note: all of these are sourced from Fekah’s Twitter and YouTube channel as well as Dofus official forums where applicable. Please also forgive that I am also not a native French speaker, but I have tried to represent all parties as accurately as possible.

What is Dofus/Dofus Touch?

Dofus is a tactical MMORPG on PC that launched in 2004 created by French game developer Ankama. It gained international traction with, in total, an estimated 40 million players over its lifetime. The servers that existed in the 2004 launch have been merged over time and as such the accounts, equipment, and resources from then, for the most part, still exist in the current servers unless they were wiped for inactivity - there are some very old accounts.

Dofus Touch is Ankama’s mobile version of Dofus for tablets and phones. It is important to note Dofus PC and Touch are completely different games. There is no crossplay between platforms, the content of Dofus Touch is not as extensive, the game is completely free to play, and even the mechanics of classes are different between the two.

Both games still have very active player bases as of today with several respectably populated servers of French players and communities of English speaking, Spanish speaking, and Portuguese speaking players as well.

The bot problem, macros, and emulators on Touch

Dofus and Dofus Touch have a notorious, decades-old problem with botting. In every server in early game areas especially, hundreds of bots run around collecting resources and farming mobs, causing a very saturated economy for low-level resources. The bots are also heavily associated with Real World Trading (selling in game currency for real money), highly prohibited in almost every online MMO including Dofus.

Ankama has tried to compensate by implementing anti-cheat and anti-bot measures, as well as enforcing very strict rules on gameplay to promote fairness. For Dofus Touch they extended the policy to state that using mobile device emulators apps like Bluestacks to play Dofus Touch on PC is a bannable offense, citing that it provides an advantage over the regular mobile user, specifically in the ability to easily play multiple characters at once. Interestingly, they have seemingly contradictory policies and explicitly stated that using multiple mobile devices is allowed, and even mirroring them to your PC is permitted - you just cannot use an emulator app. For the new servers, they released a forum post saying they are taking an extreme, zero-warning stance on emulators, saying all cases will be permanently banned without question.

In the PC client, where multiclienting is also allowed, Ankama has a rigid stance towards macros, or commands that allow the execution of more than one step at once. A prominent case is the use of AutoHotkey (AHK), a well-known open-source app that is used in Dofus, for example, to move several characters simultaneously with one click, rather than tediously clicking for every character on each window individually. Ankama has stated that their policy is “one keypress = one gameplay action,” and that using AHK macros to exceed this is a bannable offense.

Who is Fekah?

Fekah is one of the most well-known Dofus content creators who streams both PC and Touch. He is a Twitch partner and also has one of the largest Dofus YouTube channels, known for his server race rushes and challenges where he gets characters to max level as quickly as possible.

Incredibly importantly, he also has a deal with Ankama as a content creator partner, which will be critical in understanding the later part of his story. In exchange for game promotion, they allow him to be one of the only extremely rare exceptions to the emulator rule: he is allowed to play on Bluestacks so he can stream his gameplay on PC and generate content.

The main show: Fekah’s Dofus Touch permanent ban

Ankama released new servers for Dofus Touch in early April 2024 for the first time since the game’s release. Fekah streamed his world first race to 200 on a fresh character on one of the French servers, Tiliwan, garnering hundreds of viewers on Twitch and engagement on his YouTube channel daily highlights. He also ranked at the top of the PVP ladder in the new servers.

A little over a week into the launch, Fekah’s Dofus Touch account was inexplicably and swiftly banned by Ankama just before his character was about to reach level 200 (max level). Initially a 24 hour ban, Ankama revised it shortly after without explanation to a permanent ban. The reason Ankama cited: using an emulator to gain an advantage by using shortcuts.

After initial confusion and a relatively respectful but still heated response, Fekah announced his ban on Twitter and released a few videos discussing this event. He stated he played legitimately and his entire Twitch stream history is proof of innocence, with Ankama officials even watching and participating in his chat. He posed the relatively fair question of “you have been aware of this for days, watched me play, and yet you chose to ban me now without explanation, when I am level 199 and 60% towards level 200?” to which an Ankama representative essentially replied they didn’t wait for that on purpose, he plays fast, and the ban just so happened to be at this point in his character leveling.

His experience with Ankama support was more of the same: an extremely convoluted back-and-forth mess and mixed bag. Ankama claimed first he was allowed only to use Bluestacks while streaming and not allowed to use it outside of that, to which Fekah replied he understood he was authorized to use it offline to record his gameplay for YouTube as well. In response, Ankama shifted the angle and additionally claimed Fekah used shortcuts on Bluestacks to play quicker, with an official Ankama rep saying it is suspicious he progresses 10x faster than the average player.

Fekah defended himself saying they specifically authorized his use of the app and that he didn’t violate any policy on macros. He also took serious issue with the zero warning, instant permanent ban. He escalated through several levels of Ankama representatives, each of whom doubled down on the judgment. Interestingly, Fekah was able to even garner support on Twitter from Anthony Roux aka Tot, one of the executives and co-founders of Ankama. Tot himself said he personally defends Fekah, and asked for leniency from his own internal teams on this judgment. But in an astonishing revelation, Tot declared that the Dofus Touch admins are the ones who have the final say, and there isn’t anything more he can do.

New beginnings

Fekah, with great distress and sadness, eventually gave up his effort to get unbanned. He has since created a new character and account on Dofus Touch and is on the precipice of reaching 200, though due to the ban he has been surpassed in the world first race by other players. Further adding to the fire was the ban of his girlfriend Saki, who also was racing to 200, also for “playing suspiciously quickly.”She was shortly unbanned.

This controversy has divided the playerbase, some of whom claim Fekah’s allowed authorization to use an emulator is unfair, some of whom claim Ankama’s scorched earth stance on emulation needs to be revised, and some of whom are leaving the game altogether. Others are calling for Ankama’s efforts to be focused on the still-rampant bot problem rather than this zero-emulation enforcement which seems harmless. Some players on Discord and Twitter take this to be the deciding precedent case - if they won’t let up for even Fekah, a streamer friendly to both the community and Ankama, and had authorization, there is no chance they will change their policy for anyone. It is also a window into Ankama’s internal affairs, showing almost draconian rigidity concerning ban appeals, but even disagreement within the organization depending on who you ask. Players raised the argument that Ankama is in no position to be banning otherwise legitimate players who play on emulators, and that Ankama is self-sabotaging their game with an already dwindling server population.

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Well, well, well, hello again people of Hobbydrama! Before going right into it, i wanted to thank you all for the overwhelming support on my first post. Really, I didn’t expected that it would blow up this much, so thank you for all the comments and inputs yall gave me! I truly appreciate it! If someone doesn’t know what i’m talking about or is curious to read it, feel free to gave it a shot here

That being said, i’m back earlier than i tought with another drama, this time not related to music, but concerning a Cartoon Network series that i really love. Again, i wanted to talk about it because it seems like the entire Internet forgot about this situation. But not me. I never forget some good old lesbian quarrel (even if it’s fictional). That being said, let’s jump right in!

Introduction: what the hell is Adventure Time?

At this point I don’t think anyone seriously doesn’t know what it is, but for the few who live under a rock or for the older ones: Adventure Time is an American cartoon created by Pendleton Ward in 2010 for Cartoon Network. The series is based on the 2007 short film of the same name produced by Nicktoons and Frederator Studios for Random! Cartoons. Following the viral success of the pilot, (which was rejected by Nickelodeon, btw), Cartoon Network commissioned a full series, which officially aired on April 5, 2010. Adventure Time draws inspiration from a wide variety of sources, including the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons and several video games such as The Legend of Zelda franchise. The series quickly gained a cult following in the years, becoming one of the most recognizable Cartoon Network’s flagship properties of the 2010s. Critically was a success, winning numerous animation awards and having guests such as the one and only James Baxter. It is held in high regards in the world of animation due to the incredibly mature tone it gradually developed over the course of its run, for its scenes bordering on the disturbing, its mature storylines, its frankly depressing character arcs and, in general, it’s emotionally raw tone. For this same reason the adaptation of the series in other countries outside of America has often been severly censored, especially here in Italy, where entire episodes have been removed and dialouges changed drastically, censoring swears, sexual references, exessive violence and even some mentions (already vague in the original version) of an alleged past lesbian relationship between two female characters, wich are both quite important for the plot. This is also the main reason why later Adventure Time projects switched under HBO and basically flew the fuck out of Cartoon Network. Keep this in mind because it will be important later. To give you all further context on this mature and emotional tone, an entire episode is dedicated to the storyline of one character forced to deal with what is basically a metaphor of the Alzheimer’s Disease at the expense of his adopting vampire daughter, who he doesn’t even remember who she was. Just so you know what are we are dealing with.

But what is the plot? Well, to put it EXTREMELY simple, the series is about a young boy named Finn and his best friend and adoptive brother Jake, a dog with magical powers capable of changing shape and size at will. Finn and Jake live in the post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo, where they interact with Princess Bubblegum, Ice King, Marceline, BMO and others, trying to protect the inhabitants from enemies from various dimensions. Anyway, the series was so iconic that after its ending in 2018 it spawned both a sequel composed by four episodes and a spin-off, which is currently been renewed for a second season. Now that you have all this context, we can go on.

Our protagonists: a sentient fascist piece of gum and a vampire-half demon goth girl

Ok so. Now i need to go on another tangent to explain some things to make everyone understand, so bear with me. One of our main protagonist in this story is Princess Bubblegum, also called Bonnibelle Bubblegum, PB or Bonnie. Just like her name suggest, she is the princess of the Candy Kingdom. Initially she was presented like the classic stereotype of the “damisel in distress” and her main role was to be kidnapped by Ice King and saved by Finn and Jake. However, as the series went on it was expanded upon the fact that Bubblegum’s leadership was basically autocratic due to her subjects being extremely naive and childlike and without a guiding hand she tought they will quickly destroy themselves. Bubblegum is highly protective of the Candy People and cares deeply for their safety, but is secretly strained by the pressures of ruling and expresses a desire for freedom. Following a near-death experience at the end of the second season (that possession video i linked earlier), she starts to isolate herself and becomes overprotective of the Candy People, even exhibiting authoritarian tendencies temporarily in the fifth season such as installing multiple cameras in the kingdom and implanting tracking chips in every citizen. Ah yes, she also did what was basically the fantasy equivalent of a mass genocide.. They also elaborate upon her passion for science, showing that she basically has a…very worring lack of ethic. Long story short, she was presented as morally gray character that would do anything to keep her kingdom safe regardless of moral implications. Like that one time she literally sabotaged the heat source of an entire kingdom making all the people there almost die, only because she tought they were a danger for her. But the at the end of the sixth season, she is deposed as ruler following an election, where she realizes she has made the Candy People too unintelligent, and basically realized that she is kinda a shitty person and a control maniac. Following the miniseries “Stakes”, Bubblegum is reinstated as ruler and becomes less overprotective and more of a nice person overall.

The other protagonist is Marceline The Vampire Queen. Just like Bubblegum, she was initially presented as the sterotype of the “mean goth girl” who bullied the protagonists (which was very popular in early 2000-2010s cartoons) and her role was basically being insufferable, do illegal stuffs and be hot. But then the series started to expand on her lore and oh my god. It was A LOT. And it was sad as shit. To put it simply, it was discovered that Marceline was born to an human mother named Elise (voiced by Rebecca Sugar, the former creator of Steven Universe) and the demon king Hunson Abadeer. Furthermore, when she was a child, the cataclysmic Mushroom War occurred, and her mom was heavily implied to be killed by nuclear radiations. Her demon father then left her completely alone in this post apocaliptic wasteland and soon after, she developed a father-daughter-like bond with Simon Petrikov, who would one day turn into the Ice King, forgetting everything about her. Then, during the mini series “Stakes” it was discovered that she wasn’t actually born a vampire (originally she was a human-half demon hybrid) and that she was a vampire hunter for a while, until one day she was bitten by the Vampire King. Wich in on itself was an explicit metaphor for sexual assault So yeah, pretty sad and dark stuffs over here. Adventure Time wasn’t shying away from dark topics at all. As you can probably guess, Marceline was expanded upon a lot and quickly became a fan favourite: in her first role, she funcitioned as a sort of antagonist of the story, forcing Finn and Jake from their home. However, she eventually becomes their close friend once Finn recognizes that she’s not really evil and that she just wants to have fun in extreme ways. Under this “bad girl” image, she is actually a very fragile and insecure person. She suffers a lot emotionally and she has very bad abandonment issues (for obvious reasons) and daddy issues (for even more obvious reasons). This fear of being forgotten and left behind by people she loves will be very important so keep this also in mind. Now that I explained all of this and you have a wide knowledge of those characters, let’s jump right into the real meat.

The early days: Princess Bubblegum and Marceline's weird innuendos

Now if you followed what i said earlier, you must have understood that Adventure Time became emotionally devastating and mature gradually over time: it wasn’t always like this. This switch in tone started more or less during season 4-5. The early seasons were way more childish and “random”, containing more jokes, silly moments and whatnot, also the character were more stereotypied and one-dimentional. That being said, that doesn’t mean necessarily that the series didn’t already had weirdly mature subplots, that only means they were not expanded upon unlike they would do later. One of this weird sublopts (and early mysteries of the lore) was: did Princess Bubblegum and Marceline already knew each other?

The speculations started when the episode “Go With Me” from season 2 aired, in which Bubblegum looked weirdly unhappy to see Marceline, and Marceline greeted her teasingly in response. This was their first interaction on screen, but it was pretty evident that they already knew each other prior to this. But what were the circumnstances of their meeting? When did it happend? Nobody knew, but everyone was intrigued. The rest of this episode is basically comprised of Marceline ruining Finn’s attempts to ask Princess Bubblegum out by giving him bad ideas. When Finn is completely rejected by the princess, Marceline is happy to see that he has failed, and when Finn asks her to go to the movies instead, she agrees as long as it’s just as friends. As you can imagine, Marceline’s behaviour was read as suspicious from a lot of people who then started pondering the relationship between her and Bonnibelle. It wasn’t that much a matter of shipping for the hell of it, but it was geniune curiosity since the story was hinting at something. Then the episode “What Was Missing” from season 3 aired and it happened… this.

People were absolutely shocked when they heard this song. Remember this was a time in which LGBTQ+ rep in cartoons wasn’t normalized (Steven Universe wasn’t even invented yet) and it was considered weird at best, causing the cancellation of a series at worst. This wasn’t a direct confirmation by any means, but the lyrics of the song were…uhm, let’s say dubious. Very dubious. Quoting the exact words:

Sorry I don’t treat you like a goddess,

Is that what you want me to do? Sorry I don’t treat you like you’re perfect, Like all your little loyal subjects do. Sorry I’m not made of sugar, Am I not sweet enough for you? Is that why you always avoid me? I must be such an inconvenience to you. Well, I’m just your problem. I’m just your problem.

Or even:

I’m sorry that I exist

I forget what landed me on your blacklist, but I shouldn’t have to be the one that makes up with you

It wasn’t just the song, tho. The entire episode was full of this weird moments in which PB and Marceline seemed resentful and bitter about something that happened in the past and in the final scene it was revealed that Bubblegum’s most treasured item is a t-shirt Marceline gave her, which she wears as pajamas every night. At this point no one could deny that something was definetly up.

From that time on, the show hinted heavily multiple times that happened something between them that made them fall apart. The linked Bubblegum monologue about “wanting to be with someone but realizing that responsability demands sacrifices” is the greatest offender of this, but there are a lot more examples such as this scene from “Stakes”, this other scene and this one from a season 6 episode that higtly suggests that they have still some unresolved feelings. Now is important to remember that this supposed “ex-girlfriends banter/situationship” they had going on wasn’t officially addressed for a long time in the actual show. LGBTQ+ rep wasn’t normalized at the time, like i said earlier, and so everyone in the crew was silent, even if at this point was pretty obvious that they were trying to hint at the best of their capacity.

This is when our drama takes places: right after the airing of the episode “What Was Missing”.

The behind the scenes special and the illegal lesbian subtext

Now. In 2012 a video was posted on the Frederator’s Youtube channel: it was a behind the scene special of the afromentioned episode, the one with the dubious song. It basically showed early storyboards and things of that sort, nothing too special. But then, at a certain point, the commentator goes on a tangent to suggest that Marceline might like PB a little more than she likes to admit, even more than Finn. In a very “If you know you know” way. Then something strange happened: this video was suddenly removed from the original YouTube channel and the man behind it was abruptily fired from Frederator. But it doesn’t end here: the entire “Mathematical!” behind the scene Adventure Time’s channel was shut down. You can still watch this infamous video reuploaded here For obvious reasons, the fandom was pissed. They didn’t like at all how a man lost his job just for trying to suggest that two female character might like each other, and so they showed support on his blog This sparked a fire in the fanbase and also in the production room of the series itself. Everyone started to defend Bubbline: from storyboarders, character designer, musicians, writers. They all unanimously said that what Frederator’s did was an unjust and homophobic decision that literally went against the intention of the story team and what they wanted to do with those characters. Even the voice actresses of Marceline and Princess Bubblegum spoke up on this, with Olivia Olson (Marceline’s VA) even stating that PB and Marceline were always intended to be exes some years later, adding that the only reason it wasn’t explicitly said was because the network didn’t allow it and because it was considered illegal in some countries the show was airing (remember that gay marriage wasn’t even a thing in America at that time).

This was when Bubbline (Marceline x Bubblegum) became the most popular ship of Adventure Time. It was literally posted everywere, mostly out of spite caused by this entire situation. Frederator’s team tried to put out an half-baked excuse,but it was too late. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The fandom was incredibily supportive of this idea and didn’t wait for the opportunity to write fanfictions and doing fanarts of them. Even some actual character designers from the show did it, like Natasha Allegri. Of course, the support wasn’t universal: there were some people that didn’t liked the ship or tought that the team was playing with fans and that someone was reading too much into it, but it was certanly a minority. The important thing you need to know is that the vast majority of the fandom really liked Marceline and Bubblegum and wanted to see more of them. But no one could have ever imagined what would happen in 2018…

Wait. They are canon…?

During the last episode of the show, Marceline and Bubblegum literally full on kissed on screen after a dramatic moment. effectively confirming what was only a constant hinting for almost a decade. You have no idea how much impact it had on the fandom and in the animation industry in general. Everyone went absolutely insane over this scene.

For context: Marceline and Bubblegum became the most iconic characters of Adventure Time ever since they appeared, surpassing Finn and Jake. Everyone knew who they were even if they didn’t saw the show, everyone knew the weird situationship the creators were desperatly triying to allude and the constant pushback of Cartoon Network, but no one would have EVER imagined something like this happening so suddenly.

But how was it even possible? Well, it was all thanks to Rebecca Sugar. In 2013 Steven Universe came out on Cartoon Network and, for everyone who doesn’t know, the entire plot of the series is: three alien rocks from space adopt an half human-half gem child after the leader of their rebellion dies to give birth to him. They are also gay as shit. No but like, literally. Is not a weird joke, it’s the main point of the entire worldbuilding. The gem race is formed exclusively by female-presenting hologram beings. One of the main characters is literally a permanent fusion (yes, like Dragonball) between a Ruby and a Sapphire. This two ended up marrying each other on screen during later seasons, making it the first gay wedding showed in a modern cartoon. Which is kinda rad, ngl. Rebecca Sugar actually worked on Adventure Time for a period of time. In fact she developed Steven Universe while she was a writer and storyboard artist on it, which she left when Cartoon Network commissioned her series for full production. Plus, she wrote like 99% of Marceline’s song, created her in the first place and also voiced her mom, like i said earlier.

As you can imagine, Steven Universe opened a new road for LGBTQ+ characters in kids show, particularly female ones, considering it was the first big Cartoon Network production being so blatant about it. This more open-minded attitude in the animation industry was certainly one of the reason to explain how the kiss could have happened in the first place (Rebecca worked on the final AT episode) and at the time people took it with satisfaction. However things were not as good as they seemed.

The following years it was discovered that Cartoon Network cutted all the economical support to Steven Universe after the gay wedding scene, forcing Rebecca and her team to basically ending the series unceremoniously leaving out a lot of plot points, story threads, character arcs and actual lore explanations of some important things, like the literal origins of the gem race. So yeah, Steven Universe fans were understandably pretty mad when all of this surfaced. But then it was also discovered that the kiss between Marceline and Bubblegum wasn’t originally in the script of the episode and was added by a storyboard artist named Hanna K. Nyströmthe with the approval of Adam Muto, the showrunner. The fandom was then divided in two factions: the Bubbline supporters and the Bubbline haters. The former one were obviously the supporter of the relationship and they were genuinly happy that they were finally confirmed after all this years and a whopping 10 seasons. The other, instead, tought that the ships was either a late decision made by Sugar/Hanna or straight up a bad idea for the story. Which i personally disagree since it’s literally the best and most natural plot point that ever happened to AT, but i would not spend too much time talking about it. Long story short, there was a bit of discourse in the fandom but nothing too wild or extreme.

It didn’t matter that much anyway, because the sequel “Adventure Time: Distant Lands” came out on HBO in 2020 and one episode was entirely dedicated to Marceline and Bubblegum relationship, and they finally showed in its entirety their nasty breakup, confiming once and for all that they were in fact exes all along. The episode was universally well recived, many praised the quality of the writing and the new song written by Half Shy. In general they also praised the way the relationship itself was presented, in a very natural and sweet way. Now Marceline and Bubblegum are canonically in a relationship. They are cute, adorable and silly and everyone likes them. They even made a cameo in the recent Fionna And Cake's spin-off and everyone was super happy to see them again.

So yeah. I really wonder how that poor man fired in 2013 feels about this.

Tldr: two very beloved female characters from Adventure Time are hinted to be exes, a man is fired because he dares to say it, the fandom goes insane, everyone working on the show is actively trying to pass out as many hints as they can out of spite, at the end of the series they kiss. Now they are a couple and everyone is happy.

EDIT: the song "Monster" from Distant Lands was written by Half Shy, not by Rebecca Sugar! I confused the two! Also the number of episodes from Distant Lands was four, not eight. Don't know what the fuck happened to me. Edited some grammatical errors. Edited some links with more fittings ones.

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.

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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!

The most recent Scuffles can be found here, and all previous Scuffles can be found here

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.

• Link and archive any sources.

• 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!

The most recent Scuffles can be found here, and all previous Scuffles can be found here

Special thanks to u/Turret_Run for inspiring me to actually finish writing this with their excellent Rooster Teeth write-up. Additional thanks to the friends I’ve alienated by getting their help with editing this post.

Hello HobbyDrama, it’s good to be back. I normally pop up here bi-yearly to post about ballet drama. You may have read my last post about Olga Smirnova’s defection from Russia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hYZaqYCZyQ

What is “RWBY”?

First of all, it’s pronounced “ruby.” The main character’s name is also Ruby. It’s not as confusing as you might expect. Ruby is a 15 year old mega-competent anime warrior with a scythe that is also a gun. Every weapon in this show can be described as “blank and also a gun”. And there are a lot of weapons.The show is ostensibly about a team of four girls, led by Ruby, who are all going to Beacon Academy to become warriors defending their world, referred to as hunters/huntresses. The main characters are Ruby (already discussed), Weiss (her rival/friend/confusing rival-friend), Blake (a reserved, mysterious huntress), and Yang (Ruby’s half sister and team’s leading pun machine). Each character is represented by a color- red, white, black, and yellow respectively.

RWBY has had a… messy production history. It was originally conceived by Monty Oum, a well–known 3D animator. He pitched it to his friends at Rooster Teeth, a small media company he’d worked with in the past for their show Red vs. Blue. They loved it and agreed to make it, but the men they appointed to write it hadn’t ever written a show before. They’d really only written for Red vs. Blue. This led to a lot of writing issues (that HBomberguy explored more than I can in his video- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81fdKWOHrdE) that were only compounded as the show got more bigger. That’s not really within the scope of this post, but it is important to keep in mind whenever we talk about RWBY.

What is “shipping”?

If you’re on the internet at all, you’ve heard of shipping. It’s the concept of pairing two (or more) characters together because you think they’re cute. At best, it’s harmless fun. At worst, it causes fandom-splintering drama, as is the case in this post.

What is Bumblebee?

As you can probably guess if you think back to the character’s color schemes, Bumblebee is the punny ship name for Blake and Yang. It is also occasionally stylized as Bumbelby (by at the end for Blake and Yang). There were a lot of popular ships from the show (Renora and White Rose stick out), but to me Bumblebee was by far the biggest. That’s possibly personal bias, but if we carefully sift through the dregs of Tumblr, DeviantArt, and Reddit’s own r/RWBY, we can find enough fan art of the two to wallpaper a teenager’s bedroom (which I may or may not have done). There are posts from today all the way back to the dawn of the show and everywhere in between about how cute they would be together.

If I had to break down the main reason this ship exists it would probably be one of four reasons:

1. They share a lot of important character growth moments
2. People love shipping the introvert character with the extrovert
3. Black and yellow look good together
4. People wanted to see queer rep in the show

This last point sticks out, as a good chunk of the people who shipped Bumblebee would cite this along with their other reasoning. RoosterTeeth has a reputation as being a progressive company (that we now know was certainly unearned, per Turret-run’s post and others) so people were hopeful that RWBY would include a diverse cast of characters. However in terms of actual representation there was a grand total of one person of color in the first two seasons. The first explicitly queer couple in the show didn’t confess feelings for each other until season 9 (more on this in the “Spoilers” section). As of this writing RoosterTeeth is in corporate death mega-hell, so there might never be a tenth season. People felt as though Bumblebee had a good chance at becoming canon, especially since there was a good amount of fan support for the ship. So imagine how they felt when Blake and Yang were ripped apart for Blake to be put on a literal ship with someone else.

What is Black Sun?

I don’t want to make it seem like Bumblebee was a universally beloved ship. In fact, there were people who hated it. Some just didn’t like the idea of these two together, many were sick of the deluge of Bumblebee fans drowning everything else out, and most chose to take up another ship in defiance. At first people jumped ship (so to speak) for Monochrome or Freezerburn (Blake x Weiss and Yang x Weiss respectively, although I prefer the ship name Yellow Snow for Yang x Weiss). However at the end of season 1 an alternative appeared in the form of a golden man with a monkey tail.

I need to take a brief tangent here to explain the concept of faunus. RWBY has a race of people called the faunus, who are humans with minimal animal characteristics. The faunus are discriminated against by humans, although this is handled really poorly in a way that would require its own separate post to explain. At the end of season 1 Blake is revealed to be a faunus with cat ears. She’s spent all season hiding these under a bow that looks suspiciously like cat ears.

This is all revealed when the gang almost literally runs into Sun, a faunus with monkey characteristics. After some brief tension which is quickly and unsatisfyingly resolved, Sun sticks around as a side character for the next 2 seasons. Some people turned to him as an alternative ship for Blake, and gave the ship the name Black Sun

Black Sun vs. Bumblebee

There were a number of relatively minor incidents that stirred up drama between the two factions early in the show. The first was Sun’s initial appearance, but in the second season there was an arc about a school dance. This dance was unimportant to the main plot, but very important if you care about petty shipping drama. Most relevant to this post, we get to see Yang and Blake dancing together, only for Blake to switch over to Sun mid-song. It’s not a super dramatic moment in the show, but it sure was to the fandom.

However even more dramatic were the events of season 4. The world starts going to shit at the end of season 3, and season 4 starts with Blake catching a ship to her parent’s house. Sun secretly slips aboard this ship, and surprises Blake. These two spend a season bantering and fighting sea monsters, while Yang is bedridden with trauma. Sun has been upgraded to a semi-main character at the worst possible time for Bumblebee shippers.

Black Sun has been Bumblebee’s main rival in shipping since Sun first appeared. Blake and Sun share a fair amount of screentime, even before sailing away into the sunset together. They also share being faunus, which doesn’t actually mean they have any shared experiences but people seem to think it does for some reason. Bumblebee shippers hated Black Sun because they felt Sun was taking up too much screen time, and were worried that RoosterTeeth were heading towards making these two get together instead of Blake and Yang. Black Sun shippers hated Bumblebee because Bumblebee shippers are annoying (self very much included). It was war.

Oh god oh fuck

June 2017. The RWBY volume 4 soundtrack is released. What would normally be a mundane occurrence suddenly explodes the RWBY fandom (or FNDM) thanks to track 8. The song is called“BMBLB”.Obviously this is an ode to the majesty of the humble honeybee, and not at all related to the ship of the same name. JK it’s a soft song about two women being in love filled with bumblebee and cat puns. You know who likes puns? Yang. You know who has cat ears? Blake. You get the idea.

Every RWBY forum is immediately flooded with posts about the song (ex- 1 2 3). Bumblebee shippers were elated. Black Sun shippers were FURIOUS. Everyone was confused.

No one working on the show had given any indication that a song like this was coming. The whole previous season made it seem like Black Sun was the staff’s preferred ship. So to go out of their way to release a song that had nothing to do with the season on the very end of the soundtrack seemed a little weird. One might almost say… suspicious.

Weird accusations and conclusions

This was meant to be a short, easy post while I was working on Ballet and Defection. I don’t know where I went wrong.

So, why was Bmblb written, and why put it out right now? Some people started to claim this counted as queerbaiting, since they were willing to hint at Bumblebee but never show it in the actual canon. Some people argued the songwriter/singer duo of Jeff and Casey Lee Williams had just gone AWOL and the writers hadn’t been consulted on the song at all. Some people vehemently claimed that the song was a love ballad from Yang to her motorcycle, which was named bumblebee. I’m not sure if anyone ever actually believed this, but if they did it’s HILARIOUS, especially in hindsight.

Spoilers

In case you didn’t watch the later seasons of RWBY, good for you. A lot of weird stuff happens, including a DC crossover, but most relevant for this post, Bumblebee eventually became canon. The next several seasons saw team RWBY reunite and Blake and Yang rebuild their fragile friendship. They both talk through their conflicted feelings and fight Blake’s abusive ex boyfriend together. This builds to season 9, where they build a literal bridge to each other with their feelings and kiss. In my opinion it’s very cute, even if it has nothing to do with the rest of the episode or season. Also Sun disappears off the face of the show after season 5, suggesting either Black Sun was never meant to be canon or the staff were so scared of their own fandom they decided to 180 the plot of the show. Each are equally plausible.

Additional reading

A lot of my information for this came from my own recollections mixed with looking up details on the RWBY wiki. For that reason I don’t have a lot of directly related links, but I do have some wider RWBY media to suggest for further info.First and foremost, here’s a link to the song Bmblb- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJhiD4jvjo4I mentioned it earlier but if you’re interested in more RWBY production lore, I HIGHLY recommend HBomberguy’s video on the topic. It’s two and a half hours long, and extremely in-depth. I’ve watched it more times than I can count at this point- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81fdKWOHrdEIf you’re interested in the company that produced RWBY (who have plenty of un-RWBY related drama) , u/Turret_Run made this great post about it recently- https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1blq0pi/fandom_blood_gulch_blues_the_life_and_death_of/?rdt=63306And finally, if you really like puns, I recommend the RWBY shipping chart. I don’t think there’s anyone in the RWBY fandom who hasn’t spent hours scrolling through this thing- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_bnr68pepImz1RDq7uJiQraVnDjU2D0vqmrSE85sF_U/edit#gid=1295997636

The Hugo Awards are a reliable source of Hobby Drama, which has been written up several times here. This is its most recent incarnation.

For the uninitiated, the Hugo Awards are some of the most important awards for science fiction and fantasy, nominated and voted on by people who attend WorldCon, an annual science fiction convention which takes place in a different city every year.

Prologue: Chengdu WorldCon

The venue for WorldCon is decided by a vote of members of a previous WorldCon. The site selected for 2023 was Chengdu, China: this was as controversial as you would expect. The anti-Chengdu position was that (1) China is run by a repressive government which practices censorship and is involved in human rights violations up to and including genocide, and (2) a lot of the votes from Chinese fans looked dodgy and there was suspicion of ballot stuffing. The pro-Chengdu position was (1) this is WorldCon, not USA-and-bits-of-north-western-Europe-Con, and so we shouldn't decide that we can't hold it in China because we don't like their government (2) quite a lot of WorldCon members don't particularly like the US government's human rights record either, and (3) everything will be fine don't worry about it. The first two points perhaps had some merit, but events would prove the third very wrong indeed.

The Hugo Awards

The 2023 Hugos started off normally enough. There were some early teething problems with the nominations system going down, and final voting was initially delayed, before an erroneous shortlist was published, and finally the correct shortlist was released later than anticipated. This was unfortunate but nothing disastrous or too dramatic. As usual there was discussion about who was and wasn't on the shortlist. For instance, many expected that R. F. Kuang's Babel, which won the Nebula and Locus (two other prominent science fiction awards), to be shortlisted. When it wasn't on the list, there was speculation that Kuang might have declined the nomination.

The Hugo Awards were presented on October 21. Following the awards ceremony, statistics are made available for both the nominations and the final vote. Usually these are published immediately after the ceremony so that the stats nerds have something to talk about at the afterparty, though according to the rules there is a 90-day window for publication. Chengdu's stats were highly unusually not published on the day of the ceremony. There were various discussions about the delay before the stats were eventually published, and the Hugo administrator, Dave McCarty, explained that this was because of work and family commitments. The finalist voting statistics were eventually published at the beginning of December, while nomination statistics were not posted until 20th January 2024: the last possible moment.

Statsgate

Once the statistics were finally published, it soon became apparent that something weird was going on. Most obviously, six nominees on the longlist were marked as "not eligible" without any further elaboration – including the previously mentioned Babel by R.F. Kuang. This was especially odd because other works ruled ineligible were explained – e.g. The Art of Ghost of Tsushima was ineligible because it was published in 2020. Of these six, one was relatively uncontroversial: "Color the World" by Congyun Gu was ineligible due to its date of publication. It wasn't clear why this wasn't explained, as it was for The Art of Ghost of Tsushima, but as the ruling was correct this was generally considered only a minor concern. The other unexplained ineligible nominees were:

• Babel by R.F. Kuang (novel)
• "Fogong Temple Pagoda" by Hai Ya (short story)
• Sandman: "The Sound of Her Wings" (dramatic presentation short form)
• Paul Weimer (fanwriter)
• Xiran Jay Zhao (Astounding Award for Best New Writer)

All of these were deemed ineligible for apparently no reason. Dave McCarty, who was responsible for the Chengdu Hugos, explained:

After reviewing the Constitution and the rules we must follow, the administration team determined those works/persons were not eligible.

This satisfied approximately nobody.

There was some speculation that "Fogong Temple Pagoda" had, like "Color the World", been ruled ineligible due to its publication date, but if so this was an error: the English translation was first published in 2022, making it eligible. Speculation about why the other nominees had been ruled ineligible quickly began: one leading theory was that someone somewhere had deemed them politically unacceptable to the Chinese government. The fact that two of these nominees, R.F. Kuang and Xiran Jay Zhao, are of Chinese descent and speak Chinese, and might therefore deliver an acceptance speech in Chinese critical of the Chinese government, was cited in favour of this. If there was a political reason, though, it probably didn't apply to "Fogong Temple Pagoda", as Hai Ya's novelette "The Space-Time Painter" was not disqualified.

The Sandman episode was doubly controversial because the entire Sandman series had been nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form, where it was ruled ineligible because "The Sound of Her Wings" was a nominee in BDP Short before being disqualified for unexplained reasons. This is an edge case which isn't explicitly spelled out in the rules, so the BDP Long disqualification is technically correct, but it feels questionable and especially given all of the other issues many people were pretty annoyed.

Statsgate: We need to go deeper

This section goes deeper into the rabbit hole; if you don't care about the minuitae of voting systems, the TL;DR is that the stats released were provably mathematically impossible in a bunch of different ways and you can skip to the next heading.

The unexplained disqualifications were the most obvious irregularity, but they were hardly the only one. In three categories, the numbers given for nominations were provably wrong. The way nominations work is that each nominator gets one vote per category, which is divided up among the up to five works they nominate; when a work is eliminated from the ballot, its votes are redistributed according to what else was on its nominators' ballots. So if I nominate Alice, Bob, and Carol in one category, they each get 1/3 of a nomination. When Carol is eliminated, my vote for her is redistributed and Alice and Bob each get 1/2 a nomination from me. If Bob is then eliminated, Alice gets my entire nomination in that category. Therefore the sum of the points available must be less than or equal to the number of ballots cast.* In three categories, the longlisted works collectively ended up with more points than ballots were cast – for instance, 1,652 from the 1,637 ballots cast in the Best Novel nomination. The most egregious category was Fanwriter, where the fifteen longlisted candidates had a collective 364 points out of 241 ballots – over 50% more than was mathematically possible!

Another anomaly again related to Babel. Across all of the rounds of voting for which statistics were released, Babel did not gain a single point. This is very implausible: it would be possible only if not a single one of Babel's nominators also nominated any of the eight unsuccessful longlisted works. In fact, the fanwriter Camestros Felapton collected 20 Best Novel ballots from his followers, which showed that this was not the case: based on checking only twenty ballots, in one round the nominations for at least three of the finalists were undercounted.

A third issue was the so-called "cliff" in the nomination data. Normally the nominations tail off gradually: for example the top 10 nominees in a category might get 100, 95, 90, 80, 75, 70, 60, 50, 35, 30 votes respectively. Instead what happened was that after around the top six or seven nominees, there was a sudden drop in many categories. Best novel in particular often has a very flat distribution, as so many novels are published (and nominated) every year it's unlikely for any given one to do exceptionally well compared to the others. In 2023, the top seven nominees for Best Novel all got between 831 and 767 votes, with the eighth-place nominee dropping to only 150. This is an enormous and uncharacteristic drop, and the same phenomenon is noticeable in the nomination data for best novella, series, fanzine, and fan artist. (For a visual and in-depth demonstration of this phenomenon, Heather Rose Jones has two blogposts).

A final observation that many people made, which is less based on hard numbers and more on vibes, is that a couple of perennial Hugo favourites had one of their eligible works get very many more nominations than others. For instance, Seanan McGuire's October Daye series got 816 votes in best series, while her novella "Where the Drowned Girls Go" got only 117. Similarly, Ursula Vernon's "Nettle and Bone" was nominated for Best Novel with 815 votes, while her novella "What Moves the Dead" got 155.

For more stats neepery, Camestros Felapton has analysed the data in all sorts of ways, and mostly they show that 2023 was a very abnormal year.

* Because we only have the longlist of the fifteen most popular nominees, it is likely that some votes have already been "lost", so the total points available is probably somewhat less than the number of ballots cast; in other categories the number of votes still in contention was unusually high but not mathematically impossible.

What Happened? Part I: The Speculation

So what is going on here? The first thing to note is that the weird disqualifications and the weird nomination stats seem to be in tension – if you didn't want e.g. Babel to be on the ballot so much that you were going to summarily rule it ineligble without explanation, and you were fiddling the numbers anyway, why would you not just fiddle the numbers so that Babel didn't get nominated in the first place? Similarly it's surprising that October Daye got so many more votes than "Where the Drowned Girls Go", but they both ended up as finalists, which is a completely expected outcome, so again, what's the point? Maybe someone really wanted to prevent "Drowned Girls" from being on the ballot and was foiled by Becky Chambers declining the nomination for "A Prayer for the Crown Shy", but if so why? And why did they not care about October Daye? Conversely, if there was pro-Seanan ballot-stuffing going on, why was "Drowned Girls" not benefiting from it?

After much discussion, the general consensus seemed to coalesce around a combination of two or three explanations: firstly, active censorship by the Hugo administrators, possibly due to pressure from the Chinese government (national or local); secondly, incompetence; and perhaps thirdly, weird nominator behaviour (possibly including organised voting blocs). For a while things stalled there: the data was obviously wrong, the most plausible explanation seemed to be some combination of cock-up and conspiracy, and there was no prospect of anyone finding out anything more.

And then we found out more.

What Happened? Part II: The Revelations

On 5th February, Chris Barkley (who won the Hugo for best fan writer) published an interview with Dave McCarty, the Hugo administrator. He was no more forthcoming on why some works were ruled ineligible, but he insisted "they were clearly not eligible" and that he didn't violate the WSFS constitution in any way. He did concede some of the statistical issues with the nomination data, blaming it on an issue with an SQL query while counting the ballots. He also admitted that the 90-day delay in publishing the nomination statistics, which he had previously explained as due to difficulty finding the time to collate the information, was in fact deliberate: "to allow as much separation as possible [...] to minimize the thing".

Ooops.

That didn't work.

Dave McCarty was not the only person who decided to talk to Chris Barkley. Diane Lacey, also on the Hugo committee, provided him with a series of emails between various people involved in running the awards, which discussed vetting works to check whether they would be potentially problematic in China. None of the Chinese people involved in running the con appear to feature in these emails, and it is unclear to what extent McCarty was provided with guidance on what could cause problems by anyone in China, but nonetheless dossiers were compiled. They weren't compiled any more competently than anything else in this clusterfuck, of course. For instance, it turned out that Paul Weimer was considered problematic in part because he had previously visited Tibet. This is a bizarre decision because, aside from the fact that China does in fact provide foreigners with visas to visit Tibet, Weimer had actually visited Nepal, which is a different place entirely and has generally friendly relations with China. Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher actually has visited Tibet but apparently nobody noticed and she ended up on the ballot in two categories, winning Best Novel. Chris Barkley and Jason Sandford published a long report. (The political vetting emails still do not explain why the Sandman episode was disqualified!)

Also shared by Lacey and published at this time was a spreadsheet used for nomination validation, which seems to show a bunch of Chinese works which should have been nominated and were simply removed from the nomination pool. This was allegedly due to "collusion in a Chinese publication that had published a nominations list, a slate as it were, and so those ballots were identified and eliminated". Again, this is problematic for multiple reasons: firstly, the list published in Science Fiction World apparently did not suggest exactly five works for each category, but a variable number, sometimes more than the five nomination slots available; this looks more like a recommendation list (a widespread practice among English-language fans) than a slate as it is usually defined. Secondly, while slate nominations are frowned upon, there is absolutely nothing forbidding them, or giving the Hugo admins the power to ignore nominations because they are suspected to be due to a slate. Indeed, when the Sad Puppy drama happened in 2015 and 2016, the Hugo committee decided that they could and should not exclude slated works from the nominations. The chair of that committee was Dave McCarty.

Consequences

What does this actually mean going forward? Because of the nature of the Hugo Awards and their administration, it's difficult to effectively hold people to account for their involvement. There has been an enormous amount of discussion about what went wrong and how it can be fixed, and no doubt proposals will be put forward at the 2024 WorldCon business meeting. In the meantime there have been a few more-or-less concrete consequences:

• The 2024 WorldCon in Glasgow have done their best to distance themselves from the clusterfuck. They made a statement about how they were planning to ensure transparency, announcing that Kat Jones (who had been involved in the political vetting of Chengdu nominees) had resigned from the convention comittee, and refused to take money from Chengdu, reportedly to the tune of $40,000
• Worldcon Intellectual Property, who hold the Hugo Award service mark, censured three people involved in the clusterfuck (McCarty, Ben Yalow, and Chen Shi). McCarty resigned from the WIP, and Kevin Standlee (widely criticised for his early comments on the debacle, which for reasons of space we can't go into here) was censured and stood down as chair of the WIP board.
• Diane Lacey apologised for her part in the clusterfuck, and resigned from the board of CanSmofs, a Canadian Science Fiction fan organisation.
• Mainstream media including the New York Times and the Guardian covered the debacle.
• Paul Weimer was once again nominated for the fanwriter Hugo in 2024, and Xiran Jay Zhao was nominated for the Astounding Award. Zhao's eligibility was specially extended at the request of Dell Magazines, the award's sponsors, presumably as a consequence of the 2023 fuckups. Additionally, by my count there are thirteen Chinese nominees on the ballot, and a further four Chinese nominees declined a nomination.
• One observation made by Camestros Felapton and several other people is that the 2023 debacle shows that people are examining the Hugo awards stats, and are pointing out when anything strange is going on: though people regularly claim that the awards are corrupt, they are unusually transparent and yet nobody has been able to find any compelling evidence of corruption in previous years. We can never know for certain, but this episode paradoxically provides evidence that in general we can in fact trust the Hugo process and administrators.

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First of all: hello everyone! I was a lurker in this sub for quite a bit, but this time i finally decided to leave my contribution to the community with a music related drama that i feel like a lot of people don't know/don't talk a lot about. Before starting however, i want to clarify that english is not my first language so sorry in advance for any grammatical errors i might make. All good? Perfect. With that in mind, let me spill the tea.

Introduction: who the hell are Fifth Harmony?

Fifth Harmony (often shortened to 5H, wich i will use everytime i need to refer to them for the sake of brevity) was an American girl group based in Miami, composed of, you guess it, five girls: Ally Brooke, Normani, Dinah Jane, Lauren Jauregui, and Camila Cabello. You might know her for her solo career (mainly the hit songs "Havana" and "Bam Bam") and because she actually left the group in December 2016. The history of why and how she left and all the mess behind it is a whole another can of worms which i don't have the time to explain here, so i will greatly gloss over this. The thing yall need to know for this story is that the group signed a joint record deal with Simon Cowell's label Syco Records and L.A. Reid's label Epic Records after forming in the second season of 2012 American edition of The X Factor. Basically, it was the female american equivalent to One Direction.

They were a big deal in the following years, at least for a girl group perspective, relasing their first EP "Better Togheter" and touring in some low-budget concert in various malls in certain zones of America, to build a fanbase. This fanbase was composed for the vast part by teenage/preteen girls, and they begin to call themselves "Harmonizer". They will grow a lot in numbers in the follwing years, and they will also develop a full on parasocial relationship with the girls. This was that period of time in the music industry when celebrities where actually very active on Twitter and the girls will engage personally a lot with the fandom. Keep this in mind because it would be VERY important later. In 2015 they released their debut album, “Reflection", and their singles "Worth It" and "Sledgehammer" became immensely popular not only in America, but also in Europe. They actually won a Grammy in 2014, so it was kinda a big deal. In 2016 they released their second album, "7/27", with the single "Work from Home" which peaked at number four on the Billboard Hot 100, making it the first top five single by a girl group in a decade on that chart. However, Camila Cabello left to pursue a single career and the remaning girls will go on to make another album the following year, their last one: "Fifth Harmony", with the singles "Down", "He Like That" and a feat with Pitbull, "Por Favor" (which is the most 2017 thing i have ever heard, but i digress). Right now the group is offically "on hold" and every single one of the girls is doing something solo with various degrees of success: Camila Cabello made three albums and she is going to drop a fourth, Lauren Jauregui started to make R&B under an indipendent label , Normani should drop her debut album this year (hopefully), and Ally and Dinah made a bunch of pretty underwhelming singles. Now that you know all of the (really watered down and drama-free) history of the girls, let's jump right in the real reason you clicked on this.

The beginning of the end: the rising of lesbian shipping and "Camren"

Remember when i said that the fandom developed a parasocial relationship with the girls? You also remember how i said they were basically the female version of One Direction? Well, that resulted also in the rising of: shipping. Now. I need to be completely fair here. Shipping members of boybands/girlbands was always a thing and it wasn't a such mind breaking news, neither was invented by 1D fans. Also the lesbian/gay rumors about members of said groups were made since the dawn of time (remember the Spice Girls lesbian rumor that turned out to be true?), but in this specific case there were a lot of similar fandom dynamics between Harmonizers and Directioners. You will soon see why.

Since their early formation on X Factor 2012, an initally small subsect of Harmonizer started to ship togheter Camila Cabello and Lauren Jauregui. It started fairly tame, with video compilations , gifs, pictures of them and things of that sort. The girls themselves were asked about this phenomenon during an interview and they seemed ok with it, if not downright amused, stating that the fans could do "wathever makes their boat float". Is important to note that they were actually very good friends at that time and that they were visibly close on camera, showing affection, hugging and things of that sort. Keep also in mind that they were minors. This will be important later.

Now, the term "Camren" was not even invented by fans. It was Lauren Jauregui herself to coin it on a Twitter post and since that day it became the official name of the ship. Even Dinah was actively playing with fans on Twitter about this, embracing what at that time was basically a meme/inside joke in the community for basically the entire course of 2012-early 2013. To be fair, there were other ships between the girls (Camila x Dinah, Normani x Dinah, Normani x Lauren) but Camren was the "main" ship that at this point every Harmonizer knew. During this period of time it was treated as and inside joke by the majority of the community, like i said earlier. No one was getting hurt and the girls seemed to have fun with it, sometimes actively fueling the speculations with certain snapchat photos and Twitter exanges. You noticed how similar it is to the Harry Styles x Luis Tommlinson situation? Well, if you are familiar with that story you can imagine how things went down in the following years. Spoiler: they got progressivly worse for everyone involved.

The gate of hell opens: the Sun and the Moon and the gay drawings

Now we are in late 2013. The girls are doing good: their popularity was growing and they were doing small concerts and meets and greets. Even when they started to slowly gain fame outside the X Factor circle, they continued to have the same kind of relationship with fans and being active on Twitter, answering to them and whatnot. But Twitter was not the only social 5H used: they also had personal Tumblr blogs Camila and Lauren in particular were VERY active on the site, posting poetry, drawings, quotes, typical Tumblr edgy teen stuffs. (ssweet-dispositionn was Lauren's blog and waakeme-up was Camila's, now deactivated) But hey, it was the norm in 2013 after all. Not that deep, right? Oh no...oh no. You are all so wrong. It was a matter of time since that particular subset of Harmonizer (wich from now on i will call "Camren shippers") started to notice something interesting in their Tumblr posts. Now, before going on, is important to specify that the Camren ship affair begin fairly tame and small, but it started to rapidly grow in intensity during late 2013. This was also due to some videos the girls posted on their official youtube channel, in wich they would do cover of songs, vlogs and things of that sort, it's also worth mentioning some old twitcams in this discussion. Camren shippers at that time were analizing those videos and basically everything that this two poor girls posted in search of "proof" that their ship was real. They analized looks, body language, things they said and everything that was potentially "alluding" to a romantic relationship. It was not a joke or a meme anymore, people were absolutely serious and 100% sure that Camila and Lauren were in love with each other and that they were keeping it secret because...management bad or something. This was the main point shippers used to justify their research of "proof" (read as: obsessive behaviour) and "hidden signals", because in their mind the girls were "trying to tell us without being explixit about it to avoid the anger or management" (how convinient, am i right? lmao). Basically the same things Directioners were saying about Larry.

That being said, let's return to the main point: those people quickly started to notice some supposed "parallelism" between the things Camila and Lauren posted. It looked like they were referencing each other and soon enough people started to basically stalk their blogs. Obviously at one point someone named Kordei made fake tumblr reblogs of those two, but they were quickly discovered and shunned. Then it happened. Lauren reblogged a picture of the sun and the moon kissing on Tumblr, and Camila posted the same picture on Twitter and Instagram some minutes later.

It was the end. I'm not joking, it was the fucking end.

Camren shippers went absolutely FERAL over this. But why, you might ask? First of all, Lauren had a sun and moon pendands and suddenly she was wearing only the sun one. Camila was supposedly wearing the moon one (even if i can't find pictures about it right now, i'm pretty sure it was true because i remember it being used as a proof) Also, Camila was liking a lot of posts on Instagram about, guess what, the sun and the moon. She also reblogged a short story about "impossible love" so you can imagine how the shippers reacted. The sun and the moon basically became universally associated with them (moon with Lauren and sun with Camila, but i also saw some people thinking the contrary, so there wasn't a universal consensus), just like the colors green and blue with Harry and Luis. You now see why i said at the start that the dynamics were super similar?

Also, while all of this was happening Lauren posted the infamous "dragon and unicorn" video, which only fueled even more the speculations. She also recived allegedly some backlash because a fraction of Harmonizers (not Camren shippers) tought she was making fun of that kind of "depression videos" very popular on Tumblr during those years. I can't confirm this for certain tho, since i can only find evidence of this event in the descriptions of the former video.

This was also the period of time when fanfictions about them started to grow in quantity and popularity. To be fair, they were already some in 2012 and some people even theorized that Dinah, Lauren and Camila actually read those, bur there weren't a lot and most importantly, they weren't sexual in nature. But then things changed. People started to write smut fanfic about them when they still were both 16-17 years old. And there were a LOT, they literally invaded Wattpad for a period of time. Now to be completely honest, their fanbase was even younger than them on average, but i don't think it should be used as an excuse. Writing porn fanfics about real underage people is weird even if you are 14, in my humble opinion. Hell, i would argue that writing fanfiction about real people in general is weird, period. Especially when you ship them togheter with no regards of their privacy.

Another major event that happened in this time window is the Lauren’s sketchbook disaster. Right now all the posts about it have been deleted, but i vividly remember it. Basically at one point during a tour in 2014 she allegedly lost her sketchbok, and some fan found it and posted it on their Tumblr. This sketchbook was full of drawings of women and girls, in various grades of nudity. Shippers obviously tought that all this women were non other than Camila. Now, nobody has ever understood if this was her real sketcbook or a fake one made by the fan, but nontheless it was a…honestly very rude and invasive thing to do. But again, this is not the most crazy thing the shippers did.

Let’s return to the main point: remember the infamous sun and moon picture? A fan commented under Camila's post with "it's camren yo" and she actually responded negatively. This was the first time one of the girls expressed genuine discomfort on the ship and would be absolutely ignored into oblivion. And sadly, it won't be the last. Anyway, keep in mind that from this time on Lauren will be the one more vocal about the Camren problem and how much she is bothered by it, even arguing with fans on Twitter and blocking people. Camila would stay relatively silent expect for the former statement. A trend that is actively continuing to this days.

The outing and the harassing

Now let’s fast forward to 2016. I skipped a SHITON of lesser important things and moments that happened between 2013-2016, because the gist was always the same: the 5H posted some videos on youtube, the Camren shipper analyzed it for days to find every bit of “camren evidence” in it, they posted the afromentioned video analysis on yt, they recorded Camila and Lauren on the stage (and even outside of it) and they’ll be completely and utterly delulu. At this point the ship was so huge in the fandom that even non-camren shippers knew about it, you literally could NOT be an Harmonizer and don’t know about it. In this time window are situated a lot of now infamous paparazzi style videos and moments, like the one were they allegedly kiss in a car, the one were they allegedly kiss during a tour in Brazil and this pictureposted by Lauren’s mom on her Instagram, now deleted. This last one looks particularly convincing, but is important to remember that this post was never actually confirmed to be of Camila and Lauren. I mean, one of them was surely Lauren but it was never discovered who the other girl was. Some people argue if she's even Camila, some people argue if the post is real since there are no trace of it whatsoever in other places of the internet and people remember it only for the Pinterest repost. Also i feel is important to specify that during this time people also started to edit photos of them on photoshop to make them look like they were kissing and whatnot. It's veracity is pretty much discussed a lot. I personally don't even remember it on Lauren's mom feed, so it could easily be fabricated.

In regard of crazy analysis, i need to mention the infamous bunk-bed video of 2014. It’s one of the most known “camren proof” moment of the fandom, and i higthly suggest to watch it all because it’s hilariously absurd to see how much shippers were delusional about it. The claims they made on this video are insane, such as: “if you watch the reflection of the wood in front of Camila’s bed you can see the silhouette of Lauren sitting in the bunk”, “Camila’s lips are red, she was totally having sex with Lauren” or my personal favourite, “you can hear Camila’s moans if you listen close enough”. Is important to note that in those years the speculations were so invasive that Lauren and Camila started to behave more cautiously around each other, and for understandable reasons: they weren’t as much physical on camera as they were before, they seemed awkard, they tried to sit as far as possibile from each others during interviews. There are a lot of examples of this, but this video comes immediatly to my mind. To be honest, there are a lot of reasons to explain why the bond between Camila and the other girls was weakening during 2016 (again, drama that i would not get into bc it’s not the point of this post), but it’s confirmed that one of the reason for the tension between her and Lauren was specifically caused by the Camren affair. This attempt to be more neutral in public to not fuel the ship was immediatly misinterpreted by shippers, who tought that they were suddenly less explicit about it because their management scowled them. And so this caused people to ship them even more. It was a snake eating its tail: the more the girls tried to silence the rumors, the more rumors they caused in response.

But then something unexpected happened: Lauren Jauregui came out as bi in 2016 and, surprise surprise, she has a girlfriend! Who is not Camila. Good for her, am i right?

But wait, did she really came out because she wanted it, or she did it because she was…forced to do so?

Camren shippers love to forget this, but Lauren was actually outed by Perez Hilton with their indirect help. Quoting Lauren’s exact words from this interview: “I’d been dating the girlfriend that I’ve had at the time for probably a year at that point, but we had fallen in love when I was 15. I was at my uncle’s wedding in New Orleans and my aunt very innocently posted the photos from the photo booth onto her Facebook page. It was a link for the family to be able to click on and my fans are just a little wild and they found the picture where my girlfriend and I — we were drunk — [were] kissing.” After fans found the photos, they ended up in the hands of the one and only Perez, who then outed her to the general public without thinking twice. Lauren expressed extreme fear, felt like the coming out experience was robbed out of her, and she feared that her extended family would not accept her. In fact, some of her relatives reached out to her parents when the gossip started. It was obviously a very scary experience, but Camren shippers did not care at all. In their mind this was a “gotcha moment”, another confirmation that they were right all along: maybe now that Lauren came out, also Camila would! But…she didn’t. Actually, she never did to this day: Camila has never said a single word about her sexual preferences, but it’s pretty much confirmed that she only dated guys so is safe to assume she is straight.

This, like you can imagine, threw shippers in a crisis. One of the girls was bi, the other was not. Plus, how can they justify the ship and support their narrative of the “homophobic management that tries to make them stay in the closet” now that one of them is in an open relationship with another woman? Simple: they started to suggest that Lucy was…a beard. A beard for what exactly? I have no idea. For hiding Camren, i suppose. Because for some reason their management would choose to hide a potentially scandalous homosexual relationship with another homosexual relationship. Yeah, it totally makes sense. Absurdity of this claim aside, Camren shippers were truly convinced by this. The idea that both their past boyfriends were beards was always trowed around, but this time it was different because obviously Lucy is a girl. There were another two “sub categories” of shippers that belived different things, however. They either belived that:

1. The whole outing thing was fabricated by their label and Lucy was supposed to replace Camila when she’ll leave 5H. Also, Lauren and Lucy were not really in a relationship and it was used only for visibility and to “kill” once and for all the Camren speculations, since people were apparently too “close to the truth” or wathever.

2. The leaked kiss picture was faked or “a platonic kiss”. Which i find incredibly funny to think about, because it’s literally the same excuse homophobic people will use to try to dismiss lesbian relationships. But remember guys, they were totally allies and they truly valued the happiness of those girls!

You can imagine how it went down. Some people started to ship Lauren and Lucy (Laucy) and they actively went on war with the Camren shippers. Other started to harass Lucy on behalf of the Camren cause, Lauren also recived some similar dms and i belive Camila did too. But it’s important to note that almost all the infos about this harassment are completely erased from the face of the internet in the present day. I distinctly remember (and other ex-Harmonizer that are reading this may also do) a Tumblr blog in particular in which the owner was actively hoping that Lucy and Lauren would break up soon, posting edit of Lucy with devil horns and insulting her. Searching it, however, would not result in anything. If someone has more information about this, please, tell me in the comments!

Lauren during all of this mess was becoming progressivly more and more rude to shippers online (and honestly, can i blame her?), blocking people like it was her reason to live. Camila, instead, was silent as a tomb. Anyway, Lucy and Lauren broke up in early 2017, but the fandom was in chaos because of Camila leaving, so there wasn’t time to celebrate. Things were tense between her and the other four, but this didn’t stopped Camren shippers. Even when Camila wasn’t in the group they STILL tought that she and Lauren were secretly togheter or, in alternative, that Camila went away because they broke up thanks to Lucy. This was instigated by an Instagram live that Dinah’s aunt did, in which she seemingly confirms that the two were in fact a thing. But she was already knew in the fandom for saying random shit just for clout, so not everyone took her words with absolute trust.

Another thing worth mentioning: an old Camila’s demo from 2015 leaked in 2017. The song in question is called “Only Told The Moon” and, if you remember the sun and moon thing that happened on Tumblr, you can imagine how shippers reacted when it surfaced. Random fun fact: a studio version of the song it's rumored to exist somewhere, but nobody has ever found it or leaked it. So it can tecnically be considered lost media.

The aftermath

After all of this absoulte mess, you’re probably asking yourself: what happened after 5H were disbanded? The answer is: not that much, but at the same time the shipping didn’t really stop. For context: all the girls didn’t talk to each other for a while because of some unrelated drama that happened behind the scenes, so yes, even Camila and Lauren didn’t talk anymore. However Camila published her debut album in 2018. There is still a fraction of ex-Harmonizers and Camilizers (Camila Cabello’s fans) that wholeheartly belive a lot of the songs on this album are directed towards Lauren. Specifically they reference Consequences , Never Be The Same and I Have Questions. Camila has actually come on record to say what her songs are really about , but do you think they belived her? Obviously not. She was still controlled by her management to stay silent. Do you see the repeating patterns here? The same thing happened with her second album ironically titled “Romance” with songs like Shameless, Liar, Easy, Bad Kind Of Butterflies The problem is that in 2019 she also started dating Shawn Medness and a lot of people (not necessarily shippers) tought it was pr for promoting their new single, Señorita. I won’t indulge too much into this speculation or if i think it was legit or not, but i will say that all the Camren shippers belived that the relationship was fake and that Shawn and Camila were each other’s beards. Yes, because they also tought Shawn was secretly gay and silenced by his label, which was coincidentally the same as Camila’s.

Leaving Cabello aside, Lauren made a very interesting interview during an episode of the podcast En La Sala With Becky G, that went live on October 2020. I higthly suggest to watch it all because she actually talks about a lot of interesting stuffs, but also she directly address the Camren situation after three years of total silence. Basically, she confirms that it was never real and that the shipping made her feel very uneasy, she also elaborates on how the shippers made her feel like a predator since Camila was straight and she was not. Some former Camren fanatics actually listened to her this time and backed down, others were only reinforced in their belives that she was also lying because her management told her to. (even if she is under her own label so is it doesn’t even make sense. Why would she lie? But hey, if you are here you should have understood that not even logic can stop Camren shippers) During the COVID-19 pandemic some shippers belived that Camila and Lauren were quarantined in the same house thanks to some posts on their Instagram. They were also convinced that they secretly married each other because they wore two very similar rings. Remember, at the time Camila was still officially dating Shawn. They also overanlized things they posted, videos and all of the sort to back their claims, even suggesting that they were married because…Camila’s yoga mat was very similar to Lauren’s. I’m not joking. It’s all in the video linked. In 2021 they found an Instagram story posted by Lauren during Christmas in which can allegedly be heard her mom calling for Camila., suggesting that they were celebrating togheter. Now is important to remember that Lauren and Camila still didn’t officially talk to each other during this time, but in my opinion it’s possible that they mantained some contact and choose to not be public about it in fear of this kind of media reaction. And if that was the case, i don’t blame them at all: this Camren affair caused tension between them, so it makes sense they wouldn’t want people to know they were/are still friends. But i think we can all agree that saying this and thinking they are secret lovers are two very different things.

So yeah, Camren shippers still exist in 2024. They are less famous and less influential, but they are equally creepy and invasive like in 2015. Some people still comment under Lauren’s Tik Tok Camren related stuffs, and she continues to say they are delusional and to stop talking about it. Obviously, this doesn’t work. People do the same under Camila’s post too, but she never responds.

The conclusion

So, now that i illustrated all of this i will use this paragraph to write what i personally think about the situation. To be honest, when i was an Harmonizer i had some doubts that there was a layer of truth under all of this. I wasn’t a full on Camren shipper and thankfully i was mature enough to not harass them, but i was suspicious. In light of news about their bad label contract that surfaced in the recent years, i don’t think the possibility of a “secret relationship” (heavy quotation mark) is totally impossible. I don’t necesseraly belive they were in a relationship, but maybe there was some flirt of that sort/ unrequired feeling situation. But ultimately, only they can truly know what happened and we probably will never know.

That being said, i think that nobody should have cared this much about the private lives of two teenage girls. I don’t belive people at the time realized how much invasive and creepy they were and how much damage they caused: 90% of Camren shippers were queer girls in the closet and, as a queer girl myself, i can understand the desire to see your idols be like you, and i know that it was all projecting. I don’t have bad feelings against them in that sense. But you should also be aware that celebrities are not characters for your fantasies, they are real people with real feelings. And this situation was particularly bad for Lauren, who was in fact a queer person and suffered from a very bad outing caused by this shipping obsession. In the interview with Becky G that i linked earlier, she also express how much this affects her current love life, how much anxious she feels around other girls, how much she overanalizes herself in the fear of being percived as a predator. And i think this is very sad and unfair. Those shippers need to realize that shipping real people can caused damage in both cases. If they were friends, all this speculations ruined their friendship and caused them to be distant from each other, so a real platonic bond was ruined for a specultion that wasn’t even true to begin with. But listen. Even if they were really togheter…what is the point? Like, seriously, what is the point in forcing two potentially queer people out of the closet? There is a reason if they “didn’t say anything” and searching for hidden “proofs” is invasive and scary and can be dangerous if one of them/both of them are queer. This is exatcly what happened with Lauren: they damaged the life of a real queer person over a fictional paring of dubious veracity.

And at this point i ask, is it really worth it?Are you really an “ally” or are you just indulging in your personal fantasy not giving a single shit about the people involved, who are openly expressing discomfort on behalf of your behaviour? But the thing that bugs me the most is the fact that a lot of Camren shippers used to excuse their behaviour with “but they were the one to start it” and honestly, what the fuck does it mean. There is a difference between a joke two people made one time and a full on stalking of everything they posted. They have the right to feel uncomfortable about it and to change idea, particulary when the situation was so intese to cause damage to real life romantic relationship (remember all the Lucy drama?). Plus, when they made that joke they were 15. They were literal kids and no one should have continued to care this much about a thing they said for laughs ten years ago. Honestly, it’s shitty to justify this kind of behaviour with this statement. You don’t care about them as artists and people, you care only about the fictional version of them that you created in your mind.

So…yeah, that is all! I tried to write in chronological order every major event that happened during 5H’s run related to this, but remember that i also skipped a lot of stuffs because otherwise this post would be way too long. And it’s already long as hell. This group was truly a mess, and maybe i will do another post diving deep into their Camren unrelated dramas, if i feel like it. Nowdays i think that nobody talks really about them with the same intensity they do with One Direction and i wanted to leave my contribution as an ex-Harmonizer. That being said, thanks for everyone that has read this far! I truly appreciate it. I also hope my english is not that bad and that it was easy to understand. Thank you again and have a good day!

EDIT: Added an insight to the Instagram photo that Lauren's mom posted since some people were confused.

Lewis Carroll is one of the most beloved authors of all time, best known for Alice in Wonderland, as well as a number of less famous but still well-known other works for children and adults. An influential poet and a skilled mathematician, he remains one of the best-known figures of the Victorian age, his books bringing happiness to generations of children. Or so the mainstream media would have you believe.

But what if Alice in Wonderland were actually full of hidden messages about gay sex? What if the author was secretly a serial killer? What if his works contained elaborately encoded confessions to some of the most brutal murders of the nineteenth century? What if Lewis Carroll and Jack the Ripper were actually one man, and that one man was gay?

These are the questions that Richard Wallace set out to answer back in the 1990s. The conclusions he came to were insane, stupid, and fortunately for this sub, the cause of a lot of drama. Also, a warning: as you might expect, this topic involves a decent amount of homophobia and lots of talk about women being brutally murdered.

Some Background

Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgson, was the author Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and a bunch of other books and poetry. He's famous for using various nonsense words of his own invention throughout his works, and his enduring popularity means that various people have tried to "decode" his work in various ways. (As Wikipedia says about The Hunting of the Snark: "Scholars have found various meanings in the poem, among them existential angst, an allegory for tuberculosis, and a mockery of the Tichborne case.") Interpretations of his books often center on the controversial claim that Carroll was sexually obsessed with young girls, including the real Alice Liddell, though I personally find the evidence for that rather weak at best. That's only one of many claims that have been made about his life and work.

Jack the Ripper is another famous figure who, like Carroll, lived in Victorian England, remains famous to this day, and is the subject of a number of conspiracy theories. That's about all they have in common, since one wrote children's books and the other one gruesomely disemboweled prostitutes. The Ripper has never been identified, although every decade or so a flurry of news articles will declare that THIS time they REALLY figured out who it is! Some candidates are believable, if lacking in evidence, such as Francis Tumblety, a rich and eccentric fraud known for his extreme hatred of women and his large collection of uteruses. Others are extremely unlikely, such as the physician William Gull, who was supposedly acting on Queen Victoria's orders, and is best known as the antagonist of the excellent Ripper-themed graphic novel From Hell. In all probability, the real Ripper was just an otherwise forgotten nobody, but it's much more popular to suggest that some famous public figure was secretly the killer.

Richard Wallace is just some dude.

Coincidence? I think not!

In 1990, Wallace published a book called The Agony of Lewis Carroll. It is difficult to find any solid information on, and appears to have made absolutely no significant impact, but the few reviews online tend to agree that it's not particularly convincing. To quote Wallace's own plot summary:

His weapon of attack was the use of word games -- especially anagrams (he was an acknowledged master) -- to hide self disclosure and Victorian smut in the nonsense with which he delighted children and adults. But not just in the nonsense; for he used it in letters to family and friends, as well. Several biographers have even sensed that his ostensibly adoring description of his mother was "not real," but a construct, but no one has ever tried to fathom the truth behind the construct. This book makes that effort, and by treating his description of her as "not real," that it was possibly a lengthy anagram, arrived at his real feelings toward his mother and the truth about his lifelong goal.

The book is all about taking Lewis's books, poems and personal writings, rearranging the individual letters in them, and then adding or subtracting letters as needed until a secret message is revealed. Lewis's loving recollections of his mother are revealed to secretly hide resentment of her horrific abuse towards him. In order to get revenge on her and the Victorian society which refused to accept his homosexuality, he filled his books with secret gay smut, hidden behind anagrams, which would be unknowingly read by millions of innocent children. By rearranging various lines of Carroll's poetry, Wallace "discovered" messages such as "Ah, pants and orgasm hero poet am I!" and "I believe the Fathers condemn penile nutrition".

The famous opening verse of "Jabberwocky":

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Is revealed to secretly be about jacking off:

Bet I beat my glands til,

With hand-sword I slay the evil gender.

A slimey theme; borrow gloves,

And masturbate the hog more!

Rearranging the title of "The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Six Fits", and then adding or taking out a few letters, reveals not one but three different encoded messages:

"None hunt the King of Hearts in the gay night fits,"
"They, the Uranian kings, often hit on night fags,"
"The king of urnings hateth any Onanite fights."

My personal favorite is "Rip no gay peter foreskin", which really sounds less like a secret hidden message and more like something you'd see in impact font on a low-quality jpeg of Peter Griffin from Family Guy.

It was in the sequel, "Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend", that Wallace really hit his stride. Not only was Lewis gay, he was also the most infamous serial killer of the nineteenth century, as revealed by such hidden messages as "Then d'file noses, lad!"

But if the anagrams weren't convincing enough, Wallace also brings up numerology, which is always a great sign that someone is sane and intelligent and not a raving lunatic conspiracy theorist. You see, The Hunting of the Snark mentions that Rule 42 is that "No one shall speak to the man at the helm, and the man at the helm shall speak to no one", which is an anagram of "No one shall spanketh the hot male meat, and the hot male meat shall spanketh no one". And the Ripper's first victim was 45 years old. His second victim was 39. By simply taking the average, you get 42--the exact same number as that rule. The next victim was 45, like the first one--a pattern! The next one was, uh, 43, but she doesn't count, since Carroll was in a hurry and couldn't find any 39-year-old prostitutes in the area. And the one after that was 25. But maybe he mistakenly thought she was 24, which, of course, is 42 backwards. Checkmate, doubters.

The Reaction

Both Alice in Wonderland fans and Lewis Carroll fans reacted to Wallace's book with a mixture of mockery and anger. One detailed summary, which I used as a source for a lot of this, was written by Karoline Leach for the magazine Ripper Notes, and points out a lot of flaws to Wallace's arguments beyond the obvious issues: Carroll, and the various people who were supposedly his partners in crime, were all known to have been in different places at the time, and to have been with a number of other people who probably would have noticed if they ran off to London and came back covered in blood. In addition, many of the poems in which he supposedly confesses to the murders were actually written before the killings began. She put together some similar anagrams with parts of Winnie the Pooh, using the same logic to "prove" that A. A. Milne was also a serial killer.

The most devastating blow to Wallace's theory, however, came from professional puzzle writer Francis Heaney, who, along with his friend Guy Jacobson, took the opening paragraph of Wallace's book:

This is my story of Jack the Ripper, the man behind Britain's worst unsolved murders. It is a story that points to the unlikeliest of suspects: a man who wrote children's stories. That man is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of such beloved books as Alice in Wonderland.

and rearranged it to form:

The truth is this: I, Richard Wallace, stabbed and killed a muted Nicole Brown in cold blood, severing her throat with my trusty shiv's strokes. I set up Orenthal James Simpson, who is utterly innocent of this murder. P.S. I also wrote Shakespeare's sonnets, and a lot of Francis Bacon's works too.

After that point (and probably before that point, too), pretty much everyone saw Wallace's book as a laughingstock. Ultimately, Lewis Carroll is considered by Ripper enthusiasts to be the least likely suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders, which is quite an accomplishment in a way. Apparently someone bought the movie rights to the book, so keep an eye out for any announcements about that.

As for Wallace, he's gone on to become the author of (according to Goodreads) at least 64 other books, which include dating guides about how all women are shallow whores, weirdly specific history books, and exactly the kind of explicit gay BDSM he once claimed was hidden in Alice in Wonderland. Apparently the guy who described masturbation as "a slimey theme" decided that the world of gay erotica desperately needed his literary skills.

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After reading a handful of recent threads on other comic book drama I decided I would dip my toes in and tell a more recent story about a new comic book publisher, Bad Idea, and their quest to make everyone hate them (or love them) by being as gimmicky as possible.

It's a story of how collectors, speculators, and comic book stores burned themselves out of Bad Idea's comics because of Bad Idea's bad ideas.

So What Is Bad Idea?

Bad Idea Corp, or Bad Idea, is an American comic book publisher that launched in 2020. It was started by several former executives from Valiant Comics, who all left the company after it was bought out by a Chinese entertainment company, and a few executives from Hivemind Entertainment, a media production company that has been involved with shows like The Expanse and Netflix's The Witcher. Like Valiant Comics, Bad Idea was in the business of making schlocky, grindhouse comic books. The more 90's the idea, the better.

But what quickly set Bad Idea in the industry apart was their early promise to never publish trades, new printings, digital versions, or variants of any of their comics. And they wouldn't use Diamond, the biggest (arguably only) comic distributor in the business at the time. You had to order directly through them.

This was an extremely bold promise. What Bad Idea was promising was unprecedented.

It meant: Every comic would be sold in limited quantities. Comics will not be reprinted to meet demand. Every comic would only be sold in stores. And you have to order it only from them since they will be the only ones printing and shipping it.

What this meant for readers and stores was that to read any Bad Idea comics costumers would have to go to comic book stores every week and pray it was in-stock. If you missed out, you missed out. You wouldn't be able to get it anywhere else... ever

And to not use Diamond Distributors? They held the monopoly on comic book distribution since the 90's. The last comic book publisher that even attempted to self-distribute was Marvel it caused them to go bankrupt. (Sidenote: Both DC and Marvel have both abandon Diamond Distributors since 2021, but that's entirely different, dumber story.)

It went against every piece of wisdom in the comic book industry. It was a Bad Idea (tm).

Hollywood Here We Come

Despite these terrible decisions and promises, it immediately interested retailers. And to understand why you have to understand a cornerstone of modern comic book collecting: "speccing"

"Speccing", or speculating, is when a collector or investor attempts to predict which comic books are going to be used as a basis for a movie or a TV show. In the age of the Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe, DC Universe, and massive shows like The Walking Dead, this has become massively popular and lucrative. For example, if you bought The Walking Dead #1 for $2.50 in 2003, and you held it in mint condition until now, you could sell it for a meaty $1000. Alternatively, you could attempt to predict which comic book characters are going to show up in a big, blockbuster superhero movie or show, such as popular Spider-man character Miles Morales' first appearance going for around $600 despite it being first released at $3.99 in 2011. If you specced right, you could make some absurd returns.

It's not the entire community, but it is a major part of the community.

Now, Bad Idea's executive branch created a lot confidence behind the company since the leadership's previously saved Valiant Comics with an extensive and successful relaunch in 2012. The connections to Hivemind Entertainment, a Hollywood company, created a clear pipeline for Bad Idea's comics to be adapted into movies or TV shows. Here was a company creating original content being headed by comic book veterans partnering with Hollywood playmakers-- if there was any company on the market that could make the next The Walking Dead, it was probably these guys.

And Bad Idea knew it.

We Paid Gilbert Gottfried To Annoy Comic Book Shops

After announcing their existence, Bad Idea also announced it would only be selecting 20 comic book stores to carry their books... if they met their strict conditions.

What were these conditions? To quote Bad Idea:

• Rule 1: Comics are limited to one person.
• Rule 2: Comics must be sold for no more than cover price for 30 days from street day
• Rule 3: Comics can be offered for pre-order but cannot be shipped to anyone before street day
• Rule 4: Comics must be displayed in the highest traffic section of your store
• Rule 5: Stores must prominently display each promotional material for a mandated time period

Failure to comply meant Bad Idea would immediately cut you off from ever selling their books ever again.

Normally, these types of conditions would be a death sentence for a new publisher. Bad Idea's conditions meant comic book stores couldn't mark up Bad Idea comics to meet demand, sell in bulk to speculators, and that their comics had to take up prime shelf space. Speculators, however, ate this up. It meant that Bad Idea was purposely making their comics hard to find and stock, and that each comic would have a small number of copies-- essentially a perfect storm to inflate values.

Comic book stores, despite their best interest, were intrigued.

The first chance anyone had to talk to Bad Idea was at ComicPRO 2020, a comic book retailer convention. Bad Idea announced their first two titles, Eniac by Matt Kindt and Doug Braithwaite, and Megalith by Lewis LaRosa (remember this one for later), and that they will be expanding the list of stores to 50. All announced by Gilber Gottfried and other celebrities on Cameo.

Oh, and if you wanted in you had to sign up right now. The first 50 stores to sign would immediately be accepted into Bad Idea if they followed guidelines. The rest were out of luck. Better luck next year.

....Actually, make that the first 100 stores.

It was pretty clear Bad Idea was creating an atmosphere of gimmicks, FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), and artificial scarcity by announcing "limited lists", have people fight over them, only to expand it later to meet demand.

But something was happening and retailers wanted to capitalize on it. 100 comic book stores was still a short list, and the two books that were announced had top-tier talent on it. Matt Kindt was already a massively popular writer for creating Mind MGMT and writing Keanue Reeves' BRZRKR, and Lewis LaRosa was a titan of an artist in the comic industry. It was the kind of talent that perked ears.

Then COVID hit.

COVID, The Button, and The Hero Trade

The first few months of COVID hit everyone hard but it hit comic book stores especially hard since their entire model is based on customers coming in literally every week to buy a stack of comics. In light of this, Bad Idea quietly postponed their May 2020 launch to a later date.

And in the meantime, Bad Idea's social media was hacked by a Big Red Button.

Bad Idea would only launch their comics if a button was pressed one billion times. Until then... zero announcements and zero comics. Everyone was left in the dark. But now the comic book buying public knew Bad Idea existed, and they were interested in hearing more, so they clicked that button. A lot.

It quickly reached that goal around August 2020. But still no news.

Then, in September, a comic called The Hero Trade showed up at the doorsteps of comic stores.

The Hero Trade is a one-shot short story, only 8 pages, about a back-alley scumbag selling body parts of superheroes to whoever could pay. This black-and-white book was randomly sent to 200 comic book stores unannounced and the comic had no credits in it. Most had no idea what this comic was and assumed it was worthless self-published comic from an unknown creator trying to get stores to buy more copies by handing out free samples.

However, two weeks later Bad Idea announced that they published The Hero Trade. Not only that, but they announced that the comic was drawn by David Lapham, creator of Stray Bullets, and written by Matt Kindt.

Immediately copies of The Hero Trade began selling for thousands on eBay with all kinds of rumors swirling behind it. Was it the beginning of a new comic universe? Was it being made into a show or a movie? What the hell was Bad Idea? With all the obtuse rules to even sell their books meant they had to be big, right?

Bad Idea wouldn't say. But hey, here are some books you could order from us.

"Not First Printing"

What followed were weeks of confusion as stores, even those weren't in the loop, were mowed down with requests to carry Bad Idea books. Bad Idea also announced that it would be sticking to its limited roster, but now that roster had ballooned to 236 stores worldwide.

Curiously, the first comic Bad Idea comic would be Eniac... not Eniac and Megalith. But that little blip was overwhelmed by another announcement: if you were the first to buy a Bad Idea comic in stores you would get a pin. In fact, this would run every time a new Bad Idea series came out. These became immediate collector items. Word also got out that Eniac #1 would contain a new The Hero Trade issue as a small back-up story. Customers lined-up outside of stores at 4am, or earlier, just to snag this pin and this comic and to get in on Bad Idea.

Finally, on March 3rd, 2021, Eniac #1 launched.

And a lot of people were immediately turned off by the company.

Remember how Bad Idea said they wouldn't do extra printings? Well, that was a lie. Bad Idea actually had two printings come out on the launch of Eniac #1, the first printing and a "Not First Printing". Why?

Because Bad Idea had to cut everyone's orders in half to meet demand.

Why?

Because Bad Idea had already printed their entire first printing before retailer orders ever came in. Then Bad Idea took the orders from their stores, cut those in half, and then filled what they could fill with the first print with their "Not First Printing".

This led to 3000 first prints worldwide, about 10 per store, making them much rarer than the "Not First Printing" which were printed at an unknown, but higher, amount. The only difference between the two prints as that the first print had white fonts and the "Not First Printing" had black fonts. While a minor difference, it meant one copy could be much rarer than the other.

Then things snowballed out of control. The book sold out at major retailers like Midtown Comics in 20 minutes. The pins and the comic were suddenly going for $600 combined, while first prints got as high $100. Everyone, from collectors to speculators to casual readers and curious observers, wanted in just to see what this comic was. Stores would watch a customer walk in, buy a Eniac #1 for $3.99, then sell it for $100 minutes later on eBay because, remember, comic book retailers were forbidden from marking up prices on this limited comic. The one that tried was immediately banned from carrying Bad Idea comics ever again.

Everyone felt burned. If you simply got to the store late, even if you pre-ordered, you could get a "Not First Printing" book, a far less valuable for trading and collecting. Stores saw scalpers make obscene profit off of their stock and had no way to fight it. On top of that, the "Not First Printing" announcement showed that Bad Idea were wiling to print more copies of their "Not First Printing" books as long as stores kept ordering them. While this preserved the value of the first print, since they looked visually different and had limited runs, it also meant any other printing basically had no value since they were perpetually printed to demand.

How could you trust this company, as a retailer or as a customer, when they couldn't even stick to their core ideals of no new printing or variants for their launch book?

This wasn't helped by the fact Eniac #1 was only getting good reviews, not great reviews. People expected something mind-blowing from creators like Matt Kindt and Dough Braithwaite, something on the level of The Walking Dead or recent cult-hit Something Is Killing The Children. Instead, what curious customers received was an above-average sci-fi spy thriller. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, above-average is still very good, but Bad Idea spent the last year having fans jump through hoops to get it and people were let down.

One book in and Bad Idea was already failing to live up to the hype and already burning fans.

And then came a wave of gimmicks.

Buy Our Comics And Win A Rock

Bad Idea was publishing a new series about once a month, and each series lasted about four issues. But every month or so there would be... well, a bad idea.

The first of these was the announcement that they would have a comic available for purchase in stores only for only 24 hours. After that, every comic book store would have to mail back their unsold copies for a refund. Failure would to comply meant getting cut off. Retailers, again, were annoyed that Bad Idea was just creating more work for them just for a marketing gimmick.

Remember those pins I mentioned? The second was the announcement that you could trade those pins to Bad Idea for either a new exclusive comic... or a rock. The few pins that did remain people fought over and sold for hundreds. Counterfeit pins flooded the market to compensate. But little did anyone know is that Bad Idea actually chipped the pins to tell authentic ones from fake ones. Those that got caught were banned.

The last gimmick was The Final Five. Bad Idea announced that they'd be ending (as we know it) and would be publishing only five more books from August 2021 to December 2021 before closing. It would be 15 issues in total... and you would have to pre-order all 15 issues blind and upfront. No information on any of the books were given. You just had to hand over $250 and trust that these books were worth it. But hey, if you were one of the first 10 people who ordered you'd get a sticker! Hell, maybe one of those books would be Megalith, which still hasn't come out yet.

The Final Five were released and... none of them were Megalith.

There also came a final wave of redemption during the Final Five period. That Final Five sticker? You could send it to get an issue of The Hero Trade: Passive/Aggressive #1, which was actually two different stories with identical covers. Every Bad Idea store got copies of either the Passive story or the Aggressive story. The sticker could be redeemed to get which ever version your store didn't carry.

Then you could buy back that sticker you sent in. You weren't promised anything except the sticker... but if you sent some extra money you could maybe get something else. Fans sent whatever they thought Bad Idea wanted, including a cake recipe and a copy of The Hero Trade. In one funny twist, a fan sent extra money to buy Bad Idea's Megalith #1-4, which still hadn't come out yet, only to receive Megalith #1-4 from Continuity Comics.

But along with this announcement came that the Final Five had a secret sixth book. So secret that it was invisible.

Conceptual Funnies, or How To Destroy The Collectors Market

Before we get to Conceptual Funnies #1, we have to talk about the practice of "grading".

Grading is a third-party process where a professional, such as the CGC, or Certified Guaranteed Company, is given a comic book or trading card and grades it on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest, and then seals that item in hard plastic with a certificate to retain its condition. It's mostly for collectors and speculators to preserve their cherished items from ever being tarnished.

However, none of it is official. Everything from the grades to the name of the variants is generally done through ongoing conversations between the CGC and the community. None of this is endorsed or acknowledged by any publishers, like Marvel or DC, but they understand it as a pillar of the comic book community and often play to it by making rare comic book variants. The CGC exists and is legitimized by a series of gentleman's agreements between the community, publishers, and themselves, so the community often scrutinizes the CGC in an effort to make it seem "legitimate" and "professional".

At the very end of 2021, Bad Idea announced that they broke ground with the CGC, the top comic book and trading card grading company in the world-- Bad Idea and the CGC have graded the first invisible comics called Conceptual Funnies #1.

Somehow, it's even dumber than it sounds.

How do you grade an invisible comic? What even is an invisible comic book?

Well, Conceptual Funnies #1 isn't actually invisible, it's two pieces of very clear acetate plastic stapled together like a comic book. There is no comic inside, just two pieces of plastic which held the concept of a comic called Conceptual Funnies #1. Only 34 copies were made, one at every grade from 1.8 to a 10. How the condition of something like an invisible comic is judged remains a mystery.

Then, Bad Idea sold those graded books at random for $1000 a piece on New Year's Eve.

The comic book community was livid. They saw it as a violation of everything the CGC stood for. How can an invisible comic book be graded at a 10, or any grade? And how can the concept of a comic be graded? How is it even a collectible, let alone a comic? The comic book community immediately called it out as a cheap, devaluing gimmick. If the CGC continued grading whatever at any grade then the entire grading process would be a meaningless sham of made-up numbers. Which it kind of is. Community members across the board demanded the CGC to step in and disavow the comics as illegitimate.

And even if you thought this was just all a funny prank on the community, Bad Idea made it hard to justify it as just a joke. After all, what kind of joke comes with a $1000 starting price?

So the CGC stepped in. They asked Bad Idea never sell the comics again.

Bad Idea was happy to oblige... only because they had already sold out.

Then, Bad Idea closed as we know it.

Thoroughly destroying their reputation and announcing they would no longer publish comics.

Running To Kickstarter

They were lying. Of course.

After months of silence, Bad Idea came back as Bad Idea Donuts, a donut company. They would spend the summer of 2022 touring conventions as Bad Idea Donuts, selling donuts (that came with a free exclusive comic), and giving absurd tasks to fans to allow them to win exclusive comics and meet the creative teams.

This was a sly move because on Bad Idea's part because, for the entirety of this tour, Bad Idea was not selling books in comic books stores. This kept them mostly out of the general public eye to instead sell directly to die-hard, convention-going nerds.

At San-Diego Comic-Con, Bad Idea announced they were back as Bad Idea Two. Not only that, Bad Idea Two would be doing not just one blind pre-order, but two blind pre-orders. The first blind pre-order would be on September 7th, 2022.

This was capped off by the Stop Bad Idea! Kickstarter. People could pay Bad Idea to stop publishing comic books and to stop existing, but only if they surpassed $2.6 million. This was advertised at New York Comic-con with a picket lines at their booths where fans could picket Bad Idea to stop existing. Now the Kickstarter opened a whole new can of worms, not because of the gimmick, but because of what was offered.

Stop Bad Idea! would be to stop Bad Idea from ever publishing... but really it was Kickstarter to fund a The Hero Trade omnibus collection.

Remember The Hero Trade? It was that comic that was randomly sent to stores and launched a ton of hype for Bad Idea. Speculation about it launching a new comic series were right because The Hero Trade was a small part of a new, gritty, shared universe of superhero grifters, criminals, and scumbags. But instead of an on-going series, The Hero Trade were a series of short one-shots that had been published at the end of several of their comics as back-ups. The Hero Trade trade omnibus would collect all these shorts into one volume alongside some new stories.

This, of course, went against the company's original promise of no trades.

Stop Bad Idea! would also sell a set of 5 copies of Megalith #1, the comic that was supposed to be published two years ago, to only two people for $5000. Later, it offered another set of 5 copies of Megalith #2 to another two people, again for $5000. And yes, someone did buy Megalith #1.

Oh, and all of these things was available only to this Kickstarter.

On October 19th, 2022, Stop Bad Idea! announced a final twist and that they would reprint the surprise The Hero Trade comic, but this time it would be in color and it would be have an exclusive cover by Joe Quesada, controversial Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics from 2000 to 2011.

Now at this point Bad Idea fans have put up with a lot. But reprinting The Hero Trade, even with a new cover, means devaluing the first copies that were published since there are now more limited copies, even if they looked different.

This wouldn't matter to most, but it matters to collectors when a graded copy of The Hero Trade went for $3200 at its highest... but is now barely breaking $300. The collectors that have stuck around from the beginning were getting their very rare collection devalued in real time.

Stop Bad Idea! was then followed up by the equally confusing Megalith Kickstarter. Years after its announcement, Megalith was finally here... as a Kickstarter for an omnibus collection. Besides the omnibus, you could back anything from an action figure to more exclusive comics or even buy art pages. If you had the cash for it.

And finally, Bad Idea predictably broke their promise of "No Digital Comics" with their Kickstarter Save Digitial Comics With David Laphalm And The Ends! This Kickstarter was centered around The Ends series by David and Maria Lapham, with a focus on bringing premium digital comics. This an entirely other drama in the comic community, but digital comics are notoriously bad thanks to sites like Amazon's ComiXology. The Ends Kickstarter planned to give its backers uncompressed pages in ultra-high quality matching exactly what the artists saw and worked on while making their comics. And also Backers would get an omnibus of The Ends.

Where Are They Now?

Bad Idea now exists comfortably in their niche as another comic book publisher on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter has surprisingly been a major player in the comic book community for allowing small indie projects to get funding and deliver high quality products for years now. Bad Idea sits in that community thanks to their die-hard fanbase that's willing to buy all kinds of overpriced gimmicks and schlock from them. However, even their Kickstarter community has ran into problems because it has taken Bad Idea over a year to fulfill the The Hero Trade omnibus with many fans still missing items.

The publisher also recently ended their Save Now! Kickstarter. Save Now! is another series by Matt Kindt that was teased in one-shots several years ago. This Kickstarter would give backers, you guessed it, an omnibus of the entire series and bonus goodies.

But to comic shops? Bad Idea is dead.

Bad Idea published too many books at too low of a volume and created an inflated market that extremely few people could buy into. If you couldn't drop a couple hundred dollars you simply weren't seeing a vast majority of Bad Idea books. You couldn't find them anywhere digitally, since Bad Idea had no digital distribution and no one was scanning these books for uploads, so you had to shell out for physical copies. And even when prices were more "reasonable", such as with the blind pre-order campaigns of the Final Five or Bad Idea Part Two, customers simply didn't trust the quality of the books. And stores, already resentful of Bad Idea due to their restrictive rules that cut into profits, were more than willing to stop ordering from them and stop recommending Bad Idea to customers. What Bad Idea stock they did have sits unread in bins.

While these marketing tactics gave great word-of-mouth press, it also meant that Bad Idea was always going to be an insular, niche publishers producing books to an ever-shrinking audience because no one else could get them even if they wanted to. Almost like a metaphor for the entire comic industry.

Now, people may have stuck through if Bad Idea's comics lived to the hype. What people were expecting were the next Grim or Something Is Killing The Children, both of which are massive modern comics that have taken the comics world by storm. It seemed like this would happen with The Hero Trade, but Bad Idea kept The Hero Trade story limited to back-ups and one-shots with no plans for an on-going. An on-going of The Hero Trade would give the company consistent presence in the community.

On top of that, the critical reaction to Bad Idea has been tepid at best. For an easy example, not a single Bad Idea comic has ever received an Eisner Award nomination, the comic equivalent of the the Oscars. Meanwhile, new titles from Boom! Studios, Fantagraphics, and Image Comics regularly top the Eisners every year. For something as insanely hyped as Bad Idea, it's astounding to see how little their books can stand up to scrutiny.

So while Bad Idea is still alive... interest has dried up.

Bad Idea just had too many bad ideas.

​

Over late 2023 - early 2024, the internet was rocked by a series of retirement announcements from some of the oldest YouTubers in the business. Much has been said about Game Theorists and Tom Scott, but there’s another longstanding channel(s) that hasn’t come up in conversation, in part because it’s much less of a surprise and it feels more like a dying gasp than a goodbye.

On September 18th, 2023, two videos went up on the Roosterteeth and Achievement Hunter channels, titled “We need to make a change” and “We have an announcement “ respectively. The first announced that going forward, pretty much anything they put out would be hosted solely on their personal website. The second announced the end of the oldest major Let’s Play channel on YouTube if not the internet entirely. At the same time, videos amounting to 450 million views were pulled off the site. Both of those videos have an overwhelming amount of dislikes and comment sections complaining about how dumb this is and how screwed they are, which for the main channel, simply mirrors every video for the last year.

I ain’t got the gas for soliloquy so I’m just gonna say it: what the fuck happened?

Also please bear with me, I wrote all this a month ago and then the big news happened so some tenses may be out of date.

Structuring

Roosterteeth is a longstanding internet community with enough insane events in its history for a dozen hobbydramas. Rather than kill myself writing those, I hope to provide the backbone for them. This is pretty much a highlight reel of the collapse timeline. If this inspires you to dig deeper and write something more specific, feel free to leave a comment, I’d be happy to add it on while I can still edit.

What the cluck

Roosterteeth was founded in 2003 by Burnie Burns, Matt Hullum, Geoff Ramsey, Jason Saldaña, Gus Sorola, and Joel Heyman. Initially Drunk Gamers, they’d change their name to Roosterteeth to better appeal to sponsors. The new name came from their first big hit, Red Vs. Blue, a Machinima about two teams duking it out for control of the Blood Gulch Canyon map in Halo. Its success turned them into some of the first big internet celebrities, and the next 10+ years would see them explode in popularity, in part through their use of social media.

After their forums closed in 2004, they developed a full social media network, funding server hosting costs through “site sponsorship” that would eventually serve as a premium membership called RT First. On the website fans and employees alike could share and discuss content, creating a direct line of communication between Joe in Iowa and the CEO, and he was liable to listen. This gave fans a deeper connection to the group but also meant, if you played your cards right, you just might get the call to join the team. Many of the largest names at the company, such as Gavin Free and Barbera Dunkleman, started as community members. In the eyes of many, there was a direct path from social media engagement to a high-paying job. And who wouldn’t want to work there? The podcasts and shows gave this image of a chill, laid-back company where drinking beer and playing video games on company time, pranking your co-workers, and openly sharing raunchy stories were not only acceptable but lauded. It was every internet teen’s dream.

Over the years RT has branched out into basically anything internet. Podcasts, documentaries, live-action and animated TV shows, the list goes on. The biggest of these was Achievement Hunter, their dedicated Let’s Play branch (videos of people playing video games), which at times felt like its own company. Roosterteeth even had its own convention, RTX, which at its peak took place on three separate continents. They had some fuckups but it never felt like they could fail unless someone else knocked them over.

The Adpocalypse

Before anything RT has done, we need to recognize the real killer of YouTube channels: Youtube. Making Youtube videos seems simple: do something eye-catching, views pile in, live large on ad revenue. The long and short is that’s not true. Youtube, like many other social media sites, is controlled by an algorithm, which decides what’s recommended based on the whims of the C-suite. One year the site loves animation because it gets high views, then it’s channels that can put out content daily for “watch retention”, then it’s channels putting out shorts or doing livestreams to fight whatever competitor is on the rise. Single lines of code have ended more careers than any controversy or supposed drop in quality.

RT had been YouTube’s darling for years. Thanks to their sheer diversity of content, they always had something that put them in the spotlight. Because of this Roosterteeth adopted a fiercely independent personality, and a determination to make what they wanted to make and have views follow. This worked for years, Youtube loved them, their community exploded, and they were able to expand and experiment knowing if something flopped, they had a foundation to keep the lights on. Roosterteeth and many other channels enjoyed years of steady growth until the crushing hand of capitalism advertisers stepped in.

Around 2016-2017 advertisers found a problem. Due to a lack of moderation and the way YouTube ran ads, ads for their products were being placed in front of content that they did not want to be associated with . Threatened with a potential loss of ad revenue, YouTube set up a far more aggressive moderation system and announced its dedication to “supporting family-friendly content.” I can speak volumes about how this system hurt minorities , led to the takeover of YouTube kids, which is a whole other can of worms, it was ineffective , easily abused, biased, and is still at the heart of every problem you have with YouTube now, but what’s important is that the moderation system became more strict, and Youtube started prioritizing “family friendly” content, aka what you see destroying your Gen-Alpha cousins brain at the family BBQ. Videos that played T-rated games or so much as dropped a damn were liable to be “age-restricted”, with a smaller pool of acceptable advertisers, and creators could be downregulated in the algorithm if they had too many restricted videos. This would cause a double whammy of making it harder for fans to find your new videos, and for your channel to be recommended to new viewers. It was a lose-lose situation, either you pivoted and likely lost most of your audience, or you stayed course and YouTube pushed you further and further away from the front page. Over the rest of the 2010s, these channels would have their views plateau and then slowly begin to fall. You may notice this as the timeframe where a bunch of mid-level YouTubers seemed to just vanish from existence. Now you know why.

For many channels this was bad but not an immediate threat. The bleed was slow enough that they could plan their next move, and many were still making solid money. They also had a lot less to worry about because, at the end of the day, they were small groups whose only overhead was a computer and some editing software. Roosterteeth however, was a company with hundreds of people with a lease on a campus in the 5th largest city in Texas.

It also came at the worst time for the company. Before this all went down, Roosterteeth had sold themselves to Fullscreen, a multi-channel network, so they could have the funds to make movies, which all flopped. Not too long after, Fullscreen was purchased by AT&T through a subsidiary. After watching AT&T murder a very similar channel and carve up most of Fullscreen , RT knew they didn’t have the space to make anything but hits. Yet when they needed to make more money than ever, their primary income stream started drying up, both with youtube and with Red vs. Blue at it's lowest with the oft-maligned anthology series and the Shisno trilogy. The company quickly pivoted from “What do we want to do?” to “What do we do?!”

They tried subtle changes at first. They Introduced ad reads, tested out new shows , and put more stuff behind First subscriptions. As views and revenue decreased, they began to take more desperate measures. Sponsorships from weird Viagra startups and online sex toy companies, which they really fucking needed because when people complained, Geoff and Gus came on the RT podcast to openly talk about their use of viagra to justify it. They changed how they edited things to better appeal to the algorithm, cut down on long videos, and stepped into the world of “[PERSON IN ALL CAPS] did [THING] in [SUBJECT MATTER THAT 8 YEAR OLD WOULD PUT IN SEARCH FEED]” with thumbnails to match. They also split their content across multiple channels based on demos, in the hopes that these packaged groups would be favored by the algorithm. During this time several figures within Roosterteeth either moved to background roles or left entirely, including most of the founders.

Everything they did seemed to make the problem worse, as none of those channels took off. The only thing they succeeded at was turning the bleed into a hemorrhage. As views dropped, so did the spirits of the community. And there was plenty to help them drop even further.

You ever wonder why we’re here(because we don’t want to be)?

While the company has managed to keep a face of determination, the community has... less so. While they once held the same dogged determination RT did, they eventually lost the vigor and came to a single question. “Is ___ dead?”.

This started with Red vs. Blue, but then translated to RWBY, AH, and RT itself. From youtube to social media, most conversations about rooster teeth started or would quickly turn into moaning about how low views were, how the quality of the videos had decreased, and whatever some rando just knew would turn the company around overnight, which boiled down to either “ just make better content” or “bring back person who had been fired for something fucked up” (that means you person who just came here to write a “they should’ve done X” comment). As you’ll see below, Reddit is a common example of this, but you can find this in most of their YouTube comments. For example:

• What happened to the Let's Play channel?
• It's clear now. RT/AH has been rotting for a long time and is dead *
• Do you think DogBark will be the death of AH?
• AH is dead for me
• is red vs blue dead?
• Ok is there any hope for achievement Hunter to rebound? The channel is kinda dead now
• Please have mercy but, what makes Rooster Teeth such a bad company?

This doomposting not only pushed away fans who were sick of the complaints (including me), but it also set a really bad image for anyone joining RT in the present, since they’d likely find this before they’d find the community website or discord. This eventually resulted in the RT subreddits attempting to ban complaints and criticism altogether.

The Let’s Play family

The Let’s Play branch of Roosterteeth had always been a consistent source of income for the company. They had been affected less by the adpocalypse, and in comparison their overhead was lower, and production, output was higher than much of Roosterteeth’s other content. Hoping to build on this, over 2017-2018 RT absorbed, partnered with or formed 7 other gaming or gaming adjacent channels: Funhaus, Game Attack. Sugar Pine Seven, Cowchop, Kinda Funny, Creatures, and JT Machinima (now JT music) along with some independent streamers such as Lazarbeam and NoahJ456, calling this new network the “Let’s Play family”. Some like Funhaus and Sugar Pine were established groups looking for the benefits of working with a corporation, others like Cow Chop and Game Attack were formed from in-house talent (or in the case of Cow Chop, people who did not enjoy working at Creatures). The hope was to develop a network of secondary channels that would guarantee no matter how the YouTube landscape changed, they’d always have someone on top of the algorithm. The program would not last 6 months before the first channel shut down.

The problem Roosterteeth ran into (along with there not being any real benefit in partnering) was that they were trying to make 7 more Achievement Hunters, without realizing AH is a fucking miracle. A group of lets players who balance corporate obligations with fresh, real-feeling improv, don’t end up hating each other, keep to a 9-5 schedule, make quality content daily, and survive the removal/addition of members is incredibly rare. You may have unofficial groups that a streamer regularly works with, but it’s the difference between hanging out with your friends and being contractually obligated to make 7 cool hangout videos a day with the same 5 people for years.

Sure AH made it work, but most of them started at Roosterteeth or joined so early in their careers they could mold their habits to fit a rigorous schedule, find the boundaries of corporate-approved silliness, build a rapport, and didnt know how much more they could make if they work independently, which is why RT banned them from streaming for years saw greater benefit in a solid paycheck over inconsistent streaming donations.

AH also had the benefit of age. Where AH members ranged from 20s-40s, the groups that didn’t survive were mostly 20-somethings. There’s no history of 20-something YouTubers doing unhinged shit and destroying their careers, so there’s no way they could have predicted that.

(Originally I linked one to each word but I ran out of characters so enjoy this list of people you haven’t thought of in forever. If your favorite isn't there, there's a decent chance they recovered, there's debate, or I didn't want to put too many Minecraft Youtubers )

Jinbop

Venturian Tale

Skydoesminecraft

Cryaotic

Boyinband

Sjin Yogscast

Team Crafted

Toboscus

Leafyishere

Onision

Commander Holly

Callmecarson

Marble Hornets

HALF THE DREAMSMP IN THE LAST 2 WEEKS MY GOD

Jontron (he’s actually more successful than ever, but reminder that he said some hilariously racist shit )

Creatures folded about 3 months after joining RT, though to be fair they were on life support when they joined. CowChop , Sugar Pine 7, and Game Attack quietly separated from RT two years in, with Cow Chop shutting down and Sugar Pine effectively dead. None of the other channels chose to extend their partnerships beyond the initial contacts. They'd try this again with quiet partnerships mostly for merch deals, but never in that explicit "you're a part of RT" way again. Of the seven channels that started the family, only two still reside under the RT banner in earnest, Funhaus and-

My bad, guess it’s only one now.

Edit: My bad again.

Ryan Haywood (and Adam Kovick)

Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault

If you’re here for a series of semi-funny fuckups, consider skipping this one. All you need to know is two people did some messed up shit and it made things worse.

Ryan Haywood was one of the oldest members of Achievement Hunter, He was well-loved for his jokingly sadistic nature played against being a loving family man. I remember right before this went down, he did a video where he made a can-crushing machine with his kids. There were a lot of comments on the video about how even amongst the cool lives of Achievement Hunter members, Ryan had it made. He had a wonderful, loving family, was getting paid to play video games and laugh around with his pals, and was just known for being an awesome guy.

Over late 2020, nude photos of Ryan and Funhaus personality Adam Kovic made their way to Large Penis Support Group, a site for trading sexual photos. The poster claimed they got them by catfishing the two. The photos bounced around until they reached Kiwifarms. More Ryan pictures were added, and then someone took it to Twitter on October 6th, claiming to be a victim and that they were both pedophiles. While the initial accusation may have been false, it caused people with true stories, specifically about Ryan, to come forward with more concrete evidence, painting a much darker picture of cheating, grooming, and abuse.

It’s not taboo for members to date and marry fans, but not only was Ryan married, but his choice of partners was, to be frank, disgusting. Most of the girls were underage or barely legal when Ryan approached them (he would be at least 30 at the time), along with having mental health or body image issues. He would flirt with them for some time (read: until they turned 18 or the opportunity presented itself), and then arrange meetups, either flying them in or visiting them alongside travel he already had to do. A famous example of this was when, on Off topic, he talked about a cacophony of failures that let him stay in LA a little bit longer while the rest of the group was gone. This matched up with one of the girls' stories

They also animated it.

Supposedly he did this using funds from his Twitch streams, which he claimed were being saved for his children’s college.

.

I’m not going to go into details but from the accounts, it is very obvious that he chose his targets so that they would be desperate enough to let him do whatever he wanted, and much of what he did wasn’t consensual. For a full timeline and a list of information from the people who came forward, there’s this thread by u/hattiexcvi and the r/ryanhaywood subreddit. However, I would like to give you a serious warning about reading either. There is nothing to gain about knowing the specifics behind “he was a rapist who liked to use his power to abuse mentally ill teenage girls''. Ryan and Adam were fired immediately, both releasing public apologies. At the time it seemed like nobody knew this was happening.

The result for Funhaus was cut and dry. Kovic was gone, people could move on.

Ryan however fucked up things not only for himself but for all of Roosterteeth. Ryan had been a big part of the company, and his presence in vast amounts of content meant they couldn’t purge it without purging years of material. They had to delay the upcoming season of Red Vs. Blue to reshoot scenes because he was one of the main antagonists. Accusations were also thrown at other members of Achievement Hunter. New-gen hire Trevor Collins had to go into explicit detail about his personal life after people accused him of being abusive in his previous relationship when in reality it was the other way around . People accused Geoff of doing what Ryan did, and he had to go into detail about his marital issues .The trust was gone.

Ryan tried to make a return to Twitch but was quickly beaten back and his twitch was banned.

I don’t know how to end this one. It just sucks.

RWBY

I mean I gotta link it, don’t I?

For further details here’s the first two parts on the history of RWBY by u/meatshield236

[Anime] The Long, Strange Saga of RWBY, Part 1: Martyrdom Complex

[Anime] The Long, Strange Saga of RWBY, Part 2: It's all Gasoline, and somebody's got a Flamethrower :

Besides Red vs. Blue, RWBY is Roosterteeth’s biggest IP. The Japanime following four teenage waifus huntresses, the stand-in for the head writer, and a very bad Neko-based metaphor for the civil rights movement has been going strong for over a decade now, and Roosterteeth has done everything under the sun to get milk merchandise the show. DC crossover, anime, movies, video games, board games, the works.

The only problem is the fandom hates itself and may hate RWBY more.

RWBY tended to bring on a more chronically online artful crowd, who over time grew more frustrated with the story direction and writing quality. The sudden passing of the show's lead animator Monty Oum made fans aggressive about any perceived criticism, creating a catalyst for constant conflict. Instead of loose critics like every fandom has, the critics formed their own bloc, to the point they have their own forum to nitpick the show. Not liking RWBY went from an opinion to a passion. Dedicated hate watchers have channels to preach about how the show is dying, and writers devote themselves to creating their own, better RWBY. The show was built on fandom, and when you’re walking into a fandom that violent, it’s not tempting to stay.

There were also massive issues with crunch. Monty was known for working ludicrous hours, and after his passing, that pressure was put on the animation department. They were also managed incredibly poorly, leading to people needing to work 80+ hour weeks to get materials on time. This wouldn’t come to light for most until another production we’ll get to.

Combo that with the violent shipping war , the failed app , and fighting off porn artists with a stick, RWBY has been a Faustian bargain to keep the company afloat, but as of writing, it seems to have run its course.

Through comments by Head writer Kerry Shawcross and Community Manager/ VA Barbera Dunkleman, it’s come to light that the show has been produced at a loss for at least 2 seasons. This explains their Crunchyroll partnership and why there was a two-year gap between seasons 8 and 9. It would also explain sleuthing that points to the notion the animation department has been wiped out. I guess We’ll see which ends first, RWBY or RT. This wouldn’t be the first show that’s gone to shit.

Oh yeah video games

Roosterteeth tried to make video games!

It didn’t go well

If you want more, here’s a list of games you probably didn’t know they made.

Edit: checking the Steam charts, I think the last player gave up just a little bit before RT did.

I’m genlocking!

There is nothing I can say that isn’t said better in the Hobbydrama done by u/GoneRampant1. but here’s a summary nonetheless:

As RT grew over the early 2010s, it formalized its animation department, setting VFX artists and VA Gray G. Haddock as the head. in 2017 RT started looking for another big animation production, eventually settling on two pitches: Nomad of Nowhere, pitched by Geordan Whittman (whose new pilot you should watch),and Gen:locke, pitched by Gray. Gray would go on to do everything in his power as head of the animation to ensure the success of his show, such as cannibalizing other productions for budget and talent (in particular Nomad, which he sabotaged, which iswhy you should watch Geordan Whitman's new pilot), spending a ton on hiring big name actors, and using RT as his marketing machine. The title of this section is actually from some of the sponsored vids achievement hunters did, where they’d shout it while playing Titanfall because it was funny and because they had no idea what the fuck the show was about. The show was two steps above a flop but RT considered a second season partially in hopes of a turnaround, partially because upper management liked Gray.

Most significantly, he took the crunch culture at RT and turned that shit to an 11, using his position to keep things quiet. He would also bring in contractors with the promise of full-time jobs, and then show them the door at the end. Eventually, a series of Glassdoor reviews came to light (thanks u/GoneRampant1), he was ousted, and RT promised things would change. It was the first time for a lot of folks that people saw things weren’t all good, but it was a first-time infraction so RT got off clean.

They absolutely should not have.

Also, watch Geordan Whitman’s new pilot

I mean it is a Texas company

CW: slurs

Roosterteeth is a 2000s internet company. This means its fanbase contains some of the most violent, racist, and cruel fans imaginable. They survived them through a very simple philosophy: ignore it. That sorta works when your company is made of up a bunch of 40-year-olds or people who spent their youth on the other side of the hate comments, but the concept of “let’s just leave our employees to the wolves'' falls apart when they add much more vitriolic fuel to the fire, like race. These were the kind of people who got violent when another white guy was added to the group, so imagine how it went when they brought in a black woman.

Mica Burton has been the most well-known example of this. Following the fan-to-creator path many employees took, she ended up in AH, and as the first black woman to stand front and center in the predominantly white male group, was welcomed with open hatred. This was normal, however. Achievement Hunter liked to introduce people the same way your parents got you to eat broccoli, by keeping them front and center until you accepted they were there to stay. However this was intermixed with gross levels of racism, and for a 22-year-old black woman who just moved into the Deep South for a job, this wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience.

On an episode of Off Topic (AH’s podcast), Mica expressed her frustrations and talked about her lived experience with racism, and the community understood and became even more violent. However, Mica would say what affected her more was how the company treated her and her frustrations with the racism she experienced, completely ignoring her . Eventually, they would shift her around background roles until she left the company. In the end, they would come to this young woman, a lifelong fan who’d moved across the country to join them, and ask her to make sure her dad, Star Trek star Levar Burton, “Didn’t hate them”. Achievement Hunter continued to introduce people in this fashion with the same consequences. Fiona Nova, who joined about a year after Mica experienced the exact same thing. Ky Cooke (Definedbyky) and Gabrielle Jackman (Blackkrystal) did as well, but remained in-house, moving to Inside Gaming.

It wasn’t just an issue with fans, but the company itself. If you go back through old videos, you’ll find moments where they had to bleep people. In retrospect, this is strange. They regularly ran the whole library of swears with impunity, until you realize there were terms even old-school YouTube wouldn’t let slide. In a lost video, Geoff is quoted saying he would punch Ray Narvaez Jr (in-game mind you), at the time the sole non-white AH member >!“in their spic head”!<, while playing Halo. And famously Joel Hayman, the voice of Caboose in Red Vs. blue one of the founders, was fired for a series of racist tweets and was also thought to be the person talked about in issues with upper management and racism.

In 2020, during the Black Lives Matter Protests, Mica and Fiona spoke about their experiences, and the company promised to do everything in their power to make the change. Considering the video was partially dominated by Geoff, it should have been a sign.

“The dissolving”

Cw: transphobia, slurs

2022 was the first time in years things seemed to be getting better. The bleed was tapering off, and they had just run a hugely successful Uno-based subscriber drive, getting thousands of people to sign up for First. So of course the company capitalized on this by“ dissolving” job positions across multiple departments about 2 months later. This included all the staff involved in running RTX, multiple animators, and to everyone's surprise AH personality Matt Bragg, who was offered a part-time, no-benefit position instead. People were confused and devastated, but one person was pissed.

Kdin Jensen had been one of the support staff/onscreen personalities for Achievement hunter from 2013 to June of 2022. During that time she also openly transitioned, with what was believed to be the support of the company. She was a shining reminder that at the end of the day, no matter what you heard, RT was an accepting, supportive place.

On October 16th, 2022, Kdin posted a twitlonger detailing the egregious abuse she experienced both as an employee and as a trans woman over her time at Roosterteeth. Along with being severely underpaid for her work, she was denied credit and any chance at an onscreen presence, and experienced constant discrimination, overwork, and abuse. They used the threat of Texas’s increasing transphobia to effectively hold her hostage. It wasn’t just administrative though, it was everybody.

If you’re an old RT fan, you may remember them calling Kdin “fugz” in videos. This was a shorthand for >!faggot!< which they could get away with saying when recorded.

While she was being touted as an example of how diverse and supportive RT was, they were actively ignoring the fact their insurance didn’t cover any of the costs for her transition, the abuse she was experiencing from coworkers, and the continued effort to keep her offscreen.

After her, several other people came forward with tales of worker abuse and harassmentand watchdog groups gave incredibly detailed evidence that this shit had been going on forever. Along with continuing to inflict crunch on workers so severe it brought physical and psychological harm, they underpaid people at every opportunity, fostered a toxic work culture based around social media status and cliques, and an HR/ senior management that was at best apathetic, at worse malicious.

Remember Adam Kovic? How that shit was seemingly a surprise?

The HR Department knew. He’d been stalking women for years and HR FUCKING KNEW

People unsubscribed and canceled their Firsts in droves, putting the money toward former RT personalities who weren’t present in the horror stories. Needless to say, their views tanked again, but now there was an extra problem tacked on. Only some of the people who stayed were folks who liked Roosterteeth. A much larger chunk were individuals with a deep, seething hatred, either in the direction of the company, the betrayal they felt over the hostile workplace environment, or just people who hated change. Every video the main channel has put out since this has had an overwhelming number of dislikes and negative comments.

They tried apologizing but they’d just proved the promise of change meant nothing. They’d finally burned through years of goodwill just as they had a glimmer of hope they could turn things around. 9 months after this, they posted the two videos that started this write-up. There’s a pregnancy metaphor in there (something about fucking themselves) but I’m not gonna dig for it.

Let’s Stop.

I started watching Roosterteeth when I was 12. I never had that desire to be a YouTuber that a lot of kids have. I was too much of a fucking nerd I liked science more. But I would have given it up in a second to be an Achievement Hunter. To build my home in Achievement City. To share stories on the RT Podcast. A voice role in Red Vs. Blue RWBY, Camp Camp, Nomad of Nowhere. To throw a single moonball. I never experienced that loss of innocence you get when you realize a childhood dream was impossible because I could always support these amazing folks with my viewership. I stopped watching AH religiously after Ryan, it just hurt too much. Over time I came back, and then I gave up on the community altogether after the dissolving event, when I realized I couldn’t tell who the good folks were anymore. I was desperately holding onto something that never really existed. Even then I kept watching stuff on Reddit until the doomposting became too much. I was still sure they’d turn it around.

I know the announcement is coming. I could feel it in the Twitter departure. But I’m not gonna be the person telling my friends. I’m not gonna have the goodbye video show up on my feed before it’s trending. I’m going to read about it happening in a hobby scuffle, not write the post myself. I’m not going to be connected enough for it to be my goodbye before it's everyone. I’m getting those three little words out right now, on my terms.

I forget you.

​

​

​

​

I finished writing this in February, and was waiting for a friend of mine to edit it. On March 6th, 2024, Roosterteeth’s President Jordan Levin announced that Warner had shut down the company. They told the remaining 150 employees at the same time they told the press. They had a livestream on March 7th to fill out the timeline. It's not going away immediately. We'll get this season of Camp Camp, it sounds like the final season of RvB will still be made, and they're trying to work out how to get that last season of RWBY. The podcasts won't be shutdown yet, as Warner is looking for a buyer for the network. Everything else is in limbo, as people are trying to work out how much of what they've build they can take with them, such as funhaus and Death Battle. They've asked that fans go and support folks as they head off to new endeavors. People have already started archiving everything on the site, afraid that Warner Brothers will burn it all. They’re also still charging people so keep an eye out for that if you’re an RT first member. RT is supportive of everyone getting refunds.

I found out while I was writing a scuffle about a guy's Wikipedia page. Was a crosspost in another forum.

It didn’t make it hurt less.

PS: Contrast

On September 26th, about a week after the first RT announcement, Dropout announced they were finally replacing their name on the CollegeHumor channel to celebrate 5 years of streaming. Technically started before but truly born in the collapse of CollegeHumor , with only 6 months of content on hand,the site has experienced explosive growth over the same timeframe that RT spiraled. In many ways they’re the same company: A group of comedians with tight bonds making a variety of content whose primary income is a subscription-based site, with one show really launching them off the ground. However, where Roosterteeth zigged, Dropout zagged. They’ve stayed small, with only a handful of full-time on-screen talent. They’re conscious of what they put on YouTube vs. keep on their site, and have a clear separation between administrators talent, and fans, save for the CEO Sam Reich, who hosts one show at a time that still leaves space for him to do his job. They put heavy emphasis on fair pay and recognition for both cast and crew, to the point some are on record saying they got paid more for single episodes on Dropout than full seasons on Netflix. The relationship between fan and personality is strong but separate. I mention it solely for comparison, but If you’re looking for something to watch/support, I’d say give it a shot, either on YouTube or their streaming site.

It’s the same price as RT First.

So this is a story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down. Well not me, it was actually Mark Webber and Peter Dumbreck who’s lives (or cars rather) got flipped and turned upside down. This is the story of how Mercedes made a car so unstable, that it decided that staying on the ground is for suckers.

The Mans race innit

The year is 1999, and despite the worlds fears of inevitable extinction due to the evil computers, we still had to go racing. The race in question is the 24 Hours of Le Mans, one of the most important races in motorsport. Taking place at the monstrous, 13km long Circuit De La Sarthe, Le Mans is just one of those races that one knows of. It forms the triple crown of motorsport (the achievement of winning Le Mans, the Monaco Grand Prix and the Indy 500), only accomplished by F1 legend Graham Hill. It makes for compelling action and great storylines, including the famous rivalry between Ford and Ferrari in the 1950s and 1960s (which deserves its own post if it doesn’t have one). But in 1999, one funky looking car and its dubious engineering lead to one of the most spectacular series of events that motorsport has ever seen.

Endurance Racing! Its like Racing, but Longer!

Unlike other forms of racing, the objective for an endurance race of any kind is entirely different. The intuitive thing to assume is that the person who crosses the line first after an allotted amount of time or laps would be declared the winner. This however is not the case for endurance races. As the name suggests, it’s a marathon, not a shootout. As the race progresses over 24hrs, the cars will travel more and more distance. The winner of the 24hrs of Le Mans is the car that manages to cover the most total distance within 24hrs. This means that a car needs to be able to strike the right balance between being fast and being reliable. The fastest car on the circuit won’t win the race if it keeps breaking down and needing repairs. The most reliable car wont win if it doesn’t have the speed to cover a greater distance. As a result, the winners of Le Mans are always the team that manage to find that perfect mix between speed and endurance.

Yes, Mercedes once dominated outside of F1 too

In the modern era, the 24hrs of Le Mans is the flagship race of the WEC (World Endurance Championship). In the 90s however, it wasn’t attached to any particular championship. In 1998, Mercedes had been dominated the GT1 class, having won all 10 races of the 1998 FIA GT1 Championship. As a result, many teams withdrew from the competition, leaving the FIA to cancel the GT1 Championship for 1999. The ACO (who organized Le Mans) however had recently started their own racing class, known as LMGTP (Le Mans GT Prototype). For some context, a GT1 car was a racing car that had been derived from a production road car. The LMGTP class was a further evolution on the GT1 car, which moved further away from the production road car and had become a little too fast to compete in any other GT class. As a result, teams could design cars specifically to tackle the Circuit De La Sarthe, which would make for incredible racing. Thus, Mercedes got work building its masterpiece, the Mercedes CLR. It is based off of the Mercedes CLK GTR, their highly successful GT1 car from 1997, which in turn was based off the Mercedes CLK line of luxury coupes. Since the car didn’t have to follow the FIA’s homologation rules (the rules essentially state that road going versions of the car must be produced) teams could get down to building Le Mans specific monsters without worrying about how the car might function as a street legal car.

The Prep Phase

By May of 1999, the Mercedes CLR was ready for pre-season testing and qualifying for Le Mans. The CLR had been designed with two things in mind. Weight saving, and sleekness. The Circuit De La Sarthe is a mammoth 13km circuit, known for its extremely long straights, tight braking zones, high speed corners and undulating terrain. As a result, success at Le Mans can only be achieved if the car has the right mix of sleekness to prevent drag and increase speed, enough downforce to negotiate the high-speed corners, as well as endurance in the brakes and engine to be able to survive this constant cycle of extreme speed and hard braking. Thus, Mercedes designed a car that was long, sleek and low to the ground. Unfortunately for Mercedes, the car proved to be middling in May testing. The Mercedes designers made some changes before the race in June. This is when things began to go very, very wrong. It was at this time, that the Mercedes CLR began to take up an interest in aviation, to soar through the sky like a Top Gun pilot.

The newest advancement in aviation technology

Thursday qualifying begins, as the Mercedes cars number No.4, 5 and 6 looked to put their cars in a good starting spot for the race. However, very early into the session, the No.4 car driven by Mark Webber crashes violently into the barriers. The track marshals manage to safely extract Webber, who escapes with soreness in a few parts of his body, but relatively unharmed. The crash had occurred in a part of the track that was mostly inaccessible to the public and away from TV cameras. So, the Mercedes mechanics and engineers were shocked to hear Webbers accounts of the incident. According to Webber, he had been following an Audi in from of him and was looking to overtake. When the car reached the crest of a hill, and moved out of the slipstream of the Audi, the cars nose seemed to lift up into the air, and the whole car took to the sky and somersaulted backwards before landing back onto the track and sliding into the barriers. Webbers engineers initially didn’t quite believe that this could have been the case. Regardless, the No.4 car was repaired, and the team set their sights on the rest of the weekend.

On the morning of the race on Saturday, the teams set out for a warmup session before the race. However, yet again, Mark Webber and the No.4 CLR seemed to reach the crest of a hill, rotate upwards and somersault backwards in the air. The car landed on its back and skidded, before coming to a rest in a runoff area. Marshals managed to extract Webber again, with Webber thankfully receiving no serious injuries. This had scared Mercedes enough however to remove the No.4 car from the race. TV Cameras had not caught the crash, but images of the car lying on its roof were broadcasted around the world. There was something seriously wrong with the Mercedes CLR, and Mercedes were soon about to realize that it wasn’t just the No.4 car.

The other two Mercedes cars started 4th and 7th in the race. The race progressed normally until lap 76. Peter Dumbreck in the No.5 car was running in 3rd, trying to catch the Toyota of Thierry Boutsen in 2nd. As the CLR approached the Toyota over the crest of a hill, the CLR once again lifted off, somersaulting into the air before crashing into the trees off to the right side of the track. The crash was so violent that a tree branch pierced the cars monocoque, between the drivers seat and fuel tank. Dumbreck had been knocked unconscious by the initial impact, but awoke, and managed to escape the car. This time, the TV cameras had captured the whole scene. This proved to be the final nail in the coffin, as the final No.6 car was called back into the garage to retire, thus ending the race. BMW ended up winning the race, much to the chagrin of Mercedes.

A scientific flip

What happened to the Mercedes CLR is a game of physics. I will try and explain this as best I can with my 10th grade physics, but if anyone see’s anything that needs correcting, feel free to leave a comment.

In order for a car to go fast, it has to be sleek and aerodynamically slippery, so the air can run over the car with the least resistance. However, if you want your car to have downforce (essentially have your car pushed down onto the road by the air, making it more planted and more likely to go faster through corners), you need the air to have more resistance as it goes over the car. A rear wing (or spoiler) on the back of a car is an example of a device that increases downforce, by literally “spoiling” the air passing over the car. The trade-off is that this creates drag, which can slow the car down. For a race car to be successful, a balance must be found between its speed and its downforce. Mercedes had wanted to make this car as fast as possible. Since cars at Le Mans are at full throttle for over 85% of the lap, they prioritized their speed over the downforce. This is why you got a car that was so sleek, to increase the aerodynamic slipperiness. Here is where I am going to have to distinguish between overbody and underbody downforce.

Overbody downforce is anything on the upper side of the car that can create downforce (like the aforementioned spoiler). Underbody downforce is created by anything on the underside of the car. The most common underbody downforce device are diffusers, which can be placed on the front and rear of the car and help to suck the car down to the ground. Stay with me here, because this next point is extremely important. Mercedes made a key design change between the CLK GTR and CLR, which was to shorten the wheelbase. The wheelbase of a car is the distance between its front and rear axle, or how roughly how close together its wheels are. Generally, you would want a car to have a longer wheelbase. This is because a longer wheelbase provides better pitch stability. If you can picture a car that has its wheels very close together, it would have a tendency to rock back and forth like a seesaw. A car with a longer wheelbase would be far more stable in this back-and-forth pitch movement. Mercedes decided to shorten the wheelbase, which seems like a strange thing to do, as this upsets the car’s pitch sensitivity. The reason? They wanted to increase overhangs. Overhangs are the bits of the car that extend out from the front and rear axles. Think of anything from the front bumper to the front wheel being the front overhangs, and anything from the rear wheel to the rear bumper being rear overhangs. Mercedes wanted to increase the overhang lengths because they wanted to add longer diffusers underneath the car. Remember, diffusers are an underbody downforce tool, which won’t generate drag like an overbody downforce tool would. Since Mercedes wanted to prioritize the speed of this car, they wanted to get as much downforce from underneath the car as they could, so that they wouldn’t have to get it by attaching wings to the overbody of the car, which would increase drag. Mercedes now had a car that was very fast, had little in the way of overbody downforce, and had a car that was extremely pitch sensitive due to the shorter wheelbase. We have very nearly cooked up a recipe for disaster.

Mercedes made one final change to the CLR that doomed it. They elected to neutralize the pitch angle of the car. Most times, race cars run at a negative pitch angle, meaning they drive with their nose pointed slightly down. This helps to increase downforce, but as with the spoiler, it increases drag. Most cars running in Le Mans that weekend would have had a pitch angle of about -2 or -3 degrees, meaning they were pointed about 2 or 3 degrees down. In their everlong crusade to eliminate as much drag as possible, the car was given a pitch angle much shallower, somewhere between 0 and -0.7 degrees. This meant that the car, which was already pitch sensitive due to the shorter wheelbase, would be even more pitch sensitive as it was starting at a higher pitch angle.

Putting everything I just mentioned together should hopefully help paint a picture of what happened. This car was very fast but had little overbody downforce and was extremely pitch sensitive due to the shorter wheelbase and neutral pitch angle. This meant that whenever the car would run over a hill, or in the slipstream of another car in front, it would upset the air going under the car, causing it to being to pitch its nose further upwards. Diffusers work best when the car is lower to the ground, so when the car would pitch up, the front diffuser would lose downforce, while the rear diffuser (which was now lower to the ground and was aided by the rear spoiler) would increase in downforce. When the pitch angle of the car reached about 2 degrees up, the increased air passing under the car the downforce on the front end would actually cause the downforce to dissapear completely and become lift, pushing the nose of the car into the air. If the car reached a pitch angle of 2.40 degrees nose up, the car reached its tipping point. The lift being generated at the front of the car was actually greater than the downforce being produced at the rear of the car, and as a result, the car would launch itself into the air and somersault backwards. Mercedes had built a car that was too pitch sensitive, and without enough downforce, the car became an aerial Beyblade, twirling through the air like a gymnast, before ultimately crashing down to Earth like Icarus. Perfect recipe for disaster.

Where are they now

As a result of the crash, the organizers of the race amended the rules to shorten the limits of overhang length, as well as making changes to the track to make it less bumpy and undulating. Mercedes withdrew from Le Mans, and have not returned since. They did find a truckload of success in F1 in the mid to late 2010s so thankfully, they found their place. Peter Dumbreck had a long racing career afterwards, competing in Le Mans a few more times. He now works as a test driver for Aston Martin, helping to test drive their Valkyrie and Vulcan models. Mark Webber might have been a familiar sounding name to some. He ended up becoming an F1 driver between 2002 and 2013, winning 9 races for Red Bull, and being the teammate of Sebastian Vettel during the Red Bull reign of dominance in F1 in the early 2010s. He would ultimately join Porsche for the World Endurance Championship after his F1 retirement, winning the 2015 title alongside his teammates Brendon Hartley and Timo Bernhard. I will mention, for no particular reason, that Webber did manage to flip his 2010 Red Bull car in Valencia. Looks like Mark has a proclivity for this sort of thing.

Ultimately happy endings to what could have been a far more tragic story. Mercedes learned a valuable lesson in 1999. Turning your car into an airplane is not advisable.

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CW: A lot. Drugs, infidelity and intergender violence among them.

You've almost certainly heard of the band Fleetwood Mac. If you haven't, you live under a rock and get your internet by siphoning it from elsewhere with an underground DSL cable. To those people, I will summarise in brief;

Founded in 1967 and active until fairly recently, Fleetwood Mac are a commercially successful and critically acclaimed rock institution. It's likely that the average reader knows them from their period of activity from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, with their iconic lineup of the titular Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, as well as songstress Christine McVie and the singer-songwriter pair of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. But FM are unique in that, throughout their run, they've been jammy British blues, psychedelic pop, countrypolitan, stadium pop rock, balladeering AOR and just about anything else you could reasonably fit into the remit of 'pop rock'.

They're similarly unique for being an exceptionally rare classic rock act with lead vocals rotating between men and women, as well as for their crossover appeal with the authentic rockers and the radio pop crowd alike. One of these things indirectly fuelled the other, but I get ahead of myself.

Here's a brief-as-possible rundown of the many trials and tribulations of those guys who recorded the best songs you hear at the supermarket. The full story of these incidents could fill a quite-large book, so this will really just be the bullet points.

• In 1970, founding guitarist and the band's biggest star, Peter Green, already mentally declining, takes some bad LSD at a commune in Munich and spirals until he exits the band.
• The second of their original guitarists, Jeremy Spencer, leaves their hotel room before a show in 1971 to 'get some magazines' and never returns. He is found by manager Clifford Davis days later at a latter-day-Christian commune and refuses to return.
• Danny Kirwan, the last of their founding guitarists, succumbs to alcoholism and becomes sullen, reclusive and paranoid. He fights regularly with Spencer's replacement, Bob Welch, and it culminates in his termination after a blowup before a show in 1972.
• Kirwan's replacement, Bob Weston, has an affair with Mick Fleetwood's then-wife Jenny Boyd, while touring to promote Mystery to Me in 1973. When Mick finds out, he fires Weston, cancels the tour and briefly disbands Fleetwood Mac.
• Recently fired manager Clifford Davis attempts to assert intellectual ownership over the name 'Fleetwood Mac', resulting in litigious response from Mick Fleetwood, Christine & John McVie and Bob Welch.
• With the lawsuit ongoing, in 1974 Fleetwood Mac become the only major rock band to not be represented by a manager. Mick Fleetwood assumes de-facto managerial duties.
• The same year, Fleetwood approaches American folk singer Lindsey Buckingham to join FM. Buckingham agrees only on the condition that his then-girlfriend and performing partner Stevie Nicks is also invited. This alone is not drama, but it is the first domino.
• Following the success of the band's second (and more well known) self-titled album, the McVies divorce and Nicks & Buckingham split up. Tensions flare as suspicions of infidelity, towards all present members of the band, emerge. These tensions would comprise the substrate of the lyrics on their next album.
• The band considers crediting their drug dealer in the liner notes for their soon-to-be smash success Rumours, but renege on the plan when said drug dealer winds up murdered.
• While touring for Rumours, Nicks and Buckingham get in regular on-stage fights, no doubt exacerbated by the former's cocaine addiction.
• Nicks' cocaine habit blows out her nasal cavity. No, seriously.
• Mick Fleetwood reconciles with Jenny Boyd just long enough to remarry her before promptly cheating on her with Stevie Nicks.
• In 1978, Mick Fleetwood cheats on Stevie Nicks with her married friend Sara Recor, obliterating the relationship between all three.
• While touring for Tusk in New Zealand in 1980, Nicks and Buckingham get into an onstage fight which spills backstage. Buckingham throws his guitar at Nicks, Christine responds by bull-rushing the fuck out of him.
• In 1984, Mick Fleetwood files for bankruptcy. Drugs are blamed.
• Stevie Nicks checks into rehab at Betty Ford to corral her worsening cocaine habit in 1986.
• Following the release of Tango in the Night in 1987 (ed; their best album, don't deny it) Buckingham, agitated to breaking point with Nicks, quits the band, thus ending their most iconic and lucrative period.
• In late 1990, Stevie Nicks' frustrations over song placement culminates in her departure. That same year, Christine quits touring with the band, fully burnt out on the road life.
• Their 1995 album Time, featuring Buckingham-Nicks replacements Bekka Bramlett, Billy Burnette and Dave Mason is critically mauled and performs dismally commercially. It fails to chart in the U.S. and only sells 32,000 copies in its first year. Personally, I thought it was okay.
• Lindsey Buckingham returns in 1997. His second stint with the band would produce only one studio album, 2003's Say You Will.
• Christine McVie leaves the band in every capacity in 1998. She would return many years later.
• In 2018, the now solely-touring Fleetwood Mac lose Buckingham again. This time, it's a dispute over touring commitments. Buckingham would pick up where he left off in the 1980s by sueing his former co-workers for breach-of-contract. Somewhere in the world, Clifford Davis cracks open a cold beer and laughs.
• In 2022, Christine McVie, the longest tenured member after the two namesakes, passes away. With her goes any hope for reconciliation with Buckingham and any motivation to continue the band. Though not yet made official as of writing, the group is, for all intents and purposes, defunct.

So there we go. Fleetwood Mac. A band made great not in spite of their decades of turbulence and interpersonal animosity, but in large part because of it.

EDIT: No matter how much you proof, goofs get through the net.

Two weeks ago, an RLCS team named Young Money Clan (YMC) consisting of the English players Reeho, Nuqqet, and Little Motion, were banned from participating in the remainder of an RLCS tournament as well as any tournament for the next year because they intentionally lost multiple series in order to manipulate their seed in the playoff bracket. This was in an effort to try to steal a spot at the upcoming major tournament.

What is the RLCS?

Since 2015, the RLCS has gone through many different format iterations. First, it was a system where North America and Europe would select their best 8 teams and have them qualify to the world championship through a league play, with the top 4 teams from each region qualifying to the LAN. Then in season 3 (2016), Oceania was added and they would select their top 2 teams. Then in season 7 (2019), South America was added and they would select their top 2 teams as well.

The Dark Times

In early 2020, season 9 of the RLCS was underway and the world championship was scheduled to take place in Dallas. Then COVID happened and the world championship was cancelled. For the next few years, in order to combat the lull in the esport that would happen with no LANs, Psyonix (the developers of Rocket League) decided to overhaul the whole system. Season 10 became season X. There would be no more league play, instead, there would be a new system of splits. The Fall split, Winter split, and Spring split would each have 3 regional tournaments allowing teams to not only collect prize money every event, but they would also collect circuit points, which they need to qualify for each split's major tournament and ultimately the world championship. We didn't know it at the time, but for season X, these majors would all still be held online, and so would the world championship, due to COVID still existing.

Regional Struggles

For season 2021-2022 (yes that is the actual naming convention), there were big changes, mostly for "minor regions". Middle East/North Africa, Asia Pacific, and Sub-Saharan Africa were all added to the RLCS framework and they would all get their own professional productions for their streams. Most importantly, LANs were back baby! The first LAN was in Stockholm, Sweden, and consisted of 5 teams from NA, 5 from EU, 2 from OCE, 2 from SAM, 1 from MENA, and 1 from APAC. But wait, what happened to SSA? Well, they only get a spot at the world championship because ???? These regional spots were the same throughout the season. It was the same thing in the following season, 2022-2023.

For the 2024 season (ah yes, that's better), there was a 5 month off-season and with it, massive changes. I won't go into too much detail about them because that could be its own post. The important ones for this story are that SSA would now get a spot at the majors and there would no longer be any barrier for teams to compete in regions that they don't live in. In previous seasons, there had been multiple teams who migrated from their home countries to other regions in order to compete in a more competitive region and get better at the game. There had also been notable examples of the other way, going to a less competitive region in order to get free wins.

Young Money Clan

Reeho, Nuqqet, and Little Motion, are English rocket league players. Reeho and Little Motion had previously attempted to qualify for a couple of regionals in Europe, but were eliminated. They are what we call bubble players. They are good enough to make solid runs in qualifiers but they are nowhere near the level of top teams in their region. They saw the rule changes in the 2024 season as an opportunity. No longer would they be eliminated in qualifiers for a region they stand no chance in. They decided to just compete in Sub-Saharan Africa. This meant that they would be competing with about 160 ping, a massive disadvantage. Most players would call anything above 100 completely unplayable. However, YMC managed to not only qualify for the first regional, they came 2nd. And then they came 2nd in the following regional as well. The only team that was consistently able to beat them was called Limitless.

Because Limitless had won both regionals, they had a big lead in points. Limitless had 32 points and YMC only had 24. That meant that if Limitless could get top 4 in the 3rd regional, they would secure their spot in the major. YMC knew this and decided that now was their time to strike, so they flew down to Reunion island in order to compete in the final regional with more competitive ping. But that alone wouldn't guarantee them the win. There was only one way to make sure Limitless didn't make it to top 4. YMC had to manipulate their seeding to meet Limitless in the quarter-finals.

The Format

Ok, time to get a little technical. The regional format is a swiss stage with the top 16 teams, which decides the seeding for the single-elimination top 8 bracket. If you don't know how swiss works, basically if you win 3 series, you're into the top 8. If you lose 3 series, you're eliminated. It's a really good way to separate out the top 8 teams without making everyone play everyone. The important part is that game differential matters a lot. It determines which team you will play against in the following rounds.

On Friday, March 1st, the regional 3 swiss was played. For the first 2 rounds, everything went the same as always. Limitless and YMC both found themselves in the 2-0 matches for round 3, but they weren't playing each other. In round 3, Limitless swept their series. YMC had a bit of a delay in starting but then they won the first game 6-2. Then it all happened. They lost the next 3 games, losing that series, then they got swept in round 4. Then after another big delay, they swept round 5, securing their place as 7th seed in the top 8 bracket. So what happened? Basically, YMC saw Limitless qualify with 2nd seed in the bracket and then immediately started trying to manipulate their own seed to be 7th, since those seeds play each other for top 4. Here are some montages of what that gameplay looked like:

https://twitter.com/TeeZeeRL/status/1763655598678139281

https://twitter.com/TeeZeeRL/status/1763660406256443727

Anyone who has seen these players in the first 2 regionals knows that this is blatant throwing and the motivation was clear from the start. The delays were happening because YMC wanted to see the outcome of the other series to determine how many games they needed to lose for the right seed.

Before YMC even got the chance to play against Limitless in the quarter-final match they tried so hard to get, all 3 players were disqualified from the rest of the event and given a year-long ban not just from the RLCS, but from any rocket league competition. More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeagueEsports/comments/1b4kavi/young_money_clan_competitive_ruling_rlcs/

Because YMC were the only team that could have overtaken Limitless in the points standings, their disqualification meant that Limitless immediately qualified to the upcoming major in Copenhagen.

What Did We Learn?

The consensus among the Rocket League community about this is pretty simple. YMC were villains in this story from the start. If they wanted to take this spot away from SSA the "right way", they would have spent the entire split in the region, populating the ranked servers with better talent. A rising tide lifts all boats after all and having this team in the region would have given the other teams way better practice. Even if YMC made that decision before the 3rd regional, they could have gone and won that regional fairly and Limitless would have qualified for the major. Then next split, YMC could have won all 3 regionals and qualified for the next major and the world championship.

Note: This is a repost because I wasn't aware of the 14 days rule the first time around. Now that amount of time has passed.

It’s now been a little over a year since the ttrpg community experienced an event that rocked it to its core, when Wizards of the Coast, the developers of Dungeons and Dragons, attempted to enforce a policy that would all but destroy its flourishing third-party publishing community. After the dust settled, many were unsure about how things would look going forward. Would D&D collapse as players and publishers abandoned it? Would nobody care? Would a new system rise to prominence? Time will tell, but we can talk about what’s happened since.

What happened

If you want a great deep dive into the events, I highly recommend the hobbydrama done by u/ pandamarshmallows For a short(ish) version:

The OGL, (short for Open Game License) is a longstanding licensing agreement between Wizards of the Coast, the publishers Dungeons and Dragons, and publishers who want to make content using the system as a basis. As is the name, it was incredibly open, giving free reign to make D&D content so long as it didn’t include a handful of creatures and terms, with no need to compensate Wizards of the Coast. It’s been incredibly beneficial for both parties, helping cement D&D as the TTRPG. However as the guard at WOTC changed, it’s been seen less as a cornerstone and more giving money away. While there were efforts to quietly kill it, they didn’t get brazen until the end of 2022.

On January 5th, 2023, former io9 and now Rascal reporter Lin Codega published an article on tech blog io9, detailing how in a leaked press release, Wizards intended to announce the “OGL 1.1” . Along with a lot of other things, this new license required developers to effectively give full rights of whatever they made to Wizards of the Coast, that you could be subject to a 25% royalty fee on revenue, with a loose promise to only go after folks who make 750k or more in revenue, and saying you could no longer use the original OGL. Needless to say, it didn’t go well. The community banded together, rocked their shit, and Wizards backed off, even putting all of 5e under a creative commons license as an apology. However, that wasn’t enough for a lot of folks.

Even if it was never officialized, attempting to put something like this in place was a massive breach of trust. People's livelihoods relied on that promise of a free and open system, and they were planning to change it out of the blue. Even if 5e is under Creative Commons, it’s also reaching the end of its life, so nothing was stopping them from using loopholes to make 3rd party publishing difficult like they did with 4th edition. While players didn’t have the same financial concerns, they recognized that a lot of D&D’s value is from those third-party companies, or they just didn’t like the idea of their game being fucked over by C-suite decisions. Either way, people on both ends announced their intention to leave 5e behind. Now that a year has passed, we can see how well that’s going.

Honor Among Thieves

In March of 2023, Wizards/Hasbro released a feature-length film D&D: Honor Among Thieves. When things went down, one of the first things people did was announce their intention to boycott the film. Since it was a few months out, many people thought it could serve as a litmus test for whether the sentiments of the event held firm. The result? Debatable! As of writing, they’ve made $208 million against a $150 million budget. In terms of “we made more than we spent” it’s a dub, but if you go by the 3x budget metric used by a lot of hollywood it’s a flop. You could go on about how much it may have made were it not for the OGL and what is a theatrical success in a post-COVID/streaming world, but it’s perfectly in that spot where you can make a claim either way.

The dice popcorn buckets, however, are still wildly overpriced on eBay so if anyone wants to sell theirs for 30-50 bucks please DM me I’ll cover shipping.

Wizards: Kinda forgive and hope you forget

In terms of PR, Wotc’s plan seemed to be “pretend it never happened”. They continued to chug along, releasing a new adventure book Keys from the Golden Vault, which didn’t sell well but I’ll get to that later.

In April of 2023, Wizards had a Creator Summit, a conference between them and major D&D creators. It was the first direct interaction people had with Wizards since it all went down. The company tried to just ignore it but at the urging of the creators, they got into the OGL along with longstanding issues with diversity, which based on writeups went pretty well. It was the first step in healing the rifts between Wizards and the community.

They would immediately burn that when, 3 weeks later, they sent Pinkertons to a guy who accidentally got some magic the gathering cards (Wizards of the Coast owns both games) about 2 weeks early.

Yes, those pinkertons.

They would bring the controversy back to 5e when it was discovered that several of the illustrations for their upcoming book Glory of the Giants, were made using AI. After outcry, they banned the use of AI artwork... for D&D, Magic got caught using it for marketing. It seems that the company isn’t planning any more efforts to return to players good graces, but is trying to woo back publishers.

At the start of December, Wizards quietly announced a collaboration with Ghostfire Gaming, one of the most popular 5e publishers, andhad famously said back when the OGL happened they were considering transitioning to a new system. Two of their books, Dungeons of Drakkenheim and Grimm Hollow: Lair of Erathis, are now available on D&D Beyond, allowing for easier play.

On February 13th They did the same with Hit Point Press,putting their Humblewood campaign setting on the site. We can talk about how they’re only doing this after they’re planning to move to a new edition, but we have to recognize this is a shakeup. However we're not sure if people are biting

Insert hype pun here

While there isn’t exactly something quantifiable, it’s become increasingly obvious that the dynamic between players and WotC has shifted, at least in terms of response to new content. While people are still big on talking about D&D, they’re not savoring new sourcebooks in that same fashion anymore. Even the adventure books aren’t getting much talk. Not too long after the fiasco, they released a new adventure book, Keys from the Golden Vault. For a while, it was being outsold not by another D&D book, but by Fever Knights, a ttrpg published by comic artist Adam Ellis. The people who wouldn’t stop talking about a new book aren’t there for it anymore.

Nat OneDnD

In my defense, the joke’s right there!

As I mentioned earlier, part of the reason people didn’t care much about the OGL win is because there’s a new edition on the horizon, OneDnD. Whether it’ll be a 5.5 for a 6th edition is sort of unclear. There have been a lot of business peak promises throughout its development, including AI, “backward compatibility” with 5th edition, and this being a “forever edition” but with the release on the horizon, we’re seeing how that’s forming.

Over the remainder of 2023, Wizards released playtest content for OneD&D, with surveys to gauge satisfaction. The responses on the surveys have been nonplussed. The response in forums like r/DNDnext have also been less than stellar, with many at best uninterested in the new edition, and some restating their intention to move to leave D&D for a new system once they finish their campaigns. People are also not excited about the release schedule, which has the Players Handbook releasing in September, the Dungeonmasters Guide in November, and the Monster Manual in... February 2025. While they had a similar release timeline with 5th edition, they also didn’t seriously kick off until someone else lit the matches. And those guys are heating up on their own now.

New competitors

After the events of the OGL, several developers came forward with their intention to make a new game that would fill the same long-form fantasy niche of D&D. There are three that are of note: Tales of the Valiant, Daggerheart, and MCDM.

Tales of the Valiant was made by Kobold Press, one of the oldest 3rd party developers in the industry. Less than a week after Lin Codega’s report, they announced that they had started working on their own “subscription-free” fantasy role-playing system, known only as Project: Black Flag. The project would eventually be named Tales of the Valiant, using the Creative Commons material from 5th edition as a basis. While some people complained it was D&D with the serial numbers filed off, that’s exactly what it was supposed to be, a safe place for those who still wanted to make 5e content to attach themselves onto.The Kickstarter campaign for the game would be a huge success at $1.1 million,and the campaign for the Gamemasters guide has locked in another $460k. They just finished playtesting, and are planning for release in the next few months.

Next is big bad Critical Role. Critical Role is the most famous actual play out there, considered to be the catalyst for the 5e golden age by showing us hot people can play D&D helping introduce the game to a much younger, more diverse audience. Over the last few years, they’d been exploring making their own games, partnering with Wizards to produce their own adventure book, and releasing some board games. In April of 2023, they announced they were making their own fantasy ttrpg called Daggerheart,to much acclaim. From then there wasn’t much for a while. They did a playtest at Gencon, and in the meantime released a supernatural horror based ttrpg called Candela Obscura to mixed reviews . There was so little info out there for a while that the first link when you google “Daggerheart” is an unaffiliated website.If I had gotten this out when I wanted to that would be the end of it, but on February 29th they announced an open beta starting March 12th

, with material available online through DrivethruRPG and live demos at local game stores. They also announced a formal partnership with Demiplane, a website that makes D&D Beyond Style VTT’s for various games such as Vampire: the Masquerade and Pathfinder. Reviews as of now are solid but critical and the Critter Defense Engine is already warming up to support the game. It should also be noted that CR seems to be laying the groundwork to separate itself from D&D. The most recent campaign has been focused on (Spoilers for Campaign 3) >!a god-eating monster contained within the second moon, and the gods are the only legally important tie between CR’s Exandria and the Other IP’s.!< Daggerhearts lore also has soft reboot vibes, and the races given so far match perfectly with the races mention in Exandria's lore.

so it sounds like Campaign 4 for is gonna start of with a (Big) Bang.

Last but certainly not least is Matt Coville. Coville has been one of the biggest designers to come up with 5e, considered second only to rules as written for rule interpretation. Along with working with Critical Role on their adventure book Call of the Netherdeep and his long-running D&D magazine Arcadia, he has several successful Kickstarter under his belt, including the former top 5e Kickstarter Strongholds and Followers. While he would lose the title to some folks I’ll get to in a bit, he now holds the title for the most successful crowdfunding for a D&D competitor. On December 7th, 2023, Matt Coville launched a crowdfunding campaign for MDCM RPG,his unnamed fantasy dungeon crawler. Within 3 days it made 2.5 million dollars and would reach 4.6 million by the end of the campaign. According to self-published playtest results, the system is well received.

While we don’t have anything tangible for review yet companies are taking steps to set new systems up, and the money shows players are backing them. For someone who’s already off the ground, we can look at Pathfinder.

Pathfinder

For the unaware, Pathfinder has been the closest D&D has to competition for the fantasy RPG market. Started after Wizards fucked over their developer Paizo at the start of 4th edition, they’ve served as the crunchier cousin to D&D, carving their own space in the market, nipping at the heels of D&D as much as any publisher can against a conglomerate.

When the OGL stuff happened, they were the first option many people turned to as an alternative system, and they went hard. Paizo announced they sold an 8-month supply of books in about two weeks. The Pathfinder humble bundle, which only sold about 20,000 copies before the OGL sold over 100,000 copies afterwards.The forums exploded with new players, and a lot of folks promised their next campaigns would be run on Vancian casting. The problem there, if my campaigns can be used as an example, “next campaign” can be years away. However people bought the books and “Non-D&D system” is less of a dirty word at a lot of tables, so there’s investment and space.

Paizo seems to have taken their new role as on the rise in stride. They announced their own version of the OGL, the ORC license, with stated intention to hand control of the license over to another party so there would be no way for them to pull the same stunt Wizards did. They published a remaster of their most recent edition so that they were no longer under the OGL, and things seem to be going well for them. The forums for Pathfinder grew a ton during this time, and while it’s anecdotal, many stores and conventions where you’d normally find Adventurer’s League games have been shifting over to Pathfinder society. They’ve also beefed up their tech side, using Demiplane to make a VTT to rival Beyond (or Pathbuilder for the cheaper folk), and have partnered with startups like Alchemy for more advanced VTT’s.

Is there still money in 5e kickstarters?

Yes. If this was written 6 months before, I would have said maybe a little less. This would be based on Ghostfire Games Valkan Clans and Atherial Expansebooks, which put up $460k and $328 in comparison to Arora: age of Desolation’s 500k, although to be fair they were close in release to the OGL event, were one after another, and didn’t offer a giant dragon mini. HoweverQuest-o-nomicon, a book of quests by Ghostfire and XP to level 3, pulled in a nice $620k during the same relative timeframe, and what people go gangbusters on Kickstarter for tends to vary.

But then came Ryokkos Guide to Yokai Realms, by DnD Shorts, Obojima: Tales from the Tall grass by 1985 games, and The Crooked Moon: Folk Horror in 5E by Legends of Avantaris. All three are 5e sourcebooks, with Crooked moon focusing on folk horror and Obojima and Ryokko being different directions of Japanese folklore, essentially shonen anime vs. Studio Ghibli. Ryokko and Crooked Moon are now the two most successful 5e Kickstarters of all time, at $3 million and $4 million respectively, and Obojima made $2.6 million.

I can’t understate how staggering their success is. First-time Kickstarters putting up 7 figures isn’t atypical, especially when they fill a good niche, offer extra things like minis, and are made by popular creators. However back to back 7 figure Kickstarters, including ones who break records like this is unheard of. These three books represent a growing faction of those who wish to remain in 5e to get their games from somewhere besides Wizards. At least their ttrpgs. RPGs however...

Baldurs Gate III

It’s no understatement that BG3 saved Wizard's ass. Designed by legendary RPG studio Larian, the immersive, well-written, and wildly entertaining RPG based on D&D took the world by storm. It swept multiple award shows, has near-perfect scores from every major videogame critic, and had 875,000 concurrent players on Steam, the 10th highest of all time as of writing. Suffice it to say it made a fuckton of money, to the point Wizards fully attributed it to their revenue growth this year. However, the question is whether it’ll benefit D&D in the long term.

As of now, Wizards hasn’t done much to capitalize on it. You’d think the company that made official Minecraft and Rick and Morty crossovers would leap on a chance to remind people that the game that sold over 20 million copies uses their system and their lore, or even just that the game is a semi-sequel to an adventure book. They released official character sheets and some digital dice, but they don’t seem to be trying to use it to get new players on board.

It’s also debatable if it’s bringing new players. There have been a few tales here and there of people coming from Baldur Gate 3, but for a game that sold millions of copies, we’re still getting more Dimension 20 converts than Baldur’s Gate. And according to Larian, being part of the team that made the game on Wizards' side did nothing to help them avoid the chopping block.

Wizards: the fizzling

Wizards annual revenue call would have been an easy sport to indicate if sentiments on the player's side were still strong, and then Baldurs gate 3 happened. In comparison, the rest of Hasbro was down by 10%, a continuing trend of Wizards rising as Hasbro fell.

Wotc has been lauded by its parent company Hasbro for its continued success. This made it all the more confusing when Hasbro announced planned massive layoffs, and it was Wizards staff who were some of the first on the chopping block. Included in the layoffs were Mike Mearls, one of the Co-designers of 5th edition, and according to Larian, many of the folks who helped make Baldur’s Gate III happen on Wizards' side.

These layoffs began in December and are being staggered as to minimize market and press impact, so we can’t be sure how heavily this will affect Wizards until the end. This also puts them in a very strange position, as they’ll be losing folks as they prepare to launch a new edition, but that might not actually matter to Hasbro’s C-suite.

It’s starting to seem that the success of Baldur’s Gate 3’s success couldn’t have come at a worse time.Singing BG3’s success, Hasbro has approved a smattering of new D&D video games, including one in VR. They’ve also doubled down on the exploration of AI in both D&D and Magic the Gathering.This may mark a pivot of D&D away from the ttrpg that spawned it, turning the game into a “quirky origin” to a loose connection of movies, tv shows, and games a-la the MCU. Mean with Stranger things and the new book coming, Vecna is starting to give some Thanos Vibes.

As an aside, Wizards started the Ghostfire partnership days before the layoffs were announced, leading to this wonderful skit by XP to level 3.

Conclusion: Things are different and change takes time, please don’t yell at me.

While I can understand doomposters who are mad it’s not as loud, It can’t be overstated how much “Things didn’t return to normal” is a huge step forward. D&D has been the It Girl for ttrpgs for longer than most of the people reading this have been alive, and is backed by one of the largest toy companies in the world. It’s not gonna go bankrupt in an instant. The fact people feel like they can set themselves up as competitors, that players are backing them, and that there has been a cultural shift beyond “we remember this thing happened” the next time Wizards pulls something shady is massive. The fact I can find a regular Pathfinder Society game at this point more easily than Adventurers League would stun most people in 2015. People aren’t just paying lip service. They’re putting their games, their careers, and their wallets on the line.

The next year is going to be interesting. Wizards is planning a big finale for 5e with a multiverse jumping high-level adventure book where you’ll be going toe-to-toe with Vecna and then begin releasing OneDND over 6 months. This will also be enough time for both players and publishers that anything they start or put out will have happened after the OGL

Several of those competitors should have their material reach people's hands, and we can see if they’ll take off. We’ll see the full effects of the layoffs, some big actual plays likely swapping sytems (I mean CR has to use their own system), and this year's wave of Kickstarters. Things will be different, and that’s all we can expect.

(post marked NSFW just in case, as some of the links may lead to pages that contain references to sexual content)

Yes, you read that correctly. Before I dive into the how, as a word of warning:

Due to just how deep into the series the event in question took place, this writeup will naturally contain some spoilers. I'll do my best to limit anything unnecessary to vague references, but if you've ever been interested in the series and don't want to be spoiled, I'd suggest just bookmarking and coming back later.

To read the series officially, you can find it on the Viz Media website, as well as both the Viz and Shonen Jump apps. I cannot in good faith recommend any of the anime, but if you wanna watch instead of read, the full series is available on Crunchyroll in North America.

Now then, onto the show:

#Tokyo Ghoul?

For the uninitiated or blissfully unaware, Tokyo Ghoul was a wildly successful manga series, penned by one Ishida Sui. The full length ran in two parts in Shueisha's Weekly Young Jump, the first titled simply "Tokyo Ghoul", with the second adding the addendum ":re" to it (for the purpose of this write-up, any references to the series as a whole will use the first title, and details regarding the second part will be referred to as ":re"). It also had a variety of other media involved, including 3 full length anime adaptations, OVAs, light novels, spinoff manga, two live action movies, and five video games.

Many of you will, however, probably heard of its reputation as being EXCEEDINGLY edgy. Though it was marketed and aimed at young adult men, it was also incredibly popular with younger teen boys, and not terribly surprisingly, young women and teen girls as well. For a good few years, it was prime r/im14andthisisdeep material.

#Okay, but what is Tokyo Ghoul?

That is a question with a very long, rambling, and sometimes nonsensical answer. But I'll try to keep it short enough to understand.

Tokyo Ghoul takes place in, you guessed it, modern day Tokyo. A fictional version of the world, however, where man eating monsters known as, guessed it again, ghouls roam the underworld. Ghouls look, act, and talk just like normal humans, trying to blend in to society to avoid government agents that hunt them at every turn.

The plot kicks off when our main character, Kaneki Ken, is forcibly turned into a "half-ghoul" after a woman he's been crushing on lures him to a construction plot to eat him- except the both of them get horribly injured in a freak accident instead. While in the emergency room, the woman is declared deceased and her existence as a Ghoul is quickly swept under the rug, and the transplant that saves Kaneki results in him taking on the properties of a Ghoul. The worst of these seems to be that he can no longer eat any normal food, attempts to do so resulting in the most repulsive descriptions of taste I have ever had the pleasure of reading, aside from coffee. At least he has that, right?

As Kaneki panics, and fumbles around struggling to adjust to his body's new demands for sustenance, he stumbles upon new company in the form of a den of pacifistic ghouls who refuse to kill humans for their food, and takes him into their ranks. The rest of the plot is a wild ride that I won't get any further into, but the general gist of it is spent on Kaneki's internal struggle to maintain an identity. Is he still Kaneki Ken, a human college student stuck with a horrific set of circumstances? Or will he actually become a Ghoul, and toss aside his humanity? Without spoiling too much, the plot takes several very dark turns, and the finale to the first half of the series is infamously bleak.

#So about that title....

Yes yes, I'm getting there; but before I get onto the rough lead up in the second half of the series, we have to bring up the elephant in the room:

Shipping

Yes, this was coming the entire time. We all knew it. Remember that audience of young adult women I mentioned the series being popular with? Well as it happens, a large part of the appeal to them was Ishida's surprising propriety to give Kaneki serious, heartfelt emotional moments with a variety of characters, even enemies. Turns out having your life ruined makes you pretty open to trauma dumping on anyone who'll listen, even in the middle of a fight.

Kaneki was therefore immensely popular as one half of a great many popular ships, and the number of people he's paired with is frankly ridiculous, including but not limited to:

(these are the potentially NSFW links)

A prickly tsundere who berates him for whining so much, said tsundere's younger brother whom he beats half to death at one point, his human best friend, his favorite author, the woman who literally tried to eat him, a man who keeps trying to eat him, a ghoul mask maker so goth you'd swear his blood is ink, and literally every ghoul investigator he ever comes into contact with except the creepy old man.

With that said, as the story went on, many fans were aware and convinced of how far fetched their favored pairing likely was; by Kaneki's own admission his story was surely "a tragedy", and fans knew to expect some form of grim or gruesome end to the series.

#So, onto :re

Tokyo Ghoul:re marks the start of the second half of the story, and was published as a full sequel to the original run. Everything from here on may be heavy spoilers for the first half. You have been warned.

Following the events of the previous finale, which resulted in the disappearances and deaths of many characters, including Kaneki, :re picks up with a new protagonist, Sasaki Haise- except... no, wait, nevermind, that's just Kaneki again (the story treated this as a major revelation fairly early in the run, but fans had sussed out nearly immediately that it was in fact just our boy with a funky new hairdo and glasses to fix up those eyes he got gouged out).

After his big fight with the strongest investigator in Japan, Kaneki was left an amnesiac in the custody of the bureau. After they'd seen him wrecking up pretty much everyone in several major battles, they decided to take the sanest course of action, and with utmost care and caution, they- oh they made more half ghouls. And put Kaneki in charge of them, under the name Sasaki Haise. Funny enough, compared to his status in the original run, Sasaki was treated as more of a mother hen to his subordinates, and his most vulnerable moments early on were witnessed only by his own direct superior, who seemed to have a motherly tone of her own with him.

And so the second half of the story kicked off, following a few minor arcs before the big cat truly got out of the bag, and questions had to be asked. After the big bad of the series finally gets unveiled and then immediately usurped by a bigger asshole and giant conspiracies, the ride just keeps getting wilder. Kaneki changes sides back to the ghouls later on, and when he does, he finds himself meeting one of his old friends once again, one of the more popular people to pair him with no less.

And then Ishida Sui drew an entire chapter consisting of the two of them having their first time together, immediately after someone had tried to murder them.

The scene in question isn't graphic in nature, and is actually shown to be a very heartfelt moment between them both, but the intent behind it couldn't be questioned. Ishida had just set a ship on the water for real.

And oh, boy, were a LOT of people pissed. In general fans were excited to see something good finally happen to Kaneki, and hopeful that it would be a beacon for better times within the setting. But there was a very, VERY vocal portion of the fandom who took the chapter incredibly poorly. Because the character it all went down with wasn't the one they'd spent years with their headcanon on. Rants were posted, collections burned, people accused the author of baiting people with a scene of their preferred character complimenting Kaneki's muscles a few chapters prior during a hallucination. And, reportedly, even death threats were made towards Ishida on social media (thankfully, Ishida Sui is a pen name, and the identity of the author behind it remains private to this day, so no real danger was had).

In the wake of the tantrum, many people in the much more reasonable state of the community publicly condemned anyone sending threats, and a good few people were made fun of for burning hundreds of dollars in merchandise over a ship. The fandom was split, and whether it would be mended was something a bit unclear, even now. By this point, Tokyo Ghoul's mass appeal had faded, and this deep into the sequel series, it was mostly the more dedicated fans even tuning into the drama. And that's not even mentioning that much of the reaction took place on Tumblr.

#So what happened then?

After 6 years, a mass purge and exodus of tumblr, and a second- arguably third- botched anime adaptation straight, as well as Ishida moving onto new projects in the meantime, the drama in question seems inconsequential in hindsight. Its hard to gauge whether or not the people upset by it actually left the series behind, and to what length, as the explosion of complaints quickly died away after the initial outburst. But to people who still think back on the series fondly, it's hard to forget that time Ishida pissed people off with a chapter of vague, just off panel sex.

What is Teppen?

Teppen is a popular variety TV show airing in Japan. At Teppen, celebrities from all fields compete in different skills outside of their main profession. The most famous Teppen competition is the piano contest, in which celebrities play a song of their choosing on piano and are scored out of 100 by a group of judges. This competition is hosted yearly to semi-yearly, usually with 5-10 celebrities competing. Many celebrities, inside and outside of the music field, have competed over the years, including a few AKB48 members. (Japanese Wikipedia page for Teppen.)

What is AKB48?

AKB48 is a large Japanese idol group founded in 2005 by producer Akimoto Yasushi. They dominated the Japanese music charts of the 2010s, having 37 of the top 50 selling songs of the decade, including #1-#16. AKB48 is based in Akihabara, and has sister groups throughout Japan, such as HKT48 in Hakata, Fukuoka. Between the main group and the sister groups, they have hundreds of members at any one time. One such member was Matsui Sakiko.

Who is Matsui Sakiko?

Matsui Sakiko (born 1990) joined AKB48 in 2009 as part of the 7th generation. She grew up playing piano, and became AKB’s resident piano girl, often playing during concerts. As a member, she attended and then graduated from Tokyo College of Music, specializing in piano. She was never a particularly popular member, having never been picked for the lineup (senbatsu) of an AKB48 single (though she did join the senbatsu one time due to the yearly rock-paper-scissors tournament, but that’s a story for another time.)

1st-9th Teppen

Sakiko joined the Teppen piano competition for the first time in 2012. This was Teppen’s 3rd piano competition, the first two having been won by Sayuri (born 1969), a comedian famous for her piano skills, who was considered the queen of the contest. Sakiko managed to score 86 points, which won her the competition. This caught the eye of Akimoto Yasushi, AKB48’s producer, who allowed Sakiko to release a solo album, mostly of piano renditions of AKB songs.

Sakiko and Sayuri would join the 5th Teppen* in 2013. This time, Sayuri retook her crown, with Sakiko receiving 2nd place. They would meet again at the 7th Teppen in 2014, this time reversing their fortunes: Sakiko the champion and Sayuri the runner-up. A rivalry quickly ensued, and Teppen created a special one-off competition just between Sakiko and Sayuri at the 9th Teppen later that same year. Sayuri was the victor.

*There was no piano competition at the 4th, 6th, and 8th Teppen.

However, another member had entered the fray: HKT48’s Moriyasu Madoka.

Who is Moriyasu Madoka?

Moriyasu Madoka (born 1997) joined HKT48 in 2011 with their 1st generation. She was immediately popular, and selected for the senbatsu for nearly every HKT48 single. She was also known for her piano skills. She had participated in piano competitions throughout her childhood, placing 9th in a nation-wide junior high school competition. However, as a popular member, she was extremely busy and wasn’t practicing piano consistently. She participated for the first time in the 7th Teppen and did very well, receiving 87 points. She hadn’t seriously played piano in two-and-a-half years at that point. After the competition, she announced that she would start practicing again and would be back.

The 10th Teppen

Six celebrities entered the 10th Teppen in early 2015. The last three scheduled to perform were Madoka, Sakiko, and Sayuri, in that order. The high score when it came to Madoka’s turn was 84. Madoka performed a rendition of Kubota Saki’s 70s hit “Ihojin”, impressing the crowd. One of the guests yelled out, “You’ve already won, haven’t you!” Madoka received 91 points, enough to take the top spot at the time. Next was Sakiko. She performed “Let it Go” from Frozen. To her surprise, she got 94 points, passing Madoka. She said that, listening to Madoka’s performance backstage, she was about to give up emotionally. Last was Sayuri. She performed “A Cruel Angel's Thesis”, the opening song for Neon Genesis Evangelion. Sayuri got 95 points, making her the champion once again.

Here are all three performances. Madoka’s performance starts at 1:25, Sakiko’s at 5:35, and Sayuri’s at 10:00.

(I am a total layman when it comes to piano, so I would appreciate insight from anyone more musically-inclined! I tried not to give my opinion or analysis earlier, but as a layman, I thought Madoka’s performance was clearly the most impressive.)

Aftermath

There was a huge amount of controversy after the episode aired. Many believed that Madoka easily should have won. There were accusations that the judges rigged it to further the Sakiko vs Sayuri storyline. The station received dozens of complaints questioning their scoring criteria. Music producer Fukada Yasuhiko objected to the scoring, saying that if Madoka got a 94, then Sakiko and Sayuri should’ve gotten an 83 and 80, respectively. He even suggested this result will have negative effects for children learning piano. The station responded that there was no evidence of rigging and stated "the performance is judged comprehensively based on the difficulty level of the arrangement, the expressiveness of the pieces, such as whether the pieces are played with passion, and the accuracy of the pieces, such as whether there are any mistakes." Source (Japanese).

Following Years

Teppen continued with their piano competition. Madoka, Sakiko, and Sayuri all entered in the 11th Teppen in late 2015. This time, Madoka got 1st place, with Sakiko tying for 2nd.

Sakiko graduated from AKB48 in 2015, and Madoka graduated from HKT48 in 2021. Both of them continued to participate in Teppen, before and after graduation. Sakiko won the 13th, 14th, 19th, and 20th Teppen competitions. Madoka never received 1st place again, nor did Sayuri. However, Madoka, like Sakiko, did release a solo album of piano music in 2020. Both Sakiko and Madoka are active in the entertainment industry and as pianists.

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.

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Last week's Scuffles can be found here

Before any of this starts, I need to lay out some context.

The Hell is a MCYT?

MCYT, for the unaware, is an acronym that stands for "Minecraft YouTubers", though in actuality it tends to refer to any online video creator regardless of platform who makes Minecraft content. Contrary to popular belief, MCYT isn't a new term - it was coined sometime in the early 2010s to refer to Team Crafted and its adjacent creators, with the earliest uses I could find going back to 2014.

I won't go into the entire history of the MCYT community as it isn't particularly relevant, though there are some things worth noting. First is that older MCYT fandoms were a lot closer to typical fandoms than the "standoms" of today, likely due to Twitter being less popular at the time.

Second is that in the mid-2010s, MCYT went into almost radio silence as Minecraft content simply wasn't popular anymore. While some people like Hermitcraft stayed afloat just fine, Minecraft content wouldn't really reach its past levels of popularity again until the creation of SMPLive in 2019, which is the topic of today's post.

What is SMPLive?

SMPLive was a SMP (survival multiplayer) server created by CallMeCarson (though in reality, it was cscoop's idea) in 2019, with the gimmick being that when online on the server, players must be streaming their perspective. The server popularized livestreamed SMPs as a genre and is a good portion of the reason why Dream SMP and now QSMP exists. The server was comedy-focused, though had a notable amount of roleplay elements with events such as a cult war against "Spawn City" (the hub city of the server) and various court cases, and streamers would often play up characters for the audience. The best way I could describe it would be like a Minecraft sitcom.

SMPLive gained an unexpected audience with teenage girls, who formed a fan community on Twitter known as "SMPtwt", which was a stan Twitter group dedicated to the members of the server. SMPtwt would get themselves into a lot of controversies, but most of them aren't relevant to the topic at hand. There was also a notable following on Tumblr, known as SMPblr, which mainly seems to trace its origins back to 2018 Mineblr and Hermitblr (the Hermitcraft fandom on Tumblr) and tended to have very different views than SMPtwt (which will become relevant later on).

One side note regarding Hermitblr that is a topic for another post, but should at least be mentioned, is that a group of Hermitblr members actually harassed Hermitcraft member ZombieCleo off Tumblr for saying that if you have a problem with shipping, you should just block shippers instead of posting hate. This would set a precedent for MCYT fandom prioritizing their own moral beliefs over the wants of the people they claim to be fans of, which alongside the effects of SMPRonpa's aftermath, still affects the fandom to this day.

Survival of the Fittest

In late 2019, a young fan on Wattpad would begin publishing their Danganronpa AU fanfiction known as "SMPRonpa: Survival of the Fittest". Unbeknownst to them, this fic would gain a lot of popularity on SMPtwt, with fans livetweeting about updates and creators even noticing.

Danganronpa, for those unaware, is a popular Japanese visual novel series based around a group of students forced to participate in a "killing game", where the only way for someone to leave is to kill without getting caught.

That's right! Despite what would go down later, most content creators who acknowledged SMPRonpa did so positively - joking about it and discussing it with fans, chatting with the author, etc. One creator, ToxxxicSupport, would even defend it, saying it's "purely based on entertainment just like a horror movie would be - no one would ever want us to actually get hurt".

SMPblr, on the other hand, was vehemently opposed to the fic, and well, fanfiction in general, honestly, regardless of content - anything they considered "stan shit". These are beliefs they would claim to be based in the desire to not make content creators uncomfortable, though like with early Hermitblr's shipping war, a lot of it was based more in their own ideas of what's morally okay in fandom rather than anything a content creator had said themselves.

Regardless, the fic would be completed in December 2019, but what was to follow would permanently affect how the MCYT fandom would treat fanworks.

And before I forget to mention it, the freezer thing in the title is a joke related to a death in the fanfic that's been heavily memed even long after the fanfic was deleted - in which Slimecicle is hit over the head with a guitar and stuffed in a freezer. It's constantly poked fun at by fans and Charlie himself for its absurdity. Here's a funny clip of Sneegsnag joking about it.

Let's Address Fan Culture

On December 11, 2019, CallMeCarson would go live with a starting soon screen that simply contained the message:

this is gonna be a serious stream addressing some bullshit fan culture that has creeped my friends and I out. If you're coming here for laughs I'm sorry but occasionally I have to address more serious topics. I recommend going to schlatt's stream if you came here for fun or you are just an average viewer who doesn't care. he is playing Rabbids Go Home

(This would go on to be a widely mocked copypasta among both fans and other content creators.)

In this stream, Carson would go on to disavow various elements of "fan culture" that he claimed made him and his friends uncomfortable. While several topics were discussed, the most relevant to today's topic is that he would single out and discuss SMPRonpa by name.

This would lead to a wave of harassment and threats towards its teenage author, who was not expecting this to happen. They would follow their promise to delete the fanfic if someone mentioned being uncomfortable, and the fanfic was gone. In 2021 they would return to make this comment about the harassment they faced. (TW: mentions of death threats and suicidal thoughts)

The "serious stream" would also lead to the creation of the blog smp-boundaries which is now somewhat infamous for being outdated and sometimes including unsourced and misleading information, but was weaponized in many a fan discourse argument.

Lost to Time

And for 3 years, it was gone. Completely lost to time, with only snippets transcribed from screenshots that floated around what remained of SMPtwt and the controversy left to prove it ever existed. And a lot of people thought, given it was published on Wattpad (which makes it significantly difficult to download works) and the timeframe, that it would never resurface.

A lot of people would search. It became sort of the white whale of lost media related to MCYT - everyone wanted to read it, out of morbid curiosity or genuine interest.

It's probably also worth noting that in 2021, CallMeCarson would be exposed for sexual misconduct with fans and completely disavowed by his former friends and co-workers. Some of these friends and co-workers would also speak about their own experiences with Carson, with Schlatt saying he had lied to him about seeking therapy when Schlatt just wanted to see him improve, and his former roommate Noah Hugbox recounting Carson's rude treatment of him and their other two roommates Cscoop and Traves in an interview (something that would be corroborated in Schlatt's video, where he mentions hearing horror stories from Carson's roommates).

Years went past, and the fic continued to remain lost, but it became sort of an urban legend, a warning fans would tell each other. During the height of Among Us and Squid Game's popularity, you'd hear people mention SMPRonpa as a "what not to do".

Additionally, with no way to verify the fic's content, rumors would spread making it out to be a lot worse than it is. While SMPRonpa, in actuality, was a violent (but not notably graphic) fanfiction based on a video game, with time it became this boogeyman of a fic to avoid becoming the next iteration of, a gory mess about killing content creators and their families in real life. (Note: No content creator families are involved in SMPRonpa at all, besides one very short flashback with no violence.)

In January of 2022, the author reached out to me on Tumblr after seeing a post I had made about the search, and told me that they could provide more information and that they no longer cared about the blowback from the fic. While they didn't send the full fic, they did confirm that it still existed in some form, and gave me a word count.

The Triumphant Return

On January 5, 2024 - ironically, the same day 3 years ago that CallMeCarson would be exposed - I was sent a copy of SMPRonpa by an anonymous individual. A full copy.

I knew it was real - everything lined up perfectly with the many screenshots I had collected over the years. The word count matched what the author had told me in our conversation. We finally had our white whale.

And so, I published the copy, with a note asking the reader to not seek out the author, who had - on and wanted nothing to do with the fic anymore. For context, I'm a larger blog in the MCYT fandom on Tumblr, but Twitter is still the larger platform, and SMPLive had become a very niche thing at this point, being long over. I was not expecting the reaction this find would get.

Actually, it took a day for Twitter to find it. But when they did…

Oh boy.

You may be surprised, however, based on everything leading up to this, to find out that the reaction to this finding was overwhelmingly positive. And not just from fans, either.

Let's Address Fan Culture (Again)

That same day, popular streamer and former SMPLive member Sneegsnag would go live with a familiar starting soon message. (And Danganronpa music in the background.)

Of course, this wasn't really a "serious stream" - it was a full-blown mockery of Carson's stream from years prior. Sneeg would say in this stream that other than Carson, no one had really cared about SMPRonpa, and he would stress his viewers to leave the author alone. Honestly, I can't do this stream justice in text, there's a short fanmade highlight video here for those interested. It is very silly.

Fans would draw comparisons to Ranboo's 2023 horror project Generation Loss, as both had a central message about streamers playing manufactured personalities and were violent, and featured instances where the audience voted on whether the protagonist would live or die. (It's worth noting, perhaps, that Ranboo was a fan of SMPLive before becoming a content creator, and Generation Loss stars Slimecicle and Sneegsnag, two former SMPLive members who were in SMPRonpa, as its main supporting characters.)

Another former SMPLive member featured in the fic, Pokay, would do a livestream reading the fic. While he makes a lot of jabs at it (mostly for the writing quality), he makes it clear that he's being light-hearted and that no ill will is held towards the author. It's also very fun, and worth a watch, it's on his official VOD channel here.

I think I covered most of the information related to this topic, but I highly recommend you watch my friend LumenVale's video on the topic as well! It's a great video. This is also my first HobbyDrama writeup, but I may return to tell more stories in the future, as I have many regarding this community and its happenings.

This is my first hobbydrama post and it's recounting some drama that happened slightly before I joined the hobby. So I hope you will bear with me regarding sourcing. I like history, I like learning new things, I don't actually enjoy hunting for drama that much.

First, some context.

Star Wars action figures have a long and storied history which I won't recount much of here. What you mainly need to know is the license originally went to Kenner and played a significant part in making them a relative giant in the toy industry. Producing 3.75 inch figures (1/18 scale) that became an industry standard, many a child in the ancient years of 1977-1985 enjoyed the wonders of Star Wars through Kenner toys.

But what does one do when they are no longer a child and longs for the nostalgia of yesteryear? They pay exorbitant amounts for unopened figures and convince themselves plastic in a box is display art of course! Discontinued in 1985 to lagging sales and renewed in 1995 to capitalize on movie remasters, a new line of Star Wars figures coming from Kenner (Now owned since 1991 by Hasbro) appeared. They actually looked good and not like questionably carved lumps of plastic! Incredible. The golden age of Star Wars Action Figure collecting had arrived.

We now skip ahead a few years in our tale. It is a dark time for the galaxy. Kenner's headquarters were closed in the year 2000 and their product lines merged into Hasbro. George Lucas releases his well-regarded prequel masterpieces and Star Wars toys line an entire aisle in Toys R Us. George Lucas's prequel masterpieces turn out to be not so well-regarded and Toys R Us closes because some asshole decided to dump debt onto them and then declare bankruptcy. The mighty aisles of Star Wars toys eventually fall silent.

But what's this? A New Hope on the horizon?! Disney purchases Star Wars?! Sequel movies are being made?! They'll be good?! This can only mean one thing. More Star Wars Action Figures.

You now have the context to begin our story. You see Star Wars collecting had become a big thing, and it makes up a reasonable (in times, perhaps the majority) of sales of figures. The most die-hard of these adult collectors have been collecting a long time and have large, sealed in-box collections of figured taking up space on their walls. They obviously want to continue expanding this collection of matching boxes, and Hasbro wants money so a compromise is made in the Senate.

Hasbro releases not one, not two, but three Star Wars action figures lines. The first two, Retro and Vintage, are 3.75 inch and styled after the original 1977 line and the 1995 line respectively. The third, 2013's Black Series, are about 6 inches (1/12 scale) and more expensive. We are interested in the third.

I can't really say what the original plans for the Black Series line was, because that's ancient history I wasn't around for. The initial few years of the figures were... Not good. Bad sculpts, horrific faces, over production of expensive figures for a unproven block of sequels meant the line struggled. Star Wars mania meant the line didn't die.

By the release of Rise of Skywalker things were looking grim for Star Wars, but had improved for Black Series. It was still expensive, but new improvements in action figure technology meant the faces looked good now. Whatever the line had originally been intended to be, it was now squarely aimed at adult collectors looking for Star Wars characters to display on the shelves and rising prices mostly excluded anyone but that market.

Oh, also there were life-size replicas of helmets and lightsabers under the Black Series logo, nobody sane knows why. We're not talking about it*

This finally brings us to our tale, if you are unaware, Hasbro actually makes a number of nostalgia bait toy lines aimed at adult collectors now. They sell these through retailers and the Hasbro Pulse site, where you can also find The HASLAB. Haslab is basically a crowd funded effort to get particularly high-budget items into the hands of collectors that Hasbro might not otherwise be willing to make. Basically it's a bit like Kickstarter, buyers will make a pledge for a product and if that product meets a certain number of pledges, Hasbro will make it for everyone who pledged (and paid of course). Additionally, meeting certain pledge thresholds means Hasbro can afford producing some extras to go along with your expensive piece of plastic. All in all, it's a good system that lets people get things they wouldn't otherwise, like a 27 inch, $575 Unicron.

In 2021, the Black Series got their turn. The very first Haslab Black Series and oh boy is it a doozy, The Rancor. For the low price of $350, a 1/12 scale rancor could be yours! If enough backers are met, you could also get some fabulous additions! A Gamorrean Guard! A bunch of...skulls and cardboard! Salacious Crumb! Luke Skywalker! We've had three of those figures released before!

...Now if you are a Star Wars fan, you may perhaps be wondering about some notable, shall we say, absences from that list of figures. Malakili would be later added to the base funding line of the Rancor after some very negative feedback, but that negative feedback was in large part centered around one other character.

Oola

The unfortunate ill-fated dancer at Jabba's Palace has a rather interesting toy history. She's only appeared in 1/18 scale twice, once as a mail-away that a lot of people missed and made her one of the more valuable figures for a while and once as a Wal-mart exclusive alongside Jabba himself. She's never appeared in 1/12 scale. Why? Well probably because she's a female side character with a few seconds screen time. Traditionally those aren't terrible popular with kids. You also kind of need Jabba to go along with her, which raises the price on buying them together instead of say, Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia. Also, possibly, Lucasfilm didn't want to deal with moms complaining about little Jimmy seeing a half-naked lady from his favorite Star Wars movie on the toy aisle. Who knows?

THE FANS KNOW! You see this isn't the only snub for a scantly clad Star Wars lady. Slave Leia, AKA Jabba's slave outfit, AKA Huttslayer Leia, AKA that poster you had on your wall has had exactly one Star Wars Black Series release in the product's first year and it is an abomination

Why would Hasbro do this? Why would they not make a beloved cultural icon for young teenage men everywhere with the new photo-real facepainting technology? Why would they not include Oola in the Rancor's backer rewards? There's only one possible option. Conspiracy! Disney, Hasbro and Lucasfilm were conspiring to keep scantly clad female Star Wars characters out of the hands of adult collectors because of the unfortunate implications of sex slavery in GEORGE LUCAS'S STAR WARS!

Meanwhile, Yakface (Not his real name), a prominent leaker and source of news of shipping data for Star Wars products, mostly Black Series and Vintage Collection, posts a funny slogan on his twitter which is preserved on reddit here. This accidentally sparked a rallying cry for wrongfully deprived adult collectors of their scantily clad female action figures. No Oola. No Moolah. They would not be denied by woke Disney, Hasbro and Lucasfilm. NO OOLA NO MOOLAH!

...

Yeah so the Rancor didn't get funded.

If you clicked the link up earlier you might have noticed, 500 backers off. There was anger, there was finger pointing, there were ragebait videos. There was a Megathread

It wasn't really Yakface's fault. He got pointed at as a scapegoat by a few people, but generally most people agree it was a mix of poor backing rewards (Nobody wanted cardboard murals), bad communication (Yakface did more promotional work on the Rancor's funding stages and the addition of Malakili than Hasbro's socials did) and an expensive price point for a relatively young toy line (Most adults with Star Wars money collect Vintage Collection).

As for a supposed ban on Slave Leia and Oola, both have been featured as merchandise in Disney's parks.

Haslab has been a relatively successful program. Funding about 75% of their projects. Notably, the only other Black Series item, the Third Sister Lightsaber Replica* has not been funded.

Well, that's the sad tale of the Rancor. Never to grace our non-existent shelf space with his glorious girth. The only prototype that exists probably sits on some executives table or some Hasbro museum somewhere. Which would make for an excellent heist movie, but not a very good funding reward.

Disclaimers:
I don't care how you wish to display your figures, in box, out of box, it's your figure! Do what you want.
I would've paid $350 for the Rancor, fortunately for my wallet I missed it.
I'd like scantily clad women for my Star Wars collection.
Please reline the Replica Helmets and Lightsabers* to something less confusing Hasbro, thank you.
*I lied.

Quick Definitions

TVXQ are a K-pop group, a very long-lasting and frankly iconic one. They just caught up on their 20 year anniversary (and released their first Korean album in, like, 4 years!) last year, having debuted at the end of 2003, and they have as colorful as a history as that kind of lifespan suggests. Previous write-ups on this subreddit have covered things such as lawsuits, gay shipping, and crazy stalkers — that (and the fact that they have multiple write-ups here in the first place) says a lot about what kind of stuff TVXQ got involved with. Since this story takes place in 2004, TVXQ will be treated as they were then: a fresh-faced, 5-member group taking over the scene.

A few other terms to know would be Cassiopeia or Cassies, referring to TVXQ's fandom; SM Entertainment, the company that made and manages TVXQ; and rotation, referring to changing out members of a group. Other than that, if you're familiar with K-pop terminology, you shouldn't have much problem navigating this. So, let's set the scene.

(Also, a note before we start — a majority of the posts linked here will be in Korean, as most English fan forums from the time are long gone. I can't speak much about what happened overseas, but there is this blog post from an international Cassie who was there at the time. It's a good read — I recommend it for those wanting a first-hand account. I wasn't there at the time, so I can only repeat and make inferences from what I read!)

The Rotation Rumors

It was 2004. After a 2-single run, TVXQ had just released their 1st full album, TRI-ANGLE, and their fanbase was as strong as ever. With this album came a "storybook" like their previous releases — a "storybook" in TVXQ terms is like your normal K-pop photobook but with more stuff. This storybook, however, came with even more stuff than usual; most importantly, it contained essays written from the group members' perspective. One of these essays explained the process of forming the group: SM divided trainees into groups, choosing their lead vocalists to create a "dream team." That was describing past events, as the storybook explicitly stated that this "dream team" was TVXQ’s predecessor. But the statement following, saying that SM was preparing various solo "projects" for the members of TVXQ, intensified the misconception. Cassiopeias — TVXQ’s fandom — saw this as TVXQ being a project group where members could leave for solo activities and be replaced. They could be replaced! They could be replaced, and no fan wants a group where their bias could disappear willy-nilly.

So TVXQ fans got worried. At first, it started as simple talk of a Chinese member, and fans were up in arms at SM Entertainment, TVXQ’s company. As far as taking action, some talked about boycotting TVXQ related products and protesting in front of SM (A fun note is that those who actually did protest in front of SM were told exactly what SM would say time and time again... that no one was being replaced). TVXQ’s fanbase slanted young back then, so a lot of people believed the rumor without questioning, but some cast doubt on this affair. All the while, during an uncertain time in Cassieland, one forum came upon the nation — a little place called the "Seryun Sejun Official Anti Cafe."

Seryun Sejun, Please Disappear

There were scattered talks of a Seryun Sejun before the big fuss. Apparently, the "Seryun" part comes from a stage name the youngest member, Changmin, was supposed to have before going with Max. (TVXQ’s stage names were formatted like [stage name] [real first name], e.g. U-Know Yunho.) Back then, the rumor was the same, with Sejun replacing one of the original TVXQs, but nobody had any reason to believe it. Now, though, everybody was looking for a name to this menace, and Seryun Sejun came like a five course meal to a starving child.

The "Seryun Sejun Official Anti Cafe" (세륜세준 공식 안티카페) was founded on November 19, 2004, around the same time the rotation rumors gained traction. I don’t think the place started the rumors — it probably started from whisperings by the same people who spouted them in the previous months — but it’s a very important site in Sejun history. SGA, as it shortened itself (based on its Korean initials), was hosted on the (still-existent) Daum Cafe service, a place where anyone can make their own community. Think of it as a mix between a web forum and Reddit. But SGA paid host to a curious image of an incomplete TVXQ. Taken from the same storybook that started the mess, the picture depicts 4 members of the original TVXQ — U-Know Yunho (whose name I should note is misspelled in the picture as "Yunno"), Xia Junsu, Micky Yoochun, and Max Changmin — but where Jaejoong should be, a stranger is in his place. As this picture was on the front page of the Seryun Sejun Official Anti Cafe, this stranger was purported to be none other than Sejun, who would take Jaejoong’s spot in TVXQ.

The day after SGA's founding, SM stated to news outlets that they wouldn’t be changing out anyone. At the time, the rumor was still new, so with SM's statement it looked like it was starting to cool down. TVXQ fans were still worried, though, and they were still flaunting the "5 - 1 = 0" mentality. (Silly TVXQ fans, that's not how math works!) But on November 21, 2004, something happened that would set the scandal aflame.

The Yoochun Crying Incident, and the Endless Rumor Mill

The 326th episode of Inkigayo, a show where K-pop artists come to perform and promote their songs, was aired on the 21st of November 2004. One of the many highly regarded artists appearing on that day was TVXQ, who sang their song "I Believe" — but during the performance, Yoochun burst into tears. Not just domestic fans, but international fans got worried — what could have driven Yoochun to tears? The answer that many Korean fans came to was that it was the member rotation. From this point, things got serious.

Sejun became the TVXQ fandom's number one enemy in the blink of an eye. Not only was he going to replace Jaejoong, he had also made Yoochun cry! Everyone wanted to know who this menace was, and they flooded to SGA, making it reach 1,000 members by the 22nd. Some fans were enraged — like any good anti, Sejun's detractors made disparaging nicknames, the most common of which being Segyun (meaning "virus" in Korean). Some used a calmer, more polite approach to protect TVXQ, believing the rumor, while skeptics kept their heads on the ground. Others thought more positively of Sejun, though they were not the majority by far. What's definite is that a large amount of Cassies were under the impression that this was happening — there were pictures of this interloper, letters apparently written by members' friends, even news articles seemingly confirming it. (We'll get to those later.) It was an emergency situation.

But the funniest part of this is the rumor mill. The most consistent claim was that Sejun was Chinese, due to SM saying in another statement that they were planning to add a Chinese member. Sometimes Sejun was the son of Lee Soo-man, founder of SM Entertainment and number two enemy of Cassies at this point. There was that one post that claimed Jaejoong was in a coma and that 2 Cassies had ended their own lives? And according to one Naver KnowledgeIN post, Jaejoong joined YG after being replaced by Sejun. Then there was Makkang Joongi, someone who I couldn't fit into the main section. Makkang Joongi had already been floating around before the rotation rumors, and after them he made a bit of a comeback as another potential replacer. This "Makkang" figure was actually the actor Lee Joongi, who was an SM trainee when TVXQ was being planned. From this, people started saying he was supposed to be TVXQ's "6th member" but quit before making it. And then Sejun happened, and suddenly this unassuming actor became Cassies' number three enemy.

The rumor mill went so far that it spread to English speaking fan communities, who knew even less than domestic fans. See, K-pop fans might have it easy now with real-time translations of everything their fave says, but back in 2004 non-Korean Cassies saw, then heard, then panicked. Both sides of the fandom knew very little, but they were all on the same page — TVXQ should be TVXQ, and they would not take any effort to break them apart.

The Truth of Seryun Sejun

Amongst the chaos and panic, there were forces that tried calming the unruly fandom down. One of them was SM Entertainment, whose method of comfort was affirming the addition of a sixth member... but only in China. SM explained that they'd find TVXQ's Chinese member through an American Idol-style audition program called 'H.O.T Asia' and have the group promote in China (but nowhere else!) as six. This was consistent with basically everything else directly from SM — from the original storybook to accounts of a meeting that happened on the 20th after a tiny protest — but fans only wanted TVXQ's word. Those who didn't consider that SM could add a member but not replace anyone used this to brush off SM's response as an excuse. There were even claims that the article was an effort by Lee Soo-man himself to "shut people up". Even a date for when Sejun would join circulated — November 26th, after the Asia Song Festival. However it was, people were not willing to get off the train.

But on the 26th, 5 days after the Yoochun crying incident, TVXQ opened their mouths. TVXQ appeared in front of SM's office, surrounded by dozens of fans, and denied that there would be any member "rotation", as they called it. Yoochun explained that his tears during Inkigayo were from being moved by the fans' signs saying "TVXQ have to be only 5 members". They said it themselves — "Please never believe rumors. Unless we say it with our own lips, never believe it. Understand?" Yunho's dad even posted on a TVXQ forum, affirming that no one would be changed out.

Some fans did understand, and the situation did go quiet at the end of November. But others, of course, thought it was coached. The reason why Yoochun'd cried had changed a few times before (a Star News article from the 21st said Chun was just caught up in the song's vibe), and the members' indirect way of speech caused a few to come to the conclusion that Lee Soo-man (again) had ordered TVXQ to do this. A lot of people also used H.O.T.'s disbandment as an example that SM could break a promise (really, a lot of this animosity towards SM was probably inherited from H.O.T. fans.) The rotation rumor made a slight comeback in December, when TVXQ were about to release their Christmas album, along with a rumor that their dorm had been split up. As TVXQ continued activities unscathed, though, the rumor slowly but surely disappeared, becoming a thing of the past by 2005.

But the most important thing is — who was Seryun Sejun? The man most commonly purported to be Seryun Sejun was actually Choi Siwon, SM trainee and future Super Junior member. I recall fellow Suju bandmate Shindong saying in a Beatles Code episode that SM would take pictures to see how a potential group lineup looks, so it's very likely the infamous Sejun picture was an example of that. (You can see in the full storybook page that there are various arrangements of TVXQ and future SuJu members, all marked with dates before TVXQ's debut.) The confusing part was that on the Korean search engine Daum, Siwon would come up as Seryun Sejun if you typed the latter keyword in. It gave the impression that Seryun Sejun was Choi Siwon's stage name (and led to people sending misguided hate to him), but that wasn't the case. Anyhow, somehow Siwon himself got word of it, and though I can't find definite proof that the post was written by him, this is allegedly how he responded on his fancafe:

According to the rumors heard these days...there's a rumor that I'm called Seryun Sejun. This is my first time hearing this... I heard it for the first time today after finishing work, haha. I'd gained lots of anti fans without me knowing..;;

It seems there are a lot of misunderstandings~ please understand... ^^ I'm not Seryun Sejun! I'm Choi Siwon. Choi. Si. Won!! I also heard that they said at the press conference that the TVXQ rotation rumor isn't true. I'll stop here today ^ㅡ^

The Legacy of Seryun Sejun

2005 came around, and the TVXQ rotation scare became less of a possibility. The rumor did keep coming up throughout the year, but the H.O.T. Asia show never happened and no Chinese member joined TVXQ. Choi Siwon debuted with Super Junior in November 2005, and the Makkang Joongi mentioned earlier got his big break with the film The King and the Clown at the end of of the year. As the years passed, Seryun Sejun became an embarrassing past for the TVXQ fandom. One massive diatribe with lines such as "can you [Sejun] be as sleazy as Micky Yoochun?" and "do you have a pretty younger sister in Gwangju like U-Know Yunho?" became especially infamous, and Seryun Sejun was often invoked as a funny, cringey rumor and a piece of "dark history" from TVXQ's early days. For a short time in the early 2010s, the phrase "Seryun [blank], please disappear" (derived from the common Cassie catchphrase "Seryun Sejun, please disappear") became a snowclone to describe things you don't like and want to disappear (like "세륜날씨 사라져주세요", or "Seryun weather, please disappear"). It seems so silly looking back on it, but Cassies back them were really serious, and in the face of the lawsuit (where three of the members left the group) all the "5 - 1 = 0" stuff rang familiar. Seryun Sejun might not have been real, but the teamwork and will (albeit horribly stubborn) by Cassies all over the world was.

TW: Bullying

Before we begin, a glossary of terms for those who may need one. In particular, 'graduation' (a voluntary retirement of a given VTuber identity, whether indie or corporate) will come up a lot; the other specific term is '[Virtual] Livers' (rhyming with 'divers'), Nijisanji's specific term for its VTubers.

Writing this in early March 2024, chances are that the name 'Nijisanji' will ring a bell if you have engaged with just about any online space with even the slightest connection to weeb fandoms in the last few weeks. The scandal resulting from the termination of Nijisanji English's Selen Tatsuki on 5 February – exactly a month ago at the time of posting – has become a matter of considerable attention reaching well outside the VTuber bubble, and may well hang over the agency for the rest of its existence. But it's worth remembering that this was not the first scandal to rock Nijisanji, and especially not the first to revolve around its international branches. The recent blow-up has some rather older precedents.

Where did Nijisanji come from?

On 29 November 2016, tech startup Activ8 debuted Kizuna AI, voiced and acted by Kasuga Nozomi, as the first self-proclaimed 'Virtual YouTuber'. Unbeknownst to her creators, their apparent dominance of the medium was not to last. AI's time as the face of the industry was to end in flames in 2019, as Activ8's attempts to follow through on their original vision of the 'eternal idol' ran up against a fandom that had developed its own set of expectations about VTubing, driven by the proliferation of new VTuber personas that had become inextricably tied to the talents behind them. And at the arguable forefront of that movement was Nijisanji.

Nijisanji, officially styled NIJISANJI and often informally stylised as 2434 (ni shi san shi), is the brainchild of Riku Tazumi (born c.1996), who dropped out of his studies at Waseda University in 2017 to establish Ichikara Inc, and set to work developing a Live2D tracking app, offering a much cheaper and less labour-intensive alternative to the full-body studio 3D then in vogue. On 11 January 2018, Ichikara publicly unveiled Nijisanji, the name of its official app, and opened auditions; eight successful applicants debuted from 8 to 16 February. Nijisanji's bursting onto the scene with Live2D arguably kicked off modern VTubing as we know it, leading competitors like Cover to copy the format, and paving the way for an eventual explosion in the number of independent VTubers as the cost of entry continued to fall. Aggregator site Userlocal would claim that there were over 1000 VTubers by the end of March, and 6000 by the end of the year; 61 belonged to Nijisanji. (source).

We could get bogged down in early Nijisanji history forever, but the meat of this story requires us to leave Japan and 2018 behind and move away in both space and time. Before we get to that, though, why do Japanese VTuber agencies set up overseas operations, anyway?

Why expand overseas?

Even today, the exact limit of the Japanese market for VTubers is not really known, but from the very beginning, the industry has been keenly aware both of the eventual limits of the domestic space and the potential room for growth in foreign markets that will be receptive to Japanese cultural exports. Rarely has a media company sought to have less of an audience. But we also ought to account for the fact that a lot of VTuber agencies have their origins as tech startups, where you get a lot of initial funding and then need to find a way to become profitable before it runs out. Overseas expansion carries with it a certain amount of risk, but when there is only so much money before it all runs out, those are risks that may need taking.

Where to first?

If you look at the history of the major VTuber ventures, it is notable that their first priority of expansion has usually been China, then other Asian regions, and then finally the English-language market, if they ever get there. Regional markets are just easier logistically (both in terms of timezone difference and in terms of shipping for physical goods), and presumed to be more predictable in terms of spending, and historically, the largest of these markets has been the Chinese one. Activ8 did some limited English outreach with Kizuna AI, but their experiment with Multiple AI explicitly included one voice actor to serve as her Mandarin voice. Hololive's overseas expansion went in the order China -> Indonesia -> English. Brave Group, whose modus operandi has often revolved around buying up existing ventures rather than introducing its own, acquired the Chinese agency MUGEN-LIVE in 2022, and only started an English-language branch with V4Mirai the year after. What I'm saying is that we in the Anglosphere have tended to be a pretty distant, fourth-tier concern for the Japanese VTuber industry. Nijisanji would be no exception.

Only Nijixon could go to China

When I earlier wrote that Nijisanji debuted 61 Livers in its first 10 months, that was not entirely true. Nijisanji had licensed its app and its branding to a different company, who proceeded to launch Nijisanji Shanghai and Nijisanji Taipei, each of 8 members, at the end of August 2018. In other words, some 77 people signed on to become official Nijisanji talents that year.

Trying to find out what exactly happened to 二次三次虚拟主播企划 (er ci san ci xuni zhubo qihua, or 'Nijisanji Virtual Streamer Project'; evidently sometimes shortened to '"Nijisanji" Project') is tricky given the relative lack of attention from back in the day and the retroactive scrubbing of a lot of material. Thanks to /u/kirandra I was put on to this writeup concerning Nijisanji Shanghai, but this too is a rather later retrospective. Probably the only comprehensive timeline comes from the relevant page on Chinese ACGN wiki Moegirl.org.cn, which has no citations. So, bear in mind that the following is pretty dry and summative because I have to work with what I could find.

On 8 July 2018, a Facebook page for Nijisanji Taipei emerged, with a cover image featuring silhouettes of its eight members. The project would be formally announced on the 17th on Facebook (focussing on Taipei), Bilibili (focussing on Shanghai), and Weibo (ditto) with auditions open until the 27th. Over the course of the next few weeks, promo images would be teased until, on 24 August, both branches formally began debuting talents.

The debut announcement simply said that Nijisanji had partnered with unspecified 'local company/ies' (在地企業), something which may at the time have been seen as innocuous but which, with the benefit of hindsight, was a bit of a major red flag. Per the summary by Shitantan in the linked writeup, it very quickly became apparent that the quality of models in both instances was noticeably poorer than what was on offer from Nijisanji's main branch. Things got worse after debut, as rumour had it that agency management were abusive towards their talents, linked to a continual wave of graduations from the Shanghai branch which began in November with the exit of Siddel. By March 2019, only one of eight remained, Saitania Liun Linse, and her graduation had already been announced and scheduled for that June (in the event, she brought it forward to 10 May). In mid-February, Monmon would be the first Taipei member to graduate.

The news then came, in late March or early April 2019, that 'Nijisanji' Project's affiliation with Ichikara would cease, and the remaining seven members of Nijisanji Taipei, along with Saitania, would rebrand as VEgo. This was formally announced on 2 April on both Weibo (this was their final post on the site) and Facebook, although the process of rebranding had started a little earlier. VEgo trundled along for another year, but continued losing members until the final one, Talency, left on 31 March 2020, having been alone at the agency since the departure of Siarurin on 8 February. And so came the end of Nijisanji's first overseas foray. Whatever specific events behind the scenes caused all these exits may never be known at this point, but clearly neither the setup nor the management of the two branches was done with particularly great competence.

Tangent: It is commonly asserted across several sites, primarily wikis (including Moegirl, Chinese Wikipedia, and the Virtual YouTubers Wiki on Fandom.com), that Nijisanji's partner was the Japanese-owned, Taiwan-centred influencer and marketing firm, Capsule Inc., with considerable inconsistency over whether it was the 'core' business in Taiwan, its (now-defunct) Hong Kong subsidiary, or its (still-active) Japanese subsidiary that was running the show. However, neither I nor those who helped me with this writeup have found any evidence that Capsule was Ichikara's partner in 2018-19. Capsule's website has press releases going back to late 2018 that make no mention of this partnership, nor of VEgo, nor do social media posts from 'Nijisanji' Project/VEgo mention Capsule's involvement. Moreover, Capsule has since been involved in collaboration marketing projects with both Hololive and Nijisanji, something you wouldn't expect if the latter agency still remembered them for botching their first China project.

However, Nijisanji Shanghai and Taipei did not mark the end of Nijisanji's attempts to edge into the Chinese market. Barely two and a half weeks after 'Nijisanji' Project's rebrand to VEgo, on 19 April 2019 came the announcement of VirtuaReal, a new VTuber project based on a joint venture between Ichikara and Bilibili, with Ichikara licensing their proprietary tech while management would be local, and if this is giving you flashbacks well yeah basically, it is the same idea just without the Niji branding. Without an account I can't see many of the comments on the Bilibili piece, but I will say that it is very amusing to me that of the three that I am allowed to see, one of them is someone remarking:

上海2434屍骨未寒

Which, to translate idiomatically, would be along the lines that:

Shanghai Nijisanji's corpse is still warm

And that really made my day.

I won't go into VirtuaReal at length, for a couple of reasons: firstly, I don't want to get bogged down in the details, and secondly, while its relationship with Niji is really about the same as the earlier entities (its main thing is it uses Nijisanji's tech, and it has some cross-branch collaboration both in 'official' events and between talents), the fact it doesn't even use the Nijisanji name marks it as something other than a simple extension of the brand. I'm sure the group has had its own triumphs and tribulations, but I am happy to place it outside the purview of this post.

An Indone-jerk reaction

Midway through its invasion of China, Nijisanji struck southwards into Indonesia, and… wait no that's the Japanese Empire during WW2. But it does apply to both. Nijisanji's third foray into overseas expansion would move into what is arguably one of the more unexpected VTuber markets to the layperson, that being Indonesia. But Indonesia has a lot of attractions for a VTuber company: there's a strong demand for Japanese cultural exports, a relatively ubiquitous lingua franca in the form of Bahasa Indonesia, and also a relatively decent standard of English that can help Indonesian streamers reach out to a more global audience.

Nijisanji started auditions for its Indonesian branch on 19 July 2019, and saw its first 'wave' of debuts on 17 September with Hana Macchia, ZEA Cornelia, and Taka Radjiman, whose group was later informally dubbed 3SetBBQ. Five more 'waves', one of four members and the rest of three, would debut until 31 July 2021, for a total of 19 talents signing on with Nijisanji Indonesia, or NijiID for short.

NijiID's first wave would be one of, if not the, first groups of agency VTubers in Indonesia. While it was overshadowed in viewership by its successors, locally-based agency Maha5 (pronounced Mahapanca, first debuts in October 2019) and Hololive's Indonesian branch (first debuts in April 2020), it was nevertheless well-liked by fans as a cohesive community unto itself, as well as having very good ties with its notional competitors, with frequent collaboration between the three. Throughout 2022 and going into early 2023, an informal unit known to some as HoloNiji5, comprising two members from each agency, had cropped up, although unfortunately Zen Gunawan's graduation from Maha5 in June 2023 marked the beginning of the end of that particular partnership.

In contrast to the supposed horror-show behind the scenes of 'Nijisanji' Project Shanghai, fan and talent opinion on Nijisanji Indonesia and its talent management was almost universally positive, especially in retrospect. Merch arrived on time, talents didn't complain about mismanagement, and they were able to get along with each other. For its second anniversary in 2021, NijiID pulled out all the stops to do a 7-hour 'Virtual Summit', held partly in VRChat, accompanied by a merch drop featuring a body pillow depicting 'Staff-san', the personification of NijiID's management.

'Hang on,' you may be thinking, 'why is this all in the past tense?'

Hahahahaaaaaa oh god.

On 17 February 2022, Anycolor (which Ichikara had renamed itself to in May 2021) announced that Nijisanji Indonesia was going to be merged with the main branch of Nijisanji at the beginning of the Japanese financial year in April, with its management integrated into the 'main' agency staff. NijiID would no longer exist as a separate branch on the books. This was also to happen to Nijisanji Korea (covered later), but not to Nijisanji English. In the long run, resentment over this decision has been very visible, thanks to NijiID's fans being both more numerous and being more fluent in English than Nijisanji Korea's. At the time though, responses were a little more mixed, with some cautious optimism about the benefits of closer integration with the core agency in Japan, but also concern over the loss of the branches' distinct identity. Of particular note was the implied end of any future debuts in either market, with then-ongoing audition and onboarding processes for both branches being cancelled at whatever stage of completion they may have been at.

To this day, the exact reasons behind the merger are unknown. Officially, Anycolor's reasoning was that it would allow for more efficient management of their talents, a statement that rang a little hollow for fans of NijiID who had (correctly, it seems) never been under the impression that the Indonesia branch was suffering from any management problems. Since then, it has been speculated, and widely accepted, that NijiID may have been operating on relatively low margins compared to EN and the main branch, if not at a loss, and that the merger was done to hide NijiID's financial status in advance of Anycolor becoming a publicly traded company, which eventually happened in June 2022. The charitable but realistic take is that Anycolor had to either go public or sell to a larger company so that early investors could cash out, especially thanks to the credit crunch that happened post-Covid. Pulling ID into the main branch did mean cutting any future development, but at least the talents would still keep their jobs for as long as they wanted to.

Unfortunately, in time it seemed like that was all they would get. For many VTubers, merch releases are a big part of their income, with agency VTubing in particular tending to put a lot of emphasis on talent 'birthdays' (albeit not necessarily the real birthdays of the IRL talents). Usually, these warrant an official merch drop, but as early as July 2022 it was clear that the former NijiID cohort had been pretty definitively shafted. That month, Azura Cecilia's birthday was accompanied by fan merch in the form of a pair of voice packs (voice recordings that basically serve as a sort of mini-audiobook), promoted by fellow talent Riksa Dhirendra, increasingly nicknamed 'Staff R' for how much he was having to carry things for actual management. The same happened with Rai Galilei and Bonnivier Pranaja in September. With Nijisanji Indonesia no longer having its own branch-wide social media accounts, promotion for Indonesian talents was entirely driven by their own efforts and their fans', with no visible support from higher up.

Probably the most glaring example of just how badly ID were treated post-merger relates to fan mail. Unsurprisingly, VTubers get fan mail. Or at least, they do if their agency forwards it to them. Reza Avanluna stated on 30 January 2023 that he did not actually receive fan mail and told fans not to waste their money on postage. Two other ex-IDs added their own perspectives: ZEA Cornelia said that she had received fan mail in the past and that she did sometimes get softcopy scans, but the last time she got the mail physically was when she visited Japan for NijiFes in October 2022; Mika Melatika simply confirmed that she didn't get the mail. This didn't kick up much of a storm, but the tone of the fan response, seen both on Reddit and in various Twitter replies, was one that suggested that the earlier cynicism about the merger was warranted.

Beginning in 2022, graduations from former Nijisanji Indonesia talents started trickling in, typically announced in batches a few months in advance. Miyu Ottavia seemed a lone outsider when she left on 27 November, but then from May 2023 onward, at least one former NijiID member has left each month, except, ironically, February 2024. The first two, in May 2023, were members of NijiID's first wave, in an especial vote of no confidence. Reza Avanluna, the fanmail whistleblower, left in September, though not before Azura Cecilia in August, who accompanied her graduation with this rather provocative thumbnail. Mika Melatika, who was very much well-liked among English-speaking viewers, left in late December last year, followed by Riksa, 'Staff R' himself, in January.

As of writing, only seven of NijiID's original 19 Livers remain. Of the twelve who left, all of them did so post-merger. The typical postmortem on NijiID would have it that this was a branch that was flourishing, but then cruelly thrown on the pyre for the sake of Anycolor's financial reports. We are unlikely to find out soon – possibly ever – if Nijisanji Indonesia's financials really were as bad as many have presumed. But what cannot be denied is that Nijisanji's stated aim of providing better support to its non-Japanese talents in Asia was very clearly unfulfilled in the case of its Indonesian talents. The agency should have done better, and very much could have done better, but it didn't.

Korea-ending controversies

Nijisanji Korea is a bit of an oddity in terms of the history of Nijisanji branches. Whereas its Chinese branches have always been licensed out to other companies, and most of its others have been 'home-grown' so to speak, Korea was a bit of a strange hybrid. Although Nijisanji did set up its own in-house branch, it also bought out an existing Korean agency, 541E&C, whose name just rolls casually off the tongue. The first, ten-member wave of Nijisanji Korea (henceforth NijiKR) would comprise four members specifically hired onto KR, who debuted on 25 January 2020, and six members of 541E&C. This, it is commonly believed, is where the trouble started.

Now, as a disclaimer, whereas I can read Chinese and could therefore deal with Niji's Chinese branches, and a lot of NijiID stuff has filtered into English because of a generally multilingual fanbase and talent pool, NijiKR is a lot harder to find reliable info on in languages that I understand. I thus am reliant on English summaries of variable quality that I cannot vouch for the reliability of, on either an individual or collective basis.

541E&C had been in operation since April 2019, and its members were themselves indies, most of whom had debuted over the course of the year. Unfortunately, 541E&C seems to have been a little lax in its screening process, and this resulted in a rather dramatic exit very early when Moarin, one of the 541E&C members, quit NijiKR on 28 February 2020, and VTubing outright the next day. The full circumstances are discussed in a comment by /u/HarunaKai in this Reddit thread responding to the announcements, but I offer a brief summary here:

Three of 541E&C's nine members, Alice Mana, ENA, and Lucia, had chosen to graduate from 541E&C rather than continue into NijiKR. Alice Mana and ENA had been part of Project Paryi, a one-man show run by illustrator Paryi, which had dissolved in mid-April 2019; they presumably knew Moarin and thus joined 541E&C afterward. The allegation seems to be that Moarin functionally ran 541E&C herself, and exploited her position to coerce and bully the members. Alice and ENA thus seem to have taken the opportunity to jump ship during the NijiKR takeover. (As a coda to this, ENA never resurrected her old identity, but Alice returned to VTubing again in September 2020 and has been active on Youtube since.)

(TW: This is the serious bullying part)

!But the allegations about Moarin run deeper. Supposedly, Moarin was also a singer going by SIN*SKI, who was one of a number of high schoolers who, in 2016, had been exposed for bullying. Now, the implications of this seem to be complicated, and the two extant writeups in English present two stories: according to HarunaKai, Moarin/SIN*SKI's bullying went as far as forcing their victims to assume positions that, in one instance, required extensive surgery. On the other hand, there are some writeups from 2021 on DeviantArt by MapuruCafe (1) (2) (whom I will note was apparently 13 when they wrote them so believe at your peril) but which presents something a little different. Per these writeups, it was someone else going by Kyamjya who was exposed as the outright torture bully, and that this led to the 'resurfacing' of unspecified but presumably somewhat lesser earlier allegations against SIN*SKI, a student at the same school. I cannot tell which of these versions is the correct one, but either way school bullying allegations against Moarin/SIN*SKI definitely exist.!<

Regardless of the scope and nature of the allegations, Moarin's departure was taken as a cause for celebration. Such celebration may have been premature, at least as regards the future of the branch, as four further 541E&C members left in July, leaving only Gaon still present with NijiKR. While I have been unable to find any clear indication as to why, it seems plausible enough that the reason was simply that these were largely former indie VTubers who had signed onto 541E&C when it was an indie network, and the Niji buyout had placed new, corporate-specific expectations on them that they weren't happy with.

In the longer term, KR never really managed to get a particularly strong audience outside a few outliers. Many members were bilingual and chose to stream in Japanese rather than Korean, likely due to the nature of their likely audience: South Korea historically (until recently) had relatively low Youtube livestream viewership compared to Twitch, while Japan historically was the reverse. The branch seems to have lacked a lot of institutional support, with apparent delays in technical support and tensions between talents and management.

Things came to a head in 2021 with the graduations of Shin Yuya and Nun Bora in June and November, respectively. They were the two most highly-subscribed members of the Korean branch, and with their departure, nobody in NijiKR had a sub count above 50k, a bad sign for the branch's overall performance and prospects when compared to other parts of the agency. This became worse in retrospect when it turned out that neither of them actually left for very long. (Spoilers owing to standard VTuber etiquette:) Yuya >!re-appeared as V-LUP's Lee Jooin on 22 January 2022, and is still streaming today.!< Bora >!re-debuted with VSPO! on 24 June 2022 as Nekota Tsuna, a particularly stinging choice given VSPO!'s emergence as a growing competitor to the existing big players on the market.!<

NijiKR's fate would be sealed with the 2022 merger announcement. Seven more Livers would leave, four in the run-up to 21 April and two very shortly after. As of writing, twelve former KR Livers remain in the main branch. If nothing else, it has been two years since the last graduation, so at least the merger has helped with retention in some regard, with 12 of 27 original members of NijiKR (11/21 if we exclude the 541E&C cohort) still active, representing 44% (or 52%) of the branch, compared to 37% of NijiID. Even before the merger, many of them had pivoted largely to streaming in Japanese and/or English, which may account for their continued presence.

Retrospectively, feverish speculation has hung over this entire period thanks to further bullying accusations against Chae Ara, one of Nijisanji's own hires who debuted in the second wave in May 2020. What exactly happened with Ara is shrouded in mystery, with next to nothing in writing, at least on the English web. The only definitive piece of information I could find was that on 29 December 2021, she posted a message on Twitter, apparently addressing and denying existing bullying allegations. This would be the last thing she said as Chae Ara before she more or less disappeared (though she did retweet the message on 12 January), and she would be unceremoniously struck from Nijisanji's list of talents on 20 April 2022, the day before the merger. (See also her page on the VirtualYoutubers wiki, and its comments section.)

As of writing, I have been unable to find anything more definitive than the above. There came to be considerable speculation (as seen here on Nijisanji's fan subreddit) that bullying by Ara was responsible for Yuya and Bora departing in 2021, and that the graduations of Ko Yami and Lee Siu, announced on 2 February 2022, were also linked to her. In retrospect, Yami and Siu's cases would seem to be more connected with the merger, which was announced to the public only two weeks after the graduations were announced.

There's also something about a lawsuit. No idea what that involves because nobody seems to want to talk about it.

It is not hard to see why the popular narrative on NijiKR and NijiID frames them as direct opposites. In contrast to ID, which at least from the outside seemed to be entirely problem-free, KR came across as a disaster from start to finish, bookended by bullying scandals. Then, post-merger, the branches' fortunes inverted. As of writing, no former NijiKR Liver has graduated since May 2022, with 12 of the agency's 27 members (11 of 21 if we exclude 541E&C) still active at a modest but at least better-than-obscure level of popularity. Whatever Nijisanji's Japanese management has done with its Korean members has, somehow, managed to achieve a far greater degree of long-term retention than it has with the Indonesians.

India unlikely event of a total management failure…

Nijisanji India was many things, and it was also not many things. Tragically, as time passes it seems increasingly fated to be relegated to a footnote, a neat bit of trivia to be inserted into the history of Nijisanji's last overseas branch, Nijisanji EN.

On 18 November 2019, Ichikara announced auditions for the first generation of Nijisanji India, calling for one male and two female talents to take on the roles of Vihaan, Aadya, and Noor. These proceeded to debut on 23 January 2020, soon followed by some relay stream events with other members of Nijisanji and VirtuaReal on 2 and 3 February, as reported at the time here. Even a cursory keyword search on the VirtualYoutubers subreddit shows a small but persistent effort by fans to give the branch a boost. Unfortunately, Nijisanji India never really got very far off the ground popularity-wise.

On 22 June 2020, Nijisanji India's Twitter account rather abruptly posted that the branch was rebranding as Nijisanji EN, and aiming to more strongly target English-speaking audiences. This was evidently given very little fanfare elsewhere, and some of the fan discussion can be seen in this Reddit thread from October. Why, it was asked, had the branch been less successful than its cousins, despite a clear appetite for English VTubers among the viewing public, demonstrated by the recent, explosive debut of Hololive's English branch? Part of it was that the branch was just not very well marketed despite the name change, but part of it also was that it had seen no new members since the starting trio. Both the Korean and Indonesian branches had brought on at least one new wave by the 6-month mark, but there had been no new auditions, let alone debuts, for NijiIN/EN so far. Then, on 27 November, Nijisanji English's Twitter account rather abruptly posted that the branch was rebranding as Nijisanji IN. Er, yes.

So, NijiIN, formerly NijiEN, formerly NijiIN, kept soldiering on. It never did get a second generation, and then, on 13 April 2021, there came an announcement that Nijisanji India would be 'temporarily suspended' and its three Livers would graduate on the 30th. And, that was it. No real fanfare, just a lot of sadness and quite a bit of indignation as well.

One thing that is immediately striking about Nijisanji India in retrospect is just how conservative it all was, and this was apparent just from the VTubers themselves. The designs for Aadya and Vihaan were just not that interesting even considering Nijisanji's relatively down-to-earth designs; Noor stands out as the only one of the three who looks like what an average viewer would expect from a VTuber. That all three streamed in English was certainly a 'safe' choice, but they never really got substantial traction out of it, and Ichikara's indecision over whether or not to simply rename the branch 'Nijisanji EN' further speaks to a lack of any strong direction to the branch as a whole. Worst of all, NijiIN never actually got any new members after the first three, and that seems to suggest that Ichikara went into the whole thing without a particularly strong intent to keep it running. Everything seems to point to either Nijisanji having gone into IN with minimal expectations and thus minimal support, or that it got cold feet extremely quickly.

Today, if Nijisanji India is remembered at all, it is usually for the fact that it was, technically, the first iteration of Nijisanji English. And, in a coda similar to what happened with Nijisanji's Chinese ventures, the second attempt began as soon as the first one was cut loose. On 1 December 2020, three days after the NijiEN->ID rebrand, Nijisanji officially opened auditions for a new branch targeted at English-speaking countries. On 16 May 2021, barely two weeks after NijiIN's members graduated, the first three members of Nijisanji English (round 2) debuted, starting yet another chapter in the story. One of those members, Finana Ryugu, recounted that Noor had been one of her interviewers during the audition, and she is believed to still have been on staff at the end of the year thanks to her voice being heard in an accidentally-leaked test stream by a new talent. Whether she, or anyone else from NijiIN's talents and management, is still involved with Nijisanji is unknown.

Wherever next?

Well, as the last section noted, technically Nijisanji still formally maintains a distinct overseas branch 'in-house', that being Nijisanji English. However, writing this in early March 2024, it is quite hard to give a reasoned retrospective on its history while the wounds are still fresh and the dust is still being blown up. It is too early to say if the branch has imploded, or if it is dying a slow death, or if it is on the path to recovery.

What I think we can say is that Ichikara/Anycolor's overseas branch attempts have been less than stellar. To re-summarise, here's what has happened with each of them:

Nijisanji has clearly had a lot of opportunities to learn some hard lessons from its earlier attempts to do things overseas. It – and any other agency doing the same – needs to have a strong enough hand to do things like clamp down on bullying and toxic clique-building (Shanghai, Korea), but also to have more locally-minded staff that are, among other things, fluent in the talents' primary language and supportive of their efforts (Indonesia). The result of Nijisanji's repeated failures in achieving these has been tragedy for many. For those who were bullied by coworkers, those who had their support network suddenly removed, and those who dreamed of performing before the world, whose dreams were sadly crushed through no fault of their own.

But if there is one slight silver lining to all this, it is that Nijisanji's repeated missteps in international expansion have not fundamentally harmed the overall trajectory of VTubing as both a business and as a hobby. Granted, VTubing in India never really managed to take off, despite hopes for a potential market, but it is still going strong in China, Indonesia, and Korea; the Anglosphere, of course, goes without saying. VTubing may owe its current existence as a medium to Nijisanji, but at the very least, Nijisanji can no longer destroy that which it has created.

The Beginning of the Journey:

Allow me to set the scene: It is the late 2000s. It is after school, and you are a young teen with too much internet access and no social life. What do you do? You go visit one of your favorite forums to lurk on — phantomoftheopera.com.

You browse around for a bit, trying to decide what thread you’d like to read. You settle on one that’s something about a hidden plot and symbolism in the 2004 adaptation of the Phantom of the Opera musical.

As you begin to read, you are very confused. The author of this thread is talking about lens flares, lighting, and camera angles all pointing to a secret, secondary plot hidden within the movie. All of this, the OP says, was completely intentional on the director’s part. Even though you are at an age where you’ll believe some pretty far fetched stuff, this still sounds TOO out there for you.

Unknowingly, you have stumbled across what has infamously become known in the POTO fandom as the Hidden Plot.

Explaining the Hidden Plot (Kind of):

You may be asking, “What exactly IS the Hidden Plot?”

Good question, and one that is a little complicated to answer due in part to the fact that many sites that hosted threads about the Hidden Plot are now lost to the internet sands of time. It seems they can’t even be accessed via the Wayback Machine. (Trust me, I tried.)

So, I’ve done my best to cobble together an overview based on the recollections of POTO fans who were there when this theory was being actively posted, as well as info provided in this Google doc, which has direct quotes from the author of the Hidden Plot. The doc was helpfully provided by glassprism on Tumblr (thank you!).

I have made sense of the Hidden Plot based on the above linked doc, this post from rjdaae, and a summary of the Hidden Plot on the FFnet bio seemingly written by the main author of the theory. I’m not going to link her bio so no one leaves her mean comments.

A Summary of the Hidden Plot:

The basic idea of this fan theory is that there is a second, deeper story embedded into the 2004 POTO movie. This story is conveyed through cinematography, lighting, clothing, sets, the placement of props, and more. The Hidden Plot is as follows:

Erik is literally the King of Music. What does that mean? Well, I’m not sure what it means beyond the fact that he feels he is in charge of the opera house, but I think there’s some supernatural element. Christine is his Queen of Music, naturally.

Speaking of a supernatural element, in the Hidden Plot, the “Phantom” is not a persona that Erik uses. Oh, no, the Phantom is a literal evil spirit that possesses Erik sometimes.

Raoul factors into this by being a Priest of Light (I’m also not sure what that means) and is … ERIK’S BROTHER!! Yep.

Somehow, Christine and Raoul save Erik from the clutches of the evil spirit, and Christine and Erik become King and Queen of Music and go off into the light. (Or something like that.)

Wait … What? Where Did the Theory Author Get This Stuff From?

Like I mentioned earlier, apparently this Hidden Plot is revealed through EXTREMELY subtle “clues.”

I’ll give a couple examples of the theory author’s own words, which were compiled in the Google doc:

Evidence for Erik being King of Music:

“** ERIK: “Since the moment I first heard you sing, I have needed you with me to serve me to sing, for my music, my music”

“** These also seem like key words that Erik is king of music. This is his kingdom. He wants her to serve him as his queen, to sing for him, and he uses "me"--first person, showing Phantom is gone. (Kings send a servant {or more} to do their bidding and bring s person to them for an audience, just as what happened when the Phantom went to collect Christine and bring her to the king. The Don Juan song shows that is what happened.)”

Example of using the movie’s lighting to hint at the Hidden Plot:

“** When he helps her out of the boat, a long ray of blue light goes across her head, followed by another blue ray of light going through his middle--his heart (spirit). (This isn't just about being a reflection from the light—because if it were it should logically have happened many more times all the times they showed white light, and didn’t. It happens other times in story, and always in the same places on their bodies, sometimes without any white light showing.) Also, as he sings to her "Turn your face away from the garish light of day"--another blue line of light goes across his back (his middle, where his heart would be).”

Evidence that Raoul is Erik’s brother:

“** Because the white horse is symbolic of Raoul and they made a point of putting it next to the family crests in Erik’s lair, I believe this is a clue showing Raoul is a relation (Erik’s brother), and that Erik is actually a de Chagny. Count de Chagny to be exact.”

What Are the Origins of the Hidden Plot? Who Came Up With It?

I thought that the Hidden Plot originated circa 2007-2009, which is when I was actively lurking on POTO.com and saw it pop up there.

However, it appears to date back further than this.

According to rjdaae and this forum thread, the Hidden Plot first popped up shortly after the 2004 film. Its first home was on the WB message boards, and then moved to different forums across the internet. As I mentioned earlier, it appears that all of these forums are now gone, and all that remains of the Hidden Plot are pieces saved in the aforementioned Google doc and people’s recollections of threads discussing the Hidden Plot. But I digress.

As for who came up with the Hidden Plot, according to ya-chai 2 in this forum thread, two unnamed people first came up with the Hidden Plot, but its most fervent advocate and writer was someone who used to go by the username Honeyphan.

However, the idea that it was created by two other people should be taken with a grain of salt, as that’s the only source I’ve found saying the theory was made by someone other than Honeyphan.

At any rate, who IS Honeyphan? Based on old profiles of hers I found, she is/was a huge fan of the 2004 POTO film and created lots of fanfic and photomanips for it. She appears to be a pleasant enough person and a very dedicated fan with some unusual inclinations toward the conspiratorial, if the Hidden Plot is anything to go by.

What was the Fan Reaction to This?

Largely the fan reaction seemed to be, and still is, skeptical amusement. POTO fans generally do not seem to hate the Hidden Plot but find it very silly and entertaining.

However, based on fans’ recollections, there was a group of very dedicated people who discussed and espoused this theory.

Quoting again from ya-chai 2 again, it sounds like proponents of the Hidden Plot might have brought their passion into the real world:

“At one point there were supposedly sessions where forum members met at each other's houses to discuss it. That's all I know about that.

“I do know that both Gerard Butler and Patrick Wilson were asked by members of the WB forum if they were aware of any hidden story. Both actors denied knowing anything about a so called hidden story.”

If you’re a very charitable and understanding person, you might be wondering why the Hidden Plot had any attention at all. After all, there are lots of POTO AUs out there, and this could pass as one.

The reason why it has gotten so much attention over the years is very well explained in this post by ancientphantom: “What differentiated it from regular shipping and fanfic-writing was A) the extreme insistence that it was actually part of the movie and not invented by fans, and B) the willingness to create “evidence” out of the most ridiculous details, including the timing of random lens flares, what shoes everyone is wearing, how we should interpret hairstyles, and of course the memorable Stockinggate.”

What Can We Conclude from All of This?

My general takeaway is that the Hidden Plot is an early example of something we’ve seen in other fandoms in more recent years — intense fans insisting that a conspiracy theory surrounding their favorite piece of media IS real. I think the best example of this phenomenon is the Johnlock Conspiracy.

The Johnlock Conspiracy actually has a lot in common with the Hidden Plot, imo, in that proponents of both pointed to subtle clues planted in cinematography, decor, etc., which revealed the “true” story.

But yeah, that’s about it! That’s what I could dig up about the Hidden Plot.

If you’d like to see some additional insight from POTO fans who were there when this was being written, you can check out the comments of this write up that I also posted on r/box5

Edit: Typo in the title of the post. 🤦‍♀️ That should be “lens FLARE.” That’s what I get for posting too quickly

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

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

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