ever before, everything must go well. This was a sport that in 1996 had been described by Senator John McCain (yes, that John McCain) as human cockfighting. It's a stigma that still persists to some extent.

The 2nd highest has 1.6m, for comparison (n.b. The UFC doesn't disclose PPV buys anymore, but I would be very doubtful that 229 has been eclipsed since. They would have told us if so!). It is worth noting that the top 6 are all events headlined by Conor, such is his star power.

The other fights have happened, we don't care about them, it's time for the main event of the evening. I won't give a play-by-play of the entire fight or go into much technical detail about any of the specific techniques used, but I will outline some key moments.

• Round 1: Khabib takes Conor down early in the round and controls him on the mat without doing too much damage. Khabib wins the round.

• Round 2: Khabib catches Conor with a right hand and then uses this to take Conor down again. This time, whilst Conor is on the mat, Khabib throws vicious ground-and-pound (punches and elbows to the head) whilst saying “let's talk now”. This is still talked about to this day, it's such a badass moment. Dominant Khabib round.

• Round 3: A close, cagey round that stays mostly on the feet, with Conor defending Khabib's takedowns well. Conor wins this round. At the end of the round, as they are being separated by referee Herb Dean, Conor says to Khabib “it's only business”. It is generally assumed that this was Conor telling Khabib that everything he said in the pre-fight build up was just Conor hyping up the fight, making headlines, for the purpose of generating drama and media attention, which would lead to more revenue for both fighters. However, it is clear that for Khabib, Conor had crossed the line and that 'I did it for both of us, honest' wasn't going to wash as an excuse.

• Interlude: I found this clip which shows the two conversations above and very helpfully adds subtitles.

• Round 4: Khabib takes Conor down (Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before) and controls him on the ground. Khabib tries to initiate an arm triangle choke, but Conor rolls out of the position. Khabib then takes Conor's back and puts him in a face crank. Conor ultimately taps.

A controversial talking point after the fight was the actions of referee Herb Dean. Or, to be specific, complete and utter inaction. The reason being, Conor did not stop cheating all fight. At several points in the fight, Conor commits fouls, amongst them:

• Grabbing Khabib's gloves;
• Grabbing Khabib's shorts on multiple occasions;
• Hooking the fence with both his fingers and toes, on separate occasions (a way to hinder an opponent's grappling); and
• Kneeing Khabib in the head whilst they are on the mat (knees to the head of a grounded opponent are illegal).

This helpful video shows all of the fouls committed in the fight. Now, as a bit of context, fans have a difficult relationship with referees when it comes to fouls and consequences. Referees have discretion on what to do when a foul is committed in a fight. This inevitably leads to inconsistencies in how the rules are applied. To this day, I think most fans would agree that referees are too lenient when it comes to fouls. They are allowed to take away a point from a fighter for that round, but in most cases fighters will often get 2 or 3 warnings before a point deduction is considered.

Current UFC heavyweight champion (and almost certainly the subject of his own future HobbyDrama post) Jon Jones has a reputation as a dirty fighter. In this video he openly admits to poking opponents in the eye. At the end, he claims it's unintentional, but his tone throughout somewhat suggests otherwise. It has been a half-joke in MMA fandom for a while that fighters know they will likely get a warning for their first foul(s) in a fight, so incorporate their 'free eyepoke / groin shot' as part of their actual strategy.

Bringing it back to UFC 229, Conor got away with so many fouls in the main event, how did he not get a point deduction? There's no way Herb Dean missed all of the fouls. Well no, he didn't. Herb would post on his instagram profile that “My job is to facilitate exciting and clean matches. Not to intervene...Any time I intervene, I run the risk of artificially affecting the outcome of the fight.”

This explanation does not pass the smell test. Was Conor's cheating not potentially affecting the outcome of the fight? Was the fight as it happened 'clean'? To fans, it reeked that the UFC wanted its biggest star and cash cow to have every advantage possible.

That's it – end of drama! Unless...

All hell breaks loose

Conor taps, Khabib maybe holds on for half-a-second too long, and has to be pushed away by Herb Dean, whilst shouting at Conor. He then points towards Conor's coaching team and angrily throws down his mouthguard. Whatever, fighters arguing with the opponent's team after a fight isn't unheard of, it's not unprecedented.

And then, it happens.

Khabib jumps the cage, dives into the crowd, and starts fighting. Just to reiterate. After the end of his fight, the lightweight champion of the world dives into the crowd, and starts fighting.

There are so many videos of what happens here, from many angles. I will link one here. There's so much that happens in the ensuing chaos, you would have to watch the clip many times over to see everything. I will do my best to explain what happened in the melee.

• Initially, Khabib dives (does a cannonball, really) into the crowd towards one of Conor's coaches, Dillon Danis, and starts brawling with him. They are immediately pulled apart by security.
• Whilst this is happening, we see Conor and one of Khabib's coaches being kept apart by security. This is Khabib's cousin and fellow fighter, Abubakar Nurmagomedov.
• Two more of Khabib's teammates jump into the cage, one in a black t-shirt and one in red. The guy in black runs past Conor, then turns around and throws a punch at him. Not a second later, the guy in red throws punches from behind at the back of Conor's head. The person in black is Esed Emiragaev. The person in red is fellow fighter Zubaira Tukhugov.
• A further teammate of Khabib then pushes Conor up against the fence in a clinch.

I now present, angle number two.

• As this angle shows, Conor tries to jump out of the cage to help his corner, but is pulled back by security.
• As this happens, he throws a punch at Abubakar first, which seems like the catalyst for the fight that happens inside the cage.

Not much happens after the initial frantic minute or so. Seemingly a private army of security are in and around the cage, Khabib and Conor are kept well away from each other (albeit within shouting distance). UFC president Dana White enters the cage and goes over to speak to Conor, presumably in an attempt to defuse the situation.

Khabib is talking to Daniel Cormier (affectionately known as “DC” in the MMA world), a fighter who trains at the same gym as Khabib, who is trying to calm Khabib down. DC, just happened to be, at the time, the UFC heavyweight champion. I note this because DC's first instinct was to join the brawl and start fighting alongside his teammate. For his successful defense of his own title a month after UFC 229, DC weighed-in at 251lbs. DC is around 100 lbs heavier than the fighters involved in the brawl, and is phenomenally strong, ragdolling fellow heavyweights. I think it's for the betterment of everyone involved that DC decided not to start launching these much smaller fighters around the cage.

DC later explained that Khabib wasn't angry because he was still in an adrenaline rush, he wanted to be give his lightweight belt, as is customary after a championship fight. Dana White was (perhaps wisely) refusing to give Khabib the belt in the cage, fearing repercussions from the pro-Conor crowd.

After several minutes, Conor is escorted to the locker room by a group of security. A few minutes later, Khabib is escorted to the back, flanked by security. He walks to a chorus of boos and thrown objects. Announcer Bruce Buffer, ever the professional, then announces the result of the fight. He gets a mixed reception from the crowd, one can't imagine why.

DC would also humorously explain the conversation he had with Khabib once they got back to the locker room. The summation is essentially, Khabib 'lost' his mind. He didn't have a plan, or desired outcome, he just lost it. To the surprise of nobody.

The aftermath

Well that was all a bit much, wasn't it? In the post-fight press conference, Dana said that he was 'disgusted' over what happened after the main event. There was, however, an issue with Dana's outward anger over what happened. The UFC were falling over themselves to use the drama from 223 and subsequent months as hype and promotion for 229. Something that was not lost on fans and media. The UFC was trying to have their cake and eat it too. The hypocrisy did not go unnoticed. Not that anyone was really surprised, or that the UFC or Dana White care about looking hypocritical.

The Nevada State Athletic Commission (“NSAC”), which had withheld Khabib's fighter pay, released half of Khabib's $2 million payout on October 24, and announced a hearing for December, at which the other half would be discussed. They also confirmed that they would have withheld Conor's pay, had the extent of his involvement been immediately known. Both fighters were also suspended until the December hearing.

On January 29 2019, NSAC announced their decision. Conor was fined $50,000 and suspended for 6 months, Khabib was fined $500,000 and suspended for 9 months. Both suspensions were backdated to the date of the fight. Khabib evidently did not think the disparity in the two fines was fair, tweeting that he thinks it was politically motivated. Dillon Danis, Abubakar Nurmagomedov, and Zubaira Tukhugov also all received suspensions for their parts in the fracas.

In any case, why did Khabib attack Dillon Danis anyway? Khabib would later explain that “I jumped on him because other corner is too old; because Conor’s other corner, other coaches, too old, and that’s why I jumped on him”. There's an element of nobility in that, I suppose.

What do now?

I was tempted to include here a fuller account of Khabib's and Conor's careers after 229, but there's actually a fair bit of drama there that I think would make for an interesting post of its own in the future (and I wanted this post to first and foremost be about 229 and what led us there).

I will, however, include a summary which will hopefully satisfy. Khabib would go onto defend his lightweight title twice after beating Conor. Sadly, he would retire in his post-fight interview after defeating Justin Gaethje, on October 24, 2020. This would unfortunately be under horrible circumstances. Khabib's father and long-time coach, Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov had tragically passed away in July, after contracting COVID-19 whilst in hospital for heart surgery. Afterwards, Khabib's mother had asked Khabib to retire – she did not want to see her son fighting anymore. Khabib promised that he would retire, and so he did.

The fabled MMA retirement is a fickle beast. It's often assumed that an MMA fighter's first retirement doesn't count, and that they'll be back for another fight. Fighters seem to have real trouble staying away from fighting, more than other professional athletes. However, this was different. This was final. Nobody expected Khabib to come back. And he didn't. Khabib retired at 32 years old, with a perfect record of 29 professional MMA victories, and 0 defeats.

Conor's post-Khabib career has had a different trajectory. He has had 3 fights after Khabib, with a victory over Donald Cerrone, and then 2 consecutive defeats to Dustin Poirier. The 2nd defeat, on July 21 2021, coming after a horrendous leg break mid-fight. I will not link this here as it really is quite gruesome. As I alluded to earlier, there is drama to be had in these fights, but it would actually be quite lengthy to properly dissect, so I think it should be saved for another post (although it would be shorter than this one).

Conor has not fought since then. Unlike Khabib, he hasn't retired, and is constantly teasing a comeback. Most hardcore MMA fans are generally over it at this point. Conor is now 36 years old, on a 3-year layoff due to a horrendous injury, and is constantly in the news for the wrong reasons. Nobody is expecting the Conor of 2014-2016 to show up in any hypothetical comeback fight. That was truly a lightning in a bottle scenario. A lot of people just assume he will never fight again.

They will both be remembered forever in UFC history. Conor for being the biggest star in the sport, for his meteoric rise (and his numerous personal controversies). Khabib for being one of the most dominant fighters of all time, one of the best to ever do it, and for going out on top, a genuine rare occurrence in this sport.

In the end, the careers of Conor and Khabib shall be forever intertwined. They came together for probably the most intense, genuinely hateful rivalry in UFC history (I hesitate to be definitive here as there are other contenders for this accolade. Looking at you two, Jon Jones and Daniel Cormier). It certainly wasn't boring.

I hope people enjoyed this post. I'm certainly no writer, but I tried my best. I could have included so much more, but I was very conscious of the length of the post. There are so many more MMA dramas that I think are worthy of a post (I've alluded to some in the post itself) – if people are interested, I shall find the time to write these up in future.

edit: fixed a link and a few typos

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Hello everyone! I am trying to get back into writing posts and wanted to start with something short.

Edit: the “hiatus” in the title refers to the episode being pulled for four years not the whole show. Sorry for the phraseology here.

I haven’t seen Seinfeld, but…points to user flair.

What is Seinfeld?

Or rather, who is Seinfeld?

Jerry Seinfeld is a stand-up comedian, actor, writer, etc, with a varied and colourful career. Among the many gems he has created, is The Bee Movie. He also got in trouble once for dating a 17-year-old girl when he was 39…but that’s a story for another time.

Seinfeld (the show) is a fictional account of Jerry Seinfeld’s life in New York City, with three of his zany friends: George Constanza, Elaine Benes, and Cosmo Kramer. It’s often described as a “show about nothing”, focusing on the daily lives and mishaps of its characters. The show ran from 1989-1998, for 9 seasons.

Seinfeld was incredibly successful. 76 million people watched the finale. It’s loved by critics and viewers and has earned billions in syndication. It also heavily influenced shows like Arrested Development and The Sopranos.

But that doesn’t mean the show was free from controversy. 🇵🇷 🔥

The episode

The episode I am going to be discussing is season 9 episode 20, “The Puerto Rican Day”. It aired on May 7, 1998. It is the second most watched episode of Seinfeld ever, with 38.8 million viewers. *TBF it is the episode before the finale.

Seinfeld and his friends are driving through town, when they get caught up in traffic because of the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade. Some other things happen, but at one point the character Kramer accidentally sets a Puerto Rican flag on fire with a sparkler. He then proceeds to throw it on the ground and stomp on it in an effort to put the fire out. People around him quickly notice and voice their disapproval, before a Puerto Rican, because he is just so damn fiery and patriotic, verbally attacks him. Kramer yells “Momma” and flees, closely followed by the Puerto Rican and several others, because they are just so damn fiery and patriotic. They proceed to damage Seinfeld’s car and throw it down a stairwell, causing Kramer to quip, “It's like this every day in Puerto Rico.”

Unsurprisingly, Puerto Ricans IRL did not like the comedic destruction of their flag nor the stereotypical portrayal of their country.

The backlash

Within a day, the episode drew complaints from Puerto Rican activists and community leaders:

But Manuel Mirabal, president of the Washington-based National Puerto Rican Coalition -- who's been complaining to NBC and Castle Rock executives since late April, when only the show's title was public knowledge -- was not laughing yesterday.

Instead he staged a news conference at which he demanded that NBC, Castle Rock and Seinfeld himself apologize during next week's final episode and promise that "Puerto Rican Day Parade" will not be aired in syndication.

"When I watched last night, at first I wasn't too upset, but I was concerned that the Latinos depicted in the show were very stereotypical, like in West Side Story,' wearing the kind of clothes that people wore 40 years ago," said Mirabal, whose organization monitors congressional action and government policy affecting around 7 million Puerto Ricans living in the United States and on the island. "Then Kramer started running around with the Puerto Rican flag. . . . At the point at which the flag was burned, my blood started boiling."

Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer also condemned that scene -- in which the bumbling Kramer accidentally sets the flag ablaze with a sparkler, provoking a riot among parade marchers who trash Jerry's Saab. Kramer then makes one of his typically loony comments.

"The burning of the Puerto Rican flag as a sight gag was insulting to the millions who hold that flag dear, as was the slur that men rioting and vandalizing a car is Like this every day in Puerto Rico,' " Ferrer said in a statement.

Ferrer's office in the Bronx -- where many of New York's 800,000 Puerto Ricans reside -- received "a couple of dozen" calls protesting the fictionalized flag burning, according to his communications director. But Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's office reported none.

Ironically, the real-life Puerto Rican Parade is scheduled to be broadcast live June 14 by WNBC, the network owned-and-operated station in New York. Parade President Ramon Velez said he, too, was disturbed by the flag-burning. "Otherwise I didn't have too many objections. I'm not condemning anybody," he said. "There is a positive aspect, in my opinion. That is, millions of people are now exposed to the fact that there is a National Puerto Rican Parade."

Concerns had been raised about the episode several months before it had aired:

He (Mr. Mirabal) wrote to Mr. Wright last month, before he had seen the show, to express his concern and to suggest that NBC have Hispanic consultants review the program for offensive content. Until that point, NBC had said only that the episode would be titled ''The Puerto Rican Day Parade.''

In a response to Mr. Mirabal, an executive with the ''Seinfeld'' production company said that the episode could have been written about the St. Patrick's Day parade or Columbus Day parade, but that they did not occur during baseball season.

NBC swiftly apologised

''We do not feel that the show lends itself to damaging ethnic stereotypes, because the audience for 'Seinfeld' knows the humor is derived from watching the core group of characters get themselves into difficult situations,'' the network said in a statement.

NBC's president, Robert Wright, added, ''Our appreciation of the broad comedy of 'Seinfeld' does not in any way take away from the respect we have for the Puerto Rican flag.''

The protests continued into June with people sending angry letters to NBC and even demonstrating outside Rockefeller Center. NBC responded by removing the episode from reruns.

As for the Seinfeld cast and crew, they objected to the objections. From ‘Seinfeld - Season 9 - Inside Looks - "The Puerto Rican Day"’:

Jason Alexander (George Costanza): “If you don't see the irony and the humor in having him (Kramer) be responsible for a burning flag then you've just missed the point. I just kept thinking this is so sad that everybody is they're so oversensitized that they just don't get the joke it's not it's not a shot at anybody if any if it's a shot on anybody it's a shot on Kramer. And it it was you know it was it was the second to last episode so it was really a sad thing to have that sort of Downer happen towards the very end.”

Jerry Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld): “I remember speaking with the head of uh a a some sort of Puerto Rican Pride Coalition and he spoke to me and told me that they were going to uh protest uh the episode and they were very upset that we had done this. I said but you haven't seen the episode yet I said how do you how do you know that there's something in there that you want to protest and I'll never forget his exact words were “we assume that it's offensive”. So that's when I knew I wasn't dealing with anything that was you know really legitimate it was just someone wanting to. The really the only thing the episode was about was traffic it had nothing to do with the Puerto Rican Day Parade I mean it was just one of the we just thought it was the funniest of the many parades that they have in New York City that that cause these terrible traffic snarls.”

George Shapiro (executive producer): “Jerry after the series ended went to the broadhurst theater in Manhattan to do uh his show called ‘I'm telling you for the last time’ which was a standup show on Broadway culminating in this HBO special. I'm telling you for the last time and they protested across the street from the stage door every night ‘Jerry Seinfeld is a racist’. It was like a big protest he was getting death threats it was getting serious he had we had security we had plane closed policemen there and uh the last show which is the one that went out live to HBO uh it was a great show and Jerry was exhilarated. You know he he felt he did the best of all the shows for the full week and he comes out of the stage door and across the street are the protesters and before anyone could notice Jerry strides across the street with his long strides goes up to the guy shakes his hand the guy smiles at him he shook a couple of people and it sort of diffused the whole thing. Everyone but the cops and the play. The Detectives that they flipped out all of a sudden he was there talking to these guys and that was and that sort of diffused the whole thing and it ended up uh not to be a controversy anymore especially since there was no ill intent.”

(Personally I think this story should be posted to r/thathappened).

Two writers, Steve Koren and David Mandel, later said that the episode didn’t have anything to do with Puerto Ricans specifically, and that they could have chosen to use any other parade in New York City without changing the plot or dialogue.

The episode didn’t return to syndication until 2002. Now, you can buy it on digital storefronts or watch it on any streaming service that has Seinfeld.

Thanks for reading! I’m curious, have any of you seen this episode of Seinfeld? If so, what do you think of the controversy?

Welcome everyone! And please point out if I made a mistake here or there, English isn't my native language. But drama is.

This is a story that happened on the fringes of the already complicated video game industry. If you don't know a thing about video games or tabletop games, fear not, this is less about gameplay mechanics and more about good old questions of competence and management. If I speak about games, I will make sure everyone understands what's going on.

And without further ado, let's take a look at the main components of today's presentation.

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Shadowrun : A wonderful land where you can get sliced to ribbons by a katana-wielding maniac, crushed to death by a robot or fried by a magical electric shock all in the same day.

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The one and only Shadowrun, created in 1989.

Picture a cyberpunk world, a dystopia ruled by mega-corporations where citizens get arms and brain parts replaced by cybernetics. So far so good? Cool, now add a magical event that suddenly has people turn into elves, orcs, trolls, and whatever. Yep, the idea behind it is to pick a high-fantasy world in one hand, a depressive cyberpunk universe in the other, and smash these two together. You can have a team with a native American shaman summoning spirits and flinging fireballs fighting next to a ex-military wielding a shotgun and hiding blades in his artificial arms.

Somehow, instead of dismissing the setting of Shadowrun as a hookah-fueled hallucination, people played it. Or maybe it's because it was so odd that it got fans.

The standard game has you play as a shadowrunner, a mercenary for hire conducting deniable operations for whoever pays most. Destruction of assets, theft, sabotage, assassinations, your morals (or lack of) are the limit. Thing is, targets are often mega-corps, and combat is, like in real life, short and extremely lethal. As a result, avoiding fights is more important than winning them, and if combat is unavoidable, you better tip the scales in your favor before the bullets start flying.

It may not be the juggernaut that is Dungeons & Dragons, but Shadowrun made its place among the tabletop classics and is currently in its sixth edition.

Unlike Dungeons & Dragons though, Shadowrun saw few video game adaptations, despite the population of video games players and the population of tabletop role-playing games players overlapping quite a bit.

there had been a game on Super Nintendo in 1993, another on Sega Genesis in 1994, but otherwise not much happened. There had been yet another attempt in 2007, but unlike the previous two which did offer a story and a way to immerse yourself in the nightmarish hell of a future without socialized healthcare, this one was a straight up online shooter game meant to have you kill other players with the help of firepower and some spells.

All this to say, there was ample space for a new video-game.

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Harebrained Schemes : Magic, trans-humanism and big robots.

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Founded in 2011 by Jordan Weisman and Mitch Gitelman, two dudes with prior experience in video games. Oh, and Weisman also happens to be one of the creators of the Shadowrun franchise. Harebrained Schemes (shortened HBS) came at the right time to bank on the kickstarter craze. Remember kickstarter? It's the platform that allows you to pitch a project, and if people are convinced, they can throw their hard-earned currency at your face in the hopes that you won't change your mind or turn out to be a fraud. Be it for a book, a game or a potato salad. if you're convincing, people will cover for your expenses and then some.

But how can you be seen when swimming in a sea of projects screaming for attention? One solution is to use a well-known license that will bring interest just by virtue of attaching an important name to whatever you're concocting. You guessed it, Weisman got the rights from Microsoft, owner of the Shadowrun license, and proposed a new video game based on the franchise on kickstarter.

The numbers speak for themselves. HBS had hoped for 400.000 dollars, they got over 1.8 million.Harebrained Schemes : Magic, trans-humanism and big robots.

The project took off, and in 2013, out came Shadowrun Returns. Unlike the 2007 action game with lots of bullets and little in the way of words, Shadowrun Returns had a scenario. And instead of adrenaline packed action, this was a tactical RPG: meaning characters moved one after the other and you had all the time in the world to ponder your next move. In returns, you start as a down on your luck runner with no cash and no prospect who gets a message from your old pal Sam. Sam is dead, and the message was to be sent out in case of untimely demise with a simple proposal : Bring his killer to justice, and get paid. Naturally, things get complicated fast, with a serial killer, a cult and mega-corporations all coming to blows.The project took off, and in 2013, out came Shadowrun Returns.

The game had okay reviews. Nothing mind-blowing, the gameplay could get weird at times, the cover-system was obtuse, the story was nice, the Shadowrun universe was pleasant. But it had easy to use modding tools. For the uninitiated, modding is when you play with the code of the game to create your own campaign, or tweak the rules to make certain enemies stronger for example. The campaign, aptly named "Dead man's switch", was a showcase for the possibilities the modding tools the studio offered.

Returns truly tried to emulate the tabletop game, instead of giving a single story, you had the tools to create your own campaign and share it with others. But somewhere in there, Harebrained got another idea. Players did like the Dead man's switch campaign, so why not make the next one more than a showcase?

Dragonfall came out in 2014. Originally an expansion for Shadowrun Returns, an expanded version was soon sold as a standalone game, and was considered a notable step-up from the original. As a rule of thumb, if asked which game to start with, people will either tell you to start with Returns because it only goes up from there, or skip it and jump straight to Dragonfall for the really good stuff. Unlike Returns which required the hiring of bland mercenaries each run, you had a solid cast of companions this time you got to know.

Ex-frontman for a punk band currently slinging fireballs in the name of a spirit who expects followers to do badass things, and also tends to lose followers when they bite more that they can chew? Check. Computer genius who notably isn't socially awkward and shy? Check, although not being shy still doesn't make him good at people skills. Or any other skill in life. Pale woman who barely speaks and sports cyberware that belongs to a museum? Check. A dog to pet in your hideout? You better check that too.

Gameplay was largely similar, but lively companions and a scenario taking place in an anarchist Berlin (anarchist in the sense of no clear leader, not the bomb-throwing kind), made the game into a success. Or at least enough of a success to warrant a successor.

Shadowrun Hong-Kong was pitched on Kickstarter. This time, Harebrained only asked 100.000, as they had leftovers from the sales of Dragonfall and Returns, and the kickstarter was a way to gauge if interest in the Shadowrun universe was still there on one hand, and add additional features on the other.

With 1.2 millions raised, Interest was there, and Shadowrun Hong-Kong came out in 2015. The mechanics had been polished, cover actually made sense and the story delivered once more. This time, you were accompanied by an orc worshiping a rat spirit who can eat anything without ever falling sick and whose former partners tend to be former by virtue of brutal death. We got a shy nerd (I know, but she's still cool once you get to know her), an ex-cop who desperately wants his badge back, and some more exotic team-members, like one of the few psychopath who isn't a Hannibal Lecter übermensch, but a polite if cold partner with whom you can discuss how a lack of empathy affects life and what the future should look like.

Look, I have a clear bias here. Dragonfall and Hong-Kong are two games that had an impact on me, and I've read books that didn't have half the depth this game does. While the mechanics of the games are nothing new : discuss new things with your team between each missions, and have some supplementary options when on a job depending on whom you bring along, the difference is in the writing. And the writers at Harebrained Schemes are extremely good as as I'm concerned. The people you meet have made a place for themselves in the lowest strata of society and have their habits, ways to unwind, ways to handle death which is an all too common occurrence. They experienced losses and have friends and loved ones. Even the side characters feel alive, and there is an underlying message that even if you're at the bottom of the ladder, the small things you do still matters.

Hong-Kong would also be the last Shadowrun game Harebrained Schemes would work on, and it also made sense. They had gotten out three games in just as many years, and while there had been a clear yearning for Shadowrun games before, they had filled it quite well.

I didn't know it at the time, so I kept crossing my fingers we would one day get a follow-up on Shadowrun Hong-Kong.

So, what were they about to do now? Welp, HBS understood its own dynamic. After Shadowrun, they looked at another franchise which could make the advertising for them and found Battletech. If the name doesn't clue you in, simply picture gigantic robots, huge guns, explosions, and the like. It's a franchise perfectly adapted to be played on a tactical grid with a turn-based mechanic. As it happened, this was also how Shadowrun played, so the developers had quite the experience in the field.

Long story short, A kickstarter is pitched, 250.000 dollars are asked which, just like Shadowrun Hong-Kong before, aren't meant to fund the base game but rather additional features and on the side gauge interest. With over 2.7 millions raised, interest was there, and Battletech came out in 2018. It was even nominated for a few awards for best strategy game.

That's Harebrained Schemes. They worked on a few other games too, but you've seen that the company has found its groove and public.

So then, why the hell would Harebrained Schemes let itself be bought out by another company?

This is a discussion that often surrounds small to middle-sized video game studios, but I will let the man Weisman explain it himself :

"Mitch and I started Harebrained to create the kind of story-rich tactical games we loved," said Jordan Weisman, CEO of Harebrained Schemes, "and for the last seven years, our studio has been fueled by our team’s passion and by the generous support of our fans. As the scale of our games has grown and the marketplace has gotten extremely noisy we felt that HBS needed to team up with a company that could provide us the financial stability and marketing expertise that would allow us focus on what we love doing - making great games and stories."

The problem with being a video game studio with a 50-something staff is that you're one failed game away from bankruptcy. You need to handle marketing just for gamers to realize you exist, ensure quality products in a highly competitive field, and even then you can never be certain.

Paradox develops games, but also publishes many more, had already bought another studio prior, and is used to handle communications. Joining them is a way to let your team work their magic while having a security buffer. But in this case, with Paradox buying 100% of Harebrained in 2018, you also have another firm that can force decisions on you.

The crux is to find a company that lets you do your stuff freely without too much interference, and Paradox seemed like a good pick in theory.

The practice is, obviously, the reason I'm writing this post.

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Paradox Interactive. World domination and history gone weird.

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Paradox, born in the early 2000, is known for what is called Grand strategy games. What are those? Well, look at Super Mario Bros. It's a platformer game. You go from left to right, jump on foes, avoid pitfalls, and so on. Your little brother may be playing it in the living-room right now. Now pick a Paradox game, let's say Crusader Kings 3. Look at this world map, make decisions to expand your domain, fabricate claims, immerse yourself into complicated mechanics derived from local politics in the 1200's, and pause the game. Get up from your chair, go to the living-room. Look at your little brother playing Super Mario Bros. Spit on that uncultured swine, and when he looks at you horrified, smirk with the content knowledge that you will burn Constantinople or gloriously die trying while this filthy peasant is still trying to save a princess that couldn't even be married to the prince of Poland to secure an alliance.

It's a game that will have you murder a slew of children under ten to put your inbred son on the throne. It's a game that will make you realize that if your family calls you a cold jackass, they might simply be making an astute observation.

A big draw is that this game, and most other series by Paradox (like Hearts of Iron for the world war era), allows you to pick a period of time for which frontiers and powers are historically accurate or close to accurate... and then let's you run wild changing history. Do you want to reform the Zoroastrian faith to have its followers embrace nudism and be vegetarian and have it supplant Catholicism? Go for it. Or perhaps it's that strange feeling you get when the pope befriends you on account of your similar faith, and you happen to be a satanist. Or wipe out France from the map, or stop the mongol invasion dead in its tracks, or put entire continents under your rule...

Meanwhile, Mario and Peach never managed to properly expand the mushroom kingdom and keep getting raided.

I'm not merely mentioning Super Mario Bros for fun and giggles, but also to drive home a point. Platformer games have existed since the dawn of humanity and are still being made by the hundreds. Comparatively, a grand strategy game is rather niche. Mind you, niche doesn't mean obscure, Crusader Kings 3 sold 3 million copies in 3 years. Super Mario Bros, out in 1985, sold 40 million copies. It's a platformer that is played by kids, adults, boys, girls. Everyone and their grandmother can have their fun on it.

Grand strategy games? Now these are for people who are ready to spend quite some time to understand mechanics and are ready to look at a world map and nothing but a world map for hours at a time. In many aspects, it's the polar opposite of an easy to understand Mario game.

Meanwhile, Shadowrun and Battletech are tactical role-playing games, which isn't the most sold genre in the world, and while the licenses they belong to ensure some advertising, it does at the same time limit you to a specific public. Not everyone can properly appreciate the fine-tuning of a robot's giant autocannon to find the optimal firepower/heat build up ratio.

In short, Paradox, who makes niche game, has the skill to take another studio specialized in niche games under its wings.

And Paradox, know owning Harebrained Schemes, told them right away to stop making Shadowrun and Battletech games.

This isn't a dumb move, mind you. Sure, Shadowrun gave Harebrained the needed space to make themselves know, but it also limited creative possibilities on one side, and profits on the other, as they didn't own the licenses and only had a right to make games on them. Now Paradox could ensure a brand new license would get the advertising it needed to take off while getting 100% of the profit it would make. Makes sense.

That's how The Lamplighter's League was announced. Ever wanted to save the world in 1930 with a bunch of spies, thieves, cutthroats and assorted scoundrels? You'll feel right at home.

And I was crossing my fingers for the game to be good.

It came out in October 2023. To mixed receptions. And Metacritic is rather nice here, I remember the game being panned a lot more brutally on other websites. So, what the hell went wrong?

Well, we may never get the details straight, but some information came to light.

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The Paradox of proper management and work culture.

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Trigger Warning : sexual harassment, delimited by the following lines:

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In 2019, Glassdoor, a website that allows to leave remarks about a company, had some ex-employees point out mistreatment and poor pay. From the article :

"The communication around it was really bad. Our manager had basically been put on sick leave because they burned out dealing with the whole situation," one former employee said. "There was very little communication internally about how this was going to be handled."

Underpaying your staff when you're a big player in the video game industry is rather problematic, but not unheard of. And Glassdoor is anonymous, so perhaps some of these reports were exaggerated. Maybe the mistreatment reviews were over the top?

Maybe it was.

Until the leak, that is.

This, sadly, won't anyone who keeps informed about major video game studios. Ubisoft and Blizzard Entertainment have been under accusations of sexual harassment and misconducts for a long time, and they aren't the only ones.

In 2021, an internal survey conducted by Unions was leaked and revealed that 69% of women at Paradox had received abuse or mistreatment. The reports are rather damning.

"I have been to meetings where I'm the only woman in the room", says one employee. "I say 'Hey, I really think we should go this direction, based on my experience', and someone looks at me, and they say, 'You know what, you're just here as a token hire. So I think you should be quiet about this.'"

Paradox later hired an independent company for an audit, and communicated that there were "relatively few severe cases" of harassment and that those cases did not warrant "termination of employment" under Swedish law.

The report noted most cases of abusive behavior fell into a legal "grey zone" that defied current definitions but were still harmful for the victim. Those behaviors included "using harsh and demeaning language, ridicule, recurring mean-spirited criticism, unfairly questioning competence, interrupting or speaking over someone in meetings, and blaming and shaming."

Since then, Paradox has put new policies in place against harassment.

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The point is this : if management inside Paradox missed or ignored that half their employees suffered from harassment, then management isn't very good. And while I can't find any info on how the working relationship was between HBS and Paradox, poor management would go a long way to explain The Lamplighter's League.

The game came out, critics were lukewarm, it didn't sell well.

Then came the news that Harebrained Schemes had lost 80% of its employees in July 2023 courtesy of Paradox.

Thing is, the Lamplighter's league came out in October 2023. Harebrained lost 8/10 of its studio months before the release of a game that got panned by critics for reasons that include many missing quality of life features : having to click on your own character instead of the enemy if you want to whack the baddie without changing position, unbalanced stealth segments that could make you lose or win the game depending on how good you were at it, and some more. The core mechanics were fine, but it needed fine-tuning. If you look at the steam or journalism critics, you'll notice the game has been disliked for numerous bugs and balance between the different mechanism. I'm not a game developer, but I can't stop wondering if many of these problems couldn't have been solved had they remained at full staff during these months.

And thus Paradox announced The Lamplighter's League to be a commercial failure.

I don't know why, something just... I don't know, bugs me? Like that slight pain in the neck whenever you turn your head too swiftly and keep forgetting about until the next time you look at your little brother to mock his underdeveloped brain. A little je-ne-sais-quoi, almost... I dunno...

Oh wait, I know. Or rather, I know that I don't know.

I learned of the The Lamplighter's League the day I read the article about it being a commercial failure. There was a demo, a trailer and... pretty much that. Mind you, that's stuff Harebrained could have done on their own. Remember when I said being bought by a bigger studio could help you with communication and marketing? Yep, this one certainly didn't. I can't find the threads again, but I remember complaining on reddit how I missed this game existed, only to be answered how I wasn't the only one. It's hard to buy something you didn't hear about.

Would it have been successful with proper communication and enough time to solve bugs and balance? I can't be certain, even when doing everything right video games are a gamble, and the "if only they had done X" is a pointless debate. I merely wish the game had gotten a proper chance to shine, then we would have known for certain.

-

Surviving the aftermath.

-

Paradox bought Harebrained Studios, Paradox slashed the team, and then Paradox let go of them.

The result? I can only imagine what a waste of money and manpower this has all been.

[Correction: Microsoft keeps the battle tech and shadow run licence, while paradox keeps the rights for the games developed by HBS, so HBS can't work on a follow-up game on these.] It's with quite some sadness that I watched a studio I'm very fond of drift into obscurity, the name was there but for all accounts and purpose, they were dead and gone, and my hopes for a new Shadowrun role-playing game were dashed, as were the hopes of every gamer who enjoyed the Shadowrun trilogy. My fingers hurt.

I was bored one day, and launched Shadowrun Dragonfall and Hong-Kong again. Even knowing it by heart, I still vibrate with the mysterious music, get to learn about the strange characters with the same delight, carefully unravel the mysteries behind the walled city.

I thought about the studio, their games. I checked their blog. My antivirus now says it's an untrustworthy site, it hasn't been updated since Lamplighter's League. I typed Harebrained Schemes in my search engine just to find any discussion about them.

And there I found out about a new blog on which they announced a new game. Seems to be about a man that can graft body parts onto himself and lives in a dystopia. Harebrained Schemes might have lost the Shadowrun franchise, but they sure as hell aren't done with cyberpunk.

And so out of the blue, I decided to shoot them a message (mistakes included) :

Hello,

I got to know the shadowrun universe with the game shadowrun returns. It was a bit wonky, but fun. Played it and forgot about it afterwards, as young people with too much free time and video games on their hands tend to do. I picked up Dragonfall out of curiosity years later, thinking "why not?". I didn't forget that game. Or Hong-Kong for that matter. I've read good books that didn't hit quite as hard. 

There's a specific, harebrained style to the way you build a universe and characters that makes me live the story alongside them. Characters have a depth to them, the story takes you on a wild ride, but perhaps more than that, there is an atmosphere to these games. A gravitas, a melancholia, and the certainty that despite it all, deep down, what we do matters. All neatly tied up with the soundtrack by Jon Everist. Sometimes a few notes can convey more feelings than a hundred words.

I later went on towards Battletech, I played it less as the idea of huge robots isn't my thing, but I still played it because Harebrained Schemes was on the helm, and I spent way too many hours on it.

The Lamplighter's League hit that peculiar atmosphere again, with the era it takes place in, the aesthetic, and the bunch of somewhat dishonest if not frankly sociopathic miscreants working for you.

All this to say: your stories make me laugh, they make me wonder, they make angry, delighted, and melancholic when it's over. It does that for me, and I'm pretty certain I'm not alone feeling this way. 

In short: your stories matter.

I honestly thought the studio dead after the big layoff under Paradox, and I'm amazed you're still kicking despite the - let's say convoluted - state of the video game industry.

I cross my fingers that Graft will be a hit and get the recognition it deserves.

I wish you and your team the very best.

Cheers.

It may seem dumb or naive, but I wrote a few short stories based on prompts here and there. Sometimes I felt inspired and liked the result, sometimes I was less inspired and wrote an absurd piece. And sometimes, I just wrote a bit that people really enjoyed. The comments they made mattered to me a lot, and maybe it does matter others when I express them, even if it's just for a passing smile.

Maybe they would read it, maybe not. But at the very least, I wanted to express my gratitude for the stories they created and the joy they brought me.

And a few days ago, I got a reply :

Thank you, [Name]. This made our week! And we are indeed still kicking, despite it all—thanks to players like you. 

So cheers, we really appreciate your support. We'll do everything we can to make GRAFT worthy of the same praise!

All the best,

Mike

--

Mike McCain
Executive Producer

As for me?

I still have the stories in my head and heart, I still have the music in my brain (and computer). I'm sad we likely won't be seeing another Shadowrun by this team, but as with any good story, I have this melancholic joy that I got to be there to see it.

And I have that hope that against all odds, the hare is still kicking and makes a comeback.

Maybe I shouldn't. But then, I've always been the hopeful kind.

And here I am, crossing my fingers again.

Did write a draft of this one months ago, but forgot to polish and post it!

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Just like the internet of other countries, It is not unknown how korean people love making dubious claims on the internet.

however there was one claim, so dubious, that led to an entire IRL event dedicated only to see if it was true. This is the story of the T24 social festival.

In 2010, a post was made on a korean internet site asking what the weirdest thing they did in the military was. Since korea has a mandatory military service, stories of the military was a subject people loved to talk, and boast, about.

One person made a comment claiming he had built a 24-men tent alone. A 24-men tent is one of those huge tents that can fit 24 people. Other comments had called this comment: "bullshit". A 24-men tent usually requires at least four, ideally eight men to build. The claim that one men could build this alone looked like nothing more than a joke.

In 2012, this comment was put into the spotlight again as a post was made on SLR club, a korean internet site, calling it an "average korean soldier boast". Like the original comment, this post got comments calling this impossible. But there was one comment calling it possible, just with a single word:"It works", by a user named "Lv.7벌레", which may translate to "Lv.7 Bug",which is how I will call this man for the rest of this post.

This soon became a controversy, and became a bet where Lv.7 bug bet 500 thousand won, approximately $400, on how he can build the tent, in two hours, alone.

Now for most people, this claim was simply BS. A 24 men tent used in the korean army is really large and heavy, and as I said, standard procedure requres 8 men. The tarp itself weighs a hundred kilograms, and the pillars also weigh a hundred kilograms.

While it may be possible to set up the smaller pillars and the tarp, the largest problem was the central pillar. It is a ╓╖shaped pillar, made out of three heavy sticks, that need to be raised, while also making sure the small stick protruding from the pillar goes through a small hole in the tarp. Here's a korean drawing about how to set it up. usually at least five people are reqired, with two making sure the sticks don't fall off from the holes, and three pulling the pillar up while also making sure the pillar doesn't fall apart.

Someone actually asked the korean ministry of defense, and their answers varied from "it's impossible" to "maybe, but not easy"

a video of a foreign man building a similar tent by himself surfaced(sadly can't find the video now) -but if you look closely, the middle of the tent sags down, meaning that the pillar wasn't built perfectly, and possibly used only two pillars. Properly doing this alone was just impossible.

Or was it?

While this started as a silly comment, people started seriously thinking they should organize a whole event to see if the bet was true. The event gained enormous traction. A video game company promised to sponsor the event, Someone actually managed to get a 24-men tent, and people started to make trailers for the bet. Other businesses took interest and promised to sponsor it, the media picked this up and was reported on the news. Singers also promised to show up and perform for the event.

The bet was officially on, and it gained a name-the T24 social festival.

2012, september 8th, the event actually happened in the yard of a school. Over 3000 people showed up to see the event in person, and hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, joined the online stream. The event gained massive online traction. An entire bus route was scheduled only for the event to ferry people to the event. Even a few singer groups were somehow contacted to perform for the event. The man, the legend, LV.7 bug showed up in the back of a truck, and started building the tent.

See for yourselves.

This man did it.

In 1 and a half hours, he managed to build it by slowly raising the pillars by himself, and climed up on the tent to show it was legitimate.

He was very relaxed, and he even spent many minutes cheering for the audience or taking a selfie and posting it on the internet, and taking a break. So technically, he put it up in about an hour, excluding all the break time. Which is, honestly,impressive!

News of the event spread, and many news outlets picked up the event, even a TV outlet that reported on the event. The korean military's twitter celebrated him, and there are rumors that even some officials of the american army viewed the event, although there is no proof.

The event quickly became a meme, and more people wanted more fun events lile this one. However, the next "social festival"s were failure after failure, including an attempt to make a comic about shipping the prosecutor's office twitter and the historic folk village twitter, and a mass blind date for single people(which failed for very obvious reasons)

LV.7 Bug became a microcelebrity, even showing up in TV shows. However, he soon got into some drama with a webcomic artist who refused to draw a comic for the event then used the meme anyways, then later got into a legal dispute about bushcrafting. He eventually lost an legal dispute about internet defamation and later, cut most ties from the internet, except from a small youtube channel.

The T24 social festival is still remembered as one of the very few wholesome events that happened on the internet. It didn't matter if his claim that he could build a tent was true, it entertained thousands, even millions, and made an event to be remembered.

Thank you for reading.

Hello hobbyists!

This thread is for community updates, suggestions and feedback. Feel free to leave your comments and concerns about the subreddit below, as our mod team monitors this thread in order to improve the subreddit and community experience.

Sorry for not posting this and replying to the "state of the subreddit" thread, but we've decided to keep rule 9 as is for now.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.

• Define any acronyms.

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• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.

• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

Certain topics are banned from discussion to pre-empt unnecessary toxicity. The list can be found here. Please check that your post complies with these requirements before submitting!

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.

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Certain topics are banned from discussion to pre-empt unnecessary toxicity. The list can be found here. Please check that your post complies with these requirements before submitting!

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Poland. Year 1990.

After the fall of communism in 1989, Poland transitions to democracy and a free market economy.  The economic state of the country is still in shambles, but there is a lot of hope for the future. For Polish people, 1980s were synonymous with violent political oppression and poverty. For Americans, 80s are a source of nostalgia for stuff like playing DnD or trying out cool NES games. The Iron Curtain was now gone and all that stuff started arriving to Poland too, but in the 90s. Too bad everyone was dirt poor though. The new and cool Western products were an object of fascination. After all, all of it was previously completely unobtainable.

Why on earth am I rambling about the economic state of 1990s Poland in a Hobby Drama write up? Because it's a backdrop from where the hero of our tale emerged.

1. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF KATAN: POLISH TTRPG SCENE IN THE 90S

Kryształy Czasu (English: Crystals of Time) are a tabletop RPG system created by Artur Szyndler sometime in the 1980s - one of the very first Polish TTRPGs, in fact! According to Szyndler, the work started around 1984-1985, but the system was completed around 1990. Clearly his passion project, it was originally distributed in the form of floppy disks or in handwritten notebooks at fantasy fan meetups by the author himself. Later on in 1993, a revised version of the system was published by a Polish fantasy magazine Magia i Miecz, spreading it far and wide. 

How was the system? Well... According to an article I found, Crystals of Time were never really well regarded. Common criticisms included lack of proofreading, an absurdly inconsistent universe that regurgitates common fantasy tropes, lack of balancing, rules bloated with tons of unnecessary dice rolls, and insane random encounters/effects that could literally end the game on the spot (such as a side effect of a spell being able to erase the entire party of players from existence) and - most importantly - a characteristic, inept writing style. Put a pin in this last one. My brother - a hardcore TTRPG fan and a Game Master for many years - described it to me as "about as fun as filing tax documents" and that he "thought someone wrote it as a joke". Take that as you will, but I've never heard him say stuff like this about any other system.

However, it should be noted the system did have legitimate fans - its biggest strength was its accessibility (and the fact it was free). What other options were there? Back then you couldn't just walk into a store and buy a DnD manual. You couldn't even pirate it because no one owned a computer. The least you could count on was a barely readable photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of someone's DnD manual. In English. So good luck with decyphering all of that!  If you even know any English in the first place. So you're stuck here. You're stuck with Crystals of Time.

Author of the aforementioned article, Piotr Muszyński, writes that Crystals of Time garnered a lot of goodwill from the public at the time because it was a Polish product created in a time when they were automatically seen as lesser than the cool, shiny, Western stuff that just started to show up, so the system got some praise for the effort alone. And while CoT faded away with an advent of other imported TTRPGs such as Warhammer, DnD or Old World of Darkness, it still had a very small yet dedicated fanbase of nostalgic middle aged fantasy nerds. Crystals of Time were mostly forgotten... until they suddenly came back into the spotlight.

In the strangest way possible.

2. THE RETURN OF KATAN: A CROWDFUNDING SAGA

Poland. Year 2014.
Artur Szyndler starts a campaign on a crowdfunding website polakpotrafi.pl. Crystals of Time are back, baby! 

...This time, as a novel - titled Crystals of Time: Katan's Saga: Labyrinth of Death, part 1 and 2 (Kryształy Czasu: Saga o Katanie: Labirynt Śmierci, część 1 i 2). As a true fantasy epic, a new modern classic that will surely be discussed and analyzed for eons. The goal of the campaign was raising money for the creation of the first volume out of planned 13 entries (each split in 2 books) in Crystals of Time: Katan's Saga. The description of the campaign goes into detail about turning Crystals of Time into a franchise, which are unusually ambitious for a mostly forgotten TTRPG from the 90s. As Szyndler himself wrote: "as you can see, our foresight extends further than the astrologers are able to foresee" - and goddamn, he wasn't kidding. So, what was the goal? A mere 55 THOUSAND Polish złoty (~15000USD). A small price to pay for a literary masterpiece. And this is when people started getting skeptical.

As the wider internet learned of the campaign, they started noticing quite a lot of red flags. To release a book, you'd feasibly need a team of a couple people, like editor and beta readers. Crystals of Time: Katan's Saga boasted a team of nearly 40 PEOPLE(!!!), including 12 editors and 14 graphic designers. The campaign also had an official youtube channel, which posted a lot of trailers to drum up hype. The trailers are quite amateurish and consist mostly of recitations of very bad poetry about the island archipelagos of Ochria. And there's also a traditional dwarven funeral song, which is 22 minutes long. In case you need some cool tunes for your sex playlist.

It's not a secret that the author also had quite an ego. Take a look at what he had to say about the book!

"The scale of CoT. How many times do I have to say that the thing you knew up to this point was merely 1-5% of everything I came up with? Over 25 years ago, before Magia i Miecz, it was 3700 pages - including the universe. Some have seen these documents - a pile of 1,5m height. And now the scale of CoT is right before your eyes. And this is just the beginning...

"The last thing is what the beta readers said. You read this book for the first time for all the action. It's hard to stop reading - I promise. For the second time, you'll read the book to understand the world, because the information are scattered across many chapters. You cannot know everything without getting to some longer descriptions. For the third time, you'll be reading it for the schemes, mysteries and subplots. Decyphering it all is an essence of all 13 volumes. I don't recommend doing it during the first read. There is too much to comprehend. You must understand, this isn't a normal book."

"As I said from the start, this book will shock you with its ideas. The things that nowadays seem absurd will be soon throughly analyzed." 

"The writing style is what it is. You have to accept it, or not read at all. Sometimes the suspense will be jarring, but I will remain consistent."

"As some of you already noticed, the competition isn't resting and already started to create bad reviews for the book. A few of the sponsored "counter-articles" were already detected by you all. I didn't expect them to be so fast."

"Biggest assets of the first volume of Katan's Saga are the 25 vibrant characters of our party and their unbelievable experiences, as well as the plot of the novel rushing forward like a meteorite."

Artur Szyndler also stated that he hates writing descriptions of this universe that he's so proud of, so he'll put them in between chapters in the form of poetry. Or, as he calls it, a "rhymed prose". He also defiantly defended himself from doubters by stating that "if someone is looking for a beautiful writing style, they should go read Mickiewicz instead." Normally it would've been a little worrying to hear these things from the next literary sensation, buuuuuuuut.... Oh hey, look, this masterpiece will have exactly 700 different fantasy races and 25 main characters! And if you give Artur 20000 or 50000 złoty, he will make YOU into one of the protagonists of his book! It would be a shame not to take this golden opportunity and be forever immortalized in literature!
And then Szyndler uploaded a few chapters as samples to the campaign page. This is when the internet got their first taste of the book.

And oh boy, the result was not good.

3. HALF-FJORDS, HARMONY AND BAD POETRY: SZYNDLER'S LICENTIA POETICA

Before we dive into the endless void that is the book's plot, we should talk about how this thing is written.
Let's say this straight up: the book is a car crash and attracted bile fascination ever since the internet saw the sample chapters for the first time. Due to its clumsy, yet weirdly captivating writing style and absurd over-the-top plot, it frequently loops back into being the greatest unintentional parody you'll ever read. The book is full of word salad, grammatical and spelling errors and features a stream of consciousness-type narration, which was confirmed to be a result of Szyndler literally dictating the book to people who were writing it down for him. (Or, as haters referred it to as, "the transcript of a TTRPG campaign ran by the worst Dungeon Master in the entire school".)
The most characteristic Szyndler-isms include:

• Quotation marks in completely random places, such as calling a group of literal TITANS "a gathering of many unbelievably "tall" foes"  or phrases like  "His eyes almost "popped out of his skull"(...)"
• Szyndler's inexplicable obsession with describing things as "half-"something. Half-plates. Half-plane. Half-life. Half-mammal. Half-fjords...
• Describing things as "some sort of ___" or saying that things happened "probably", as if the narrator himself wasn't sure what he's talking about. Yet at the same time the book will state extremely specific numbers of things, such as revealing that a character twirled exactly 253 times during her dance, or thatsomeone is "one of the most important gods in over 126 455 pantheons".
• Ellipsis... showing up.... constantly...
• Whenever a problem in the plot has an easy solution, the characters immediately dismiss it because "it would disrupt the harmony". No, they don't elaborate. The harmony must be swinging wildly like a pendulum because they disrupt it like 3 times a page.
• Random creatures, places and things are always described as by their "essence". It's a frighteningly common occurence to read that our main characters  "passed by a powerful enemy, a seaweed existence born from essence of vitality and nothingness*"* and then we have to move on like it never happened*.*
• The ballads - long works of VERY questionable poetry that are stuck into the plot. They mostly detail geography, inhabitants and customs of lands and races who are completely unrelated to the story. In-universe, they are masterpieces created by the party's bard, and literally everyone constantly praises his genius and god-given talent. These go for dozens of pages at the time, so I hope you enjoy the worst rhymes ever concieved by man.
• The narration jumping wildly between different subplots with a subtelty and grace of a cocaine-fueled chimpanzee.
• Szyndler has ZERO sense of scale. It constantly leads to situations where the party will enter a room in a dungeon and have a random encounter with a thousand harpies or a million gargoyles. This isn't a problem limited to the novel either. In the equally clumsily written TTRPG, the capital city of the orc empire (with a population of a few millions) has a sole food source, which are... the fish from a local lake.
• Every single time someone casts a spell, the spell is mentioned to be "ancient", "forbidden", or "ancient and forbidden". Sometimes the spell's level is also stated. Characters also talk about their classes, levels and allignments all the time. I'm slightly disappointed we don't learn how much EXP they earn.
• A lot of characters in the book are based on the author's friends and, in one case, even the author himself. Often this fact is only cleverly disguised by spelling their names backwards (Kemot = Tomek, Skela = Aleks...).
• Crystals of Time universe has every single fantasy race, creature, spell, land and concept ever implemented in other fantasy stories. All of them. All of them at once. Which is a shame because some of Szyndler's ideas are quite interesting, but they get drowned out by this noise of unnecessary information and concepts. Nothing is presented and elaborated on, its only listed out somewhere and exists solely to bloat the book with MORE STUFF.
• The characters die and come back to life so frequently that you can risk a statement that Crystals of Time is the most pro-life book ever written.

As a fun little sidenote: Artur Szyndler also had a short stint as a politician. He ran in local elections in 2007, but didn't get a mandate. He was member of Prawo i Sprawiedliwość party. If you're a Polish citizen, you probably know where this is going. If you aren't a Polish citizen - if you ever heard anything about the political state in Poland during the last 8 years (such as a near total ban on abortion,etc)... Those were the guys in power. Which brings me to the final Szyndler-ism...

• Sexist and racist content! There isn't a single woman in this book that doesn't get naked. Female characters stripping and/or having sex with something/someone is a frequent solution to any problem the party faces. Szyndler seems to be weirdly fixated on putting subplots "just for women" in his book, with... really interesting results.

The situation wasn't exactly helped by these posts detailing Szyndler's quotes and opinions expressed during his convention panels. Highlights include the claim that the book with "feature subplots for men (battles, fights, duels, weapons) and women (romances, seduction, interior design, raising children)", or the fact that Szyndler likened RPG systems in which the GM does not calculate the result of the dice roll, but instead decides the effect to be a sign of fall of our civilization and *somehow* connected it to there being "Jihad in France". Take that, Matt Mercer!

Shockingly, the campaign did not reach its goal, therefore no money was gained. It raised over 7000zł (~1800USD), and had only 69 backers. And even though this money was supposedly needed to fund writing of the novel, the book, in all its 1400-page glory, inexplicably... came out anyway shortly after. In all its self-published, barely coherent, typo-ridden glory, of course. As a cherry on top, despite allegedly employing 14 graphic designers, all illustrations in the book have very small resolutions, leaving them very visibly pixelated in print.

Szyndler changed his mind about the goal, and the campaign was now supposed to be funding special "collectors editions" of his book all along, or something. Was the campaign intended to be a scam? I don't know, and I won't make a definitive statement. All I'm sure about is that he clearly had no idea what he was doing.

4. KATAN'S SAGA: HEY, WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS BOOK EVEN ABOUT?

I read the book three times and all I know is it's an ultimate test of reading comprehension. Summarizing the plot in short (or coherent) fashion is literally impossible, so instead I decided to go for a small collections of Greatest Hits - both in plot point and quotes form. Not really highlights, more like... uh, lowlights.

The main plot of the saga is centered around the hunt for an evil deity called NATAK the God Slayer. Natak pissed off all the gods so much that they decided to get rid of him for good - by travelling to his birthplace and killing him while he's weak. Two gods, Asteriusz the Great and Gorlam the Brave (2 of our 25 protagonists), travel to the land of Ochria 9000 years earlier, which - by complete coincidence - is also the time and birthplace of an orc named KATAN, future god-dictator who rules Ochria. Can you guess where this plot is going? Because Artur Szyndler thinks you don't, and seemingly sets it up as if it was a plot twist.

Unfortunately for us, Asteriusz and Gorlam are the two most unobservant morons that ever lived. The two eventually meet baby Katan, who is being cared for by an amnesiac priest of an unknown deity, who grants him an absurd amount of power to protect the kid. Once Katan is a toddler, he starts wielding two "half-plates" (weapons) called the God Slayers. At one point the priest starts a chant for Natak the God Slayer. At another, the priest literally says the obvious twist to Asteriusz and Gorlam's faces, but they "weren't listening", so I guess their CSI-level investigation will go on for the next 26 half-volumes. You'll catch that nefarious Natak one day, guys! I believe in you!

The actual plot of volume 1 is about a group of paladins, who decided to... stand in the middle of a forest and practice sword fighting right next to the Tree of Balance, which inevitably gets chopped down - which will cause the destruction of the world very soon, because "the harmony was disrupted". The world's only hope is now our party (and Asteriusz, and Gorlam, and Katan...), who have to travel to the Labyrinth of Death, a dungeon/eldritch location, to bring back a new magical sapling. The rest of the plot is just increasingly absurd random encounters on their way to the tree. It's like Dungeon Meshi, if Ryoko Kui consumed a lethal dose of LSD. 

The funniest part is that they end up accidentally destroying that new sapling as well, making their 1400-page long quest ultimately pointless.

***
Remember those sample chapters on the campaign page? Keep this in mind: this is how the book introduced itself to the world.
Hannah, originally introduced as a tough and heartless elven assassin, gets immediately brainwashed by Asteriusz to be his devotee, and essentially becomes the party's resident prostitute. She offers a dance to the leader of the mountain giants in exchange for letting the party through and what follows after is a roughly 10-page long sequence of Hannah stripping and breasting boobily all over the place. And it truly has to be read to be believed.

"Suddenly her thin body jumped into the air. Her hands, held high, were pretending to be a geyser. At almost one meter up in the air, the girl began her spin. And not a normal one.

(...)
Only her hands waved every time, like wings of an albatross. Some were sure the girl was really flying. They saw the dancing leaps into the air, all almost of four meter distance, combined with preserving the one meter height throughout their distance.
(...)
Snake movements of the spinning black mamba were reaching the higher parts of the elf's body. When they reached her buttocks, most of present men bit their lips. Paladins took off their helmets and stretched out their necks to see better. And they had a lot to look at. The chiseled muscles of her female butt, covered only by elastic black cloth, perfectly showing off her moves. Each of her buttocks not only shrunken, straightened or wiggled separately, but one could see a moving barrier between these two styles of dance.
(...)
Girl's perky breasts seemed like they don't want to submit to the snake movements. They tried to shiver, jump, and even flapped around to the sides.
(...)
The dance continued to mirror the movements of a snake running away from paladins.
(...)
Her breasts continued to land once to the left, then to the right, while still maintaining their perkiness.
(...)
Both legs changed their positions to the rhythm of the music. Their fast movements made noticing the change impossible. Once left, and then right leg, took turns on the ground while the other one waited, with a knee bent so hard her feet touched the buttock - just like a heron.
(...)
The spectators then realized two things. One was that the legs of the dancer were distracting everyone from the breasts, the second - that her tiny steps started shaping some sort of strange pattern. Only half of them recognized the point of this sequence and its meaning. From time to time, separated by one long "step", she was spelling out her name with the stomped drops of sweat. On the stone floor of the "chamber" you could see her name - Hannah."

And then our elven stripper Hannah starts spinning during her dance. She spins exactly 253 times until all her internal organs are crushed by the force. And then she dies. Don't worry, she gets better. Later in the book she gets married 3 times, to 3 guys, all of which are clones, all are named "Nameless", and are also the eldritch abominations ruling the Labyrinth of Death. The upside is that at least she's not at risk of mixing up any names in her polycule.

***

The party decides to adopt a pre-pubescent medusa princess named Mantisa, despite the fact that once she comes of age she will automatically turn evil, so they'll have to kill her anyway. And she can become evil at any time. It doesn't stop one of our paladins from marrying Mantisa the next day, and the two become a true power couple on the battlefield as well. And by that I mean that tan Arkadian is carring Mantisa on his back at all times during combat.

"Additionally, he [Arkadian] felt that during the more energetic movements that his helmet was touching her naked breasts"

Which he felt somehow. Through his helmet.

"The surprised demonic knight was baffled when Mantisa's nipples pierced into his helmet's visor. The moment of inattentiveness costed him a bit too much. The paladin cut into his demonic hands. (...) Tan Arkadian, pleased with the idea, praised his partner.

"Bravo! Your sight worked on him! Next time make sure to stare into his eyes longer, so that he pertrifies."

Mantisa decided not to correct the young knight."

It should be noted that Mantisa is pre-pubescent only as a Medusa, and is explicitly stated to be 18 - the same age as her husband. But later on the party walks into a trap that makes everyone 1 year younger. Except Mantisa, who got 4 years younger, due to her species' weird obsession with number 4. Arkadian briefly considers that their age gap might be weird now, to which she replies that they got married at 18, and "if someone is outraged by the physical love between a 14 and 17 year old, then it's their own problem". We thankfully don't have to ponder the ethics of... all *this*, because Arkadian decides to walk into the trap 3 more times, so that he can be the same age as his wife. And they say chivalry is dead!

Mantisa also has a quirky habit of murdering other female characters if they even breathe in Arkadian's direction. That includes murdering literal newborns. (Don't worry, they get better.) I think these might be the "subplots for women" that Szyndler hyped up.

***

During the very same fight with the demonic knight, a samurai/salamander woman named tan Sunin shows us her best moves as well.

"The knight, clinging to life, kept defending himself. (...) supernatural magic and endurance gave him a chance to survive longer, giving him an extra hour of life*. (...)* After two hours*, only this energy kept its master alive, stopping the bleeding and continuing the "fight". (...) When tan Tacjan fell to his knees, tan Sunin kept slicing. Obedient to the will of her race, the wrath of god and fate, that she was an instrument of. Only some time later,* after 3 hours of this strange execution, she took a little break and changed her weapon and a target of attack."

Biggest mystery is how the demonic knight did not die from boredom.

***

"It was just then tan Kemot realised he's actually naked, and his two long rods of manliness are celebrating the return of the arms just as joyously as he is."

Typical Crystals of Time experience: reading a page and suddenly getting slapped in the face with an unexpected sentence like this.

***

During one of the YouTube trailers we can see the list of 700 races appearing in this story. Those who were particularly eagle-eyed noticed that the list contains silverfish (pl: rybiki cukrowe), a completely normal species of bugs. It was a common belief that it was probably a prank from some staffer who snuck it into the list without Szyndler knowing. That is, until the book came out, and it turns out it contains a poem about a species of 3-meter tall, armoured silverfish living on the edge of space, who are singlehandedly saving the local economy by... locals gathering and eating their excrements. Which, I remind you, is all written as a POEM. When Szyndler wrote that "his book will surprise even the most hardened fantasy veterans", he wasn't fucking lying -  the man didn't even hesitate before writing a ballad about nutritional properties of space bug poop.

***

One of the paladins, a guy named tan Sahrac, is inexplicably revealed to be a legendary Mother of All Invasions, a 4-meter tall double-spider (a giant spider with another giant spider as a head), ruler of all spider races who ravage the land. He was just pretending to be a human, because he likes being a cool paladin, and it would be pretty hard to swordfight as a spider. Sahrac committed to the bit so hard that he also has a human wife, two kids, and makes it very clear he prefers to identify as male. He speaks with a lisp as well. Much later in the story he, while in spider form, lays a (somehow fertile) egg. It results in a daughter who is a new spider princess. (Baby spider kills Katan, but don't worry, he gets better.)

Incredibly progressive stuff from a man who used to be a member of a homophobic right wing political party. Most definitely not on purpose.

***

Speaking of strange gender-related content. Our paladins eventually discover that they've been followed by a 4-meter tall stone sphinx, who has the exact same face as Asteriusz the Great, for some reason. And that this sphinx was following them ALL ALONG, but was invisible.
The sphinx's name is Tifra, and she's actually female. She has Asteriusz's face because she's his #1 fan. She's also married to a paladin/giant tan Imar and pregnant with his baby, which they conceived via divine intervention. Because, I remind you, she's made out of stone.
I should note that tan Imar is the only black guy in this book, and coincidentally also the only one who speaks entirely in broken Polish. Funny how that works!

"A loud "Nooo!!!" escaped tan Imar's clenched jaws."

Tan Imar also has his Ventriloquism skill levelled up all they way to 99. 

His shock is understandable, because he just witnessed his pregnant sphinx wife have her fetus forcibly aborted on the battlefield by their archenemy. The fetus survived the abortion thanks to yet another divine intervention, and is now a half-giant half-necrosphinx. Thankfully, Asteriusz resurrects the ghost of Tifra as well. As he claims: "I will form her into a being in a shape of an angel. Because of the circumstances of her death she will look like a half-sphinx and half-snake". So, a half-giant half-necrosphinx, birthed by a ghost half-sphinx, half-snake, possibly also a half-angel? I hope my explanation clears everything up.

***

"Tytanical choir of a thousand Harpies in a "closed space" is able to seduce an entire army..."

They are in a dungeon. Which is composed of nothing but rooms. All of which are closed spaces. Because they are rooms. I can't believe I have to explain this.

***

Wonderful example of word salad very typical for this novel.

"Unfortunately, he chose an overwhelming number of very strong foes to attack us. Here we have mountain orcs, stone giants, lion-headed manticores, triple-headed chimeras, bigfooted gigols, sea harpies, demonic grasags, royal scorpids, black minotaurs and waddling anarchs. More so, from the "ceiling", straight on heads of the scorpids, fell down cave cyclopses, armored cobras, furry gargoyles, elephant dissolvers, tentacle-headed leafeaters and deep-sea octopusorians. It's incredibly bad news, because these monsters are typical for the Spider Archipelago."

Okay, we got 16 here. Only 684 races left to add to the story, I guess. (tag yourself, I'm the "ceiling")

***

Around halfway through the book, Gorlam the Brave gets separated from the party. During that time, he learns that they're walking into the trap - "an apocalyptic battle in the Gnome Chamber" - so Gorlam starts running to warn them in time. Gorlam runs through the Labyrinth of Death for... 164 PAGES. He finally arrives, much later in the book... and learns that the battle he wanted to warn them about already ended.

Gorlam and his pointless dungeon ultramarathon became a bit of a meme for people making fun of the book, so it became customary to ask: "Is Gorlam the Brave still running?" on every post about Crystals of Time.

***

More than once the party manages to bypass the challenges of the Labyrinth by performing "the Shuffling" (pl: przeszuflowanie)... which in normal speech means "get eaten by a monster, travel through its digestive system and exit through the anus". Our brave paladins are disturbingly fast and eager to suggest it as a solution. Some characters even recall the past horror of  - not shuffling - but being shuffled through...

***

"Their appearance was unique. Red, halftransparent jelly-like body showed an inner skeleton of a skeleton*. The teal eyes shined with their own light. Feet with long claws and four upper limbs were nothing compared to their pair of giant bat wings, which fossilized upper surfaces were as sharp as a guillotine".*

In case Polish speakers are wondering: the original says "szkielet kościotrupa". I'd like think this is a one-time mistake, but then I also found "reptile-shaped reptilions" (pl: "gadokształtni reptilioni")...

***

Undead paladin tan Lemoc and his brother, tan Tabakista, casually reveal that they were chased out of their homeland for "too humorous approach to life". What did they do? Together they snuck into dozens of undead women's sarcofagi each night, and raped and impregnated them while they were asleep. The entire party laughs. According to the book, the problem was only that the women's husbands "were more than insanely displeased" by this. Euphemism of the century right there. Szyndler has a real way with words.

***

Tan Abuk, our bard, who was hyped up as a poetic genius for the entire plot, turns out to be a royal rakshasa, a gigantic tiger demon with six hands, "a race insane when it comes to any arts, including the understanding of beauty and music". Turns out that they are fiends that destroy entire continents of anyone who dares to criticize their space bug poop ballads. In other words, Szyndler invented (more like borrowed) a race of demons whose only purpose is to genocide the haters.

A group of rakshasas is on their way to my house as we speak.

***

"Like all cyclopes, they specialize in boulder throwing. They do it excellently, as they are exceptionally strong, and their one eye makes their aim better."

Depth perception? What's that?

Szyndler's poetic license when it comes to laws of reality is truly baffling sometimes. He thinks that labor (poród) and post-partum period (połóg) are the same thing, because he uses them as synonyms - he wrote an entire sphinx abortion ballad about it. He also refers to pregnancy as "lasting over half a year" which is... very vague for a man who likes extremely specific numbers. At two different occassions our paladins have to escape a gigantic oven. They all easily survive because the bubbles of air inside their full-plate armors act as an insulation against the heat and they don't get hot at all.

***

You might have noticed that somehow I managed to not say a single word about Katan, THE GUY THE SAGA IS NAMED AFTER. That's because he's barely doing anything. He is a toddler by the time he joins the party, and despite his growth being accelerated with magic, he reaches mayyybe elementary school age at the end of the book. So he spends time throwing himself down the stairs, repeatedly, for fun.

At one point, Asteriusz the Great gets hit with a magical spinning "half-plate" weapon, called the God Killer, that Katan was wielding. It spins constantly, much like a buzzsaw, and is cutting into poor Asteriusz, but the party cast a looped Wave of Healing spell that keeps him alive and heals him instantly. Katan tries to get the half-plate out but can't, because it keeps cutting off his fingers (which grow back instantly thanks to the spell). But he's trying! Again, and again, and again, and again.... And that would basically be his entire contribution to the plot of this book.

In case you're wondering, the half-plate keep spinning inside Asteriusz... for exactly 135 pages (11 chapters). Is this "the plot rushing forward like a meteorite" that Szyndler mentioned? I bet.

***

At the end of the book our party makes it out of the Labyrinth of Death, but without the magical sapling they came there for in the first place. They're back to square one. And then we learn that "in this very moment, someone in Ochria stopped the flow of time...". And the book just ends. I shit you not, this is the last sentence. 1400 pages, and there's not even an ending!!!

5. THE SECOND DEATH OF KATAN: RECEPTION AND LEGACY

To say that the reception was not good would be an understatement. 

The book reportedly sold 3000 copies. The planned sequel(s) to the book were scrapped, even though previews were read at some cons (how I wish I could see them!). We can safely assume the big plans to translate the saga into English are also dead in the water. 

The book's main legacy was being a popular target of memes in fantasy/fandom circles. A very popular Facebook fanpage was created: Czytam Kryształy Czasu po raz pierwszy dla akcji (Reading Crystals of Time for the first time for all the action) - its name being a reference from a famous Szyndler quote posted above - whose main purpose was to liveblog reading the book and post particularly funny quotes from it. 

Artur Szyndler reacted to the mockery maturely, accused his detractors of being "middle-schoolers", and also claimed they were sent by rival fantasy writers looking to protect their own interests, whom he called "mercenaries". At one point he was a commenter on the Reading Crystals fanpage... and beefed even with his own fans. Turns out the OG CoT fans were not pleased - they were in fact quite skeptical and slightly annoyed with the announcement of the book. After all, this isn't a revival of a cult classic RPG system they were all begging for, and the fact that this book exists just made them a laughing stock.

If you speak Polish, and somehow became as fascinated with this book as I am, I highly recommend buying it. It's still out there. My copy has an autograph from Artur Szyndler inside, who wished me an "unforgettable reading experience". He was right, in a way. My highly annotated, highlighted copy is well loved, and a crown jewel of my collection of oddities. It brought me a lot of joy.

If you do NOT want to buy the closest thing humanity has to the Necronomicon, I can point you to an old series of my posts detailing the plot in excruciating detail. (Edit: now, due to popular demand, some of my posts have English versions!) I quote the original book a lot. I got roughly 75% through, before the essences of madness seeping out of the Labyrinth of Death made me quit. If you somehow make it through all my posts, I will personally congratulate you on your achievement. No, I won't pay for your therapy.

Last of all, this book has a page on TVTropes. Judging by the writing style, it was created and maintained by one person. If you are out there, TVTropes guy, and reading this, we are possibly the only true Crystalheads on this Earth. We have mutual trauma. I think we should shake hands.

6. AN EULOGY FOR KATAN: THE EPILOGUE

Just like The Room, Crystals of Time: Katan's Saga is a passion project of a wildly untalented man with a big ego, who crashed and burned. But while Tommy Wiseau (who's coincidentally also Polish) embraced his role as the villain and ultimately acknowledged his movie as a mastepiece of unintentional comedy, I don't think it would ever happen for Artur Szyndler, as it requires swallowing his pride first. He clearly thinks everyone else is at fault, and if they dare to laugh at his "half-fjords" or whatever, that means they're children, business rivals or are simply blind to the genius of his prose. There are no mistakes in his book. If you don't understand something, that means you don't know enough about the intricacies of CoT lore.

Back in the 90s, the staff of magazine Magia i Miecz - the same guys who were publishing the Crystals of Time TTRPG - turned on Szyndler in a very public way. They created a mocking caricature of Artur Szyndler, Paladin Arturius and published his "adventures" in their magazine. While the source of the conflict isn't publicly known, it was clear that the old fantasy fandom at large did not particularly like Szyndler even before his crowdfunding drama. Reading the adventures of Arturius struck me as quite childlish and uncalled for, even more so after I read the thread of Artur fighting with fans. I actually started feeling a little bad for him.

That is, until I kept doing research and found an interview with Szyndler from 2023 where he basically states that women are too dumb to comprehend the realistic genius of Crystals of Time, so they prefer simplified RPGs for morons where they can have fun, like DnD 5e. Goddammit, Artur. I was trying to be nice to you in the end, but alas, I am probably too dumb to grasp your genius after all. Godspeed. Never change.

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CONTENT WARNING: >!Sexual assault imagery and references (no, seriously)!<

Introduction

Transformers: Age of Extinction is a cinematic death knell. 

For sure, it made a whole lot of money: The second-highest box office toll of the Michael Bay Transformers film pentalogy, even. But this quick cash rush came at a dire reputational cost. The preceding movies had never enjoyed particularly good critical esteem, but Age of Extinction was a whole new low that turned off even normie cinemagoers. The results became evident as soon as the very next movie, The Last Knight, the intended launching point for a cinematic universe that instead wound up grossing just over half of the preceding movie and marking the definitive endpoint of Bay’s involvement with the series. From there a reboot, but still no dice in terms of recouping those old totals. The poison was deep, too deep. As I type this we are witnessing Transformers One, a critically acclaimed animated paradigm shift for the Autobots and Decepticons’ battles on the big screen struggle at the box office with the core fanbase and film commentators desperately trying to convince outsiders to give it a chance. Some of that was due to a notoriously bad set of trailers, but it’s also not a stretch to say that even a decade on the brand is still very much wounded at the theater. 

This is not a post about Age of Extinction. Any number of Youtubers can give you the lowdown on every conceivable way it fails as a film. I have nothing to add to that conversation. But if you dare to think this is Transformers’ low point, then you have no idea. Go back far enough, traveller, and you’ll find something much darker. A primordial force predating even the first Michael Bay movie, a subseries to make the likes of Transformers: Energon seem dignified by comparison. In fact, just think of the worst franchise slop of the past 10-15 years you have seen and I promise you this is far beneath it. Rise of Skywalker? Ghostbusters 2016? Child’s play, my friend. Child’s. Play.

A Brief Trek Through Binaltech

It’s 2003, the second and final year of Transformers: Armada’s run. But while that series absorbed the bulk of the attention of kids invested in the franchise at that time (and most of the money from their parents’ wallets), another less remembered toyline debuted the same year. Transformers: Alternators, also known as The Transformers: Binaltech in Japan, was a simple concept: New versions of pre-existing Autobot and Decepticon characters, now based on real-life licensed vehicles. Optimus Prime as a Dodge Ram SRT-10, Shockwave as a Mazda RX-8, even Grimlock set aside his usual t-rex alternate mode to become a Ford Mustang GT. And those are just some of the ones I can count on the median reader actually recognizing! All in all, it was a pretty cute idea. It also didn’t go particularly well. 

Right from the conceptual stages, there were problems. The plan was to give the G1 cast members upgraded versions of the vehicles they were originally based on, but many manufacturers refused to play ball. This most notably knocked out Autobot staples Jazz and Bumblebee, Porsche and Volkswagen respectively shooting down initial concepts due to not wanting to associate with so-called “war toys”. Getting enough brands who weren’t managed by comically risk-averse corporate fogeys on board to actually get a product line out the door turned out to be merely the beginning of the headaches, for distribution of the toys was its own mess. From TFWiki, my master source for 90% of this post: “Over the time of its original run, the Alternators line was particularly notorious for including toys that were extremely hard to find due to only shipping in one or two waves... ...whereas others shipped for multiple waves, despite having already been shelfwarmers (Swindle, in particular).” By 2005 Walmart dropped Alternators due to low sales, with Hasbro’s response being a new assortment later that year which didn’t sell either, prompting them to discontinue the line entirely. Binaltech seemingly fared marginally better - Its low sales cancellation came in early 2006, and before then a brief subline known as Binaltech Asterisk hit the market, three more Autobots releasing across Fall of 2005 each coming with little driver’s-seat-compatible figurines of girls based on female humans from past Japanese Transformers shows. Not the characters themselves, mind you, but weird semi-clones with slightly different names and designs: See this compared to this. Your guess is as good as mine. Unlike Alternators, Binaltech also had an actual story that tied itself into the decade-spanning epic that is the Japanese G1 continuity, albeit one only told within the instruction booklets of the toys themselves. This quaint little excuse plot, by the way, involves time travel and universe-hopping, including a connection to Beast Wars. No, I will not elaborate.

The big takeaway from all this is that in conjunction with Galaxy Force, the Japanese dub of Transformers: Cybertron underperforming (no concrete numbers, but the toyline ended 3 months early), the brand was in something of a slump in its home country. Filming for the movie that would ignite the franchise’s cultural renaissance was soon to begin, but with the final result over a year out Takara needed a fresh new idea to carry them through and regain some interest along the way. 

What I’ve just given you is the nuts-and-bolts business context of Japanese Transformers heading into 2006. This was even the year Takara merged with Tomy after an announcement in 2005, for whatever that’s worth. But make no mistake, dear reader: None of this suffices as a satisfying explanation for what is about to happen. The average toy company, when faced with a stumbling period for one of their flagship brands such as this, would try to gin interest back up with, at absolute worst, some dumb but ultimately harmless gimmick or a legacy product line for nostalgia baiting. Neither of these are what Takara did in 2006. Instead, they opted to make quite possibly the bleakest bet I’ve ever seen from an entertainment corporation of their size: That all the people who ever grew up loving the world of the Transformers, the people who had the gall to invest themselves in its characters and stories were actually a bunch of degenerate sexual deviants.

When All Hell’s Breaking Loose

On March 31st, 2006, online retailers were solicited a Binaltech Asterisk Convoy (Optimus Prime), alongside an announcement from Takara for something called “Transformers Atari”. Respondents were fairly excited, a mix of Binaltech diehards happy to see the line continue and speculation on Takara importing the Atari-made Transformers Armada game. In the midst of these impressions, TFW2005 user Nevermore made a strange observation.

“Kiss - Transformer Convoy x Melissa

Release August 2006 6500 yen

‘Kiss’? :huh”

The other forumgoers who took note of this cracked corny jokes about the 80s band of the same name. And then...

https://www.tfw2005.com/boards/threads/transformer-kiss-wha.97217/

https://forums.tformers.com/talk/forums/topic/45840-transformers-kiss-v/#comments

I am fairly confident that I have isolated April 3rd, 2006 as the precise date the Western fanbase became aware of Transformers: Kiss Players. While information about this radio drama was limited, they did get one key piece of information that would set the tone: It was about a girl kissing Transformers to give them special powers. If you take the time to browse the above threads, you’ll find that just this tidbit alone was enough to set off viscerally negative reactions among commenters. For what it’s worth, I think this was a major overreaction for how little info there was: Human-transformer romance was hardly a new concept by this point, and with only a threadbare plot summary to work off of the motives of the project couldn’t initially be parsed. It was very much possible, perhaps likely that this was a line targeted at girls. One poster even claimed the radio show got more female listeners than male, although no proof is offered.

I can’t tell you how long this cope theory lasted, but I imagine it was demolished the moment (DO NOT CLICK THE FOLLOWING THREE LINKS IN PUBLIC) pictures of the toys’ boxes made it online.

Ok, I think we need to back up a little here. What is all this, exactly? 

Kiss Players is a midquel set between the 1986 movie and Season 3 of the original cartoon. It turns out that after Galvatron was thrown into space at the end of the movie he ended up crash-landing smack dab in the middle of Tokyo, the impact obliterating the city. This event so thoroughly devastated human-Cybertronian revelations that it led to the establishment of the Earth Defense Command, a government agency committed to exterminating all Transformers on Earth. In addition, Rodimus Prime resigned out of shame for what he had done, giving up the Matrix of Leadership and reverting back to Hot Rod. Under normal circumstances recontextualizing the iconic ending of the ‘86 film in such an unbelievably dour way while undoing the arc of its main protagonist would’ve been in itself the fulcrum of immense controversy, a precursor to everything people hated about Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi. Here though, it’s just the cherry on top. Anywho, the EDC completes their purge via an army of man-made Transformers known as Autoroopers, but they soon find out the impact scattered Galvatron’s Unicron-empowered cells into the atmosphere and now they’re merging with organic life and cars to create bio-mechanical monsters known as Legion (more on them in a bit). There’s a silver lining, though. Quoth TFWiki again: “This catastrophe also created the means to defend the world against the Legion—when Galvatron's cells came into contact with human beings, they also become able to fuse with other entities containing his cells by kissing them. With their Autoroopers being the perfect candidates for this "Parasitech" fusion process, the EDC began recruiting and training these "Kiss Players" as combat squads to battle the Legion.”

To say this premise is unfathomably broken and bizarre would be the understatement of the century. Keep in mind, later this very year another beloved Japanese franchise is going to debase itself, and within the wreckage people are going to spend over a decade clowning on this scene. Kiss Players is basically this moment but baked into the premise of the product line with female leads who look like children, plus panty shots. There’s even the “fun” bonus of one of the aforementioned leads being a younger Marissa Faireborn, a recurring character from G1 Season 3. This is the same as this. 

But y’know what? If you’ve dealt with enough weird ecchi shit and are sufficiently desensitized to it, you can argue this isn’t so bad. Still wildly inappropriate and completely out of step with anything done in official Transformers media before this point, but not true rock bottom I guess. It helps that like I said, the primary medium of telling the Kiss Players storyline was a radio drama, so there were no visuals besides the gross box art pieces.

At least, there wouldn’t have been if they didn’t make a tie-in manga. 

(Dengeki) Die(oh), Autobots!

Meet Yuki Ohshima, the man who wrote and illustrated this 3-chapter manga for the magazine Dengeki Daioh. Over the years he’s done art for many actual toys, even working on the long-running collector-oriented Masterpiece line. Regrettably, these manga chapters are the only thing anyone in the Western fandom remembers him for. 

https://www.tfw2005.com/boards/threads/new-kiss-players-manga-scans-at-fan-to-fan-nsfw.111038/

This thread is a true work of art. 11 pages of reactions that run the gamut from visceral disgust to demented laughter at the sheer insanity of the situation. While the link in the OP is long broken, I can give you an idea of what people were responding to with (DON’T CLICK THIS IN PUBLIC EITHER) the most infamous image of the comic. 

Remember those Legion fellas I mentioned earlier? Yup, that’s one of them. And no, your eyes are not deceiving you: That is a dick tongue. 

You know, I was gonna do a bit here where I used the Star Wars Intro Creator to make a “funny” montage of the most insane TFWiki descriptions of events in the manga and radio show. I was gonna have a paragraph conspiracizing about how Ohshima was scapegoated for this whole debacle. But y’know what? Looking at The Legion Page again, I don’t feel like it anymore. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is no exception. Nothing I can type will ever be able to convey the limit-breaking levels of cynicism and contempt that supercharged this whole sordid production better than The Legion Page. Takara top brass in 2006 looked at this and said to themselves: This is it. This is what our flagging brand needs. This is what those pathetic fanboys have truly craved all along, deep in their heart of hearts. This is not the worst visual in Kiss Players. I could’ve pulled out the kind of stuff that forces you to look up Fall of Cybertron or Prime or even live-action movie clips as a defense mechanism to remind yourself of what Transformers is supposed to look like. But it is absolutely the most evocative. Nobody can see any of this and ever forget it. 

Closing Out

Well, that was horrible! Bad time was had by all, I’m pooped. Before we wrap things up, I wanna make a couple final comments.

First off, you may have noticed I conspicuously failed to mention the Japanese fanbase’s reaction. To put it bluntly, I do not know the language and feel like relying on machine translation to comb through ancient blogs and forums won’t be very productive. All I have here is one final wiki quote, which you’ll just have to take at its word: “There were a number of people who claimed, amazingly, that there was absolutely nothing wrong with such a thing, and that everyone else simply wasn't understanding it was a "cultural thing"—"it" being... the enjoyment of sexual assault imagery, apparently. This, of course, is in defiance of the fact that many Japanese fans were themselves openly decrying Kiss Players, fearing that American fans would think that this was somehow accepted as "normal" in Japan.” It is worth noting that the second half of the line did stop doing a lot of the really bad stuff, so while perhaps somewhat embellished this doesn’t seem too far from the truth. That said, I still encourage readers to chip in additional information on this facet of the story if possible. 

As for legacy, this seems like the most open-and-shut “the embarrassed licenseholders immediately retconned it out of existence and strove to pretend it never happened” imaginable... But unbelievably enough, no. To this very day, the events of Kiss Players are still an untouched part of Japanese G1 canon, and its characters have shown up in stuff like Transformers Legends’ tie-in comic, another more successful bid at targeting nostalgic Japanese guys complete with its own seedy humor, albeit a fair bit more reasonable (They “only” put some of the female Autobots in provocative outfits!). Not as tiny cameos tucked in the page margins or the corner of one panel either, the two main girls besides Marissa got full-on adult timeskip designs and plot-relevant roles tying them even deeper into the lore. As for robots, the Autoroopers would be localized as “Autotrooper” and repurposed as generic Autobot grunts in various future projects, most notably Transformers Animated. In fact, just last year the Buzzworthy Bumblebee toyline released a figure of that show’s design, retooled off War for Cybertron: Siege Deluxe Class Ironhide. Look at the picture and you’ll see that an alternate head based on the original Kiss Players design was included! There’s also Glit, whose color scheme served as an inspiration for Shattered Glass Ravage (AU where Decepticons are good and vice-versa). Now, I don’t wanna hype any of this up too much: We’re fundamentally dealing with background cameos and obscure comics meant for hardcore superfans here, nothing more. Well, with one potential exception, which I showed you at the very beginning of this post. Age of Extinction has some shocking similarities with Kiss Players: It too involves humanity turning against Transformers after a city-decimating catastrophe, this time Dark of the Moon’s battle of Chicago. In both cases an evil organization makes their own Transformers to replace the originals - the corporation who does this in AoE is even called KSI. Both give Galvatron some degree of plot relevancy. There’s even a weird crass joke about dating an underaged girl! Coincidence? Honestly yeah, probably. Doesn’t make it any less hilarious to speculate if Michael Bay knows about this shit. 

Even nearly 20 years later, Kiss Players is still the derisive butt of jokes in the hardcore Transformers community, a built-in fandom shock jockey akin to Goatse. It has largely been kept in containment, Youtuber ComicTropes being the only semi-notable non-superfan who has really taken a look at it. Considering its content and relative obscurity, any sort of reputational rehabilitation or even an ironic cult following akin to All-Star Batman and Robin seems exceedingly unlikely. And yet, from time to time, it comes back in small ways. Just a couple years ago Karyuudo Fansubs actually took on the radio drama, doing their work on the whole thing. Perhaps it deserves to be forgotten, but somehow I just don’t think it will be.

I've been wanting to write about this debacle for ages, and I've been half-hoping that either someone else will get to it (didn't happen) or that the situation would reach a definitive conclusion before long (also didn't happen, more on this later). Since neither of those panned out, here I am with this hopefully not-completely-inadequate write-up about how a much-loved mobile game turned into a complete meme.

(This is my first hobby drama write-up, so if I've done something wrong, feel free to tell me.)

What is King's Raid?

King's Raid is a gacha game that was initially published in Thailand in September 2016. It was later bought by Korean company Vespa and then released in Korean and English in February 2017 before finally being released in Japan in March 2018.

For those who don't know, a gacha game is a live-service game that has lootbox mechanics where the player uses premium in-game currency (often bought with real money) to pull for either characters or items. While gacha mechanics are fundamentally equivalent to western lootbox mechanics, most people who play gacha games differentiate them from western live-service games by their anime aesthetic, and players also most often gamble for characters rather than items in these games. For reference, a popular gacha game is the megahit Genshin Impact.

While King's Raid's anime aesthetic was typical gacha, and its story was mostly generic "hero's journey" fantasy, it differentiated itself with its gambling mechanics. Namely, the player gambled solely for weapons, and all characters in the game could either be earned for free with enough daily logins or outright bought with premium in-game currency (which can also be earned for free in-game by doing certain daily tasks). In other words, as long as you invested time in the game, you could get your character of choice with no risk at all.

Another point in King's Raid's favor was the somewhat equal gender distribution on its roster. Now, this probably sounds ridiculous to those who weren't in the gacha space at the time, but back then, most gacha games in English featured predominantly female casts, with few if any male characters. (Off the top of my head, games released around the same time such as Girl's Frontline, Azur Lane, and Genshin Impact's predecessor Honkai Impact 3rd all had exclusively female rosters. In fact, even the whiff of adding playable male characters often sent players into a tizzy. That's not to say male-only roster games weren't being made, but they were often not being licensed globally -- just look at hugely popular Touken Ranbu, which debuted in Japan in 2015 but didn't receive an official English translation until 2021.) In fact, many gacha players might even argue that this uneven gender distribution is still an issue in today's gacha games. But, with King's Raid, it not only had a roster of both men and women (some of whom were even furries! if you're into that), it also featured equal opportunity fanservice for them. Want every single one of your characters in a swimsuit? You can do that! Want to dress all your characters in suits? You can do that too!

It's hard to state just how free-to-play friendly King's Raid was during its first few years to those who don't play gacha games, especially since it seemed to eschew a lot of the predatory gacha practices of the time -- some of which are still in place today! But needless to say, it was popular enough to earn it a top spot on app store charts and even netted it an anime adaptation in 2020.

Signs of Trouble

While there are disagreements about when the decline of King's Raid began, with some arguing that the growing power creep (harder to get weapons, increased grind, etc.) were the first warning signs, for the sake of not confusing the gacha uninitiated any further, I'll stick to talking about things that took place outside of the game.

In 2021, even with the aforementioned power creep, King's Raid was in a relatively good place, and the playerbase had mostly positive feelings towards the game. At this point, the anime adaptation had basically concluded, and while it was mediocrely reviewed, it did bring a slew of new people into the game. Meanwhile, the game itself was actually gearing up for the final chapter of its main story, which eventually dropped in May 2021. (Yes, a gacha game story that actually ended!) And while the playerbase also had mixed reactions to that, it was still nice to see these beloved characters' journeys come to an end.

Riding this hype, in March 2021, the developers posted their Q1 2021 plans for the game, including an announcement for a King's Raid 2, basically a completely new story set later in the same universe with new main characters, though still available on the same app as before. At the same time, they also announced a PC client, which ended up never materializing (what will soon become a trend for Vespa, as you'll see).

While they initially announced King's Raid 2 for the end of the year, it eventually became abundantly clear that they wouldn't be able to fulfill their promises. Despite numerous requests for more information on this second season, even just in-progress screenshots, Vespa continuously pushed off these requests, often showing just minor changes to current content instead.

Finally, in November 2021, Vespa announced what everyone in the community had been expecting: that King's Raid 2 would not be finished in time and would have to be delayed until sometime in 2022 -- later revealed to be June/July 2022.

At this point, the game hadn't received any new content in a while (those of you who play live-service games know this is a fairly clear indicator of something seriously wrong) and was going through endless holiday event reruns. Most people did not realize it was about to get a whole lot worse.

2022: Slow But Steady Decline

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of what happened in 2022, I just want to give some additional outside context. For much of King's Raid's run, it was Vespa's only game. However, in late 2021, Vespa released a new game Time Defenders in Japan, which eventually got a global release in April 2022. This game did extremely poorly, supposedly releasing in an extremely unfinished state, and ended service in September 2022. Some King's Raid fans attribute Vespa's split attention -- and the poor revenue Time Defenders generated -- with Vespa's eventual downfall, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

In retrospect, the release of Legendary Costumes (costumes that were sold for a limited time, in a limited quantity, and for a whopping ten times as much premium in-game currency than normal, always-available costumes) was a sign that Vespa was probably in dire financial straits, but since they continued to release updates reworking older content, dedicated fans still believed that Vespa was actually working on King's Raid 2, even as actual events, including reruns, trickled to nothing -- because why else would they fix old content if not to attract new players for their new upcoming content? Though it's also important to note that a lot of these content reworks were incredibly unpopular with the existing fanbase, to the point that many prematurely left over them, further adding to the game's decline.

For a time, the dev notes were almost entirely characterized by these content rework updates and costume additions before even those things finally stopped. In March 2022, the lead producer announced that all updates were going to be put on pause until Vespa finished development on King's Raid 2. They also, again, put off showing any actual in-development screenshots for this supposed sequel (which is looking more and more like vaporware by the second) and hinted at a balancing patch with season 2.

In April 2022, Vespa gave players their first glimpse of season 2, which was, wait for it, a logo. Yes, that's it. It wasn't until June 2022 that the playerbase would get something even remotely substantial -- character sheets for the main characters. Over the next two months, they'd upload seconds-long teaser trailers of shadowed models of these characters to try and pretend they're doing something, even as their announced (and already delayed) release date sailed right on by.

At this point, most of the community except for a few diehards had given up on King's Raid 2 ever materializing, especially as it's outright revealed in July 2022 that Vespa is in dire financial straits, with most of its employees getting laid off, including its main artist. However, as has become an unfortunate theme in this write-up, little did they know that it'd only get worse.

The Final Betrayal

Remember that balancing patch I mentioned earlier? Well, it's come back with a vengeance. In September 2022, the producer announced that they weren't going to wait until King's Raid 2 to implement the balancing patch -- no, they were going to "balance" the entire current hero roster. This update ultimately dropped in October, and hoo boy, it was not pretty.

There are numerous reddit threads about how awful this update was, but in short, it literally changed everything about how hero mechanics worked. Heroes now were no longer unique with their own abilities and powers; all heroes of the same type were now functionally the same exact unit. This absolutely killed all individuality each hero had, which had previously been a big selling point of this game. Added onto that, it also required the players to rebuild all their characters basically from scratch, since most previous upgrades had been unceremoniously changed or outright removed.

Needless to say, this was the final nail in the coffin for basically the entire playerbase. Even if King's Raid 2 did actually drop, none of them were going to be here for it. The game was effectively dead.

But Is It Really Dead?

After the nightmarish rebalancing patch, everyone thought that the end of King's Raid was only a matter of time. It now had effectively zero playerbase, and the only ones who still kept logging in were masochists who were too attached to their painstakingly obtained characters to do otherwise.

But then something absolutely mind-boggling happened: King's Raid never ended service.

Forgive me for jumping the gun there. Let's rewind time to March 2023 when Vespa finally seems to run out of money and announces that they were up for grabs on the open market. At this point, everyone thought that Vespa was just going to declare bankruptcy and that King's Raid would finally be put out of its misery. But then a devil's miracle happened: Vespa actually got bought! Or, rather, it seemed to have merged with some outside investment companies after getting some cash injections, eventually changing its name to Anic Inc. While it seemed that the servers went down briefly during this transition, within a few days, King's Raid was back up and running again under its new company name.

Yes, that's right, folks! You can still play King's Raid right this minute -- it's still on Google Play! The servers are still up! People can still create an account this very instant and play not-technically-dead King's Raid! (And, yes, I did redownload the game just to check that this was still true -- it is, and I still have all my stuff even.)

Owing to its perpetually undead status, King's Raid has now become a perennial meme among gacha gamers. In particular, anytime you see a gacha game announce end of service, you bet someone will be there pointing out that King's Raid has managed to outlive yet another game.

And so that's the story of the undead gacha game that just seems to continue limping along despite all expectations. If by the time you are reading this, it has finally been put to rest, please leave a comment below so we can date the historic moment and give it a moment of silence. Thank you, King's Raid, for teaching all of us that: hey, maybe an end-of-service announcement isn't the worst thing that can happen to a live-service game.

INTRODUCTION

The advent of the world wide web fueled many hobbyist pursuits. People from the MENA region were no different, their main hubs being forums spread all over the internet, all with their main points of attraction. Anime/Manga, Movies, TV shows, and yes, literary work. Which is our main topic for today.

INFLUENCES & BEGINNINGS

Real stories and oneshots:

All forums had their own subforums for written stories, some more robust than others. Early on, there was no differentiation between what was a real story, or what was pure fiction. Forum visitors didn’t really care much about it, though, so it continued on that way for a while. The posted stories tended to be short and contained in the OP (unless the poster deliberately trickled it through multiple posts in hopes for more engagements). There was no regulation of story sources, and no rewards for posters save for very short and unspecific replies.

Translation of romance novels:

The translation of Harlequin Romance novels by the company branch in Cyprus into Arabic brought their novels into a new audience, and soon enough Lebanese and Egyptian publishers raced to get their hands on publication rights, adjusting the novels and neutralizing some of the references this new audience would be confused and alienated by. Internet forums had the lion’s share with driving the interest, posting the novels serially in written form and then later on by scans. Some even established teams to purchase and translate the original copies and post them in the same serial manner at first, then by downloadable word files locked behind reply-wall, therefore driving more traffic into their forums.

TV shows and series:

While the translated novels did ignite an interest in written romance novels in online spaces at the time, it’s the local TV shows that built the beats of the stories written. Now extending beyond a few posts, these new stories, closer to the people’s hearts by their familiar settings and beats, quickly gained an audience that rivaled and then surpassed that of the translated novels reigning over the literary sub-forums back then.

Societal issues and daily life:

If I were to describe Arabic web romance novels with a few words, they would be serialized women’s fiction. Not only are the relevant subforums and their management populated by women, the stories always talk about the challenges women of the region experience. Some extend beyond women’s issues, though, and would discuss societal and political issues at length, and in such a raw way that raised awareness to many tragedies the region faced and is still facing.

KNOWN CONVENTIONS AND TROPES

Arabic romance novels as published online tend to be long, the TV shows influence contributing in them having something like a slice-of-life/telenovela feel (those were popular, too, I should note. The Lebanese also brought them to broadcasting channels with their dubs. My mom used to watch Rosalinda and all the other Thalia works). The novels would star many characters, most of them to be paired up in the most dramatic plot-lines possible. There were fandoms and hatedoms for many of them.

A few other known tropes/conventions:

• Second marriage and its complications
• Marriage to quell a blood feud between two rival clans (most of them having a sorta Enemies-to-Lovers plot-line)
• Family drama of all shades and forms
• Depictions of strong familial bonds and female friendships
• Not setting the stories in one particular country and writing the story in Modern Standard Arabic*****

*****This is one point I want to talk more about, because it’s an interesting one and a convention I personally followed on a number of occasions and still do.

Anyway, I think it’s interesting because it has a marketing and escapism aspects.

Marketing, because novels written in local dialects tend to mostly attract those of the same locality, while those written in MSA would provide a writer a bigger audience.

There are outliers, of course. Egyptians have one of the most recognizable and easiest dialects (since they have a massive media industry), so stories written in Egyptian dialect tend to have a more diverse audience than say, a Khaliji dialect. There’s also the case when the story is just that good that people would read on regardless, like the time I saw Egyptian women casually waxing poetry about a Qatari writer’s works on a Facebook post asking for recs, only for their comments to be supported by others of different nationalities.

So yes, MSA + Unspecific Location combo became quickly accepted, so common in frequency that it became a trope itself.

Escapism, because using MSA kinda masks where a writer is from. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the ongoing wars and instability wreaking through the MENA region. This is only my theory, but I think this choice some writers make in using MSA and setting the story somewhere unspecific gives a sense of comfortable distance for the writers and their audience who are unknowingly experiencing the same grief. It gives them the joy of pursuing their hobbies without having to mind the reality of their situation.

Sometimes I would be following a story and later realize a writer is from a country undergoing hardships from her apology for the lack of updates. I remember this particular Libyan writer, pen-named Bard al-Mashaa’er (Coldness of Feelings) that used to post novels with a steady schedule, until she began her latest story, her epic political romance Junoon al-Matar (Madness of the Rain). She was away for years, leaving her readers wondering and praying for her safety, only to recently make her return and continue on with her novel.

Some writers, though, don’t return.

AUDIENCE

Passionate and unrestrained. Readers wouldn’t shy away from their critiques, and would analyze each chapter with words and words of predictions and cheers, which writers fueled with rewarding the correct ones with a mention at the relevant chapter update. Later on and with the rise of social media, Facebook groups became a new host for their discussions, with each writer having her own group.

CURRENT STATE

The status of the Arabic romance web novels scene changed. Most popular forums fell off radar. Rewity forum, being one of the biggest surviving forums, continues to host new and updating novels to this day. The rest are either on social media or on Wattpad.

For a decent time now, publishers have picked up on the potential market for online-published novels, actively browsing the forums and Facebook groups in search for writers with a considerable following to publish their works traditionally. Some even get adapted to the live-screen.

FUTURE

I think it’s a hobby with a massive industry potential, especially with the appearance of companies like the Jordan-based Abjjad offering e-book reading services in exchange for a subscription. Maybe the next step would be an e-book publishing service capitalizing on it?

For now, it’s a beloved hobby partaken by many in the MENA region, done for the very passion of it. I know it’s accompanied me in my teenage years, and developed my interest in both reading and writing. It’s introduced me to many great writers, many interesting intricacies, and many valuable perspectives.

Thank you for reading.

Introduction

The video game industry is a challenging one to break into. It's an extremely demanding profession that requires a lot of time, money, and mental energy to succeed at. Over the course of the 30+ years of the industry's existence, many ambitious teams and projects came and went with various results. There are plenty of tales of smash success, comfortable mediocrity, and flops. It's the successes and flops that usually print themselves into the memory of gamers, and those stories carry over from one generation onto the next.

The story I will try to present here will fall into the latter categories.

The Beginning

We land in the Czech Republic, a tiny country in continental Europe, in 1997. After being mostly viewed as a niche enthusiast hobby from the end of communist rule until the early 1990s, the commercial success of several point-and-click games began the country's first steps toward stardom, which will arrive after the turn of the century. Our game fits under the point-and-click category as well. In the roughly 100k town of Ústí nad Labem, a tiny game company named TOP Galaxy is created. The guys from this studio don't have a lot of information available about them because they only released a single game. You will soon find out why. This group of ambitious developers gets to work almost immediately after formation.

Overly ambitious, perhaps?

TOP Galaxy had a big vision. It includes international distribution, several language localizations (including voice acting and subtitles), more than 20 hours of gameplay, and an blend of excellent 3D graphics and air-brushed (yes you read that right, air-brushed, not painted) 2D graphics. Due to factors we will discuss later, only two of these things would materialize. Now, a brief summary of the game's plot line.

The Plot

The game is set some time after 2020, when virtual reality on Earth was outlawed in 2003 due to its addictive nature. American journalist Jimmy Dix goes to a so-called "entertainment orbital station" named "DreamLand," built in 2016, and is researching the mystery of virtual reality players who supposedly go insane following a visit to the station. He travels to seven separate virtual environments (a laboratory, Frankenstein's castle, ancient Egypt, 1930s Chicago, 17th-century Macau, an airbase, and a jungle) in his effort to solve the mystery. For whatever reason, there are also cyborg monkeys used as cheap labour.

The Development

The aspirations of the young team would catch up with them at a breakneck speed. The 1998 deadline for the game's release quickly became impossible due to the game's increase in complexity; yet, strangely enough, the physical edition still bears the copyright year of 1998. Thus, the game was postponed. The development was also struck by other unknown problems, which likely led to the developers decreasing their ambitions. As a result, plans for an international release and localization were put on hold, but despite this, English subtitles and the main menu indicate that some localization work has already been done. One of the few last straws to this dreadful development cycle was the game's enormous size, which prevented it from fitting on two CDs, so the developer had to resort to three, further increasing the costs of development. The final number, you ask? After conversion and adjusting for inflation, the total cost was an colossal 847 thousand US dollars — at least for the time and nation's being. The game lacked any anti-piracy features, which made the situation even worse, as the game leaked before release. Although that wasn't the final nail in the coffin, this was one of the last ones.

The Release

Finally, the year 1999 arrives, marking the game's official release. The game's technical and visual aspects are praised in the reviews, which are largely mixed and most critique is sent towards the voice acting and snail - paced narrative. Remember the 20 hour playtime? Yep, that is one the reasons for it. The last nail for the coffin would arrive in the from of the retail price. 110 US dollars. While the exact number of copies sold is unknown, there are unconfirmed reports of 10,000 copies being produced for retail. The inability to secure a international publishing deal was just a finishing touch on the figurative coffin that is the commercial failure of the game, though "annihilation" might be a more accurate description. The team behind the game would follow up by closing its doors only a year later.

The Impact

The enormous failure of TOP Galaxy and Dreamland: Final Solution is quickly forgotten, as Hidden & Dangerous was released less than a year later, making the Czech video game industry globally known and setting the stage for many classics, such as Mafia, ARMA, Operation Flashpoint, UFO, Euro Truck Simulator, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the smaller Amanita Design titles and plenty of others. The moral of the story? I am not sure about the entirety of it, but "don't bite off more than you can chew" might be among the lessons to learn from here.

For the curious, the game can be found here.

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You probably haven't heard of astrophysicist Michael H. Hart, but if you're into science fiction at all, you almost certainly have heard of what he's famous for. He's best known for his work on the Fermi Paradox, the question of why humanity has never contacted aliens, given that everything we know about the universe suggests that we should have come into contact with them by this point. Although the paradox named after Enrico Fermi, he essentially just brought it up in a casual conversation once, and Hart was the first to actually put together and publish a detailed mathematical analysis of the concept.

Nowadays, the Fermi Paradox is well-known both in scientific circles and within popular culture. Hart's work on it is enough to make him a reasonably important figure in the field of astrophysics, and a genuinely impressive person even if he were a complete dumbass in every field outside of physics.

Which is probably a good thing, because Michael Hart is a complete dumbass in every field outside of physics.

The 100

After publishing his influential 1975 paper on the Fermi paradox, Hart decided, like a lot of people who are really, really smart about one highly specific topic, that he must also be smart about everything else too. So in 1978, he published a book called "The 100", intended as a list of the 100 most influential people in history. He wasn't a historian, of course, but everyone knows that all those historians are just people who weren't smart enough to get into one of the hard sciences, and that any astrophysicist willing to descend amongst them like a God among mortals will clearly understand their work far better than they ever could. So who made it into his top ten?

Well, in tenth place is Albert Einstein. Fair enough, dude did a lot of sciencey stuff. He's a pretty big deal.

Ninth is Columbus. Yeah, I can see that, contact between Europe and the Americas is pretty historically important.

Eighth? Gutenberg, who invented the printing press. Yep, books are cool.

Seventh is Cai Lun, who invented paper. Good thing he did that or Gutenberg would have just been sitting around looking sad waiting for someone to find something he could stick in his printing press.

Sixth is Paul the Apostle, fifth is Confucius, fourth is Gautama Buddha. All major figures in their respective religions, makes sense.

Third is Jesus Christ. He would probably have been ranked higher, but Paul's role in spreading Christianity means he gets a big chunk of the credit. Basically, think of Paul the Apostle as the Ralph Nader to Jesus Christ's Al Gore as far as this book is concerned.

Second is Isaac Newton. And in first place as the most influential person in human history?

Muhammad, the founder of Islam.

The Reaction

Obviously, there was plenty of controversy over the very existence of such a book, something that Hart went out of his way to emphasize in the second edition, with exactly the level of humility you would expect from someone who decided to write the definitive guide to which historical figures are the most important: "Critics objected that Hart had the nerve not only to select who he thought were the most influential people in history, but also to rank them according to their importance. Needless to say, the critics were wrong".

As for my opinion? Even beyond the inherent silliness of ranking every historical figure by how influential they are, the list is kind of dumb. Why is Isaac Newton, a physicist whose work was theoretical rather than directly affecting the world, ranked so high when many other important thinkers didn't even crack the top 100? Why do the founders of religions get highly ranked based on what happens with their religions millennia after their deaths, while the founders of nations don't get a similar level of credit for the impact of their countries? If Jesus is responsible for everything Christianity has ever done, why isn't George Washington responsible for everything the USA has ever done?

But the main controversy was over his placement of Muhammad as #1, and even more so the act of placing anybody above Jesus Christ in terms of importance. (Keep in mind that this book was published only twelve years after the "bigger than Jesus" controversy led to mass record burnings and death threats against the Beatles.) This might lead you to suspect that Hart is just a Muslim biased in favor of his own prophet, but he's actually Jewish. This led to an enormous surge of popularity for Hart's book among Muslims--look, even non-Muslims recognize how awesome and great Muhammad is! Google his name and a good chunk of the results are from Islamic religious sites or Youtube videos talking about his placement of Muhammad as #1.

But of course, this is a list of the most influential figures in history, definitely not the best or most moral figures in history. Hart put Muhammad first because he had a significant impact, not because he necessarily thinks that it's a positive impact, or because he likes Muslims. So what does Hart actually think of Muslims?

Well, he hates 'em, along with pretty much every other group that isn't pure white Judeo-Christians. Surprise, turns out he's unbelievably racist! I've tricked you all. This isn't just book drama, it's also white supremacist infighting drama.

The Racist Bit

Between The 100 and his work on the Fermi Paradox, Hart had become reasonably famous by the mid-90s, enough that American Renaissance invited him to give speeches at a number of their conferences. If you're not familiar with American Renaissance, they're a white nationalist organization willing to just barely pretend they're not Nazis, at least most of the time. Hart, who you'll remember is Jewish, was apparently gullible enough to believe them. All went well for about a decade, with Hart giving rousing speeches on the necessity of turning a quarter of the USA into a whites-only utopia, apparently under the impression that the people he was talking to would let him in if that ever happened.

This worked out until the 2006 conference, when Hart brought along his friend Herschel Elias, a first-time guest who wasn't too sure about this whole white nationalist thing. Hart assured him that these people weren't Nazis, and that they had absolutely no hatred towards Jews, after which David Duke, former grand wizard of the KKK, stepped up to the stage and immediately proved him wrong with an anti-Semitic rant about "a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and our spirit".

Hart stood up, screamed that Duke was a "fucking Nazi", and ran out of the room. Duke's next words are unfortunately lost to history, but I'm guessing they were something along the lines of "no shit, Sherlock".

Afterwards, Hart organized his own conference dedicated to talking about the inferiority of every minority group except Jews, which seems to have had no real impact on anything, and with a poster that just screams "graphic design is my passion".

Although his work on the Fermi paradox is significant, Hart's various controversies mean that he's not particularly well-known or admired in the field of astrophysics, or even in science-fiction fandom, where the Fermi Paradox is a famous and popular trope. He's a classic example of someone who's unbelievably smart in an incredibly specific field, while simultaneously being too stupid to realize that the Grand Wizard of the KKK might be a bit anti-Semitic. Although the term "Fermi-Hart paradox" is occasionally used, it's unlikely to become popular any time soon. As for The 100, although it sold very well (60,000 copies by 1992 and probably many more by this point), it's not really taken seriously by anyone as a work of history, and its main legacy is taking up shelf space next to Guinness World Records and Ripley's Believe It or Not in hundreds of used book stores.

I cannot conceivably provide the full extent to what occurred, because it’s such a breathtakingly insane story of lying and manipulation that doesn’t seem possible due to the time required to maintain it. Regardless, I will do my best. Attached at the bottom is the original article which exposed the wrongdoings of Averra, as well as a video essay by the same author, which goes more in-depth into the investigation and drama. This is my personal recounting of everything at surface level, with information from other people who were personally involved, as someone who was fooled by his lies.

Background: What is NationStates, and What is Alcris?

NationStates (or NS) is a political simulation web game created in 2002 by author Max Barry, as an ad for his book Jennifer Government. He probably didn’t realize to what extent his game would become popular, however, as it’s persisted all these years and still has a thriving community - as of now, over 300,000 accounts, or nations, exist on NationStates.

People govern these nations, but they can also move their nation to communities called regions. Regions can consist of tens of thousands of nations, to single digits. These regions are basically like communities, with different themes, oftentimes with vastly different focuses on different aspects of the game. The vast majority of respected regions, however, all share one element - they almost always have some form of regional government.

Regional governments range in size, scope, and structure, but they’re usually made up of a dozen elected officials who decide how the region, or the community, is run. They establish constitutions, write and vote on laws, and maintain foreign relations and embassies with other regions. This aspect of NationStates can be called simulated government.

Alcris was one of these respected regional governments. Founded on April 6th, 2021, Alcris had, at its peak, 129 nations, as well as embassies, or relations, with upwards of 30 regions, including big names you might recognize if you play NationStates such as The South Pacific, Conch Kingdom, Forest, and others.

Alcris was supposedly founded by three childhood friends who grew up in Switzerland, named Averra, Wintermoore, and Gelenia, so it made sense that Alcris had a Swiss-style government, featuring a directorate and direct-democracy - while other regions had UK parliamentary or American presidential systems, Alcrisian government was centered around a singular executive council, called the governmental council.

Each member of this governmental council was tasked with controlling a different aspect of Alcris - the Foreign Affairs Councillor controlled relations with other regions and managed diplomats, the Security Councillor controlled moderation, the Council Chair organized voting, etcetera. They also voted on laws, called acts - while other legislative systems might need a simple majority, for an act to be passed in Alcris, it required all councillors to come to a consensus. If one councilor voted against the act, or if two abstained, the act would not pass.

Theoretically, this meant it would force the executive council to come to a consensus if any act were to be passed, meaning that any flawed legislation would have to be reworked to appeal to everyone. In reality, it was designed to benefit one man and maintain his control over the Alcrisian government, as he systematically lied and manipulated people for years, suppressing opposition, guilt-tripping and harassing anyone who criticized him, with an extensive network of alt-accounts who voted in his favor, occupied seats in government, and maintained his image.

Secession

On August 3rd, 2024 (so about 2 months ago, at the time of this writing), 14 people signed a secession document titled A New Dawn. The contents of the secession document started with the termination of a merger agreement which had happened a year earlier, and proclaimed the founding of a new government called New West Conifer, or NWC.

The document pointed to culture clash, disagreements in government, and failure by the Alcrisian government to preserve the culture of the New West Indies and Evergreen Conifer, the two regions which had been merged into Alcris as per the merger agreement.

Discontent had been brewing for months. It wasn’t until a channel in the previously locked New West Indies Discord server was opened, that talks about secession began to emerge. When the secession document was released, it was posted in the Alcris Discord server.

Immediately, Averra, one of the co-founders of Alcris, took action. He declared a state of emergency, and nearly 30 people, many of whom hadn’t publicly signed the document, were kicked from the server.

Now that the eventual outcome of this has been established, we’re going to start with what led to this.

The Alt-Accounts

As noted earlier, the secession of New West Conifer included the termination of a merger agreement between Alcris, and two other regions, the New West Indies and Evergreen Conifer (Evergreen Conifer was included as it had been merged into the New West Indies a while earlier).

The New West Indies had originally been in favor of the merger with Alcris due to concerns around the region’s longevity and activity. Before the merger, the NWI was suffering through a bout of inactivity, so the decision was made to merge with a region they had close relations, and even a dual-citizenship agreement with. That region would be Alcris.

But why did Alcris want to merge with other regions?

Besides the New West Indies and Evergreen Conifer, multiple other communities were merged into Alcris around the same time. Laraniem, and Mithra, two other regions, both agreed to merge with Alcris due to concerns with longevity and activity. The mergers, combined, doubled the Alcrisian citizenry, strengthening the preexisting Alcris community with new people.

Except there was no preexisting Alcris community.

The three original co-founders of Alcris, that being Averra, Wintermoore, and Gelenia, were the same people. Their nations were controlled by one person, using Averra as his main account. He possessed multiple Discord accounts for them, and as the sole founder masquerading as three, he had unlimited control over Alcris.

But that wasn’t the full extent of his alt-accounts, because the entirety of the Alcrisian citizenry were puppets. Averra possessed 35 alt-accounts, posing as different people. Alcris masqueraded as a lively community of multiple people, pursuing relations with other regions, before merging them into Alcris. He negotiated dual-citizenship agreements, and, in the case of the New West Indies, managed to vote in favor of secession with his own alt-accounts. He preyed on small regions suffering from inactivity, pressuring them into mergers. Because, without these mergers, there’d be no real people in Alcris. Averra somehow maintained this veil long enough to ensure the success of these mergers, bringing in new people who had no idea what they were getting into.

Corruption

With these 35 alt-accounts, Averra could rig every single election. Every single administration included at least two of his alts on the governmental council, and always himself. With two alt-accounts on the governmental council, he could block any legislation from passing simply by abstaining twice.

With such a large number of accounts voting fraudulently, it isn’t a surprise that Averra placed first every election - in fact, his vote count, alongside one of his other alts, was inflated by almost 400 percent.

There were three major political parties - the Progressives, the Moderates, and the Protectorates, although their names would differ over time. Averra utilized them to display a theater of competition in elections, fielding different candidates. In reality, all three political parties were controlled by him, and they fielded candidates that happened to be alt accounts, entering office only because he would vote for himself.

Opposition parties, made up of actual people, were suppressed. The first major opposition party was formed shortly after the New West Indies-Alcris merger, named the NAPP, made up of former members of the NWI.

Each political party had a supposedly private Discord channel so they could communicate. It just so happened that Averra owned the server and thus could see every channel. When he spotted NAPP members criticizing recent legislation he had written in their private channel, Averra proceeded to use one of his alt-accounts to apply for NAPP membership.

When the alt-account, named Hsui gained access to the channel, he accused NAPP members of personally hating Averra, before pinging Averra’s main account, inviting him into the channel.

The NAPP was dissolved shortly after, although further opposition parties would be formed by NAPP members in the future. All would be suppressed just like the NAPP. Averra would continuously hold a grudge against former NAPP members and went out of his way to make sure they never entered office. With his mass amount of his alt accounts, he utilized Alcris’ ranked choice voting to inflate the vote counts of himself and his alts, all while placing opposition candidates last on ballots submitted by his alts.

In a snap election on June 2024, a successor party to the NAPP, called the Science Team, fielded two candidates, who were both former NAPP members. Disregarding ballots submitted by Averra alt-accounts, both Science Team candidates would’ve won. Officially published results placed both of them in last place and second-to-last place.

Discontent

Besides lying and manipulating a bunch of people, members of the New West Indies had personal disagreements with Averra and his alternate personalities from the beginning, before the merger.

In one instance, Averra joined the NWI Discord server with his alt Wintermoore, under the guise of serving as a diplomat. In a public channel, he communicated to Wintermoore (so himself) in Swiss German, revealing that he had given Wintermoore a list of people to avoid in the server.

Obviously, NWI citizens called him out on this, because revealing such information in a public channel, especially in the discharge of diplomatic duties, was obviously intentionally inflammatory, and at a minimum a very rude gesture.

In instances where he came into disagreement with someone, he would oftentimes guilt trip them. This practice was even more evident later after the NWI-Alcris merger, where he would mention difficulties in his life such as depression, stories about how his family hated him, and more.

The NWI-Alcris merger agreement had one important clause: the flags of the NWI and Conifer would be culturally preserved. This came in the form of flag emojis on the Alcris Discord server, a very simple courtesy,

So when Averra removed the emojis from the Discord server, to create extra space for other emojis, the case was brought to court, citing the treaty and Alcris’ constitutional obligation to adhere to the treaty.

The case was presided over by Gelenia, one of Averra’s alts. The official opinion of the Court was that the treaty was vague and made no mention of specifically the preservation of emojis. Alcris’ obligations to preserve the culture of regions which had merged into it were very minimal and yet it failed in every aspect.

So first, Averra slighted NWI’s immigrant community as a whole, before carrying out an extensive harassment campaign on one of its former members.

Averra’s personal grudge against one of the former NAPP members, Sammy, came to an extreme. Any time Sammy would criticize his actions, his alts jumped to defend him, all while making comments against Sammy.t

Various incendiary comments, coming from a variety of different accounts, were made against his character.

In one instance, Averra faked another conversation with one of his alt-accounts, to generate more sympathy for himself. He created a fake scenario where he had a sister which happened to share her name with Sammy, while having the conversation in Swiss German, thus removing context from the conversation and making Sammy think that Averra was talking about him behind his back.

When Sammy reasonably confronted him about it, he used his alt-accounts to tell Sammy to “stop inserting himself into everything”. Averra’s first thought to respond to any criticism was to guilt trip.

Thus Always to Tyrants

And so secession happened. People were brought into a Discord server as the secession documented was being drafted, and an official date was set.

But all of this had happened without knowledge that Averra had been using alt-accounts to rig every part of Alcris. The disrespect brought upon members of the Alcrisian community was enough alone to make them leave, even without knowledge of the wider scope that had kept them powerless from fundamentally changing Alcris’ flaws.

So how did we find out?

It was pretty simple, and maybe sheer luck. There were suspicions months beforehand, from a variety of different people, but they were dismissed in private circles as being ridiculous. It wasn’t until someone personally observed Averra’s Discord account going offline, before one of his alt’s accounts went offline to send a message, before going offline followed in succession again by another alt going online to send a message, did it become abundantly clear that something was going on.

And in hindsight, how was this not realized earlier? Everything seemed so obvious - the alts all acted as an exclusionary clique, they had much less activity compared to real server members, they jumped to defend Averra, all voted the same way. It’s just inconceivable that one man would dedicate so much time to something so dumb.

But now we were sure without doubt. The allegations were made available in a private channel on the New West Conifer succession Discord. For a few short days, as its members awaited secession, people spent time collecting further evidence within Alcris’ Discord server, all the while talking about the absurdity of the situation.

Secession came. The secession document was posted in the Alcris server.

So now we have to discuss the fallout. As mentioned at the beginning, Averra immediately purged over 30 members from the Discord server, including many which hadn’t signed the document. People who were entirely uninvolved in the secession were purged.

Averra attempted to maintain a veil of normalcy. He declared a state of emergency, forming an emergency cabinet, all populated by his alts, except for one (until he managed to get new people to fulfill those positions).

But the allegations and evidence. were damning. An extensive investigation was organized in a substack post, detailing how idiosyncrasies in Averra’s speech patterns identified his alt accounts, how his accounts would log on at similar times, etcetera. As information about Alcris began to spread between other regions on NationStates, embassies with Alcris were closed en masse. Upon realizing just how damning the evidence was, he suppressed the evidence, banning the creator of the substack post, eventually responding half-heartedly. He made multiple attempts to address the allegations, all of which failed, alongside his attempt to suppress the evidence, all while guilt tripping the people who were left.

But it was obvious everything was falling apart. So he faked a mental breakdown, all while consoling himself with his alt accounts. What makes it funnier was that he slipped up, and accidentally responded to himself, telling himself that everything was ok, with his main account. He generated fake activity, faking conversations with his alts which previously were never online. He celebrated the departure of people he didn't like.

Seeking to start anew and repopulate Alcris, Averra made a decision. He began to delete loads upon loads of evidence, deleting channels from Alcris. Then he began to recruit, posting onto the subreddit for worldbuilding Discord server, the subreddit for worldbuilding itself, even going onto the subreddit passportporn, advertising the regional map for Alcris’ geopolitical roleplay that other people made.

It didn’t work. Today, Alcris’ region page on NationStates is password locked, and at under 20 nations, as his alt-accounts were deleted due to inactivity.

So Here We Are

The New West Indies/Evergreen Conifer, Mithra, and Laraniem were all originally different communities, all brought together into one place, all because Averra needed real people to populate a Discord server full of fake people.

We wouldn’t be here without him. I wouldn’t have met a ton of great people if none of this happened.

Averra got what he wanted: an engaging, loving community. He was just unable to control those people at will, like he could with his puppets. And so they left, and he’s left with nothing but the remains of what he orchestrated, while the people he duped move on.

New West Conifer is, two months in from secession, a thriving community, with a constitution and democratically elected regional government, with governmental transparency as a prime focus. There have been some troubles but it is ten times what Alcris was and ever could be.

Further Reading

The video essay (I highly encourage you watch this! It goes deep into the methods used to conclusively prove Averra’s alting, plus some information omitted from my post. My post was meant to provide a more personal look at the situation, this is something more serious): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RItD1vKUMWg&list=LL&index=21&t=1605s

The article: https://danyo.substack.com/p/the-averra-dossier-secretive-network

The secession document: https://www.nationstates.net/page=dispatch/id=2538618

Regarding the cultural assets of the NWI and Conifer: https://danyo.substack.com/p/amicus-brief-on-nwi-conifer-cultural

And finally, Thanks to Danyo, as he granted me permission to use many of the graphs and evidence featured in his original substack document exposing Averra.

The world is full of infamously bad works of fiction. I don't mean fanfics like My Immortal or legolas by laura either; I mean original books that somehow made it to a publisher and ended up in printed and bound form, for unsuspecting readers to pick up. Some are bad on purpose, like Atlanta Nights. That trainwreck of a book was an elaborate troll campaign by a team of authors to expose a vanity publisher as just that. Or Naked Came the Stranger, a book created as “proof” that publishers will greenlight any slop that comes their way, because sex sells!

And then you get books that were not in fact satire. They are shamelessly, gloriously bad. Things like Theresa the Empress or the Maradonia saga, published by authors who legitimately thought they were penning masterpieces. Look, I'm not going to be harsh on them. I don't believe that talent is a fixed trait. Everyone who writes has the chance to be a good author if they study the components of a great work, put their heart into it, and are willing to find and correct the mistakes they make. I'll get a little more into this later, because I firmly believe that the author and story I talk about here had the potential to be great.

Back in the year 1970, nerds shared their fanfic and amateur novellas by means of meeting up at conventions or by mailing zines. God bless 60s women mailing their Spirk fanfics to each other – we owe modern fandom as we know it to them. One such zine was called OSFAN, the zine for the Ozark Science Fiction Association in St. Louis, Missouri.

Enter the main character of this story. No, not the protagonist, the author. His name was Jim Theis. In the late 60s, he was a starry-eyed teen who loved the Conan the Barbarian series, the codifer of the sword-and-sorcery genre of the age. Wanting to emulate the epic series, Theis wrote a short story, entitled it The Eye of Argon, and sent it off to be published to a zine. It was accepted, and it appeared in OSFAN-10.

The basic plot of Eye of Argon is as follows: Grignr the barbarian, freshly escaped from an altercation in the city of Crin, rides across the desert and fights off two enemy soldiers before arriving in the city of Gorzom. He wooes a prostitute, Carthena, at a tavern, but gets into a battle with hostile local soldiers. Following the fight, he's arrested and taken before the city's prince, who sentences him to the mines. He languishes in the dungeon and fights a giant rat while the evil Cult of Argon secretly prepares to sacrifice a young woman. Grignr escapes his captors and slips through the secret entrance that goes to the cult's lair. He slays the cultists and rescues the woman, who is revealed to be Carthena. He takes the gem known as the Eye of Argon as he and she escape the palace. Outside the palace, the gem turns into a slug monster, which Grignr narrowly defeats before it gives him a strange vision and disappears. Dazed, he takes Carthena back home with him to Ecordia.

Now you might say, “That sounds a little dull, but I wouldn't say it's the WORST thing I'd ever read.” Well, what put Eye of Argon on people's Hilariously Bad Books radar is that its prose is the most violently purple thing you've probably ever read. Allow me to share an excerpt.

The paunchy noble's sagging round face flushed suddenly pale, then pastily lit up to a lustrous cherry red radiance. His lips trembled with malicious rage, while emitting a muffled sibilant gibberish. His sagging flabs rolled like a tub of upset jelly, then compressed as he sucked in his gut in an attempt to conceal his softness. [chapter 2, pp 116 in my copy]

Prince Agaphim is fat, in case you haven't noticed.

That's how the novella is narrated, for seven chapters, at approximately 11,600 words total. This merciless battery of the thesaurus leads to phrases that are either redundant (“the stygian cloud of dark ebony”) or self-contradictory (how, exactly, does someone's face flush pale or pastily light up to cherry red?) The titular Eye isn't a ruby, mind you – it's a scarlet emerald! The armor and weapons wielded by characters change their form and culture of origin between scenes. For example, the blades that Argon's cultists hold are described as “poinards”, lightweight long daggers from Europe, in one scene; in another, they change into “scimitars”, which are West Asian/North African in origin. Agfand, Prince Agaphim's crooked advisor, somehow dies twice during the story (once in Chapter 2, then again in Chapter 7.5). On top of all this, there are plenty of spelling errors, dropped spaces, and misused or missing punctuation.

Most works of amateur fiction fade away into the sands of time, but not so for the Eye of Argon. Exactly how or when it began to circulate in nerd-dom is unknown, but the catalyst is believed to be when sci-fi author Thomas N. Scortia shared a copy to horror author Chelsea Quinn Yarbo. One way or another, the story found its way into the hands of sci-fi convention goers, who made a sport out of seeing how long someone could read it aloud without bursting into laughter. Some leveraged the mockery into a charity function, with donations being made to stop the reader from continuing their recitation.

The Eye of Argon received a printed edition in 1987 and then again in 1995, with the latter version being attributed to “G. Ecordian” instead of Jim Theis. This may be because the authorship of the story was called into question for a while. The widely-distributed copy did not credit Theis, leading some to believed that it was actually an elaborate piece of satire, possibly a group effort like Atlanta Nights. In a 2003 interview with Ansible UK, author David Langford claimed that Samuel R. Delany and some students at a Clarion workshop put together Eye of Argon as an exercise to see how intentionally bad of a work they could create.

That turned out to be completely false, so either Langford or Delany is full of it. Richard W. Zellich, who ran the Archon convention in the St. Louis area, maintined in Usenet posts from the early 1990s that Jim Theis was the true author. According to him, Theis was indeed a real person who attended the convention several times. Furthermore, in 1994, a fan named Richard Newsome provided his transcription of an interview with Theis in OSFAN-13 (which will be relevant again later.) This proved to be the smoking gun that proved Theis really did write the story.

Also for a time, the ending of Eye of Argon was considered lost. The publicly available copy was the Scortia-Yarbo edition, which cut off abruptly with Grignr attempting to excise the goo monster from his leg. This was because the ending was printed on the final page of Scortia's fanzine, which had fallen off the staples. From this copy all the others had sprung. So for thirty years, nobody knew how Grignr's deadly struggle with the slime monster had resolved. Finally, in 2005, the stars aligned and a librarian at Jack Williamson Science Fiction Library at Eastern New Mexico University discovered a treasure even greater than the many-fauceted scarlet emerald: a complete copy of OSFAN-10! This edition had the long-lost ending everyone had hoped for! The lucky librarian, Gene Bundy, sent the copy to Lee Weinstein, one of the people involved in the quest to prove Theis's authorship. The online edition of Eye of Argon eagerly added the lost ending to their website, and in 2006, Wildside Press published a complete edition on paperback. This appears to be the copy that pops up when you search for “Eye of Argon” on Google. For some reason, the cover art is just a photo of an acid pool in Yellowstone Park. It doesn't appear that the Theis estate gets royalties when copies of this edition are sold.

As for Jim Theis himself, he went on to pursue a degree in journalism, and he wrote one other fantasy short story, Son of Grafan. According to an interview with Hour 25 in 1984, Theis stated that the mockery he'd received for Eye of Argon had scared him away from writing any more works of fiction. Although he'd tragically been chased away from his dream, it seemed he lived a contented life nonetheless: he earned his journalism degree, presumably had a career in that field, got married, and had two children. Sadly, he passed away at only 48 in 2002, having had heart trouble. In his obituary, he's described as a beloved father, husband, and son. His family requested donations to the American Heart Association in his memory.

I am a firm Theis defender. He was 16 when he wrote the Eye of Argon. Were you a great novelist at 16? No, you weren't. Neither was I. When I look at Theis's story, I see my own early writing: underdeveloped characters, excessively florid prose, and somewhat simple plots that don't meaningfully reconnect with earlier events. The difference is that my writing was tossed up on Fanfiction.net and eventually deleted, or it still lingers on my Google drive and the assorted USB sticks around my house. Theis had the guts to send his off to be published in a fanzine. And it got accepted, so someone thought it was decent enough to show to the world. He didn't do anything wrong. He was a teenager who wrote a clunky story and got bullied for it. That's why I don't make fun of his work.

And in retrospect, is it really that bad? The characters are underdeveloped, but hell, they were made up by someone with an underdeveloped teenage brain. Grignr is impulsive and violent, but he still generally does the right thing, and he has moments where he loses and struggles. I've read books with far more insufferable, plot-armored characters. The worldbuilding is cliché, but at least there's an attempt at it. Gorzom seems to take cues from ancient Middle Eastern cultures, so at least it's not yet another medieval Europe with the serial numbers filed off. The plot is plain, but it has a plot. I've read works with less substance in that department. The pacing is decent, and although the narration is far too purple, exposition tends to be woven into the action naturally rather than awkwardly dropped in blocks. Plus, it does paint a vivid picture of what's going on. Apart from some minor orientalism going on, Eye of Argon lacks the racist elements endemic to contemporary fiction. Grignr is described as a redhead and is presumably white, but the other characters' races aren't actually specified. Carthena is sexualized to hell and back, but she is a named character who plays an active role in the plot, Grignr needs her help to escape, and she's not slut-shamed for having sexuality. It's made clear multiple times that her relationship with Grignr is consensual; the barbarian expresses disgust at how her autonomy was taken away by the prince, and her sexual assault at the hands of the cultists is depicted as the evil and bad thing that it is. She even has a kill count of two – it's her that slays Agaphim at the end! All things considered, not bad for 1970. Eye of Argon has far more misogynist, rapey books as its contemporaries. And the infamous prose, well, it's clearly modeled off the style of the narration in Conan. Are we really going to make fun of a teen for emulating his favorite author?

I will forever wonder what things would look like if Jim Theis had been encouraged and helped instead of mocked. It wasn't like he didn't recognize where the issues with the story lay. As early as three months after its initial publishing, Theis stated that “...Eye of Argon isn't great. I basically don't know much about structure or composition,” in an interview for OSFAN #13. He demonstrated a graciousness and self-awareness that even some adult authors lack. I believe that we could have gotten a damn good Eye of Argon series if people had given him a chance. At the very least, we could stop making unauthorized copies of his novella, to profit off of his embarrassment while his estate never receives any royalties for it.

Fortunately, I'm not alone in feeling this way. In 2018, a small-time author by the name of Geoff Bottone released a novella called Grignyr the Ecordian. According to him, it's a reimagining of Eye of Argon with the goal of making the well-crafted story that Jim Theis probably had in mind. Starting with a kindly dedication to Theis, Bottone's book keeps to the original story structure of Argon as much as possible, while expanding on the worldbuilding and character dynamics. I've read it, and it's pretty good. No spoilers, but Grignyr the Ecordian seems like a fresh take on his story that Theis would be proud of. The pacing is consistent and keeps the story moving, the changes that are made make sense, and it even gives a plot-relevant reason for Agfand dying twice. It takes Theis's original worldbuilding seriously and gives it the “Yes, and” treatment it deserves. If the story behind Eye of Argon has caught your interest, I highly recommend giving it a read.

Children of Ecordia, unite!

Also, if you want, you can donate to the American Heart Association in Mr. Theis's memory :) https://www.heart.org/?form=FUNELYZXFBW

https://www.fanac.org/fanzines/OSFAn/osfan_13_allen_1970.pdf

Scan of OSFAN #10: https://ansible.uk/misc/eyeargon.pdf

Jim Theis obituary: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/45128109/

HTML edition of the story for easy reading: https://ansible.uk/misc/eyeargon.html

https://mythcreants.com/blog/i-tried-to-praise-the-eye-of-argon-and-ended-up-with-these-lousy-writing-lessons/

https://search.worldcat.org/title/21801115

https://news.ansible.uk/a193.html

https://news.ansible.uk/a211.html

The Rise and Fall of the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO)

Today we take a deep dive into the world of self-published fantasy books, the book blogger/reviewer community, and unpack all the drama that comes with starting your own awards for clout. This is the non-chronological history of SPFBO's slow descent into irrelevance as told through its biggest controversies.

What the Heck's a SPFBO?

The Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off or SPFBO (yes, it's blog off and not book off. No, you're not crazy for wondering. My proofreaders were surprised that wasn't just one of my many typos) is a yearly competition to highlight the work of self-published fantasy writers. Here's the mission statement:

The SPFBO exists to shine a light on self-published fantasy. It exists to find excellent books that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. It exists to help readers select, from the enormous range of options, books that have a better chance of entertaining them than a random choice, thereby increasing reader faith in finding a quality self-published read.

The contest first began in 2015 (then called The Great Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off) when author Mark Lawrence announced his intent to try to find the best self-published fantasy books. Here's how it works:

• Every year, 300 self-pub authors enter their books for the competition
• 10 blogs are tapped to be competition judges
• Books are divided among these blogs until each one has 30 books to review
• Each blog selects one book from their assigned reading to move on to the finalist stage
• Once all 10 finalist slots are filled, all teams give final ratings on all of the books
• The book with the highest average score at the end of this round wins the cleverly-named award: the Selfie Stick

At nearly ten years old, SPFBO has gone on to have a number of controversies over the years. I'm here to catalogue its slow descent into irrelevance after its explosive debut by talking about many of its ongoing issues through the lens of its biggest controversies.

Mark Lawrence

Let's start by talking about the SPFBO host, Mark Lawrence. Lawrence is an accomplished and popular fantasy author. If you're into fantasy books, you may know that his Broken Empire trilogy was a smash success when it came out in 2011. He's also a reliable and quick writer, currently projected to publish his 18th book in a span of 14 years when his most recent trilogy completes in 2025. The guy has had plenty of critical and commercial success as a traditionally published author including a few badass award wins. This raises the question: why would he want to start a contest to highlight self-published authors? He's objectively done about as well as anyone could hope in traditional publishing and, to the best of my research, has only ever self-published a couple books on Wattpad but the first of those projects, Gunlaw, began months after SPFBO was first announced. What's he got to do with self-pub?

The common understanding is that he's helping out self-published authors out of the goodness of his heart because they don't get enough respect. I am skeptical that's the full reason. A few things to know about how Lawrence runs SPFBO:

• Lawrence's involvement in the actual competition is minimal - all reading and judging is done by blog teams with Lawrence posting announcements and updates once a quarter or so
• Lawrence famously rarely reads any entries. In the nearly ten years this contest has run, I could only find evidence of him having read a handful of participants. It wasn't until this YouTube video in August 2022 that there was solid proof of him having actually read all of the winning SPFBO books. This is widely known too and being read by Lawrence is considered a big badge of distinction in the SPFBO community
• the competition is centered entirely around Lawerence's blog and he has responded negatively to suggestions of creating an official website or oversight committee for the awards

Lawrence doesn't seem like a guy who is sincerely interested in self-published fantasy. Rather, this seems to have an opportunistic element. The evidence is certainly all circumstantial but I'm struggling to think of any other award where it's an open question whether the guy giving you the award will read your award-winning book.

A relevant consideration here is that Mark Lawrence has a history of obnoxious self-promo. He has been banned by r/fantasywriters for flouting their rules (comment link and backup screenshot because Lawrence likes to delete his comments once he realizes they reflect poorly on him). He seems to be in a constant battle with the mods of r/Fantasy over his promo violations (comment link and backup screenshot) as seen in the frequent potshots he takes at their self-promo rules (comment link and backup screenshot) including this instance where he appears to have directly DMed a random user to ask them to post promo on his behalf (comment link and backup screenshot) because he knew it would get removed as promotional if he posted it. I mean, what else could "Posted with permission since self-promotion is not allowed" mean? So when I say "it seems like Lawrence's motives for running SPFBO don't seem entirely altruistic," that's not coming from nowhere. There is a record of him knowingly engaging in underhanded self-promo. Though to be fair, I get that publishers don't support their authors enough and that Lawrence's tenacity in promoting himself and hanging in there as an author is on some level very impressive.

Now a lot of this can be forgiven if Lawrence were better at running SPFBO but he is rather uninvolved in most of the contest. The blog teams do most of the actual work and are asked to have read nearly 40 books by the end of the SPFBO year. I'm a big reader, I usually average around 80 books a year and I can't imagine devoting half my hobby time to this endeavor but there are brave souls out there who do every year. Meanwhile, Lawrence has a tendency to abandon aspects of the competition when they start to take more work than expected. This can best be seen in one of SPFBO's biggest controversies: the AI cover fiasco. For years, SPFBO ran a best cover contest where a selection of good looking covers were uploaded for users and critics to vote on. In 2023 though, one of the winning covers was revealed to be AI generated which was explicitly against the rules of the contest and violated the self-report form authors had to fill out in order to enter the contest.

People were upset and there were ideas for how to revamp the contest so that such an issue would not repeat but Lawrence simply ended the cover contest completely. The cover contest was an immensely popular part of SPFBO and served to highlight that not all self-pub books have bad cover art but the moment it became more work than posting pictures for other people to vote on, he dropped it faster than Kendrick Lamar drops Drake diss tracks. There's no explanation as to why either. Lawrence didn't provide a reason in his announcement, he did not respond to requests for comments from the news orgs that reported the story, and our only hint as to why is a tweet hinting at his distaste for controversy and suggesting someone else not associated with SPFBO should run the contest instead.

All of this is worth bearing in mind as his leadership failures start to underscore and exacerbate SPFBO's systemic failures.

Edit: A commenter let me know there was some important context that I'd missed. Lawrence has a daughter with special needs who takes up a lot of his time and attention so some of the lack of effort in SPFBO I've been critical of can likley be attributed to him being a good caretaker of her.

Grimdark Supremacy

The oldest and dearest controversy in SPFBO history is that the contest has mainly been dominated by one specific fantasy subgenre: grimdark. For those who don't know, grimdark is an infamously hard to define subgenre with everyone disagreeing about what it is, how it's different from dark fantasy, and whether it's good or bad. For simplicity's sake, I'll say that grimdark tends to focus on nihilistic or cynical worlds where goodness itself feels like an impossibility but pinning it down past that is a fool's errand.

It's probably no surprise that the competition wound up so skewed towards grimdark. After all, being run through Mark Lawrence's blog, it probably attracted a fair portion of Mark Lawrence fans and Mark Lawrence is a grimdark author of considerable importance. His attempt at defining grimdark (because even the authors of this genre struggle to pin it down) lists his own debut novel, Prince of Thorns, as the 3rd most grimdark book of all time with a community-voted rating of 4.47 grimdark points out of 5 and an interview with Grimdark Magazine (GDM) describes him as

a key voice in grimdark fantasy since the release of Prince of Thorns in 2011. Lawrence engages heavily with the grimdark community as both an author and as founder of the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off

I do find it telling that GDM considers running SPFBO to be evidence of engaging heavily with the grimdark community. It seems like an indirect acknowledgement that the contest is seen as being by and for grimdark writers. That perception has haunted the competition for years. Repeated complaints about SPFBO's seeming lack of openness to those other subgenres have flared up from time to time on social media and there have been both authors and judges who have participated with the intent of broadening the reading tastes of the SPFBO community.

When a non-grimdark book does win, it can get treated rather dismissively. To his credit, Lawrence has tried to be supportive of non grimdark winners but he's not very good at actually being supportive. Lawrence reviewed SPFBO 7 winner, Reign & Ruin, which is a fantasy romance. The review absolutely screams: I don't like this but feel obligated to support the winner of my competition.

It feels extremely unengaged in the the book. "I learned so much about clothes" and "The book's prose was good, as was its writing and also its descriptions" would feel-low effort in a middle school book report. It certainly doesn't feel like the type of review someone would write about a novel they personally bestowed an award upon. You can see how damningly faint the praise is when compared to something like his review for Senlin Ascends (a book which will come up again in a future section):

The imagination is unbound and intriguing. This has a strong Jack Vance, Dying Earth vibe, mixed in with overtones of Kafka, but it's also very much its own thing with hope and defiance to offset the cynicism.

That said, it would be unfair of me to not acknowledge that SPFBO has gotten better at this over time. SPFBO 9 finalists (the currently active SPFBO as of this writing) were broken down by one participating blog as having:

• 4 cozy reads
• 3 dark fantasy, with 1 being Grimdark
• 3 epic fantasy novels

Plus, in addition to Reign and Ruin's SPFBO 7 win, another romantic fantasy, Olivia Atwater's Small Miracles, won SPFBO 8. So it seems SPFBO is slowly diversifying. I'm not sure the jump from dark to epic is all that big but dark to cozy does feel like a real change and two romance winners in a row does feel promising.

Who Are Reviews For?

SPFBO has a recurring bout of infighting on the subject of reviewers and how they review entries. There's always one reviewer that is significantly more critical than the other reviewers. Who this person is changes from year to year but the person with the lowest overall ratings often gets flamed online by both SPFBO enthusiasts and authors for belittling the competition. It's such a known quantity that Lawrence has even addressed it directly in his blog over the years as have judges and participating authors. I won't mince words: bad reviews are an affront to the competition in many authors' eyes because they don't see it as a competition for quality. They see it as a chance for self-promo and anyone giving them bad scores is ruining the good vibes and community building or worse, not being a true ally to self-publishing. You may recognize this as being at odds with what most people would consider to be the point of a contest and SPFBO's own mission statement: to find excellent books.

Frankly, a lot of self-published novels are dreck and that dreck has only gotten worse thanks to AI. We all know this. The lack of a professional filter does mean that books which would never be given a commercial shot can find an audience (and that is great!) but it also means no quality control and a lot of resultant rubbish. That's why SPFBO is theoretically such a useful endeavor. Providing a quality filter for casual browsers who are open to reading good self-published books but can't find them on their own is a great service. But the trouble is that SPFBO is also buried in garbage entries. I would estimate that at least 1/3rd of entered books are unreadable and I'd be shocked if they were ever even in the same city as an editor, another 1/3rd are just regular bad, and then the remaining 1/3rd vary from mediocre to quite good. Even in the finalist stage, it's not uncommon to see books with average scores of 4, 5, or 6 out of 10 which would be unthinkably low in the finalist stage of just about any other competition.

This issue of wildly uneven quality is compounded by the fact that there tend to be two types of people who enter into the contest as judges. The first type is what I'd call the Cheerleader: someone who wants to support self-publishing and get it taken seriously as a format. The second type is what I'd call the Professional: a reviewer who sees their critiques as their art form and is most invested in putting good reviews out. Both types have their place in this competition and are good to have around but they often clash because the Cheerleader is very forgiving of obvious flaws while the Professional is very unforgiving of the same. So every year this leads to a fight between people who view themselves as supporting a maligned format and people who are interested in making sure they’re reading things that are actually good drags down the entire competition every year. The argument always goes "we need to build up self-pub as a real alternative to trad pub! Kicking self-pub author with bad reviews only helps Big Publishing" vs "we need to be honest about the quality and not treat self-pub with kids gloves. It may seem cruel but this is what it means to be taken seriously."

The Senlin Drama

I think this divide between Cheerleaders and Professionals can be traced back to the very first SPFBO controversy. I call it the Senlin Drama. 2016 was the second year SPFBO was ever run and one blogger, Jared Shurin of Pornokitsch, was torn between two finalist picks: Path of Flames by Phil Tucker or Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft (told you it'd be back). After much soul searching, Shurin opted to advance Path of Flames. What happened next was Mark Lawrence read a self-published fantasy book for the first time in his life. Okay, probably not in his life but this is the first time I can verify he actually read a SPFBO book. He was intrigued by Senlin Ascends, read it, loved it, and made it his mission to champion it. Ultimately, this led to Senlin Ascends getting a traditional publishing deal, critical acclaim, and setting his next series up for a six-figure book deal. This is pretty good so far. Isn't this what you want out of a self-pub competition? To unearth hidden gems?

Well, yes but then it took a bit of a weird turn. The rules of SPFBO were rewritten specifically to make up for Senlin Ascends having not made it to the finals. Mark Lawrence announced the Senlin Net in 2017, a rule where bloggers who wound up with two strong picks for finalist could send their second pick to another team to give that book another chance of making the finals. This is not a bad idea but the tone of the announcement is rather odd. Take a look:

In addition to the unavoidable flaws a system may be corrupt. Flaws cannot be avoided but corruption can. A system that allows room for corruption (unfairness) will attract accusations of foul play even if none is actually happening. Hence it is important to have rules that allow no room for it.

For the SPFBO it is better that we select a good book by a process that is not only fair but seen to be fair, than to select the best book by a process that has room for unfairness in it (even if none is actually present).

Please tuck away that tidbit about seeming to be fair being more important than being fair away for later. It will be important in a future section.

Senlin Ascends may not have made it to the finals, but the strength of the review convinced Lawrence to read it and then champion it all the way to a publishing deal. Bancroft may not have won but he is arguably SPFBO's biggest success story, showing the importance of good word of mouth and how great books do get overlooked by traditional publishers. Isn't that everything you'd want SPFBO to be even if Bancroft didn't take the prize? So why is the tone of this announcement acting like the competition is on the verge of becoming a corrupt institution?

Anything I could say on why would be speculation, unfortunately. What I can say concretely though is that this post has also semi rewritten history so that now Shurin is regularly belittled in hindsight for picking wrong even though the actual review makes it extremely clear how good the book was and did so in a way that was convincing enough to get it read by people who matter. The guy who got the ball rolling on how great the Books of Babel are is retroactively villainized for writing an effective review because he personally preferred a competing book by the slimmest of margins while being as open and honest about his process as possible.

You can see how this started the Cheerleader versus Professional trouble, right? Shurin was set on picking the book he felt was best, publicly agonized over his choice when presented with two books that he thought were great, and still gave a fantastic review to the book he didn’t choose. But he didn’t support the right book and Lawrence acting as if a grave injustice had been done gave a little more weight to the Cheearleader side. Shurin tried to be a Professional, was rebuked for not doing it to the liking of the host, and has been retroactively scorned for failing to Cheerlead Senlin Ascends like Lawrence did.

Now, that said, sometimes the Professionals are definitely assholes. For SPFBO 6, Mark Lawrence specifically recruited one of the top reviewers on Goodreads to participate in SPFBO. As of the time when I'm writing this up, Khanh, first of her name, mother of bunnies as she goes by on Goodreads is the fourth most followed GR reviewer in the US. That's objectively a pretty major get for a small competition that surely added a lot of legitimacy to the proceedings, right? Nope! Turns out Khanh was not a fan of self-published works, did not enjoy any of her time as a judge, wrote several extremely negative reviews (and yes, there's Mark Lawrence once again engaging in self-promo in the comments), and quit the competition before even finishing her slate of 30 which were redistributed to the other teams. Moreover, her clear disdain for self-published work quickly made every other judge miserable since most of them (both Cheerleader and Professional) do want to help out non-traditional authors.

Khanh was absolutely a bad fit for the contest and it's probably better for everyone (including her) that she left. This does highlight the failure of Lawrence's leadership though. In a bid to get a big name, he apparently didn't bother to find someone who cared about the contest at all and maybe wasn't even prepared for it as a concept. Khanh certainly made things worse with all the bad blood she generated but she never would have been there in the first place if she hadn't been actively recruited.

What Even is Fantasy Anyway?

One of the big rules of SPFBO is that the book has to be fantasy. There was some consternation among other types of spec fic about genre favoritism but now that there's an equivalent contest for sci-fi self-pub, most of those complaints have died away. And now that only fantasy is allowed and everyone agrees on that front, we have to ask: how does this competition define fantasy?

Perhaps looking at a successful finalist will help us understand what counts. Combat Codes by Alexander Darwin was a finalist for SPFBO 6 in 2020. It even went on to be acquired by spec fic powerhouse publisher Orbit for a traditional publishing deal. Combat Codes is basically as successful as a SPFBO book can be, which is all very interesting when you learn that Combat Codes is not fantasy in any way and should not have been eligible for SPFBO. You wouldn't know this from the review of the blogger who picked the book to be a finalist since the second line of the review reads "It blends fantasy, sci-fi, cyberpunk, martial arts, and more."

A follow up review by a competing blog was quick to point out there were no fantasy elements and sure enough, when Orbit published the book there was no mention of fantasy anywhere in the press release. Even post publish, the top Goodreads review for the book expresses surprise and confusion that the book was ever labeled fantasy by anyone. So how the heck was this able to get to such an advanced stage of the competition if it breaks a major rule by not being fantasy?

Well, this is where we get back to Lawrence's leadership. You see the rule is that only fantasy is allowed but there's a tacit admission that the rule will not be enforced:

iv) It must be a fantasy book. (If you say it's fantasy then it is. But if it isn't really it won't get far.)

What a peculiar exemption and now provably untrue with at least one non-fantasy finalist. Behind the scenes sources that I am not at liberty to name have told me that Darwin did not realize that the competition was only limited to fantasy books when he entered and thought that his sci-fi was fine to compete. This caused a stir on the SPFBO judge Discord and many teams complained about having a sci-fi finalist. After enough of the judge bloggers complained, Lawrence reached out to Darwin who reclassified his book as fantasy for purposes of the competition so he could retain his finalist status because of course he would. The alternative would be self-disqualification after already reaching the top 10. Lawrence may as well have asked "Do you want to have a pizza party or do you want to kick yourself in the balls?" There is only one answer anyone would pick aside from maybe the cast of Jackass.

I want to be clear that I don't think Darwin necessarily did anything wrong here, at least initially. He entered a competition without knowing the full rules. That's a misunderstanding at worst. It should have been up to Lawrence to fix this but instead he turned the question to Darwin who was effectively asked to choose between lying about the content of his work or derailing his chance to achieve a lifelong dream. Would he have still been able to get enough notoriety to get a publishing deal if he'd self-DQ'd? Probably not. And yes, Darwin may have lied but I can't blame him for choosing how he chose. I think most people in that situation would choose the same way. This is why it reflects poorly on Lawrence's leadership that he handled it this way. He could have either finally opened up SPFBO to accept all spec fic or enforced the rules that his own bloggers were asking him to enforce but he opted out of doing anything.

Incest

No, not literal incest. Competitional incest. One thing about self-published authors that drive a lot of people up the wall is the constant self-promo and networks of backscratching. You'll be unsurprised to learn this extends to SPFBO which is absolutely rampant with questionable relationships between authors and judges. This is most obvious in how frequently judges and contestants hop back and forth between that dividing line. Let's take a hypothetical example:

• Year 1 - contestant enters the competition and becomes a finalist
• Year 2 - former contestant does not have a book out and decides to help out SPFBO by judging. They join the blog team that named them as a finalist in Year 1
• Year 3 - contestant now has a book out again and so re-enters the competition. If they get far enough, they will eventually be judged by the same team they worked with in Year 2

There's no provable quid pro quo happening as far as I can confirm in this example but it definitely has the appearance of impropriety. What I'm describing here is not a one off occurrence, it happens nearly every year to multiple teams. I get how it can happen innocently. Bloggers enjoy the added legitimacy that comes with having a finalist on their team and authors who want to support SPFBO like giving back but it really feels like there should be rules here to prevent this sort of thing.

For an extreme case, I would point to Sarah Chorn whose blog Bookworm Blues has been a SPFBO judge multiple times, she has also competed in SPFBO with her book Of Honey and Wildfires in SPFBO 6, has been a developmental editor for multiple SPFBO finalists before entry (it's unclear if she was editor and judge for the same people in the same year but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt for now), and is an editor of Grimdark Magazine. Chorn seems like a nice person so I don't want to give her grief and I beg anyone reading this to not harass her or her editing business (which I have taken care not to link) over what is currently only the potential appearance of impropriety. I simply want to highlight that this degree of involvement at every level of the competition is concerning even when done in good faith by nice people with the best of intentions. To make a comparison to a different award, imagine if a person could be on the Pulitzer Prize committee, a nominee for the prize, and the editor for multiple finalists in the span of a few years. It'd look pretty sketchy. Edit: Though as a comment on this post points out, it happens all the time in awards and specifically to the pulitzer.

Now this can be done in a way that is okay. For instance, author Devin Madson was a finalist in SPFBO 4 and a judge in SPFBO 8 with the Fantasy Inn, the blog that called out Combat Codes lack of fantasy status in an earlier section. While the folks at the Fantasy Inn are clearly fans of Madsons's, they were not judges the year she was a finalist and multiple years passed before she judged. Moreover, since then she hasn't re-entered the competition to the best of my knowledge. This is decently ethical even if I'm still not entirely comfortable with this arrangement.

Here's where we come back to that thing Lawrence said earlier about it being more important that the process is seen as fair than actually selecting the best book. Does that philosophy not apply here? Apparently it doesn't because to the best of my knowledge, Lawrence has never raised any concern or spoken on the fluid relationship between participant and judge before. This seems like one area where you really would want to make things seem as fair as possible but it feels like the overly friendly and insular nature of the community is seen as a perk to be enjoyed rather than a problem to be addressed.

Irrelevance

For many years, SPFBO was a potential path to traditional publishing success. A few big publishers kept their eyes on SPFBO and scooped up contestants who seemed promising. This includes but is not limited to Josiah Bancroft, Olivia Atwater, Devin Madson, Jonathan French, and more. However, while these books got great feedback from SPFBO, many went on to belly flop in traditional publishing. Grimdark Magazine had this to say about Michael R Fletcher's attempt at a trad pub career:

As Fletcher himself said, “By the end of the year, it appeared on over a dozen best-of-the-year lists, neck and neck with real books written by real authors.” Here at Grimdark Magazine, we loved it. However, despite all of this acclaim, it wasn’t selling well. Because of this, Harper Voyager passed on the sequel.

This became a common phenomenon. Edit: I've been corrected on this point. Fletcher started out trad pub and then moved to self-pub. I had the order of events backwards.

SPFBO success mostly did not translate to marketability. The competition which aimed to shine a spotlight on exceptional work was turning out to be an extremely niche competition where everyone who might be interested in the winners was already a SPFBO judge. That's not to say that there will never be another contestant to make the leap to trad pub but every year there are fewer and fewer SPFBO contestants making that leap. Even Orbit, once the great scooper of promising SPFBO titles, appears to have stopped.

In ten years, SPFBO has gained all the worst qualities of awards competitions and slowly lost all the valuable parts, if it ever had them to begin with. It's arcane, insular, full of overly cozy relationships between judges and contestants, hampered by ineffective yet self-important leadership, hobbled by severely limited notions of its own genre, and extremely hit or miss at vetting for quality. To this day, winning SPFBO is no guarantee that a book will be good. I could devote an entire section to mediocre and bad winners but I just don't think me talking about what a sexist slog The Grey Bastards is would be nearly as interesting as the drama that currently exists.

Can SPFBO be Saved?

Possibly but it's in bad need of reform. The contest clearly cannot continue on as it has been. Some changes I think would go a long way:

• Real leadership - someone with an active passion for finding good self-pub who will actually put effort in. Ideally a leadership council to handle serious responsibilities and a dedicated site for the sake of professionalism would help too. You can even see a better designed independent site put up by a former participant that puts Lawrence's blog to shame
• Better and enforceable rules - there's no point in having rules if you're not going to enforce them. It cheapens the contest that existing rules are not taken seriously internally.
• Better quality control - there needs to be a more serious effort to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's embarrassing to see 4.3 and 8.1 finalists sitting side by side in the final ratings.

Even if all these changes are made, it's possible that traditional publishing houses won't come back. That time may have passed permanently but a good faith effort to take SPFBO from a glorified clique back to a real competition would go a long way towards getting real interest back.

Conclusion

So now you know the whole history of SPFBO. I hope this deep dive into the petty world of blogging about self-published fantasy books was as enjoyable for you to read as it was for me to write and research.

Edit: After much feedback, I've rewritten several sections of the post to remove speculation and incorporate criticisms the first draft received. I hope this solves the issues people had with the initial write-up feeling one-sided.

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In late 2015, a massive indie RPG called Super Space Funeral 4 & Bubsy was released, to a mix of confusion and outrage. Why? Well, keep reading and you'll find out.

Content note: This story touches on discussions of transphobia, involves tasteless portrayals of fictional transgender characters, and contains some really bad words relating to sex work. I debated if this needs the heavy tag, but almost all of that stuff is aimed at fictional characters, not real people. Links that go to possibly heavy stuff are tagged, though, and I censored slurs in the quotes. If you'd rather something wholesome that's still related to the LGBT+ community, why not learn about Oceanspirit Dennis? Space Funeral 4 is kinda gross.

(0) Background information

People will occasionally remember Space Funeral 4 and ask what happened. Usually, they don't get an answer. Despite the massive waves it made at the time, discussion of the game has just… sort of vanished. Little information survives, except for inscrutable third-hand references.

Before we start, let's all agree to be adults about this, and let's not harass anyone involved in this story. Cool? Cool.

To my knowledge, there is no comprehensive write-up of those events. Most sources have been lost to bit rot or been intentionally destroyed, but I managed to track down enough material to put together a rough and superficial outline. How did it come to be? Why it was like that? Whence the backlash? Well, let's find out.

Okay, so, Bubsy the Bobcat is a videogame character from the "mascot platformer" era. He received two good games in the 90s, plus one more mediocre one, followed by the franchise- and company-killing mistake known as Bubsy 3D. There was a failed TV pilot in the mix as well. Making fun of Bubsy 3D is a tradition as old as YouTube - in the spirit of the 2010s, here's an Angry Video Game Nerd segment. This strange afterlife eventually lead to Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective - a well-received art-platformer from 2013. Fun fact: The word "Bubsy" will appear 147 times in this write-up.

RPG Maker is a nifty little piece of software that you can use to make JRPG-like games, without needing to know much about programming. It's not as powerful as more universal game engines (like Unity or Godot), but it also has a much lower barrier to entry. There's been a thriving community of RPGMaker developers for decades now, and occasionally that community produces a breakout hit. A few examples from the last 10 years include OneShot, LISA: The Painful, Fear & Hunger, and Omori.

Another famous RPGMaker game is Space Funeral, a 2010 art-game by Stephen "thecatamites" Gillmurphy.

(1) Space Funeral and Earth Birth (2010-2012)

Space Funeral is an arthouse classic, best understood as a commentary on fantasy tropes and faux-nostalgic retro games. It uses wildly clashing graphics, stolen pop songs, and absurdist writing to unique effect.

Stephen "thecatamites" Gillmurphy: It wasn’t so much about the sprites or art in particular of RPG Maker so much as a kind of classicist way of dealing with that stuff, which is like the idea that videogames reached their peak in the output of a few large companies in the 90s and ever since it’s all anyone can do to ape those things as closely as possible[.]

In the game, you explore a garish broken wasteland full of strange creatures. Your party consists of "Phillip," who is a perpetually sobbing bald man, and "Leg Horse," who is a gruesomely mutilated ex-human. (Don't worry, he's fine.) An intense atmosphere of dread hanging over it all, even with the surreal humour, and it turns out that the world is actually post-apocalyptic. An artist named MOON was exposed to the world's platonic ideals, couldn't handle their impossible and unreachable perfection, and decided to break the world apart to create room for art and self-expression. You kill her, and the world retvrns to normal - a generic fantasy kingdom made out of stock RPGMaker assets. Is this a good thing? Who knows! Roll credits.

MOON: Nothing could be created which was not a pathetic mockery of the objects of the city. The finest works paled in comparison. In the face of such beauty I felt corrupted, an animal. Our world meant nothing. We were all graceless, creatures of slime.

If you want to know more, here is a Let's Play, and here is a review. This sort of thing is like catnip for artists, and if something becomes popular among a community of creative types, and the creator is cool about things - well, you get fan works. The first big fangame was released in 2013 by DuckStapler, and it was called Earth Birth.

DuckStapler: A satanic ritual summons Phillip and the Leg Horse from their purified land of Space Funeral into the corrupt land of Earth Birth where the evil forces of Science threaten to overtake the good forces of superstition. Dracula tags along with our protagonists halfway through the game.

Earth Birth is longer than Space Funeral, and improves on that game in many ways. The combat is more interesting, for example. However, while the game is well-made, it doesn't have much of a vision of its own. That's fine and all, but it misses the point a bit - if there's any specific idea that Space Funeral really wanted you to engage with, it's that creativity and self-expression are more important than technical skill, and that imitation is a dead end. That's what messed MOON up so much!

(2) Super Space Funeral Deluxe (2012-2014)

One of the people active in the Space Funeral community was SqrlyJack - a webcomics artist, shitposter, animator, squirrel furry, and Michael Jackson superfan. Squirrel + Jack, see? Also a trans woman who wasn't yet out for most of the story, so don't be confused if sources use "he" or "they."

SqrlyJack began work on her own Space Funeral fangame in October 2012. (Archive) Super Space Funeral Deluxe was going to be a straightforward "16-bit" remake of Space Funeral - basically the same game, but with spruced-up graphics and some new content.

SqrlyJack: Also because I was planing on upgrading the graphics, I was going to downgrade the ending graphics. hahaha!

After the release of Earth Birth, SqrlyJack decided to take Space Funeral Deluxe into a different direction. New areas, new party members, and sexy furries in the form of "growlf sex workers." Dracula hangs out with them, in case you're wondering. You know, the vampire? He drinks the wine and he smokes the weed. (Archive)

SqrlyJack: Its like he gets worse and worse in each game

The title was changed to "Super Space Funeral 4: Deluxe Blood Red Edition," since this was going to be a proper sequel now. A demo came out in April 2014, and was received warmly. (Archive)

The demo spans from the beginning of the game in Scum Vullage to after the first dungeon. Even though it’s only the prolog and the first chapter of the game, it’s still quite a lot for a Space Funeral game. Enjoy the demo!

Note that it covers just the remake stuff, with very little new content.

(3) Enter the Bobcat (2014)

You may have been wondering where Bubsy comes in. Well, it's early 2014 now - Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective has released, and the character is back in the public consciousness. SqrlyJack starts Bubsyposting after watching a YouTube Poop. She immediately creates a Bubsy OC, who is a burned-out ex-celebrity, and, well… (Archive)

BUBSY MOTHER FUCKING BOBCAT!!!!!!!!!! Bubsy is life. Bubsy is love. (…) But now he spends his time in mediocrity as a depressed, drunken transvestite hooker. HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN TO SUCH A BEAUTIFUL CREATURE??? (…) And the fairly recent fan game "Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective" is a fucking work of art, on par with the creepy, ugly, surreal, wackiness of Space Funeral. (…) But yea that's BUTTSY BOOBCAT, the drunkenist most depressinist transvestite prostitute bobcat in a shirt to hit the streets and THE GREATEST THING TO EVER BE BLESSED UPON OUR SOULS.

The gender transition idea comes from the fact that Bubsy 3D's voice actress also voiced Rouge the Bat. SqrlyJack really latches onto this idea.

SqrlyJack: And in Bubsy 3D, she just seems like a girl *poorly* trying to act male so she doesn’t get fired (For example, Rabbit from [Steam Powered Giraffe], after going through her transition, is used to her new voice and has trouble with her old voice, so I guess Bubsy here is an exaggeration of that, being a cartoon and all).

She goes all-in on this, even starting a second game project - a platformer called "The New Adventures of Bubsy," featuring everyone's favourite depressed bobcat. She also starts a Tumblr character blog to roleplay as New Bubsy, later renamed to "Modern Bubsy." That character becomes a whole thing. There's just so much lore here.

(4) Pivot to Bubsy (2014-2015)

A little later in 2014, "The New Adventures of Bubsy" was cancelled, and Modern Bubsy was added to Space Funeral 4 instead. (Archive)

SqrlyJack: I figured Bubsy will be the new guy. Also it’s the same “updated” Bubsy from my other game project.

giga-pichu: HELL YEAH

This isn't totally out of left field. Stephen "thecatamites" Gillmurphy, the creator of Space Funeral, was a bit of a Bubsyposter himself. The "& Bubsy" in "SF 4 & Bubsy" comes to mean Modern Bubsy specifically.

SqrlyJack: I’m using “Modern Bubsy” as the 4th party member in Space Funeral 4. SF4 will include the tale of Bubsy’s awful misadventures after Bubsy 3D. By the way, Bubsy had a sex change. Gotta have that token JRPG babe, and since this is Space Funeral, it might as well be unpleasant and comical.

The turn of the year is also when we start to see a lot of Modern Bubsy porn. Like, a lot of it. The whole thing tends to emphasize Bubsy's status as a burned-out ex-celebritiy, which usually means a ripped shirt and smeared makeup. If you truly absolutely must, the softcore picture "Boobsy lol" is a representative example.

[A picture of an otherwise naked Bubsy in a thong. Breasts are covered from behind by Phillip Spacefuneral's hands. She is sad. Content warning, but click here to see it.]

PlasticFantastic: Thanks for finally making something I feel a little guilty about faving. XD

Development of SF 4 went on, slow but steady. In mid-2015, the project even received an endorsement from Space Funeral creator Stephen "thecatamites" Gillmurphy himself, kinda. (Archive)

SqrlyJack: @thecatamites Can you believe there's gonna be another one? And Bubsy's the new party member???

thecatamites: @SqrlyJack as long as the franchise eventually outnumbers final fantasy i am happy

Spirits were high, and by the end of 2015, quite a lot of content had finished - about three quarters of the game. SqrlyJack was doing everything except the soundtrack by herself, without any beta testers, so she figured that now might be a good time to show off the added content. She set up a GameJolt page, and published a second demo.

And what a demo it was.

(5) The demo (2015-2016)

If you wish to experience the game for yourself, and I'm not saying you should, then you can still grab a copy from the Internet Archive. Takes 5-7 hours depending on your familiarity with JRPGs. You can also occasionally find Let's Plays on YouTube, like this one. Or just keep reading! That's also an option.

By accident, SqrlyJack had chosen the perfect release date. Demo 2 dropped a few weeks after Undertale and a few weeks before the re-release of the old Bubsy games on Steam, following a surprise Greenlight campaign. Space Funeral 4 sat at the exact intersection of those two trends, earning quite a lot of free attention and even some press coverage. Consider "Awaken to the Beautiful Nightmare World of Super Space Funeral 4 Deluxe Blood Red Version & Bubsy:"

Joel Couture: [I]t’s easy to get lost in their colorful worlds filled with monsters, lions, and muscle hedonists. And Bubsy. Yes, that Bubsy, (well, maybe not QUITE that Bubsy) thanks to developer and comic artist Squirrelly Jack. Squirrelly Jack has just released a demo of the fourth iteration of the series, [SF4], letting players overcome horrific, bloody monstrosities while living out their dream of dating Bubsy. Just… maybe don’t play it at work. Maybe.

Absolutely definitely don't.

So… what's going on here? Is the game actually good, then? Well… nnnno.

gungod6461: Played through this whole game aswell. Probably the worst game i've ever played. No clue how people left good reviews on the gamejolt.

Lineder: The creator here just uses it as a vehicle for, you know - inserting the repurposed bastardised Bubsy character and whatever… you know… fandom… jokes, memes they like, into a game that people cherish, and uh - [faux Southern accent] "I wanna have a piece of that Space Funeral pie, and it's gonna have my name on it, going forward, Space Funeral 4, Deluxe Blood Red version." Okay, so, your game is basically a version of vandalism. Let's draw some grafitti onto it. Because you're really cannibalising the first two games and then just drawing your own shit on top.

Whoopbones: why the hell does Leg horse have a MOUTH

SqrlyJack had been building her fanbase for a while now, and those people liked it. But reactions were… mixed overall. Most reviews were lost in the Content Purge, but as far as negative feedback goes, this post is fairly representative. Swears redacted for your convenience.

DestroyerOfBlocks: not only is it full of [hecking] bronies and furries but there is a [hecking] furry in your party and it is the authors [hecking] bubsy the bobcat pre op transgender oc with a giant [genitals] and [breasts]. (…) everything about this game is so completely veered off of what space funeral was (…)

theres a [bad] teleport maze which was [hecking] [genitals] because its a teleport maze with invisible enemies that you had to fight if you ran into because you couldnt flee from those forgets wasting my time (…) so congratulations the gameplay is [bad] too except unlike other space funerals there is more of an emphasis on it for some ungodly reason so it being [bad] is sort of an issue now.

instead of traveling through interesting areas you travel through [hecking] furry and brony villages that are a massive department from the traditional gory and unsanitized feel and are actively stated to be "the best place in space funeral" and its [hecking] awful why even make it space funeral. (…) this isnt bubsy therapy session this is [hecking] s p a c e f u n e r a l.

This was the mid-2010s - furries were the socially accepted punching bag of the Internet. There's some legitimate criticism of the gameplay mixed in, not just invective, but it's not very helpful. Do we have a less biased source, perhaps? Maybe someone who bothered to actually review the game in depth?

Let's skip forward to the end of 2016. This is when a big long review was posted to Tumblr, written by one SeaShelbby. I'll simply call it The Review from here on out, because it deserves Capital Letters. There's also a nine-hour stream to go with it, here and here, or spliced together here.

(6) Space Funeral 4: What's in it

If you're just here for the drama and not so much the context, feel free to skip to the next chapter. But here's the highlights from The Review.

Space Funeral 4 starts as a high-definition remake of Space Funeral 1, starring "Phillip" - a perpetually sobbing bald man - and "Leg Horse," a gruesomely mutilated creature. This is normal. After defeating the second boss, Blood Ghoul, you fall down a hole and the new content starts.

You visit Mt. Depression, an area that is generally praised by players, because it nails the Space Funeral "house style." It's weird, a little gross, and thematically resonant. Here, you recruit your third party member, Dracula the vampire. After fighting some neckbeard enemies, you come to a village of "fuzzies." (Anthropomorphic animals. They're furries.) This area then acts as the hub for the rest of the game, with the other areas branching off it. You access them one after another, by pouring Purple Drankk into a toilet, creating a portal. (Hence "toilet worlds.")

World 1, "Diabeetus," is based on a bit of internet culture ephemera. It dares ask the question the lamestream media will not: What if a My Little Pony "Dinky Donkey" said a swear? And was possibly ground up to make sugar in a factory run by Princess Celestia, because that was a thing in OFF? And what if those ponies were also Mexican? This follows then-relevant fan animation PONY.MOV almost beat-by-beat. I liked the art for Apocalypse Celestia, though. This is also where Bubsy joins the party, you help her investigate the factory and she sticks around. Her class is "Boobsy" and she gets moves like "Flash" and "Face Sit."

World 2, "Bakayarou," takes aim at anime tropes and Japanese games (specifically Pokémon). A lot of it just ends up mocking the Japanese. Professor Genki puts in an appearance, as do various salaryman and nerd scientists. There's a teleportation maze with invisible walls and respawning monsters. Not great! This is also where you get to date Bubsy, with a whole dialogue puzzle and everything, and change her class from "Boobsy" to "Your Waifu." The boss of the area is a pop tart.

World 3, "Funky Town," is a Blaxploitation slash Disco thing. Strong music theme. I have little to say on this area, because it's basically a long forest maze followed by an even longer maze with sliding block puzzles. Golden Sun got away with this sort of thing because of good pacing and puzzle design, which this game does not have. It's interesting to see furries "fuzzies" with afro haircuts, though.

What follows is a segment where the game threatens to become interesting. After defeating the greedy Sir Nose, the party is suddenly attacked by aliens - Woolies, from the Bubsy games. They're knocked out. You experience an extended flashback from Bubsy's perspective, showing her rise, fall, and gender transition. I'm actually going to link to a Let's Play of SF 4 here. NSFW, content warning. Bubsy defeats the aliens, rescues the rest of the party, and sail off. The demo ends at this point, cutting to credits and thanking the player.

You may have noticed that everything after Mt. Depression has basically nothing to do with Space Funeral. This was a common criticism, but the game also kind of fails if considered on its own merits, due to needlessly sadistic level design and repetitive combat. (And the intensively weird vibe around Bubsy. We'll circle back to this in a minute.)

(7) Social Media Doom Spiral (2016-2017)

After the stream was posted, SqrlyJack obviously showed up in the comments. Reaching out to SeaShelbby, who participated in the second part of the stream, they ended up having a relatively cordial chat.

SqrlyJack: lol no worries, sport. I know the game has flaws. It’s early access, so any issues you have are helpful. But if you’re the type to go on and on about social justice bs then we’ll have a… fun chat… ;3 Nice art tho!

(…)

SeaShelbby: I’ll be sure to cover everything (especially level design, because that’s where most of my personal complaints lie). It’s a fair review too - don’t worry, I do have some things I definitely would love to compliment you on.

SqrlyJack: I had a good feeling in my gut about you which is why you’re the only one I bothered to stalk. Figured you’d be the only one with actual constructive ideas. It was the main guy I thought was annoying so sqrly thinks you’re ok 👌

Foreshadowing is a literary technique that-

Actually, on that weird mention of "social justice bs" - let's jump back in the timeline and explore that. It's early 2016 again. The months after the demo's release are a time of ups and downs. SqrlyJack cashes in on her notoriety by selling Modern Bubsy posters and doing ads, which is actually well-received. (Archive, archive).

She also engages heavily on social media, gathering and re-posting discussions about the game and responding to people. This ends up involving perhaps a little too much friendliness towards certain questionable people on 4chan. Here's a thread archived from a 4chan archive. (Source contains bad language.)

VisualMaster: It's a headcanon that actually makes reasonable sense, it's what happens when you imagine how bad could a single atrocious game in the series could affect the mascot character, and what he's done in the decade that followed.

Sir_Gallonhead: Imagine seeing a semi-friend you have not seen in awhile turn to gay prostitution and drugs. Now imagine that no one cares because it is Bubsy. FUCKING FUCK

SqrlyJack: I like keeping tabs on how my work is spreading, and I am legitimately excited that /v/, for the most part, likes what I’m doing with Bubsy, even if it’s mostly for the NSFW byproduct of it all. That and I’m still shocked that a Bubsy headcanon could have this much impact.

… I said SqrlyJack "engages" on social media. But perhaps "posting through it" is more accurate? Because for the most part, SqrlyJack doesn't respond well if you don't like the game. Soon, she's actively seeking out the negative attention. As an example, consider this slapfight with some Roblox teen.

Description: Someone told me about a new Bubsy game. (…) i searched "Bubsy's New Adventure" because i thought that was the name. i was wrong.

SqrlyJack: “BUT MOOOOOOOOMMMMM!!! I HAVE TO GET ON TUMBLR TO OBSESSIVELY HATE ON THIS MEAN FURRY ARTIST WHO DRAWS NAUGHTY THINGS MY UNDERDEVELOPED MIND CAN’T COMPREHEND!!! AND UNBLOCK 4CHAN NOW SO I CAN POST EPIC MEMES!!!!!! SQRLYJACK IS THE BOOGIEMAN AND MODERN BUBSY HAS COOTIES!!!!!!!!! GIVE ME INTERNET, MOM!!!!!!!!!!!! BUY ME GAMES ON STEAM NOW!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”

tags: parenting should have a license, kids like this are why birth control exists, fucking obnoxious, just stop, it's like sitting next to a crying baby on an airplane

I should note that the video she's responding to has thirty-six views.

Many people express confusion over why this is a Space Funeral title at all, since it's much more concerned with imageboard culture. And, well, with Bubsy stuff - which attracted criticism itself. Yes, Bubsy eventually becomes a more serious character instead of a joke, but that only happens after like 5-8 hours of gameplay. The overwhelming majority of the experience is quite gross. SqrlyJack seemed to understand this problem, to a degree, though she was never able to resolve the contradiction.

mudkips-waffle-house: what are the reasons for people hating on trans-bubsy? Is there something about em that makes people angry?

SqrlyJack: Many things really! Some folks, usually the haters on Tumblr, see her as an offensive stereotype meant to make a mockery of trans people. Others, like the haters on 4chan, see her as forcing trans representation in an obnoxious attempt at being progressive. I also suspect a lot of these guys are probably angsty teens who are just trying to fit in. Furries and Bubsy are things they see other people hate on, so monkey see, monkey do.

Good observation, but the ever-more-agressive Posting really doesn't help her case. (I'm not gonna repost the anti-trans or anti-furry hate from 4chan, you can imagine what it looks like.) But again, ever since the creation of Modern Bubsy, there's been this ongoing issue where people think the character is hate art.

semerl: To the #Bubsy series’ hatedom, including those running the trans Bubsy blog: I’m sick of your shit.

SqrlyJack: [picture of a salt shaker]

The edgelord persona really bites her in the ass here, because it causes people to assume that she's posting in bad faith. It also doesn't help that she's actively seeking out Bubsy fan groups to pick fights. (Archive, archive)

JollyInLove: What is this shit?

SqrlyJack: Hey look, another toxic Bubsy fan on Deviant Art! Go on, flame more of my artwork so I can show the world how stupid you people are.

Where it gets dicey is with the topic of transmisogyny. Content note for the rest of this section, you can skip past it with this link. [ NEXT >>> ]

So, one of the first big conflicts here is with Bobby "Ponett" Schroeder, creator of the best lesbian furry game (as per Valens 2020), Super Lesbian Animal RPG. She voiced being uncomfortable with Modern Bubsy, due to the stereotypical portrayal (sex addict/messy makeup/constantly depressed/lots of focus on the genitals) and subtweeted about it. And oh boy that did not go well. Here and here is SqrlyJack's side of it.

Ponett: i blocked my first weasyl user!! how exciting. it was the person who draws that horrendously transmisogynistic shit with bubsy

SqrlyJack: Heh. It’s exactly what I expected - completely deranged. It’s all taken out of context of it being a washed-up Bubsy headcanon just to fit their SJW agenda, and all the points here are generally exaggerated or completely false (and ironically have some disturbing implications). (…) I do show that she is hung, but it's mostly to spite the people who bitch about her not having a vagina[.]

"Weasyl" is a furry art/social media website. Seven likes on the Tweet, posted 3h ago as per the screenshot, entire blog post as a response.

Here and here are some thoughts from Ponett, much later.

Ponett: like a year ago on twitter i said i saw some weird bubsy art that i thought was transmisogynistic, without actually naming them or “””””modern bubsy””””” or giving any real indication that it was their art i was talking about. but sure enough they saw the one single critical tweet, and since then they’ve repeatedly harassed me across multiple twitter accounts and tried to sic their followers on me for daring to say i didn’t like their art that one time[.] (…) they also constantly edit swastikas and shit all over the art of a friend of mine who had a similar run-in with them, because that’ll sure teach people they’re not a jackass

(The hateful edits were real and were made by SqrlyJack as part of a years-long spat with another online - uh, personality. Cuteosphere, specifically. Who it seems also had a closet full of skeletons, click that previous link if you absolutely must know more. Content note, again, applies.)

I think that criticism is fair. You can see why the art would make some people uncomfortable, right? It's not just the visible surgery scars, or the laser focus on the crotch region, or the perpetually smeared makeup, or the tons and tons of weird porn. It's just - look, in high-resolution closeups, SqrlyJack will go so far as to draw Bubsy with beard stubble. The vibe here is not good. You can tell why that causes people's "hate art" sensors to tingle, right?

Actually playing through SF 4, you can kiiiiind of tell where SqrlyJack was going with this. It's explicitly and textually not the transition that blows up her life. In fact, that's like the one positive thing that happens. It's the failure of Bubsy 3D and the resulting loss of employment and health insurance that's bad.

Things really were going to end well for Bubsy, with her saving her friends, turning her life around, and finding happiness or at least stability in the restored land of Space Funeral. (Archive).

SqrlyJack: A lil sketch of how I plan Modern Bubsy will look like when she turns her life around.

sunnysandcatofficial: She’s so precious and cute. <3 Love her piercing.

But this doesn't erase the fact that the game is drenched in sleaze, and that SqrlyJack really does draw a ton of porn with an intense focus on her surgery scars, smeared makeup, red eyes, and- well, I've gone over the list like five times, you know the drill by now.

At least this gave us a funny example of SqrlyJack drawing her enemies as the soyjaks. She did this quite a lot.

[a picture showing "The PC and idealistic adventures of SUPER TRANS LESBIAN BUBSY the Role Model Bobcat"]

SqrlyJack: Ok, so I thought it over and y’know, maybe they’re right. Maybe all this “Modern Bubsy” head canon stuff is grossly offensive (like it’s easily pretty much the new black face it’s so bad), so I went and fixed everything to be both completely safe and sterile while promoting wholesome, progressive values. (…) That’s much better, don’t you agree? You wish you were as progressive as I am. :^) Me… Me… Meeeeeeee… Mmmmmmmm… <3 Grrrrrr You win this round, Es Jay Dub’yuhs!

And of course she never calms down in response to criticism, she always immediately doubles down on whatever behaviour got her in trouble. (Archive)

[A galaxy brain meme regarding Bubsy fan-work. The final line with the biggest brain is labelled "wanting to succ the bobcat [very uncomfortable word for genitals]."]

As the year wears on, SqrlyJack casts herself as a lone crusader against an imaginary army of Social Justice Warriors. By October 2016, we get whole entire comics to own the SJWs epic style. (Archive)

Social Justice Strawman: You know who sure is a dick! Drawing his sinful you know what! He needs to mind his own business and let us publicly slander him in private!

SqrlyJack: Heh heh… whatever you say, buddy. Now if you'll excuse me, I have games to make.

She does take a moment to dunk on the transphobes too, here and there. (Like I'm pretty sure Cuteosphere is the one who starts that fight.) But there really is a lot of anti-SJW posting.

In spite of it all, work on SF 4 continued all throughout 2016.

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It is early 2005 in Strahlsund, Germany . The Kastelruher Spatzen (Kastelruhe Sparrows) have just won their fifth Krone der Volksmusik (Folk Music Crown), Humankapital has been declared the Unwort des Jahres (Non-Word of the Year), and the readership of the Ostsee-Zeitung (Baltic Sea Newspaper) honours a man by the name of Claus-Peter Schoschies with the title of Sport-Ass von der Küste 2004 (Coastal Sports-Ace 2004) (Yes, Ass is German for Ace). He has beaten various popular Football Players, a remarkable feat for someone from an extremely fringe discipline: Orthodox Problem Chess. This year is the height of his career: He has played at the 2004 Olympics in Athens and has risen to the rank of Chairman of the regional sports club, honoured with the prestigious Bronze Needle. It's also the height of his career since it will come to a rather sudden, dishonourable end in early 2005. But first, a short explanation:

What is Problem Chess?

Problem Chess is the competitive solving of chess problems. While most chess players will have encountered chess problems along the lines of “Checkmate in two moves”, solving them competitively at tournaments is a fringe activity. Imagine a group of people sitting at a separate tables, looking at sheets of paper and scribbling down chess notations. Not the most exciting thing to view, but a true test of one’s capabilities as a player. International champions tend to be world-level in regular play as well. Eagle-eyed reader will not that I haven’t explained what Orthodox Problem Chess is. There is a reason for this.

A Doctor of Mathematics makes a curious discovery

Someone who is, apparently, an eagle-eyed reader is Dr. Olaf Teschke, who was born in the small town of Sassnitz, close to Stralsund. The Mathematician, who occasionally writes humoristic editorials for chessbase.de, is rather astounded at the Schoschies’ reader-awarded title. Blessed with the robust memory of a chess player, he remembers the Sport-Ass from the sidelines of a regional tourney. But he does not remember him for his remarkable capabilities. Rather, he remembers a player who is “on the level of a middling club player”.He might just be misremembering, of course. So, as any true academic, he decides to double-check.

Short research reveals that Schoschies plays in events organised by the OPCF (“Orthodox Problem Chess Foundation”). Successfully, placing between second and fourth on their European rankings.  This is interesting, since at the time, the German Champion of Problem Chess is Arno Zude, who, unlike Schoschies, is also a Grandmaster of regular Chess. Of course, these are the normal problem Chess rankings, not the elusive OPCF’s orthodox problem chess rankings, which can only be found in one place online: The archives of the Ostseezeitung. All articles detailing Schoschies’ victories also appear to be written by a Gernot Peter, independent chess correspondent. His articles manage to make the rather dull sport sound exciting, even flashy. Strange and stranger still. The again, it’s 2005 and not everything can be found online.

What can be found is an announcement for the next OPCF tourney. Just a date, no address. Teschke writes to the given E-Mail, politely asking where the tourney is held and if it’s possible to watch. Again, the newspaper articles make them sound quite exciting. Teschke does not receive an answer, but the next day, a new announcement appears in the Ostseezeitung, announcing the unfortunate cancellation of the Event. The OPCF must be quite elusive and small indeed.

Speaking of Events and Elusiveness

The OPCF has an impressive roster: A yearly Marathon Tournament in Dresden, a Group Tournament on the Canary Islands, and the yearly Bestenermittlung (Literally: Determination of the Best) in varying towns. Can’t find much about these online either, and at the Dresden Chess club no one knows about the supposedly 27 year old annual event. But let’s leave that aside and look at the most important Tournament, the Bestenermittlung. Schoschies recently placed second after the Russian Dr. Nikolai Garnejew. According to the newspaper articles, this Russian is his main rival. This year, he apparently only had surpassed Schoschies because “Schoschies had too much respect of my capabilities”. I would like to point out again that in Problem Chess, the players sit at separate tables and do not directly compete against each other. Beyond being a dangerous rival, Garnejew is also a unique last name. So unique that it can be found effectively nowhere else online. Perhaps a further look at the other participants is warranted: Impossible to find are equally strangely named regular competitors Ole Lars, Finland and Fridjow Hirsch, Munich. In fact, the Telephone Book lists not a single F.Hirsch in all of Munich. Not even the famous American player, Prof. Bill Farmer seems to exist, just a voice actor of the same name. Somewhat fittingly, he is most famous for being the voice of Goofy.

But what about the highlight of the OPCF’s events? The Demonstration at the Olympic Games? Well, no one else remembers it. In a response to a request by Dr. Teschke, the Committee even outright states that “no Chess Demonstration was held in 2004”. Yes, the unfortunate, but unsurprising truth is this: Schoschies has never played at the Olympics or any other major event, never won any notable prices beyond a Book coupon in the 80s, and Orthodox Problem Chess doesn’t and presumably will never exist. Teschke publishes all these findings online in March 2005. He dryly states that, unless this is proof for the existence of parallel universes, he has just unmasked a Fraudster. It’s not a good look for Schoschies, who had just raised about 6000€ for a visit to the Olympics that, again, never happened.

The Aftermath

Schoschies has faded back into obscurity, after failing to provide proof of the existence of Orthodox Problem Chess. His last statement is a claim that he’ll return the raised money. Whether he ever did so, I haven’t found out.

Teschke still teaches Mathematics at University and considers his involvement in the affair his “15 Minutes of fame”.

The Ostseezeitung owned up to their mistakes. The only article on their former darling that can still be found online details his fraud. Gernot Peter never wrote for them again, most likely on account of him not existing.

In the German chess community as a whole, this Drama is still fondly remembered to this day for its absurdity.

All in all, many people have garner false acclaim for non-existent sports titles throughout history, but this may be the only case where someone managed to do it with such a blatantly non-existent sport.

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