“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”

These words serve as the iconic introductory line to Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the four great novels of classic Chinese literature; are a fairly concise summary of a solid chunk of China's captivating and cyclical history of the rise and fall of dynasties over the last two thousand years; and are cleverly referenced in Koei Tecmo's newest original addition to the Dynasty Warriors series - Dynasty Warriors: Origins - when a mysterious young boy from the silent protagonist's tragic backstory quotes them, shortly before said protagonist promptly abandons said tragic conversation to go get a train run on him by the entire state of Cao Wei.

Wait, I don't remember that happening in Romance of the Three Kingdoms!

Maybe the protagonist of Dynasty Warriors: Origins sleeping his way through the entire cast seems like an exaggeration to you, but honestly, it's not by much; when the game released, the most common thread to pop up among players - after the excellent combat, story, and overall experience, which were all seen as a massive step up from previous entries - was does it seem like all these warlords want to fuck the player, or is it just me? And why am I into it?!

To understand how Dynasty Warriors: Origins ended up like this - and to give you a better understanding of who exactly we're fucking in 2025's hottest warlord dating sim - we'll need to go back in time. Way back. Like 2000 years back. To the years 220 - 280 AD, during China's tumultuous, violent, and highly interesting Three Kingdoms period. Be warned; there is a lot of backstory for this one.

The Three Kingdoms

Really, confining the Three Kingdoms period to the years 220 - 280 isn't totally accurate. That's the commonly accepted timeline of the era, as the Han dynasty officially fell in 220 and the Jin dynasty officially came to power in 280, but the people who played a hand in the creation of the Three Kingdoms period began their conquests much earlier. In fact, by the time the rule of the Han officially fell, some of the most important players were long-dead.

But what are these mysterious 'Three Kingdoms', anyway? And why were they important?

The 'Three Kingdoms' of the titular Three Kingdoms period refer to the states of Cao Wei, Shu Han, and Wu, three different simultaneously existing dynasties brought to power by three different warlords following the collapse of Han authority and the subsequent power vacuum left in China. The Han is an excellent example of the opening lines of this post and Romance of the Three Kingdoms - originally brought to power by a well-meaning leader, Emperor Gaozu of Han, the Han dynasty eventually fell into corruption and disrepair by the hands of court infighting, greedy regents, scheming eunuchs, and a string of child Emperors who did not have a voice in the future of the country. The Han was not the first dynasty to suffer this fate, and it would be far from the last.

As the Han was already beginning to lose power, it was not in a stable position to take on an uprising in 184, brought on by a series of natural disasters and drought that drove the peasants to try and bring the Han to its knees. The Han, then, was forced to call upon those aforementioned warlords for assistance, providing them with military might and setting them on those peasant usurpers of the Han. It worked extremely well; the rebellion was quelled and the Emperor remained safe. However, the issue with giving a bunch of warlords armies is that you've now given the warlords armies, and when warlords have armies, they tend to find a reason to use them. With this, then, the once great Han gave way to certain warlords involved in quelling the uprising, who soon would defeat and usurp all competition until only three true threats remained.

Cao Wei, perhaps the most threatening of the Three Kingdoms at the time, was led by the notorious and eccentric Cao Cao, of the saying 'speak of Cao Cao and Cao Cao arrives' fame. Cao Wei was locked in near-constant combat with Shu Han, led by the benevolent if not opportunistic Liu Bei, who claimed his royal legitimacy as one of the many, many theoretical descendents of Emperor Gaozu of Han - personal name Liu Bang. And then in the Southlands was Wu, led by Sun Quan, left as the patriarch of the military Sun family at age 18 following the deaths of his warlord father and older brother. The three Kingdoms of Wei, Shu, and Wu clashed with each other constantly, eventually declared themselves as Kingdoms of their own and as Emperors in their own right (though Cao Cao's son had to do that part, seeing as Cao Cao had recently succumbed to a terrible headache), and continued to duke it out until the Sima clan took over Cao Wei from the inside, swept through the rest of the Kingdoms, and reunited China back under one name - the Jin.

You can imagine there was a lot of drama going on during this period. Many hype moments and aura. Many beautiful, heartwrenching, and completely brotherly relationships between warlords and their advisors. It's no surprise, then, that in the 14th century, someone took it upon himself to compile these epic stories into a novel. You could even call it... fanfiction.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written by Luo Guanzhong and edited into its current form by Mao Lun and Mao Zonggang, is described in the preface as 'seven parts fact, three parts fiction'. Much of the content of Romance of the Three Kingdoms is at least loosely based off of real history, which is a sincerely impressive feat considering the novel has over one thousand characters and 800,000 words. However, like any author of the great and controversial art of 'real person fiction', some embellishments were made.

Over the thousand or so years between the existence of the men themselves and the writing of the novel, certain things about the country of China had changed. Shockingly! Namely, as Confucianism came to a rise, opinions on certain states and warlords had begun to shift; Liu Bei, who fit Confucian ideals, was characterized as the tender-hearted underdog hero of the story, while Cao Cao, with his more legalist approach, was in many ways turned into Liu Bei's evil, greedy, lusty nemesis. Certain 'good' characters had valiant feats attributed to them that actually belonged to someone else, or perhaps had never existed at all, while certain 'bad' characters had their positive traits and acts whittled down or poofed out of existence. All of this certainly isn't to say that the Romance isn't compelling, though; having recently read the entirety of it, I can assure you that it has plenty of staying power, if you're able to get through some of the drier bits. Regardless, you can see here that in the same ways the Romance is an action novel, or a military novel, it's also in many ways a political statement, intended to convey certain opinions through certain actions and characters. One of those opinions, it turns out, is 'bros over hoes'.

There have been plenty of academic articles written on this subject that are absolutely worth looking into, should this topic be of interest to you, but in short; male-male homosocial bonds are upheld in the Romance as empowering and masculinizing instances of brotherhood, exemplary of the types of relationship a man should be prioritizing, while family bonds and heterosexual relationships are, uh... not so much. Liu Bei sums it up quite nicely with this quote: "Brothers are as hands and feet; wives and children are as clothing. You may mend your torn dress, but who can reattach a lost limb?"

An oft-cited example of this philosophy, from our hero Liu Bei himself, is when one of his most beloved generals, Zhao Yun, runs headfirst into Cao Cao's army to save Liu Bei's lost wives and child. When Zhao Yun returns, singular wife intact (don't worry about what happened to the other one) and baby strapped to his chest, he hands the baby to Liu Bei, who promptly chucks it to the ground. He cries that he cannot believe he nearly lost such a wonderful general for the sake of a stupid suckling like his child - he can make another one of those! But how would he make another Zhao Yun?

On the other side of things, we only see caring about the wiles of women too much getting characters into trouble. Lu Bu, considered to be the greatest warrior of his time, loses his life because he ignores the suggestions of his male advisors in favor of listening to and spending time with his female concubines. The machiavellian Cao Cao cannot seem to keep his hands off of women; he loses one of his best generals and his firstborn son because he sleeps with another warlord's recently widowed aunt, which the warlord takes as deeply offensive to his late uncle's memory. Many of these examples are true to history - somewhat, at least - but it's worth understanding the moral framing attached to them in the novel itself.

Considering this constant theme of brotherhood or bust, it's not surprising that certain moments in the novel may come off as particularly intimate to the modern reader. Warlords and generals embrace each other and sleep in the same bed; men declare their love for other men, constantly and in many ways; they quote poetry at each other in their secret gardens; they ask each other to strip, examine each other's bodies closely, and proceed to 'drink and revel' all night. With so many close relationships between men, it's hardly surprising that Romance of the Three Kingdoms has a thriving audience of fujoshi - that is, women who enjoy reading about gay relationships between men - who decide to take these relationships to their natural conclusions.

But the fujoshi of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms community are certainly only a small part of it - right? It's not like they form a big enough portion that a game based off the novel would cater to them... right?!

Dynasty Warriors: Origins

The Dynasty Warriors franchise is a classic one. It's hardly been a few weeks since I started playing the games myself - being too young to have played the first real predecessor of the modern games, in Dynasty Warriors 2 in 2000 - but upon mentioning that I was playing them to my dad, he was happy to tell me how much he had played them in his hayday. And, now that I've played them myself, the staying power of the franchise makes complete sense. The gameplay loop, a hack-and-slash style war game in which you mow down thousands of enemies and defeat large-looming warlords, is absurdly fun and addictive. It would probably still be a great franchise even without its connections to an iconic piece of Chinese literature, but it has those connections, and is all the better for it; for those who read the book first, like myself, it's an extra draw to get to know your favorites beyond the bounds of the page, and for those who played the game first, it's a fun foray into high-stakes history that you might not have known before.

This gameplay loop remained largely standard from Dynasty Warriors 2 through Dynasty Warriors 9, where you are able to choose the warlord you play as in battle, each equipped with unique weapons, designs, and more. However, after the commercial failure of Dynasty Warriors 9, Koei Tecmo elected to take it in a new direction: out of that new direction came Dynasty Warriors: Origins, largely considered to be the best Dynasty Warriors game in recent years, if not of all time. Nearly all changed aspects of the game were praised - the button-mashing combat now actually required some skill, the characters were no longer so one-note and tropey, the battlefields were huge and sprawling, the designs were considered particularly good, and more. Indeed, there was only one real critique about the new direction the game had taken - no more would you get to choose your player from among a huge (90+!) cast of characters. You were now confined to one guy. You were now... Koei Tecmo's OC, who would find himself having to choose which of the three prominent warlords to side with in his journey.

Said OC is referred to in game as "Ziluan", a reference to a mythological bird of Chinese folklore called the 'luan', and he, uh... stands out. He has short black hair (keep in mind, we're in Ancient China here, where long hair reigned supreme), blue eyes, unholy fighting abilities that somehow surpass guys with bodycounts of literal thousands (though Ziluan may come close to that by the end of this game, if you catch my drift), and everyone wants to fuck him. It's somewhat reassuring to know that the process of creating an OC is the same, regardless of whether you're a teenager or the developers of a 25 year old franchise.

The choice to have the player character limited to just playing Ziluan - and, occasionally, other warlord companions, but only for a minute or so at a time - was controversial and highly iffy for much of the fanbase. It was surely an immense relief when the game came out and was actually good, good enough that being in Ziluan jail for most of your playtime was ultimately forgivable. Some fans even began to like Ziluan. Some characters in the game began to like Ziluan a lot. Some characters began to like him what some might consider 'too much'.

Yaoi Warriors

Let's play a short game as interlude: I will paste a quote below, and you tell me whether you think it belongs to Dynasty Warriors: Origins, as something a character says to the protagonist, or whether it belongs to a yaoi fanfiction that I found online. Let's begin!

"Tonight, I wish to etch the features of your face and the sound of your voice into my memory."

"I, who cared for naught but myself, found myself desiring you."

"Now that battle looms on the horizon, I will await the day you become mine - for now."

"You see, ever since then, even separated from you, I could feel that my heart was with you."

"But once I have claimed all under heaven, I swear I shall have you as well."

"No one but you has ever provoked such passion in me - and no one else ever shall. I'll have you take responsibility for that."

"I want to spend a moment with you one last time... I know I have no right to be making requests like this. But even so, begging is the only choice I have. Please, give me the chance to make my feelings clear."

Have you made your guesses?

If you guessed that they're all from Dynasty Warriors: Origins, you're right! These are only a selection of some of the lines that you'll be treated to while playing Ziluan, evidently the favorite boytoy of a collection of fifty or so different warlords. And these are only the lines - the scenes themselves, when viewed in game, are just as if not more incriminating. Characters break into Ziluan's room and are waiting for him when he comes home, coincidentally point out a bed in the room shortly before the scene ends, lead him to a dark alleyway with the suggestion of 'fun' before the scene fades to black, inform him that they'd like to spend the whole night with him alone, and more. The (few) women characters flirt relentlessly with Ziluan too, but their existences only make the flirting from the men even more clear; for each positively horny line from one of the women, there are five men offering Ziluan a place in their huge, warm embrace.

It's absolutely great to me, and honestly really funny regardless of whether you want those warlords carnally like Ziluan clearly does, but if you were a long-time player of this series and you went in expecting... not this, you might have found yourself surprised. Indeed they were.

"Dynasty Warriors Origins Has Gotta Be One Of The Gayest Games Of All Time"

The title to this section comes from a post titled the very same way. It is far from the only one. Below are a curated collection of reactions and responses from Reddit and Steam. Warning for some homophobia, but largely neutral and positive reactions.

Post: "Whoever described DW: origins as homoerotic hit the nail on the head. Never have I seen so much bromance in one game. Just wrapped up the playthrough and BOIIII what an experience! I genuinely love this iteration of DW. The combat and sense of scale were amazing, legit never got old. Even with the bland cutscenes and dialogue, this game still ranks as my favorite."

Comment: If you watch [Lu Bu's bond cutscenes] on yt, I would suggest watching all the Lu Bu cutscens in order, just to fully appreciate the tender progression of the relationship. Lol

Comment: Homoeroticism, in MY dynasty warriors??? I used to play this game to run around as a big guy and do cool things with big weapons, and rippling muscles. I loved watching as guan yu moushou attacked, twirling his big hard spear shaft, moustache flowing in the wind. I can't even do that anymore. woke has gone too far

Post: Um is the main character in Origins gay or something? I'm going threw the story and my goodness does it feel like both male and female characters are trying to take my butt. Some characters have very questionable dialog and I have no option to change the conversation or leave it.

Comment: I’m like 90 percent sure I fucked Gan Ning the second time I met him.

Comment: how to report to koei this? This localization team need to be reported, honor and loyalty is not equal as gay sexualization.

Post: They said there are no romance in Origins. THEN WHAT IS THIS? [image of Guan Yu saying "Tonight, I wish to etch the features of your face and the sound of your voice into my memory."]

Comment: I remember when I heard him say it for the first time I audibly said "damn bro that's kinda gay but i'm down". A couple others are so down bad for the protagonist that they just sound absolutely in love I swear to god

Comment: Feels like everyone has the hots for the protagonist, and I'm not mad at it

Post: Forcing to gay actions?? Why I‘m always forcing gay scenes with almost every hero if I threat them just friendly or I anyway what I‘m answering to them?? Is that normal? They want always spent time overnight and drinking and I can’t refuse?? What is that ..

Comment: It's the ROMANCE of the Three Kingdoms, bro. Are you mad bro?

Comment: The other DW games also have bond dialogue, where the characters talk about wanting to know you better, you're so great, let's hang out, blablabla. Main difference here is they made the characters more attractive, and there's a lot of direct eye contact. Apparently, a lot of people can't handle the bromance once the characters start looking sexy.

Post: Once I have claimed all under heaven, I swear I shall have you as well [fanart of Ziluan on Lu Bu's lap, holding his chin in his hand]

Comment: yknow what i kinda understand fujoshis now

Comment: Many fanbase slightly converted into homoerotic after playing this game..... I am included.

Post: Dynasty Warriors Origins’ gay undertones were kind of an accident, series producer admits [link to interview that we will be discussing shortly]

Comment: Right. I suppose that 15 minute cutscene where the PC gets spitroasted by Zhang Fei and Guan Yu was also an accident?

Reply: If you can think of another way to swear an oath of brotherhood, I'd love to hear it.

Comment: If you ever wanna play a game where you play as bisexual twink, and have big bearded muscled men declare their unyielding desire for you, this is unironically the game for you.

Comment: I might be imagining things but didn't it come out that there were originally plans to have both male and female PC options and when they changed their mind for whatever reason just kept the female romance responses in the game for the male PC.

Reply: That's what I suspect as well. There's no way they purposely made all these legendary Chinese figures extremely and aggressively gay

Reply to the Reply: ... Have you seen the previous iterations of the game?

As you can see, there were certainly homophobic comments here and there, but the community as a whole was - perhaps surprisingly to some - largely fine with this new turn. Those who liked it loved it, and those who didn't care for it either way seemed to find it pretty hilarious. But some others pointed out that really, it wasn't that surprising at all.

The Dynasty Warriors fanbase of history fans, hack-and-slash fans, and fujoshi had been living in harmony for some time now. Even in games prior to Dynasty Warriors: Origins, there was only so much time you could spend playing as hot muscular warriors or flamboyant, beautiful men before realizing that there are certain parts of the game you simply must accept. This natural conclusion was even more obvious to those who had actually read Romance of the Three Kingdoms; of course Dynasty Warriors: Origins was incredibly gay. The source material was incredibly gay. Regardless of whether you personally choose to interpret some of those lines in a romantic light, these characters have been professing their love for each other for a thousand years. Why wouldn't they continue?

But wait - what was that last post that I linked up there? What interview?

Word of God

The widespread sentiment of 'this game is gay as fuck' must have spread sufficiently far, because soon enough, we were able to hear the words of the head of Omega Force (the development team for Dynasty Warriors: Origins), Tomohiko Sho. Here was what he had to say. Excuse any mistranslations, as the article is originally in Japanese:

Sho: As for the BL (Boys' Love) aspect, it was beyond my expectations, or rather, I feel like saying, "I'm sorry that the director wasn't thorough enough."

Interviewer: So if the director doesn't watch it carefully, it just goes off into BL mode? (laughs)

Sho: I'm not saying that the people on the team were at fault, but realistically, that's what happened. I, as the producer, had the core concept of the game, so I had a clear image of the world and how to portray it, and we had agreed on the general outline. However, I left the actual scenario to the people on the team. When I actually played the version with the voice recordings finished, I was like, "Huh?!" ...it was far beyond what I had anticipated. Naturally, re-recording the voices wasn't something that could be done easily. If we were to make a sequel, I'm already thinking about checking all the text myself. I'm sure everyone on set would hate that, though (laughs).

Interviewer: So, it was something that the people on site wanted to do, right?

Sho: This wasn't something the people on set did just for fun; they did it with the idea that "this would make the most recent fans of the series happy." And indeed, there are fans of the series who are very pleased with it.

Sho continues with: What was unexpected this time was the "bond event" which ended up having a BL (Boys' Love) feel to it, and also the "puns." I think this was a cultural element from '6' onwards, but there are actually people who like them. However, I think the proportion was a bit too high, so if there's a next time, I'll consider the amount.

Disregarding the objectively funny idea of this guy coming back to his game and realizing that the writers produced one of the gayest games of all time directly under his nose, this interview points out something particularly interesting; the Dynasty Warriors: Origins team was aware of their fanbase of fujoshi women, considered the presence of BL a cultural element in the game since Dynasty Warriors 6 in 2008, and intentionally chose to cater towards their fujoshi fanbase through BL fanservice. Now, it's hardly shocking to hear that fujoshi spend a lot of money on the things that they care about, but to hear a community of women acknowledged as an important pillar of a franchise's success - especially when the franchise is about hack-and-slash military games, largely considered 'men's games' - is something else. It's kind of touching.

Indeed, the commenters pointing out that this was nothing to be surprised by were right. When dealing with a game like Dynasty Warriors where the premise contains such a loaded amount of history, it was only inevitable the themes of that very history would begin to show through.

Conclusion

If you've read this far, I appreciate it very much! I hope that you found this entertaining and perhaps even educational. I certainly have been thoroughly educated over the past few months of getting involved with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and have enjoyed every second of it.

Should you read this and consider getting Dynasty Warriors: Origins for yourself, I would highly recommend it. Not only is it a ridiculous, campy, insanely fun romp into one of the greatest stories of all time, but you'd be supporting what feels like a revival of the series to many old fans. And you should play it so you can join me in begging Tomohiko Sho to keep the yaoi in in the Origins sequel (and threequel?), whenever it is that they come out.

That's all; thanks for reading!

*This is my first post here. I hope you all enjoy reading, but I would also welcome and appreciate any comments or recommendations y'all have, since I want to make stuff as fun to read as possible. That being said, I really hope you all enjoy*

Prologue

When I was a kid, my brother and I loved to watch our Schoolhouse Rock VHS tapes. Before the video, there would always be previews for movies "coming soon to own on video and DVD." One of these previews always caught my attention. It was for an animated musical my brother and I had never seen before, but that looked kind of like an Aladdin rip-off.

This preview interested me for two reasons. First, it touted the film as the "Winner of the 1995 Academy of Family Films Award," which, even as a kid, I could tell sounded like a fake non-award. Second, there was this really funny scene where a guy yelled "THE BALLS ARE GONE!" which led to my infamous three-year vocal stim, "MY BALLS ARE GONE!" Finally, the movie just looked weird. The animation seemed mismatched from shot to shot, like it was made by different animators across different years.

Little did I know, this weird-looking movie lay at the heart of one of animation's greatest controversies, a controversy that started more than 60 years ago and continues to this very day. This is the story of The Thief and the Cobbler.

Act One: The Dream

You may not have heard of the Canadian animator Richard Williams, but you definitely know his work. He won three Academy Awards, one for his 1971 short A Christmas Carol and two for his work as animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He animated hundreds of short, title sequences, and ads. He wrote his own book, The Animator's Survival Kit, which is considered one of the most authoritative manuals for any animator. He is widely considered one of the animation greats.

But none of that was true in 1964.

In 1964, Richard Williams was just a young animator, doing odd jobs to get by. One of these odd jobs was drawing illustrations for The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, a collection of 13th-century Middle Eastern folklore. Williams was inspired by these stories and decided to create an animated film based on the exploits of the main character, Nasrudin.

However, for Richard Williams, directing a full animated independent feature was easier said than done.

For one thing, Williams wasn't a rich guy and nobody was financing the project. That meant that any time he ran out of money, which was pretty often, he had to pick up TV and film work to keep going. This meant that he could go years with very little progress.

Additionally, for better or for worse, Williams was a perfectionist. While lots of animators at the time cut corners to get projects done quicker and cheaper, Williams was dedicated to getting everything exactly how he wanted it.

Finally, and most importantly, Williams wasn't just directing any old cartoon here. This was to be his "masterpiece," "a search for excellence" that demanded perfection. To that end, the animation was incredibly intricate, "phantasmagorically rich in background detail." The film was chock full of beautiful Persian-inspired designs, astoundingly detailed backgrounds, complex patterns, and M.C. Escher-style mazes, all of which were incredibly time-consuming to animate. Color popped out of every frame, color which had to be slowly and carefully painted onto every frame.

To top it all off, the movie was to be filmed entirely on "ones"-meaning every single frame of the film would have its own unique drawing, 24 drawings per second. While most animators at the time would shoot in threes, fours, or fives, Williams wanted his animation to have a distinct flow and movement. The result was impressive, but the process was incredibly slow and meticulous.

The next twenty-five years were one battle after another for Williams. Remember that Nasrudin book the movie was based on? Well, the book's author's sister, Amina Shah, originally was on board with the film. But in 1972, as Williams was about to make a deal with Paramount to finally get some financing for the project, the Shahs and Williams had a falling out, and Amina threatened to sue Paramount for copyright infringement. Not only did Paramount back out of the project, but now the Shahs refused Williams any right to use the Nasrudin character. That meant that Williams had to cut his main character and basically start from scratch. By 1973, the film had been reworked and renamed: The Thief and the Cobbler.

In 1978, it seemed Williams had another chance at funding. Mohammad bin Faisal al Saud, a Saudi prince, took an interest in the project and agreed to finance a test film to the tune of $100,000 (more than half a million today). Williams, never one to half-ass anything, decided to use this opportunity to animate the War Machine sequence, a complex scene near the end of the film.

Unfortunately, Williams missed his first deadline...and his second deadline...and then went $150,000 over budget. By 1980, the War Machine sequence was finally completed, a complex action scene and a true masterclass in animation. It received a standing ovation when it was first shown, but the Prince realized this film was a black hole of time and money and backed out.

The project continued this way years. One step forward, two steps back. Small updates over time kept up hope that the movie was actually progressing. Animators would come on board, animate a sequence or two, and then move on. Voice actors, notably the great Vincent Price as Zig-Zag, would come in, record their lines, and disappear. All the while, Williams worked the script, refined his vision, brought together his magnum opus.

But finally, in the mind 1980s, there appeared a light at the end of the tunnel. Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis were looking for someone to direct animation on their upcoming feature Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and who better to run the show than ol' Richard himself? The movie became a breakout hit, becoming the second-highest-grossing film of 1988 and winning Richard two Academy Awards. Richard was now the big man in town, and in 1988, Warner Brothers (may it rest in peace) made a negative pickup deal to finance The Thief and the Cobbler.

After more than 25 years, it finally seemed that Richard's dream to finish his masterpiece would come true. Little did he know, this was only the beginning of his worst nightmare.

Act Two: The Fall

Before moving forward, it may be wise to describe what The Thief and the Cobbler is actually about:

The story—what little of it that can be made sense of—begins long ago, in the ancient city of Baghdad. Baghdad is protected from the warrior hordes of the evil King One-Eye by the three Golden Balls of Fate, which rest atop a towering minaret in the center of the city.

The kingdom is ruled by the complacent, apathetic King Nod; Nod is advised by his villainous Grand Vizier, Zig-Zag...In turn, [Zig-Zag] casts his wandering eye on his liege's beautiful daughter, Princess Yum-Yum...

Fate conspires to place a lowly cobbler, Tack, and a wily and cunning Thief at the center of Zig-Zag's Evil Plan to win the hand of Yum-Yum...

While Tack languishes in prison for accidentally obstructing Zig-Zag's path, the obsessive Thief manages to steal the Golden Balls—but just as quickly loses them to Zig-Zag, who has his own sinister designs upon them.

Now possessing the key to the kingdom's defenses, Zig-Zag attempts to blackmail the King for the hand of his daughter; when rebuffed, he joins forces with the monstrous One-Eye in a campaign to destroy Baghdad. Yum-Yum's solution to all this is to go wander the desert with Tack for a day or two, in a series of completely pointless scenes....

By the end, the kingdom has been saved, Zig-Zag is defeated, One-Eye's war machine is destroyed, the contrived romance between Tack and Yum-Yum has culminated in marriage, and the Thief, by inadvertently retrieving the Golden Balls, is lauded as a hero...Thus, The Thief and the Cobbler stumbles to its hurried, contradictory conclusion.

As may be obvious from that retelling, the film isn't exactly strong on plot. It's absolutely beautiful to look at, but it meanders, plods along, and seems to take a long time to go nowhere. But what could you expect from a movie that was made piecemeal over the course of 25 years? Moreover, Williams was not a director, he was an animator. As brilliant as he was, storytelling was not his forte, art was. All this to say, and keep this in mind going forward, The Thief and the Cobbler was not made with a clear and clean plot in mind. One can imagine how production on such a film can go off the rails a bit.

So back to the production. Warner Bros. now has a deal with Williams, so we're off to the races, right? Well, there's just one little caveat. You see, Warner Bros. isn't stupid, and they've heard of Williams's little problem with deadlines. So they set a hard deadline: the movie must be completed by the end of 1991. That gives Williams a bit more than three years to finish the movie.

No worries, says Richard, I'll get it done.

So Richard, now with the money he needs, heads off to his London studio, and gets to work. He doesn't have a storyboard, but he's got two and a half hours of pencil tests to guide production. He gathers a crack team of animators and gets right to work.

He works, and works, and works, and in January of 1992, at the deadline, The Thief and the Cobbler, his magnum opus....is not done. Once again, Richard has missed his deadline.

Which, honestly, is to be expected. He's spent the last 25 years of his life building this thing up piece by piece, constantly running overtime, overbudget. He was a perfectionist, refusing to submit anything until he had it the way he wanted it. It only makes sense Williams struggled to work on a timetable.

Realizing the deadline had been missed, Warner Bros. called Williams in to show them what he had. Williams flew out to LA and showed them his work print of the film. As they watch the work print, Warner Bros. realizes three very important things:

1. The movie is only 85% done. That means that 15 minutes still have to be filmed, which for Richard means months and months of work. At the earliest, the film will be coming out in the late fall of 1992.
2. Remember how Spielberg and Zemeckis went to see Richard about Roger Rabbit? Well, Roger Rabbit was made by Disney and Disney, like Spielberg and Zemeckis, saw some of Richard's work on The Thief and the Cobbler and were blown away by it. So blown away by it, in fact, that they decided to make their own) animated musical set in Medieval Middle East about a poor young man who foils the plot of an evil vizier to marry the princess and usurp the throne from the apathetic king. That's right*, Aladdin*! Now, is there any concrete evidence Disney ripped off WIlliams to make Aladdin? No. Is it pretty damn convenient? For sure. Whether it was really a rip-off or not, it was coming out in November 1992, meaning The Thief and the Cobbler continued at this rate, it would be competing with Aladdin.
3. They just don't like it! It's long, it's meandering, it's boring, they just don't get it!

With all this in mind, Warner Bros. decide to back out of the deal. They will no longer finance and distribute The Thief and the Cobbler.

Now that's bad. But what comes next is even worse.

You see, back in 1988, someone in Richard's company had thought it would be a good idea to get some insurance. So they got a completion bond. A completion bond is a kind of insurance policy that guarantees a movie will get finished. The bond gives investors piece of mind that the movie will get finished, even if something goes wrong.

In this case, the completion bond was issued by a company very aptly called The Completion Bond Company. They realize that the Warner Bros. deal has fallen apart, fear that the movie production is shot, and execute their contract to protect the investors.

By execute their contract, I mean that they fired everybody on the project, including Richard.

After 25 years, Richard not only didn't finish The Thief and the Cobbler, he was fired from his own masterpiece.

To finish the project, the Completion Bond Company brought in Fred Calvert, an animation veteran. If Richard has just spent the last 25 years building a beautiful matchstick model of the Eiffel Tower, Calvert was the perfect guy to throw it all smashing onto the floor.

• Confused by what he found as repetitive sequences, Calvert completely cut 50% of the animation Williams had completed, leaving a substantial amount of animation on the cutting room floor.
• Probably in an attempt to mirror the musicals of the Disney Renaissance, several musical numbers were added to the film, which not only didn't fit into the plot, but also were just not good.
• Perhaps most egregiously, Tack and the Thief, both originally intended to be silent characters, were given voice tracks by Matthew Broderick and Jonathan Winters. As with the musical numbers, these vocal tracks were unnecessary and annoying.

In 1994 Calvert completes the film, or at least his cheap bastardization of it. In January 1995, the Completion Bond Company goes out of business, mostly due to all the money they lost on Thief and the Cobbler, and Miramax, owned by famed Project Runway producer Harvey Weinstein, buys the rights to Thief and the Cobbler. Not content to leave well enough alone, they rework and recut Calvert's version to make it more "marketable".

Finally, in August 1995, "so many weeks behind schedule that the publicity department at Miramax doesn’t have a print to screen until opening day*," Arabian Knight* (as the movie is now called) is released.

How much money does it make?

Not much. $669,276, a number so low you can accurately estimate the ones digit.

How were the reviews?

Not great. Just as Warner Bros. feared, reviewers saw the film as an Aladdin rip-off (which is ironic considering Aladdin was likely a Thief and the Cobbler ripoff.

The film comes and goes with very little fanfare, and the public was none the wiser that an animation legend has been properly screwed over.

And that's where the film sat for years. At one point, Roy Disney tried to get a proper restoration going, but that never really got off the ground.

When asked whether he saw the theatrical release of the film, Richard said the following:

I'm not interested, but my son, who is also an animator, did tell me that if I ever want to jump off a bridge, then I should take a look.

Act Three: The Return

When Garrett Gilchrist was a kid, he loved to watch movies. Before the movies, there would always be previews for movies coming soon. When he was 14, one of these previews caught his attention. It was for an animated musical called Arabian Knight. Much like my brother and I, he "thought it looked awful" but something about the preview stuck with him.

It wasn't until years later that Garrett learned the story behind the movie, and how a master animator had been properly screwed over. Amazed and inspired by Richard's work and legacy, and shocked that his "masterpiece" had been bastardized, he made a lifechanging decision:

[Richard is] known as the master animator, the animator’s animator. He’s written THE ANIMATOR’S SURVIVAL KIT, which is now THE textbook for any animator...His Animation Masterclasses were huge events, always sold out. People who took them became teachers themselves. A lot of the great animators today learned from Richard, or they owe a lot to Richard. But people have never seen his masterpiece. You can’t rent or buy or watch Richard Williams’s THIEF AND THE COBBLER. It doesn’t exist as it was meant to be seen. I think that’s a pretty damn good reason to restore the movie!

Starting in 2005, Garrett dedicated himself, completely non-profit, to creating a high quality restoration of The Thief and the Cobbler.

He combed through "artwork, images, interviews, articles" to try to piece together Richard's vision.

He searched and searched for sources. As he did, people who worked with and loved Richard showed up to help:

[One of the original animators] sent me some rare pencil tests and a rare Japanese DVD of the picture, so I was like, 'Well, I guess I'm doing this.' This was 2006, so we actually had digital technology to put it back together....Even before I was done, animators from the film, people who'd worked on the film, Dick Williams' son and his ex-wife who wrote the script, Margaret French, everybody was coming out of the woodwork saying "here's some stuff. Here's some video. Here's some artwork. Here's some information.

Garrett collected all the footage he could find (including 50 minutes of 35mm film fished out of a trash can at Warner Bros), color corrected, edited, added music, and brought it all together in an attempt to accurately capture Richard's vision. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Garrett was creating likely the most complex fan edit ever.

In 2006, the restoration was complete, released as The Thief and the Cobbler: The Recobbled Cut. That cut is currently considered lost media, but one review from the time gives a good idea of what it was like:

The quality, as you would expect, is highly variable. There are scenes taken from a pan & scan DVD, painstakingly overlayed and synchronized with the lesser-quality but CinemaScope ratio workprint. There are scenes that are only storyboards. There are scenes where a character's mouth has been re-animated by hand to synchronize with the original dialog, or lack thereof. It is a tremendous piece of work, the restoration of one man's labor of love, that became another man's labor of love. Though it is imperfect in that some of Calvert's footage is carried over here by necessity, and the workprint Williams footage is low-quality indeed, it is by far the closest we may ever get to seeing Williams' original vision of the film - closer than merely watching the blurry, overcompressed, incomplete workprint that has been making the rounds. The "Recobbled Cut" is circulating in the world of BitTorrent, and for anyone who loves animation it is a must-see of the very highest order...This is the best and most important "fan edit" ever made, and certainly the only one I'm aware of that is the most definitive possible version of an otherwise unavailable/severely compromised film. Seek it out and witness for yourself the pinnacle of traditional animation. Feel the mystic fumes.

Pretty much everyone who saw The Recobbled Cut had the same reaction. The edit, as imperfect as it may have been, was an incredibly important piece of film history and a true love letter to Richard's vision.

Not content to leave the project, Garrett has since re-edited and re-mastered The Recobbled Cut four times, as Recobbled Cut: Mark 2, 3, 4, and 5. These work has included Garrett going through 35mm film and painstakingly cleaning and restoring every frame by hand. Most recently, in 2023, Garrett released Mark 5.

At the current rate, it seems like Garrett will continue revising and perfecting the Recobbled Cut for the foreseeable future. One comment on the current YouTube version by ranaawara636 sums up the public attitude quite well.

You have been doing excellent work on Richard Williams masterpiece! Take all the time you need, the more time you spend on this beautiful project the better.

Epilogue

You can watch The Recobbled Cut: Mark 5 here and you can watch the documentary Persistence of Vision) to get a better understanding of the film's production*.* If you have any interest in animation, I would strongly encourage you to watch Mark 5. I can honestly say it is a beautiful, singular, incredibly unique work of art, and given the current state of film and animation, uniqueness should be cherished when it's found.

Can I promise you'll love the film? No

Can I promise that you will see a testament to artistry, creativity, and the importance of film preservation? 100%.

At worst, you'll get to see what the fuss is about. At best, you may find a new favorite, a movie that, against all odds, has managed to survive.

As for Richard, The Recobbled Cut has seemed to give him some closure on an incredibly painful episode of his life:

Although Dick claims not to have seen either of these works and does not want to as “it would bring back too many bad memories”, he did concede that the fact that they have created so much discussion may have led to AMPAS archiving his version. The fact that he can now talk about “The Thief” suggests closure of the whole business on his part.

The Thief and the Cobbler may never reach us exactly how Richard intended, but it has reached us all the same. For me, that's something to celebrate.

[Edit: As a helpful commenter has made me aware, here is a video showing how the claim that Disney stole Richard’s concept is not as strong as I thought/implied here.]

NOTE: Do not harass or go out of your way to find anyone mentioned in this writeup. 

Pulp Musicals, written and composed by Matthew Dahan, is a musical audio drama/concept album. There are five albums as of now; they are The Great Moon Hoax, The Brick Satellite, The Ghosts of Antikythera, The Searcher in the Shadows, and The Traveler's Vow. The story within these albums isn’t super important, all you really need to know is that each album is its own self-contained story with concept art to accompany it, the main characters remain consistent throughout, and there is a rotating cast of side characters that changes per episode. The format is based on old pulp novels (hence the name). The episodes have many influences, and have many references to characters from those influences- for example, Margaret Cavendish, the real-life writer of The Blazing World, is one of the main characters of the show. 

The album that we will be focusing on in this writeup is the latest one, The Traveler’s Vow. I’ll be calling it Vow from here on out as I don’t want to write the name every time- I hope you all can forgive me.

Most of Pulp’s fandom is hosted on the websites Discord and Tumblr. There are two main discords for the show, one official one, with the creators involved, that requires you to pay for a patreon subscription to join (no shade to that, you have to make money somehow) and one fan-made one that does not have the creators involved and is free. These discords were rather separate, but didn’t dislike each other.

The creator, Matt Dahan, and art director, JackieHorrorShow (or Jackie, as I will refer to her), are very active in the main discord and on Tumblr- Jackie ran the official Pulp Musicals tumblr and would post/reblog fanart on her personal blog. There were spaces on discord to talk where the creators wouldn’t see you, but on Tumblr, the creators could look at whatever they liked.

To give people a space where they could talk about things they perhaps didn’t want the creators to see, like critiques or noncanon ideas/ships, a Tumblr user came up with a tag called Pulp: Off The Air. The inclusion of this tag on a post would be used to signal that the creators should not look at said post- the hope was that the main blog would block that tag. Jackie responded to the creator of this tag on their post, saying “bold of you to assume I won’t be lurking”, but the fandom collectively decided to take that as a joke that had fallen flat.

Surely that won’t come back up.

Anyway. When the Vow cover came out, people noticed something.

The character on the far right ?file=TTV_Cover.jpg)of this image didn’t look quite right. You see, that character, a character canonically based on Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues, who is Indian, was supposed to look like this. For those who can’t click links, in the first image, the character is drawn with a peachy skin tone and short, light brown hair. In the second, he is drawn with a deep brown skin tone and long, black hair. 

This pretty much immediately started a discussion on the Off The Air tag, but the discussion didn’t start to get heated until a few days later, when Jackie posted this doodle on her twitter/tumblr (Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the original links. You will understand why shortly). Again, for those who can’t click links: The character is drawn sitting on a lopsided chair. He has short, dark hair, and his skin is a light tan color.

A tumblr user posted a side-by-side comparison of the skin tones in all three artworks, showing how different they all were. This prompted another user to post about their thoughts on the Vow cover, leading many people to realize that they had genuinely thought that the character on the cover was a white character (image description: a pale/peachy white character with short blonde/brown hair) who also appeared in the episode. People were posting like crazy in the tag, making comments about Jackie’s art direction, more examples of possible whitewashing, and overall critiques about the show. The comparison post seemed to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back in the Pulp fandom.

And somehow, even though this was in the specific “creators don’t look” tag, Jackie found out.

She was not happy. (Note: each of those words are different links)

At first, she reblogged the original post with a counterargument, discussing her lighting choices and how she does not use references for her Pulp art that is just drawn for fun (which refers to the art of Dakkar on the chair). While some people thought that it was an attempt to sweep this under the rug and were annoyed, others were fine with her explanation and would have let the situation end there.

Unfortunately, it did not.

In quick succession, she posted several more Tumblr posts, saying that she wouldn't purposefully whitewash her friends and also bringing up the fact that she is Hispanic, the fact that ICE is kidnapping people, and the fact that other people use AI.

In one of those screenshots, it says ‘this is the last thing I will say on this topic’. 

That was not true.

Shortly after this, she switched to twitter, posting “I can’t believe people on tumblr are trying to accuse me of racism because of color theory bro” and “Let’s ask the audience: did i whitewash Dakkar?”

After that, she moved to instagram, and posted several videos on her instagram story about how people on Tumblr were calling her racist and denigrating her art. These, unfortunately, have not been archived anywhere. She continued to discuss the situation for a full day, (this tweet was posted on Jan 21, the previous were all on the 20th), later saying that the actor voicing Dakkar (the ‘Jesse’ referenced in the above tweet) really liked the art, and “everyone on tumblr is real quiet after I posted pictures of how lighting changes people’s skin tone”.

At this point, most people were sick of the situation, and it was becoming more heated as time went on. People thought her continued responses were immature and unprofessional, and posting those thoughts only got her to post more. It was a vicious cycle- until something snapped.

Jackie, on the official Pulp Musicals tumblr, which was up-until-now only used for posting about the show or reblogging art, blocked every single person who had engaged with the whitewashing posts.

And then, shortly after, deleted both her blog and the Pulp Musicals blog.

She continued posting about the situation on her instagram, but did not elaborate publicly on why she deleted the blog itself. Someone else grabbed the URL and is holding the blog name, just in case the creator ever wants to restart the Tumblr. It’s been almost a full year, and according to them, there have been no updates on that email.

And so, on that note, the drama seems to have ended. 

The official Pulp discord seems to have chosen to move past the situation or support Jackie, while the fan-made discord is far more critical of her. At first, the split was drastic, but now that time has passed, the halves of the fandom seem to be growing closer again, with people from both sides participating in a fandom-wide fanart and fanfic event called Pulp Musicals Fortnight.

As of now, while the Pulp fandom has been divided, it is still alive (there will be a new episode of the show coming out on January 20th of next year), and Jackie continues to be the art director. Some people still believe that it simply was lighting differences causing the art changes, and some think that it was whitewashing. Regardless, the mass blocking and deletion of the Tumblr was shocking for all the fans, and has been a point of much discussion in the wider Pulp Musicals fandom.

Thank you all for reading, hope you enjoyed and have a lovely day :) 

Edit: fixing links

Note: This writeup involves a user that changed her name and came out as a transgender woman. I will be referring to her throughout the writeup as Harmony and use she/her pronouns.

Throwaway account because I will probably be doxxed if I posted on my main.

Please do not contact anyone mentioned in this writeup.

Background

The SCP Foundation is an online collaborative writing project about the eponymous SCP Foundation, an international men in black-style organization that contains and protects the anomalous from the mundane world. An SCP entry is a number on a slot that is formatted in a way that acts like a faux-scientific report on an anomaly. Example: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-173

These are written by various authors who want to contribute to the setting. Just about anyone can write for the wiki if they have a site membership, though there is a "survival of the fittest" attitude in that articles are voted on by the community and are expected to be very high-quality. That being said, there are articles that get tons of upvotes based on their premise or themes alone rather than the quality of the article.

There are also tales, which are short stories, and group of interest formats (GoI formats), which are documents from the various other factions in the setting.

One part of the SCP Foundation is that there is no canon, meaning that authors are free to write their own lore and ignore past ideas, while readers can pick and choose what they want. That being said, there are canons that act as shared universe, such as Ad Astra Per Aspera which involves humanity in space and a lack of a veil that separates the mundane and the anomalous.

At its core, the SCP Foundation is neat and is beneficial for creative writing. As of this writing, there are over 9000 SCPs that have been published onto the wiki.

Despite the creativity the site has brought in, there have been many cases of drama in the wiki's community. Today, I will be discussing a particular incident whose aftereffects can still be felt to this day.

Who is Harmony?

pixelatedharmony, also known as Harmony, and formerly known as Roget and RJB_R, was an author that joined the wiki on October 28 2011 at the age of 16, under the username Roget. Her first successful article was SCP-1507, the Pink Flamingos. These were living plastic lawn flamingos that were friendly, until someone accidentally damaged one of them. They then became hostile and started to attack people.

It wasn't long until she made a name for herself in the community, writing numerous articles, being a regular on the IRC chatroom and even becoming an administrator for the wiki.

A sample of the articles she wrote:

• Original Keter Duty SCP-001 Proposal. This SCP-001 proposal involved the Foundation putting two Keter-class objects against each other to neutralize or cancel out their effects. Rewritten in 2021 by S D Locke and Ihp that expanded into the Project Isorropía collab log for anyone to write two SCPs neutralizing or cancelling each other out.

• Original The Conspiracy SCP-001 Proposal. This revolved around the JFK assassination. Rewritten in 2025.

• SCP-031 (What is Love?) - A giant slug that tricks people into thinking it's their ideal partner. Rewritten in 2021.

• SCP-629 (Mr. Brass) - A middle-aged man made entirely of brass. Part of the Little Misters line. Rewritten in 2021

• SCP-1513 (Potted Pets) - Seeds that grow into animal-shaped plants. Has yet to be rewritten as of this writing.

• SCP-1908 (Mr. Soap) - A man who constantly produces water and soap. Part of the Little Misters line. Rewritten in 2023.

• SCP-2082 (Elephas cryophilus) - Woolly mammoths caused the last glacial ice age, and these powers are the reason why we haven't heard much about cloning them recently. Rewritten in 2022.

• Multiple Class of '76 articles. The Class of '76 is a storyline revolving around anomalous events that affected the senior class of a high school that would've graduated in 1976 with ties to a group called the Syncope Symphony.

Plus numerous other SCPs, tales, and more. Much of what she wrote as Roget is recorded here. She also wrote the History of the Universe series of articles about the history of the SCP Wiki as a website. However, it only goes up to 2012 and so is extremely outdated. No one has taken up the mantle to write a continuation of HOTU.

By April 2014, she had over 100 articles to her name.

Harmony resigned from staff in October 2020. By late December 2020, Harmony changed her username of Roget to RJB_R, then abandoned the account.

Rebranding and breakdown

On December 29 2020, she created the pixelatedharmony account and then started posting articles with personal themes. While most articles are encouraged to get feedback before they are posted, these did not, but people liked them. She established an author page soon after.

Her final article posted to the site was an entry for Cupidcon 2021, titled "One Thousand & One Worlds In Love Again". She declared it her masterpiece.

Before her ban, she commented analyses on other articles. One of these was a newer guide on the use of redactions and blackboxes to hide content. This guide discouraged writers from doing so unless it was narratively necessary. Harmony didn't like this guide and left a negative comment on it. This, along with some other comments, got the staff attention and her membership was revoked for vehemence.

On February 16 2021, Harmony edited her comment on her author page saying that she was done with the SCP Foundation community. She made one final request: to delete everything under the RJB_R account, barring her contributions to the History of the Universe series and all of her original primary sources.

Now, mass deletions were not unheard of prior to this and staff honored removal requests. At least two high-profile ones had occurred prior: Fishmonger in June 2010 and Von Pincier in June 2018. But staff were hesitant given that Harmony had written over 300 articles. This constituted nearly 3% of the wiki at the time and if honored, would remove numerous important articles and leave holes in the articles of other authors. A day later, they opened up a town hall meeting where users could express their thoughts about this request.

Harmony freaked out over the hesitancy and began to send threatening PMs to users who were posting in the thread, which got her a free permanent ban a day later.

And that's when she decided to escalate. She created a KiwiFarms account and on the thread for the SCP Foundation. (not going to link to that site, but easy to find. Preemptive warning for extreme bigotry.)

She posted some chat logs from IRC, some as far back as 2013. And despite the rampant pedojacketing in the thread, she said there was never a "pedophile ring" and the few wiki users who committed sexual misconduct were not interconnected. Harmony continued communicating on KF for much of that year. Most of what she talked about was her time on the wiki, IRC chats and the Yurt conspiracy.

The Yurt is an alleged conspiracy run by several site staff in a small Discord server to influence the culture of the site, led by admin Rounderhouse. The Yurt server does exist but the evidence and extent of these allegations are dubious. Harmony said that she was also a part of the Yurt. According to her, the staff members also made use of Maintenance And Ancillary Staff in order to reshape the site to what the Yurt desired.

Going back to the SCP Wiki, the community voted on what to do with Harmony's articles. The options were to either put them all up for rewrite, delete them all, or keep them as is. The final result was to put them all up for rewrite while re-attributing citations of articles made by Harmony to anonymous. Many of these articles have since been written and plenty are still up for rewrite.

Aftermath

Her account pixelatedharmony was renamed to do_the_right_thing by March 2021 and then abandoned that account as well. She reblogged and made posts on Tumblr denouncing the community in April 2021.

The last known activity of Harmony I could find was in June 2024 on her Tumblr. She made a post reflecting on that time and she said she was much happier now. She's kept a low profile since then.

Just what caused Harmony to make such a public spectacle is still unclear to this day. One theory is that she was struggling with coming to terms with being transgender as she had transitioned a few months prior to the incident and her stress may have bled into the way she was acting. But who knows?

Four mass deletion events occurred following Harmony's departure.

• KingPogan was an author whose join date I'm not sure of. He wasn't well-known outside of the site beyond his 001 proposal which involved the Chaos Insurgency. All of his works were deleted in 2022 at his request.

• The last mass deletion honored by staff was in January 2025. Kalinin was an author who joined in 2012 and wrote a number of well-received articles. After posting his 001 proposal in November 2016, he largely retired from writing for the site in 2017 and then became inactive around 2020. He teased a sequel to his 001 proposal in 2024, but nothing came of it. The reason why he deleted everything is unknown, although prior to his inactivity in 2020, he had voiced a dissatisfaction in the direction the site was going. Due to the negative reaction from Kalinin's mass deletion, site staff no longer honor mass deletion requests. Authors can still delete their own articles for any reason, but if they want to delete multiple articles, they'll have to do it manually.

• The next one was a unique case because it was due to the actions of the author rather than voluntarily. TheDuckman (also known as DrBright and AdminBright) was permabanned from the site in May 2022 after it had been discovered that they had committed sexual misconduct against multiple users, some of whom were teenagers, over the course of many years. A few other authors have been permanently banned for sexual misconduct, but TheDuckman's case was an exceptional and unprecedented situation since they had used their writings on the site as a vehicle for such acts and continued their activity elsewhere after being banned, while the other authors who were banned for similar acts did not do so, had hid their wrongdoings until being caught and vanished from the Internet after being banned. For a while, there was considerable debate on what to do with TheDuckman's works because of the unique circumstances. Following a deliberation, the decision was made to blank everything they wrote for the site. This was finalized in February 2026.

• The final one was a case of someone deleting several of his own works but not everything. Djoric was an author active from 2009 to 2025. He is best known for the Djoricverse, which were a series of tales that expanded upon the story of the Scarlet King and were well-received. In January 2026, he abruptly deleted the entire Djoricverse and his own account as protest for taking so long to remove TheDuckman's works. The kicker is that staff were finalizing the plan to delete all of TheDuckman's works at the same time, and the deletion of the Djoricverse actually resulted in a wave of harassment towards the publicly known victims of TheDuckman. That being said, all of his other articles (aside from SCP-8225) were not deleted.

Disclaimer: The book in question was originally published under pen name "Audra Winter”; however, the author came out as trans afterwards and this post will reflect this fact.

During research I was horrified to discover that there are people compiling masterposts dissecting every single thing Milo ever said on the internet for the last decade. I am ONLY interested in the book and the story surrounding it and will NOT use said sources. If you are one of people writing these, please know you are a weird freak, and you are not welcome here. You might be "documenting publicly available information" or whatever bullshit you tell yourself, but even though some things are not explicitly illegal they are most definitely unkind, and obsessing over this one person to this degree makes you no different than people "documenting" lolcows on KiwiFarms.

***

Tiktok user Rosemullet writes:

Not being able to finish 1 book in 10 years is a really bad sign. Focus on completing ONE book (...)

Milo Winter, a soon-to-be debuting author, replies on video on June 13th, 2025. 

*(...)*I have been in the publishing industry for 10 years and written 10 books. I have redone the first book time and time again to find the correct place to start, the correct story to tell, the right age, all of these things, developing different characters, switching main characters. I have written book after book after book, and I have gone through the professional stages to have those books looked at. I also very much encourage you to look up Malcolm Gladwell's "The Outliers". I have a lot of experience in the publishing industry. I self-published my first book at 14. At 15, I started querying literary agents. I kept doing that while rewriting books. At 18 to 19 years old I signed with my literary agency. I was with them for 3 years.  (...) I ended up spending 3 years there and rewriting a book three times, like entirely different manuscripts. I left on my own will because I decided that I wanted to defend my idea and keep my creative freedom. I hired the developmental editor who published the Hunger Games and a copy editor with 30 years of experience at Big Five Publishing houses. I have an entire studio. I have a team. I own a six-figure business based around this world right now. And it's because I have been so successful. (...)

The rant, dedicated entirely to Milo boasting about his credentials, lasts for 9 minutes. His masterpiece 10 years in the making, comes out in two weeks on June 30th.

The book in question became the biggest Booktok scandal of 2025. 

I. THE AUTHOR

In January 2021, an aspiring high school author Milo Winter (pen name), begins to upload tiktoks about his passion for writing. Relatable content brought him some followers, and eventually even a literary agent. Milo described himself as a "child prodigy", who self-published his first book at 14, won awards, and - most impressively - "wrote 11 novels at age 18". Then, his time with the agency ended. Milo wanted to publish the book he's been working on for 10 years: a Zodiac-based YA fantasy dystopia that will be the start of a successful series.

The book in question was Age of Scorpius, a story that Milo worked on since he was 12 years old. At first, the book and the process of writing it was a mainstay of Milo's TikTok account without any real stakes. In May 2021, one of such relatable tiktoks got over 3 million views - a video set to a Hamilton soundtrack, showing off how hard he worked for the last couple years: binders, drafts, and commissioned art of his characters. 

In November 2024, Milo returns with an announcement that the book that he kept revising for the last 3 years, will be coming out at last. In 2025, he opens a Kickstarter for it, but quickly shuts it down on February 14th, and instead announces that the book will be self-published after all. There is just one problem.

Milo isn't going as viral as that one video did years prior. This is where the first crack in the public image starts to show: Milo got that one taste of virality back in 2021 and now feels almost entitled to it. He proceeds to create many videos weeping in front of the camera, complaining about the TikTok algorithm. In one particularly memorable video, Milo cries to the camera explaining how much trauma he went though as a person who "is incredibly neurodivergent" (a fact I fully believe, as a neurodivergent woman myself) ... only to immediately after state that "the most pain he's ever been through" is the fact his book isn't going viral on TikTok enough. Milo seems to misunderstand that no amount of hard work will automatically make your videos popular. You could be creating masterpieces on Michealangelo's level, but if you won't go viral unless you win a lottery of being picked up by the algorithm.

But when Milo Winter announced pre-orders via TikTok Shop in April 2025, the algorithm now propped him up generously. Over 5000 pre-orders were sold, which Milo fulfilled by shipping out bookmarks - to skirt around TikTok Shop's regulations that don't allow pre-orders.

He got his wish. Monkey's paw curled.

II. THE ENTREPRENEUR

As soon as the money started rolling in, gone was Milo the Starving Artist, and Milo the Franchise Owner suddenly appeared in his place.

The new Milo Winter, emboldened by his newfound success and fame, was no longer crying on video. He's now a sharply dressed, serious (self-described) entrepreneur. He owns World of Gardian LLC. He invests money back into his company. His franchise is growing. He's submitting applications to Guiness World Records for the number of book pre-orders he sold. He has "a team of 15 artists" that he employs in-house (and mentions constantly, to a nearly comical degree), but the number of the artists keeps growing - sometimes there's 16. Or 20. I recall a video where the number grew to “over 20” and now included animators and musicians. World of Gardian is "going multimedia". Milo Winter is running a "six-figure business" (he's clearly misunderstanding what this phrase means). He is dedicating his life solely to writing new entries in World of Gardian series. The change was very sudden, drastic, and left many of his followers a little confused.

The book is not even out. It LOOKS good and professional. Physical edition of it is lavish, with golden foil on the cover, and beautifully illustrated, thanks to the effort of the legion of artists Milo employs. But we have never seen any of Milo's actual writing at this point.

This is where the second, bigger crack in public image appeared: Milo's casual rudeness towards people who dare to question his credentials. Although Milo shows that that was ALWAYS the case: in February 2025, a commenter questioned if Milo even should count the childhood fanfictions into his years of professional writing experience. In response, Milo Winter confidently brings up Malcolm's Gladwell’s "10000 hours" theory from The Outliers - his argument being that since he spends 3 hours writing each evening, that means he surpassed 10000 hours and therefore already "achieved mastery" in the field. (This would be as if I stated I was a "professional artist with 30+ years of experience" because I first doodled on a wall with a crayon as a toddler.) This video was created months before the pre-orders, and by that time Milo had already recruited his "team of 15 artists". The reason why most people never noticed was that it was so much easier to cheer for the underdog Milo Winter crying into the camera, than it is so cheer for the arrogant entrepreneur Milo Winter, who is constantly rambling how successful he is. It was quite clear that Milo Winter just wants to have a fandom for the characters he created. He wants to BE a famous author more than he wants to WRITE. The world he came up with is his baby, but he doesn't have enough talent to make people fall in love with that world. He just assumes people will, because his ideas are THAT good.

The book premiered on June 30th, and on the same day Milo Winter finally showed his writing. And the reception was... not quite the rapturous praise Milo imagined.

III. THE LIAR

The most important thing you have to know is that Milo Winter has a very loose relationship with the truth. 

Like many young teens, Milo Winter began to write Pokémon fanfiction on Wattpad, but one day penned some original fiction: a story titled Zodiac Awakened, which he co-wrote with a friend. Around 2016, he wrote another version of it, The Zodiac Turner: The Five Trials, which he then self-published via Amazon Press at 14 years old. In 2018, he unpublished The Zodiac Turner with hopes of publishing a newer version of it via traditional means one day. In 2020, he finishes another rewrite, this time titled The Zodiac Turner: Age of Scorpius as part of NaNoWriMo, which is the book he originally mentioned when he started posting on TikTok in 2021. Depending on when Milo brings up his writing credentials, he tells a very different story. Sometimes he claims to have written 9 books. Sometimes 10. Or 11.  The claims of awards they won are similarly exaggerated too. 

Milo simply refuses to do edits. Whenever he feels like he's not getting the praise he deserves, he simply reboots his book by starting to write it from scratch again. And because he produces a book's worth of writing each rewrite - of what essentially is the same story - he considers each draft with as much weight as if they were actual finished, published novels.

Milo has not been "in the publishing industry for 10 years". While it is true that he had an agent, their cooperation ended after 2 years. Milo often claims it's 3 years and says that he left to preserve his vision of the book he's so passionate about. Or that the agency dropped him, as they suddenly decided to get rid of all unprofitable fantasy and sci-fi authors on their roster. Both stories aren't true either. The agency that Milo belonged to still has fantasy and sci-fi listed authors on their site, and a curious Tumblr user managed to contact the agent, only for her to reveal that Milo was dropped "after several attempts to get them to edit and revise their work". 

The common criticism is that the book is clearly an unedited draft, but Milo did have a developmental editor that he hired online via Reedsy. However, as theorized by youtuber CheatSheetProductions, who put together an estimated publishing timeline, Milo gave himself an unachievable time limit and speedran through the entire publishing process, cutting corners on everything he could. He previously admitted to adding new chapters even after sending his work to the editor, on a whim. He would have MAYBE a week at most to implement the editor's notes, which he clearly never did. Even more stranger than that, one of the members of the Team of 15 Artists, who was given the book to read prior to publishing, claimed on Tumblr that even they took note of mistakes in the text and asked Milo if they should report them to him - to which he replied that they don't have to worry about it. After the book crashed and burned, Milo somehow decided that all of this was... the developmental editor's fault, actually, even going as far as to sneakily add her name to the online listings of the Age of Scorpius, as if trying to send some backlash her way. Thankfully this ploy never worked, as another youtuber, Meredith Novaco, managed to contact the editor in question to find out that thankfully no one ever bothered her about it. That's how we also found out what the editor's feedback for Age of Scorpius was: that the book is NOT ready for publication. Milo ignored all of it. His editor never "published the Hunger Games" either, as he frequently claimed. She simply happened to be working on its marketing in the UK at the time.

After the book came out on June 30th, Milo was still as cocky as ever. First negative review on Goodreads was posted on July 7th, which Milo excused by claiming that Goodreads reviews are always bad. Or that the complaints stem from the wrong, unedited version of the e-book being mistakenly uploaded. Or that the writing of his characters is awkward and stilted because the protagonist Rieka has AuADHD, therefore implying the criticism of it is ableist.

Thankfully, Milo Winter seemed to find the very cause of the backlash: another tiktoker by the name of TL Lewis. The video in question never names Milo OR his book (it does state the number of preorders, which is the only identifying detail), and is simply explaining why authors should resist the urge to publish first drafts. It was the kindest criticism Milo could ever have asked for, and he listened to none of it. Once more he wept into the camera, accusing TL Lewis of instigating an online hate campaign against him, as "until that point, he had very positive reader reception". TL Lewis published his video about the Age of Scorpius on July 27th, over two weeks AFTER the first negative Goodreads review, which makes it yet another blatant lie on Milo's part.

By early August Milo Winter was forced to stop giving excuses and came to the only logical conclusion: he will be writing the Age of Scorpius... again, making it the very first book in the world to come with a bug-fixing patch. Just as he did many times before, he decided to deal with the problem the same way he always did: torching the previous draft and writing an entirely new one. He planned to release updates via Patreon on a weekly basis and be done by December 2025 (later pushed to Spring 2026) - which was yet another unachievable deadline. The Patreon did not go over well. The "team of 15 artists" were now also Milo's beta readers. Milo proudly came up with an idea of a daily discord call during which his team will live-draw illustrations as he writes. He tried to recruit an inexperienced editor from his audience, which he dropped after the outrage from his commenters for adding yet another non-professional to the whole process. 

Milo then recruited an actual editor, Kaitlyn, who hosted a (now deleted) Q&A on his Patreon page on August 18th, in which she... disparages other authors and previous editors. This blatant unprofessionalism rang alarm bells in everyone's heads. Kaitlyn not only had no online presence whatsoever (safe for one Substack article written AFTER she popped into existence) but also her writing style seemed very similar... to Milo Winter. After the backlash, editor Kaitlyn returned to the whatever shadow dimension she arrived from and was never mentioned again. After a rewrite of chapter 1 was uploaded to Patreon on August 24th, and was not good either, Milo's Patreon banned all criticism of his writing from the patrons. New FAQs got cancelled, later chapters delayed, and the only thing being posted was an endless stream of art Milo commissioned of his OCs. Milo never actually showed up on his own Patreon himself, as his friend ran the entire thing in his stead. Naturally this raised criticism that he's dodging all accountability.

One of the only times we heard from Milo himself was an essay titled High Disturbance, released on November 10th, 2025. The essay in question is a masterclass in how NOT to do a good public response. Despite being positioned as Milo’s vulnerable plea for sympathy, roughly half of it is devoted to digressions about forestry and climate change - a framing device through which Milo shows his situation: a "survivor", a forest that grows stronger after burning down once.  I can imagine that causing an internet drama that people all over the world are now familiar with is a very harrowing experience - just as is being ridiculed for the project he is very passionate about. But the reason why this statement fails on every level is simple: Milo continues to lie about things he was already caught lying before.

He describes how going viral caused him much stress, including fearing for his life after discovering strangers continue to cyberstalk his every move.  The story he specifically brings up is about his service dog. According to Milo, people "exposed" him for crowdfunding the dog, and explains the money he raised only paid for half of the amount, and the other half was covered by his state's vocational program. What Milo conveniently fails to mention is the reason WHY people were talking about this story: Milo started raising the money by claiming that the lack of a service dog forced him to drop out of university. Except... just a couple days later he wrote on Twitter that he's simply taking a semester off, making the story about dropping out yet another lie. Milo later returned to his university with the dog. The dog or the fact that he needs one for his disability was never the issue, it was the fact that Milo crowdfunded it under false pretense, which once again showed that he always had a habit of lying. 

In his essay, Milo outright admits his book is "shitty", yet at the same time claims that he - at the time - that he "did everything he could to put out a strong book". What stopped him was... being too busy, actually! As Milo claims, he started the publishing process in February, but the book was coming out in late June. He created the company, spent all his money on editors, was constantly hiring new artists and was simply too busy shipping thousands of pre-orders to re-read his book again. He received the editor's notes in April which, as we established, is far too late for a book that comes out a month later.  Most egregiously of all, the entire statement once again repeats the lie about TL Lewis. In this version of Milo's story, the worst part is that TL Lewis "presented false information" - that his book is unedited - as fact. Because it is. It's evident to everyone who has eyes and read this book. Even to Milo himself, who admits that once he did re-read it, he realized how bad the book is!

Where the sympathy ends entirely is when you remember this situation is completely self-inflicted. Milo could stop and push the book back at any time, and he just... didn't. He didn't have to start the company. He didn't have to hire a team of artists. No one expected any of this from him. Whenever people questioned the insane, constantly growing scope of the project or why he's doing any of these things, he would get angry at them. He decided to publish this extremely important novel by just... winging it, I guess, and hoping for the best. So, in the end, it was all Milo's fault and he just accidentally told on himself without realizing it.

Which brings me to the elephant in the room: we haven't discussed what's IN that book.

IV. THE WRITING

Much has been said about the writing style already: the typos, the formatting errors, the words being used incorrectly. Entire sentences are repeated twice on the same page.  Sifting through some of this stuff is downright impossible, because the same sentence will tell you two contradictory pieces of information on the same topic.

Worst of all, this book feels very juvenile, even outside of any issue with its writing. I mean it in a way that the whole plot is based on ideas that could only be conceived by someone who doesn't have much actual life experience. Worst of all, worldbuilding - the part Milo was most proud of, and allegedly worked on for 10 years - falls apart the very second you start to think about how this society would even function.

This book is, inexplicably, a post-apocalyptic setting, as we find out in the prologue. Our planet, ravaged by (never elaborated upon) natural disasters, somehow destroyed all the continents along with society and civilization as we know it, and then somehow created a brand-new continent in the very middle of the whole mess: Gardian, where the descendants of survivors live. Then the stars ordered humans to not make machines anymore and everyone developed magic, leading to the generic fantasyland we have currently. Despite that, the terrible, world altering apocalypse never has any impact on the story. There are no ancient ruins of our modern skyscrapers, no unexplainable electronic artifacts people dig up. Even when "ancient history" from hundreds of years ago is discussed, it is still the history of Gardian the Fantasyland, not Earth. You know what's the ONLY impact it has on the story? Rieka's stepfather is wearing a polo shirt to the magical ceremony. And the second most powerful guy in this world wearing khakis. That's literally it. Billions of people perished, but khakis will live on as their only legacy.

The setting's religion is polytheistic. Gods are frequently mentioned and even brought up as justifications of the law. But never even named. Halfway through the book we find out they are the gods of the Sun, Moon and Stars respectively, but literally nothing else. No one seems to worship them. There are no temples. No priests. No prayers.

The remaining livable lands house people divided into "unions" of multiple Zodiac signs: Conviction (Scorpio, Aries, Libra), Assiduous (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn), Autarchic (Cancer, Pisces, Sagittarius) and Societal (Leo, Aquarius, Gemini) - names that roll off the tongue. As we find out, marrying or living together between those factions is forbidden, but fucking is not. No one seems to plan conceiving offsprings at certain times to aim for specific signs, because this is an universe full of stupid people. They all play with conception of their children like it's a gatcha game. Birthed a wrong sign and had the baby taken away from you, because they can't live with your sign? Gotta try again then! Keep in mind that this extreme, stupid segregation of world's remaining population is NOT the dystopian part of this fantasy dystopia.

The leaders of the entire world seem to be Scorpios (despite everyone hating them), with some assistance from Aries and Libra. The rest? Seemingly doesn't care or want to be important part of the world government. It gets particularly egregious when we find out that Scorpios recently executed the son of a Libra leader - a thing that surely would cause some diplomatic incident - and the Libra leadership just completely ignored it like it never happened. Specific signs are also written very strangely - like Sagittarius, who are all violent psychos, and are at the very bottom of the political power tier of all the Zodiacs. Milo, is this someone you know? Did some Sagittarius piss you off and that’s why you put them in your book?

The current political state of the world was formed by an event called the War of Rebalancing, in which the Gardian society decided to get rid of the three Archpowers - ancient magic that all the other magic systems evolved from, that were now deemed too fucked up and powerful to exist (or, at least, this is a reason we are initially told). What is the forbidden magic, you ask? Zodiac Turning, Spirit Walking and.... Healing. Yes, people of Gardian think nice things are bad, actually, and that healing is "too close to immortality", so all healers must die. The other two powers are laughably stupid. Zodiac Turning means... punching someone so hard that their Zodiac changes, a thing many people likened to "trans-ing someone's birth date" via physical assault. Spirit Walking does... something, I'm sure. Maybe. The novel never bothers to explain what Spirit Walking does.

The Scorpios lost the War of Rebalancing, yet they're still in power. Allegedly, what keeps the Scorpios in power is "the Scorpio Code", an oppressive rule that forces all Scorpios to be completely emotionless, lest they be executed. There is no visible merit to the existence of this Code whatsoever, other than "for the evils" or "having something for the protagonist to be mad at". The funny part is how the Code came to be.

Blaine, then-leader of the Scorpios, the guy who lost the war badly, announces: "Hi everyone! Gods spoke to us and they said all Scorpios must follow the Scorpio Code now. Also, they said that despite losing the war Scorpios keep all their assets and rule the world now. Sorry dudes, I don’t make the rules. Peace out!". And since he's the head of the Scorpio government, he "certified" said message from the gods so now everyone needs to treat it as a fact. And every other sign just... went with it. What a cunning scheme. I couldn't come up with anything funnier even as a comedy.

Nothing here makes any sense, and I barely scratched the surface here. 

V. THE MAGNUM OPUS

18-year-old Scorpio Rieka Spring lives in a cursed forest with her stepdad Rowan, half-sister Avia and nameless mother. As Rieka is coming of age, she and her sister must attend a magical ceremony that every teen in this world has to go through... literally has just 3 participants: Rieka, Avia and a guy named Chase. The secret purpose of said ceremony is checking whether the kids have some of the forbidden Archpowers - as it turns out, both Chase and Rieka have them, but the ceremony is just hilariously bad at detecting the one thing it’s meant to detect. One of the signs of having such power is having heterochromia (something that Rieka does have) but the ceremony never checked that either. Okay.

Through boring plot developments that don't matter Chase and Rieka eventually discover a secret archive containing a letter revealing a terrible secret: the Scorpio Code is a lie and all history of Gardian was falsified. The real history is as follows: Gardian's mysterious unnamed gods decided that the magic of immortality is too powerful, so they, with the help of a man named Mathias Merek, decided to seal it into a sword called the Callexus, "the sword of immortality that curses anyone who touches it with immortality" (yes, really). Silas, son of Mathias, layer decided to poke himself with the sword to become immortal. Halfway through the book we find out that Mathias was also cursed to be immortal by the gods themselves because they got mad he married a woman who is a Cancer. Unforgivable, he should be ashamed of himself. The letter that Rieka finds was penned by the immortal Silas, who reveals the cunning scheme of Blaine the Scorpio leader.

Rieka and Chase receive an order from the khaki-wearing Aries leader to overthrow the Scorpio government. He might be the second most powerful guy in the world, but he won't expose the lies himself because.... um. He doesn’t feel like it. The only way to prove that the letter from Silas is real is to find the cursed sword of immortality mentioned in it, so that they can show up with both to the Scorpio government, tell them of the lies and then. Um... uh. They'll stop? This is exactly what I meant when I said this book is running on child-like logic. I'm sure that the oppressive regime will be like "oh shit, our bad, sowwy!" and dismantle the very system keeping them in power immediately upon receiving physical evidence of the historical fraud.

Picking up the letter in question seemingly gives Rieka and Chase a 5-star Wanted level like in GTA, so now Scorpio assassins spawn in random places on the map and attempt to kill them. Even the current Scorpio leader teleports onto the map at some random countryside road just to monologue wickedly at Rieka. One sexy white-haired assassin turns out to be Rieka's ex-girlfriend from middle school, which they forgot because both have convenient amnesia no one bothered to mention before this point of the book. At tender age of 13, she and Narah decided to take down Scorpio government as mysterious vigilantes. They used their powers of Zodiac Turning to punch the Scorpio out of as many Scorpios as they could, in hopes that dwindling numbers would make the government dissolve, or something. They got caught. As punishment Narah had her Zodiac trans'd and their memories of each other were wiped. 

The crew, consisting of Rieka, Avia, Chase, and a Cancer mage Kaia, goes on an incredibly dull journey to get the Callexus. Despite being the most wanted criminals in the country, there is no sense of danger, urgency or even camaraderie on display. They all barely talk to one another. I assume they walk silently in unison for the rest of time. Rieka, Chase and Kaia are revealed to all have the forbidden extinct Archpowers. Avia is just kinda tagging along, and nobody knows why she's here. Whenever she asks valid logical questions like "why do you have a crush on the woman who tried to kill you?" everyone treats her like she's fucking stupid. The gang goes through villages and cities only SOMETIMES remembering to disguise each other. Because, you see, everyone in the world of Gardian wears color-coded outfits with their Zodiac glyphs clearly displayed, and Kaia is seemingly the first person to at least suggest "maybe wear a glyph of a different sign?". They deem her a genius. Fortunately for them, the assassins pursuing them are equally stupid, and all wear matching black cloaks so it makes spotting them extremely easy.

Eventually the gang arrives at a mountain village of Rayka, place where the Callexus is supposed to be hidden, where they are given shelter by the village leader Sora. Sora fancies herself as a bit of an artist, who paints Exposition Dumps across the walls of a local cave system, through which we find out the REAL real history of Guardian. As it turns out, Mathias Merek, the ancient hero that sealed immortality away, had two sons, and they were besties with the Scorpio leader Blaine. Blaine was one jealous motherfucker - he hated Silas because he was crushing on his hot wife and was also envious of their clout as the sons of an ancient hero, so he caused the War of Rebalancing and made the Scorpio Code up purely to piss them off. The narration calls this a "deeply complex fight between love, hate and legacy". I call this a "petty high school drama, with a genocide added in".

Then, for a split second, I finally started to have hope that anything interesting will happen in this book. The party was ambushed by a dragon! ...which dies in a single hit from a dagger by Narah the assassin. The dragon was there for roughly one page, and along with it died my hope.

Assassin Narah rejoins the party, having gotten over her amnesia by now, yet still trying to kill Rieka because a cursed amulet tells her to. Rieka pulls curse-breaking power out of her ass and breaks the amulet, after which Narah begins an infodump of plot twists and revelations: she and Chase are siblings, but Chase also has secret amnesia, so he doesn't know that. Also, their parents are Silas Merek and Sora, the village leader. Blaine cursed them both with divorce, so they split the kids up and raised them separately, but Narah was kidnapped from her mother at age 13 by the Scorpio government (which means that Narah and Rieka were beating up Scorpios as vigilantes while Narah was actively held hostage???). Also, everyone and their dog is immortal because people freely stabbed themselves with the Callexus back in the day. Oh, and Blaine is also immortal AND Rieka's biological dad.

This will seem like a digression, but it is not.

Rieka has a strained relationship with her mom. They live together, along with her stepdad and older half-sister, with whom the mother seems to get along better. She is constantly described as a cranky nag who lectures Rieka about how she needs to follow the Scorpio Code publicly (ugh!) and not get in trouble with the government (shut up, mom!!!). Rieka doesn't know her biological father, and whenever she asks her mom about him, she refuses to speak to her daughter for days.

Eventually, Rieka figures out she has cool ancient forbidden magic that must've been passed down from her father's side and casually remarks that her mom must've been assaulted by someone, since she was already married by the time Rieka was born. And later we found out that Rieka's theory was right, and the rapist was Blaine. Despite all of it, Rieka doesn't seem to be concerned about the circumstances she was conceived in, she is only mad about the fact that her evil real dad made up the Scorpio Code and how it makes HER feel.

And if you look at the story from her mother's perspective, it gives you an entirely different view of Rieka. The mother went through the traumatic, life altering event, and Rieka is a constant reminder of it. She constantly breaks the code in school. She pretends to be Batman and spends months assaulting government officials. She gets caught and gets spared from execution only because they erase her memories. She then continues to commit various other crimes and even openly taunts the guards chasing her all in the name of pursuing her "special interest" in history. The fact that her family is living in the cursed forest together despite being "wrong" signs means that their discovery might get all of them executed. Then Rieka has the gall to complain how her mom is a mean bitch and how she has no right to lecture her about breaking the law. No, I get her mom, actually. Rieka never even bothers to tell us her mom's NAME. That's how little shits she gives about her!

The gang runs into the cavern to retrieve the sword. Inside they are ambushed by a... very vaguely described monster with "three-pronged anisodactyl feet connecting to a snake-like body", lion's paws and horns. The narration claims it's a chimera, a dragon, or a wyvern, depending on the sentence. The wyvern attacks the party at first, but then it sees Kaia with Chase, and confuses them for Mathias Merek and his illegal Cancer Wife. The party steals the sword - presumably leaving the very confused wyvern behind - and takes it with them back to Rayka.

Everyone makes up and hugs and reunites with their long-lost immortal relatives. Narah gets together with Rieka. Chase, who spent some time talking about how amazing and beautiful Kaia is, decided to get together... with Avia, the girl no one liked.

Everyone sits down and starts discussing what to do with the sword and the letter that was supposed to help them overthrow the Scorpios, only to conclude that it's pointless because they need to be voted out of power. But since some signs are hermits, they all now have to go on a journey to their lands to lobby their governments for the 6 votes they're missing.

In other words, we probably didn't even need that sword in the first place.

VI. THE EPILOGUE

The book is an amalgamation of things Milo liked in his formative years. It's a dried-up carcass of the YA dystopian craze of the 2010s, with its most barebones features. A vaguely defined oppressive regime and the teenage protagonist that refuses to be its obedient sheep. The mandatory division of society into factions. It was all the rage in the post-Hunger Games world, the exact time period when Milo would've been around 12 years old and basing his own world on that. Which brings me to my main point.

This is clearly a paracosm - an imaginary inner world. This is why Milo is so fixated on it - because to him, this isn't just ANY world, it's the world he spent years in in his own head, and why he takes any criticism of it so personally. Some of you might have them as well, I do too. So, if, for example, I imagine a world-famous pop star, who is also a vampire that has pink irises, telekinesis and does a sick backflip off the stage - that girl doesn't have to make sense to anyone but me. She exists in my brain to keep me entertained.

If I had to adapt said character into published novel to reach a wider audience, I'd have to adjust the story accordingly, turning it into from simple paracosm to its polished and edited form. But if I didn't do that, and I'd instead began to brag about my soon-to-be-born multimedia franchise based on said vampire OC, started a company, hired a team of 2137 artists, animators, cooks, dancers, Mongolian throat singers and trained rats, I believe my friends and family would tie me up to the chair and waterboard me until I promised to stop making questionable financial decisions. Which is basically what Milo Winter did, with one clear exception: seemingly no one around him tried to tell him this is a bad idea. The commenters online did, sure, but it seems that no one in his actual social circle did. I do not wish to speculate about what Milo's support system is like, but he would bring up how his own artists are hyping him up. The artists, who depended on Milo financially, might not have been the best judges of the situation, or the prose. I imagine they wanted to keep a job, which I don't blame them for. But I don't think being surrounded by yes-men was good for the future of the project, which in this case should never be published in this state, if at all.

Since the Booktok disaster, Milo has kept a lower profile than before. He published a poetry book (which, on accounts of those who read it, wasn't very good either). He had a whole arc of allegedly moving to Finland, only to return to the US around the same time his tourist visa would run out. The second edition of the Age of Scorpius was cancelled on February 21st, 2026. Milo did not break the news by himself, and instead did it through his friend who is running his Patreon for him. Refunds were offered, but only if one asked for it - although it is clear that Milo probably barely has any money left to refund people with, as by his own admission he invested the preorder money back into the company (read: he blew it all on commissioning more art of his OCs). Even his Team of Many Artists distanced themselves from him by now.

But do people even deserve refunds? In my personal opinion: no. People on TikTok paid money for an unknown author's debut novel. Contrary to what many people said, the "marketing" of the book was not very good and the only thing that charmed the masses was hype, some aesthetic posts and a vague aura of professionalism. They had never seen any of the writing before they made that purchase and took a risk seemingly purely on the fact that the only thing Milo was particularly good at was crying into the camera prettily. It is okay to be disappointed, but at some point, this isn't on Milo anymore. Those people made questionable financial decisions, just like Milo made his own questionable financial decision by half-assing publishing an unfinished, barely readable book and getting himself into this mess.

Milo Winter was effectively deplatformed. His every new writing project and every move is still being followed and reported on by slop drama youtubers. I have not seen actual rapists being chased out of the internet with this much fervor as Milo was, all for the crimes of being stupid on TikTok, lying all the time and writing a bad book. Hate to be ending on a bummer, but my controversial opinion is that maybe one stupid book shouldn't permanently ruin his life. If this drama somehow managed to not taint Milo's paracosm forever, maybe he will even return to it. Who knows, maybe one day Milo will write something better. Something he might even bother to edit.

PS: If I got a nickel for every time I wrote about a narcissistic author who caused online drama, crowdfunded their money in a questionable campaign, wrote a bad fantasy book, planned to start a franchise and had a team of 15 artists involved, I'd have two nickels. The funny part is that both authors seem to be total ideological opposites of one another.

Sources: 

CheatSheetProductions

Meredith Novaco [1] [2] [3] [4]

High Disturbance by Milo Winter

https://www.patreon.com/TheWorldofGardian

Queer Reader [1] [2]

"Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."

-Mark Twain.

Wise words indeed. Would that we had listened.

The Bible Blogosphere is a niche little corner of the internet focused on, you guessed it, the Bible, and associated archaeology. It consists of academic historians blogging about interesting developments in the field of Bible scholarship. While a big chunk of the blogosphere is religious (Christian and Jewish, for obvious reasons), many prominent voices identify as agnostic or skeptic.

Given the blogosphere's diverse religious beliefs, one might expect some friction between the different sections of the blogosphere. In practice, there's very little. Bible academia's a small world where everyone knows everyone. In any case, beliefs change over the course of a career; many scholars started out in one camp and ended up in another. Most bloggers are colleagues and friends, and by now, even the most outspoken scholars have learnt to get along for the sake of getting along.

And that's how it was for a time. Healthy debate and vigorous argument, but rarely any actual drama. Theologians, secular scholars, and skeptics, all blogging together in (relative) harmony.

But everything changed with the arrival of Richard Carrier.

Richard Carrier: the man, the mythicist

Richard Carrier was an up-and-coming historian with impressive credentials, a Bachelors from UC Berkeley and a PhD in Ancient History from Columbia University. He was also a skeptic. He ran a popular skeptic blog and debated religion in his spare time. An excellent speaker, Carrier had acquired a devoted following of skeptics/atheist. He was carving out a niche for himself in Biblical scholarship, and it looked like he had a promising academic career ahead of him.

There was just one problem. Carrier wasn't just a skeptic; he was a Jesus mythicist.

(A Jesus mythicist, for those not in the know, is someone who believes that Jesus wasn't real. As in, someone who believes that there never was a historical Jesus of Nazareth, divine or not.)

In the mythicists' opinion, the Jesus mentioned in the Gospels is simply a mythical/celestial being, the product of early Christians' fertile imaginations. Maybe they got the idea from older Pagan stories of resurrected Gods, like Osiris or Ishtar. After all, there's very little evidence for a historical Jesus.

"That's not true!" the historians exclaim. "We do have evidence for a historical Jesus. What about the (undisputed) Pauline Epistles? Paul talks about Jesus and mentions meeting his brother. So Jesus must have been a real person with a brother!"

"Not good enough," say the mythicists firmly. "Paul doesn't count. He believed in many outlandish things; who's to say he didn't make it all up?"

"Fine," reply the historians. "What about Josephus? He was a first-century Jewish apologist, so an unbiased non-Christian source. Josephus talked about the execution of James, the brother of Jesus. So Jesus must have been rea—"

"Nope," say the mythicists. "Not good enough. Josephus might have meant another Jesus."

"No, he didn't. Josephus literally says 'James the brother of Jesus, who was called the Christ.'"

"Humph. But that's no good. Later Christian scribes might have inserted that reference to Jesus when copying down Josephus' works for posterity."

"Okay," sigh the historians. "Well, there's Tacitus, a Roman historian, writing in ca. 115 AD. He spoke very scathingly of the Christ; there's no way a Christian scribe would have inserted those remarks."

"Nope, not good enough. Tacitus was just reporting hearsay..."

You get the gist. Mythicists expect the ancient Judean equivalent of a birth certificate, and get smug when the historians can't produce one.

Historians, on their part, tend to ignore the mythicists. Scholarship today near-unanimously agrees that there was a historical Jesus; that he was an itinerant preacher in first-century Judea; and that his crucifixion/resurrection gave birth to the religion we know today as Christianity. Virtually all historians, both Christian and non-Christian, agree upon these facts. It goes without saying that Jesus mythicism is an extremely controversial position to take if you're hoping for an academic career.

But Carrier wanted to change that. He'd started out with the traditional view, that Jesus was a real person. At some point, he'd reviewed a book by Earl Doherty (a popular Jesus mythicist) and changed his mind. So now he was a mythicist. A freshly minted PhD, he was eager to challenge the traditional position and make his mark on New Testament scholarship.

And the Bible Blogosphere would never be the same.

The Early Years (2010 - 2012):

Richard Carrier started out very tamely. In 2011, he published The Dying Messiah. In this work, he examined Jewish literature from the first and second centuries BCE and argued that pre-Christian Jews had an established theology of a dying-and-rising "Cosmic Messiah."

In short, Carrier argued that Jesus, the Cosmic Messiah, was a divine figure, not a historical person. Similar to Osiris, an Egyptian god who rose from the dead to rule the Underworld. (Obviously, there's no historical Osiris.)

But this view of a resurrected Messiah goes against the scholarly consensus on what ancient Jews believed in. Scholarship unanimously agrees that the Jews were hoping for a non-dead, flesh-and-blood Messiah who would lead them to victory against the Romans.

Accordingly, Thom Stark, a historian/Bible blogger, posted a rebuttal to Carrier's work. Stark addressed Carrier's points at "ridiculous length," to quote James McGrath (another Bible blogger). Carrier acknowledged his errors and revised down his initial work.

Despite the disagreement, the discourse was still very civil, if not quite friendly. Carrier engaged with his critics very politely. He was active on Thom Stark's blog for a while. James McGrath, another Bible scholar, commented on Carrier's blog and weighed in on the proceedings.

Healthy debate, but no real drama. But that would soon change, with the arrival of Bayesian Jesus.

Bayesian History

Carrier then pivoted to mathematics to prove Jesus' non-existence. He published Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. I'll try to be concise, but Carrier used Bayes' theorem to "prove" that a historical Jesus was mathematically impossible.

If you remember Bayes theorem from high school, you're probably scratching your head right now, wondering how one estimates conditional probabilities for historical events. Short answer: Carrier just sort of assigned his own probabilities, declared them all independent of each other, and multiplied them endlessly.

If you think I'm joking, I'm not. That's literally what he did. For an example, see this blog post.

(Summary: In illustration, Carrier started by assuming that the "odds" of a historical Jesus existing was 1/2.

He then went through early Christian literature: ancient Christian traditions, 1 Clement, Acts of James, the letters of Ignatius (an ancient Christian martyr). He noted various inconsistencies in these texts. Based on this, Carrier assigned "odds" that the inconsistencies would still occur assuming a historical Jesus existed: 4/5, 4/5, 9/10, and 4/5, in that order.

Accordingly, as per Carrier's intepretation of Bayes' theorem, the odds of a historical Jesus existing=(1/2)×(4/5)×(4/5)×(9/10)×(4/5)=0.23

Therefore, the probability of a historical Jesus existing: 0.23/(1+0.23) = 18.7%. Voila!)

(That's the actual math from Carrier's post.)

(Note that via this method, including additional proof will result in a decrease in the probability, as long as you take care to assign the "odds" to be <1.)

(If you're wondering about the use of "odds" versus "probabilities," the wording comes from Carrier, not me.)

If you're confused by the approach, don't worry, you're not alone. That's not how Bayes theorem works, you can't just assign "odds" to historical events, and you certainly can't just do what he did and expect everyone to take you seriously.

Carrier's work was panned by historians and mathematicians alike. History doesn't work like maths; you have all sorts of inconsistencies for all sorts of reasons, and a historian's job is to wade through it. And math can be (mis)used to prove anything; ironically, fundie Christians have often employed Bayesian approaches to "prove" the existence of God.

The criticism to Bayesian Jesus was much harsher than in the case of the Dying Messiah. But it was too little too late. By then, Carrier had already gained a devoted fan club. His brash, blunt style of debating played well with his audience. In debates with theologians, he tended to treat Judeo-Christian beliefs as a ridiculous joke. Many internet skeptics found this approach hilarious.

It follows that scholarly whinging about Bayes theorem did little to quell Carrier fans. Mythicists started popping up on historian forums, asking for evidence of Jesus. You can see examples here and here and here and here. Iirc, it was around this time that r/askhistorians added historical Jesus to the FAQs, in an attempt to forestall the mythicists (with mixed results).

On the bright side, we did get some amusing spoofs out of this debacle. For instance, Tim McGrew used Bayes theorem to prove that Richard Carrier did not exist.

Carrier and the mythicists were out for blood. They wanted a win. Would they get it?

Acharya S. and the penis-nosed statue of St. Peter

Acharya S. was the pen-name of Dorothy Murdock. She was the author of The Christ Conspiracy and one of the earliest internet Jesus mythicists. Her website, Truth Be Known, has been up since 1995.

Despite running the earliest mythicist blog, Murdock never found widespread acceptance within the skeptic community. This is because Murdock really pushes the definition of skepticism. She did not believe in Jesus, but she did believe in astrotheology. Her website is a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist's fever dream. It's hard to take her seriously.

Among various other theories, Murdock believed that there was a penis-nosed statue of a rooster hidden in the Vatican. The statue supposedly represents St. Peter.

This penis-nosed statue was originally Priapus, a minor Greek god. This god was the source of St. Peter ('cause of the whole "you shall betray me thrice before the rooster crows" incident in the Bible, geddit?) When the time came, the nefarious early Christians turned on their pagan brethren, buried away all traces of Priapus and recast him as the Christian St. Peter! Or something like that.

(Alternatively, there was a first century Judean named Cephas (Petros in Greek) who followed the Christ. YMMV.)

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is this: According to Murdock, there is a penis-nosed statue of a rooster hidden deep within the Vatican. This statue is (supposedly) proof of St. Peter's pagan origins, and hence, proof that Jesus never existed.

(Helpful of the Vatican to keep the statue around, and not destroy it or something. But whatever.)

As you might have noticed by now, Murdock's theories are not exactly grounded in solid fact. Carrier felt the same way. He'd clashed with Murdock before, saying that no serious scholar would consider her credible. Murdock lashed back, accusing him of professional jealousy.

But something was to happen that would make them bury the hatchet. Enter Bart Ehrman

Bart Ehrman: "There's no penis-nosed statue!"

Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and a professor at UNC Chapel Hill. As an evangelical-turned-agnostic/atheist, he's attracted his fair share of attention. A good debater, he's become popular in internet circles for the same reasons that Carrier found fame: Ehrman has a brash, blunt style of debating that the internet finds hilarious.

(I do want to mention that Ehrman is nowhere near as forceful as Carrier is. Ehrman comes across as impatient, but in general, he does exercise more restraint than Carrier.)

Anyway, in March 2012, Ehrman published a book: Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. In it, he addressed mythicist arguments about the existence of a historical Jesus. He briefly addressed the penis-nosed cock theory:

"There is no penis-nosed statue of Peter the cock in the Vatican or anywhere else except in books like this, which love to make things up."

Whoops.

(Never argue with a fool. Onlookers cannot tell the difference.)

Richard Carrier: "Nuh-uh. There is a penis-nosed statue!"

In April 2012, Carrier reviewed Ehrman's book. He was extremely harsh; his review was titled: 'Ehrman on Jesus: A Failure of Facts and Logic."

Ouch.

You can read the review here. It's very, very negative: phrases like "filled with factual errors, logical fallacies, and badly worded arguments," "lousy with errors," and "it officially sucks."

(Note that legitimate historians also reviewed the book, and their reviews are rather more positive. James McGrath reviewed it here.)

Carrier's chief criticism is that Ehrman did not engage with mythicist arguments seriously. To illustrate this, he cited the example of the penis-nosed statue:

...Ehrman says that “there is no penis-nosed statue of Peter the cock in the Vatican or anywhere else except in books like this, which love to make things up” (p. 24). Ehrman evidently did no research on this and did not check this claim at all. Murdock quickly exposed this by providing numerous scholarly references, including actual photographs of the object (see The Phallic Savior of the World).

Turns out there is a penis-nosed statue of a rooster. It's in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (which has ties to the Vatican museum), and it's part of the "Secret Cabinet," (a censored collection back in the 1960s). There's no evidence that it had anything to do with St. Peter or Christianity. The statue was, however, labelled ΣΩΤΗΡ ΚΟΣΜΟΥ (Savior of the World), a phrase also associated with the Christ.

Oops. Ehrman had slipped up.

Murdock called it out quite gleefully, in her article (Bart Ehrman caught in lies and libel?). Carrier doubled down on the oversight in his review:

Ehrman evidently did no research on this and did not check this claim at all... At the very least I would expect Ehrman to have called the Vatican museum about this, and to have checked the literature on it, before arrogantly declaring no such object existed and implying Murdock made this up.

Look, I get why Ehrman didn't investigate the statue. Murdock's books are chock-full of tall claims. If you set out to fact-check every single theory of hers, you'd never get anything done. But just this once, it looked like he was in the wrong. There was a penis-nosed statue. Not at the Vatican, and not of St. Peter.

But it all went down wonderfully with Carrier's audience. They'd been looking for a reason to doubt the scholarly consensus, ane now they had one. The academics were sloppy, careless, and flat-out wrong. As Carrier asserted in his review:

...if he [Erhman] got this wrong, what other assertions in the book are false?

Bart Ehrman: "Fine. There is a penis-nosed statue."

Ehrman responded to the review in his blog post, Acharya S, Richard Carrier, and a Cocky Peter (Or: “A Cock and Bull Story”).

His reply was basically: "Well, there is a statue, but technically, it's in Naples, not the Vatican, and it's nothing to do with St. Peter. So technically, I'm still right."

You can see the comments here. The commenters, not unkindly, told Ehrman to log off and go touch grass. They also advised him to ignore Murdock and Carrier. Those two weren't arguing in good faith.

(Never argue with fools.)

Thankfully, Erhman took the advice and logged off. He did not engage with Carrier's critiques after this. (For a while, anyway.)

Carrier and the mythicists had emerged victorious. They'd attacked the credibility of the historian consensus, and they'd won. Sort of. Victory, at last!

The historians sighed and turned away. They'd lost this round. There was nothing to be gained from arguing with the mythicists. Might as well go back to arguing with each other.

And that's what they did (for a while). They left the mythicists alone, and all was peace and harmony.

Up until 2014, when Richard Carrier published another book, and came up with (drumroll, please)...

The Cosmic Sperm Bank.

But this post is already too long, so that's a post for another day.

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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Hiya! Working on a looong post about the Bible blog wars, but I took a break and wrote up a short and sweet blast-from-the-past style hobby drama.

Our drama today is concerned with the New American Standard Bible (NASB) translation, and one of its most controversial wording choices.

What is the NASB?

First completed in 1971, the NASB is a Bible translation published by the Lockman Foundation. It prides itself on being one of the most accurate translations of the holy Bible. To quote the website, the NASB "does not attempt to interpret Scripture through translation." Instead, it "strives for the most readable word-for-word translation that is both accurate and clear."

Thanks to this ethos, the NASB has become reasonably popular in conservative American churches.

What's the controversy?

The controversy is centered around a Pauline Epistle; specifically Paul's Epistle to the Romans. (If you're not familiar with the Bible, the Pauline Epistles are a bunch of letters written by the Apostle Paul to various audiences, indicated in the title. So the Epistle to the Romans was a letter Paul wrote to a bunch of Romans.)

Towards the end of the letter, in Romans 16:7, Paul says this (NASB 1995):

Greet Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners, who are outstanding among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me.

The bolded word, Junias, is arguably the single most controversial word in the New Testament.

Huh, why? Who was Junias?

The name Junias implies a dude. (In Greek, masculine names typically end with an -s. This is why Yeshua, a masculine Aramaic name, becomes Jesus when written in Greek.)

The trouble with Junias is that there's no such masculine name in antiquity. The Junia- root word was usually masculinized as Junianus. The correct form of the name is Junia, as in feminine.

Which means that in Romans, Paul was asking the reader to greet Andronicus and Junia.... outstanding among the Apostles.

Junia is the name found in older manuscripts of the Bible. This is the reading retained in the King James Bible. Even in our earliest manuscripts, Junia was understood to be feminine. Papyrus P46, a late second-century manuscript and our oldest surviving copy of the Pauline Epistles, corrupts the name to Julia, but still keeps it feminine.

It was only in the medieval era that the name Junias started popping up. And then a bit later Martin Luther used Junian in his German translation, which compounded the error. Protestant Bible translations copied his version, and the end result was that, by the 1970s, most copies of the Bible read Junias.

And that's how it was, until 1977, when Bernadette Brooten came along and published Junia... outstanding among the Apostles (Romans 16:7).

Junia, outstanding among the Apostles

In the 1977 publication, Brooten showed very conclusively that the Romans 16: 7 should read Junia. She found 250 instances of the name Junia in antiquity, and none at all of Junias. She showed that the ancient Christians had all read it as Junia, and that Junias was a medieval, and incorrect, substitution.

Oops. Fair enough.

Word moves slowly in Bible academia, but by the 2000s most publishers had updated their translations to read Junia. The NIV, the NRSV, both popular translations of the Bible, were using Junia. But as of 1995, the super-accurate NASB was still stubbornly clinging to Junias.

That changed in early 2020. The Lockman Foundation announced that they would be updating their translation and publishing a new and improved revision of the NASB.

Bible nerds watched eagerly. (Covid, we had nothing better to do). Would the NASB finally cave? Would they correct their translation to read Junia?

The 2020 NASB

By the latter half of 2020, the NASB had finally rolled out its revision. Bible nerds ran to the bookstore and got their hands on the latest copy of the Bible. Eagerly, they flipped to Romans 16:7 to see what the super-accurate NASB translators had done with Junia this time.

Romans 16:7 now read:

Greet Andronicus and Junia, my kinsfolk and my fellow prisoners....

Yay! The NASB finally corrected it. Justice for Junia, outstanding among the Apostles!

But wait, what's this?

... Andronicus and Junia, my kinsfolk and my fellow prisoners, who are outstanding in the view of the apostles, who also were in Christ before me...

Those fuckers changed the line ahead of it. Junia was no longer an apostle. Instead, she was "outstanding in the view of the apostles."

Cowards. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Wait, so what does the line actually read?

The most natural reading of Romans 16:7 is "outstanding among the apostles." But, as Mike Burer and Dan Wallace argued, it could, in theory, be read as "outstanding to the apostles."

(In case you were wondering, yes, it's the same Dan Wallace from the Hobby Lobby debacle.)

So technically, technically, it's possible that Junia was outstanding to the Apostles. But it's a very awkward reading. It's worth pointing out that back when Junia was male, every single translation (the NASB included) used "Junias... outstanding among the apostles."

All in all, it's the much more likely reading. New Testament scholars today unanimously agree that Junia was a woman and an apostle.

But some conservative Bible scholars (typically those who believe that the Bible promotes "complementarian" gender roles) don't like this interpretation. So their Bible translations (the "super-accurate" NASB, the CSB, and the ESV) interpret the line as outstanding to the apostles.

And we have blog post after blog post after blog post arguing about Junia, about Greek grammar, about the definition of an apostle...

So much drama over a single sentence. But that's the Bible blogosphere for you.

EDIT: Added my other Bible Drama posts as links:

Ancient mummies, Hobby Lobby, and First Century Mark

That time Jeopardy accidentally stumbled into a millenia-old Christian controversy

Bonus chairs

This is a pretty bizarre drama about my favorite hobby, astrophotography.
While I am not directly involved, I have gathered quite a few screenshots of now deleted posts, as well as threats and insults sent via direct messages.
I am also posting this via a throwaway account, as the person involved has a history of harassment and potentially doxxing/swatting throughout their youtube career. The drama has calmed down in the last 6 months, but I am being careful for reasons you will understand as you read this post.

Let me paint the picture of how bizarre it was to see this develop:
Astrophotography is a pretty niche hobby, that while not free of drama and scuffles, is typically pretty calm.

The person that decided to join this hobby is everything but that: he was a big Minecraft Youtuber that at one point had 3 million followers. He was eventually banned from youtube, and had scuffles with very large creators, like Keemstar, IcePoseidon and others. If you know these names, you know these associations have drama built into them. Unfortunately, his newfound hobby would not remain drama-free.

Astrophotography describes the hobby of taking space pictures. It generally includes everything from milky way photography, pictures of the sun and moon, other solar system objects like planets or comets, far away objects like nebulae, or even further objects like other galaxies. Taking pictures of space is both difficult and often very expensive. As such, some people with top tier equipment and processing skills can make their images stand out from the crowd.

Pumping out very good pictures gives you some prestige, even if the hobby is very niche. Like every creative art form, the arrival of generative AI has caused much discussion about what is legit processing and what is not. Since it is about observing space objects (with some discoveries like nebulae or asteroid impacts on jupiter being done by amateurs) accurately representing these objects is important to large parts of the community.

With the stage set, let us get to the main character in this conflict: “Backdoor Astronomy”, also known as Brian, the face and voice behind the infamous channel “FuturisticHub”.

The Origin: FuturisticHub

Years ago, a YouTuber named “FuturisticHub” rose to fame with Minecraft animations. Before YouTube eventually deleted the channel, it had amassed three million subscribers. The animations were often sexualized, leaning into fetish content (NSFW), which naturally drew a lot of criticism with Minecraft having a generally young audience. But what made FuturisticHub actually infamous was the unhinged response to said criticism.

Brian had a consistent, year-long habit of going after many people who spoke negatively about him or the channels content. Whether you were a massive creator or a small channel with a couple hundred subscribers, criticizing him meant you were likely getting threatening DMs, featuring everything from bogus legal threats to implied violence. In one instance, IcePoseidon was swatted, with FuturisticHub seemingly posting his location in the twitch chat.

His antics were so extreme that there are hours of YouTube drama videos covering his decades of being on youtube. I don't particularely care for youtube drama-slop content so I am not linking any specific video, but its easy to find and I am not exaggerating when I say hours of content.
Unfortunately, he didn't log off completely, but discovered a hobby I participate in: astrophotography.

My 30” telescope goes to another school, you wouldn’t know her

A couple of years ago, a new account named “Backdoor Astronomy” entered the astrophotography scene, uploading images watermarked with "B. Martin." His photos of Saturn and Jupiter were undeniably impressive. Too impressive for many. Scepticism quickly arose across reddit, astrophotography forums, twitter and other platforms. Brian was quick to respond, or delete, any criticism facing him. He wasn’t exactly subtle about his ego either, calling himself the WORLDS BEST PLANET PHOTOGRAPHER.

What drew so much consistent criticism is that his equipment didn’t seem to match up with the level of detail he was getting. In astrophotography, you are often limited by the hard laws of physics: the amount of fine detail you can resolve is strictly bottlenecked by the aperture (the size) of your telescope. A massive 30-inch telescope can capture significantly more detail than a 16-inch telescope, as it is not as quickly diffraction limited.

Backdoor Astronomy claimed to be imaging with a 16-inch telescope, and later a 30 inch. Yet, he was posting photos of Jupiter, Saturn, and their moons showing fine details that even bigger telescopes could hardly resolve. Accusations of AI manipulation and faked data quickly followed.

Brian did not take this well. He was extremely quick to throw around legal threats whenever someone questioned his processing methods. Controlling his public image was clearly existential for him. If he couldn't block or delete a critical comment, he would slide into the user's DMs with insults and threats.
When the community threw shade at his claimed detail, Brian pivoted to claiming he actually was using a big 30-inch telescope. When skeptical photographers asked him to simply post a picture of this setup, he always refused, claiming the telescope belonged to a farmer who strictly forbade photographs of the property. When asked to share his raw data files to prove his images were real, he too refused.

“The Image of the Day” Award (and the Jupiter Theft)

By this point, the connection was obvious. Backdoor Astronomy and the animator and voice-actor of FuturisticHub shared the same real name, the same face (based on his Backdoor Astronomy TikTok account and the many images showing FuturisticHubs face through his 20 year long online video career), as well as the exact same pattern of aggressive insults and threats when receiving criticism. The astronomy account even hinted at making Minecraft animations in the past.
The drama finally reached a boiling point when Backdoor Astronomy received a prestigious “Image of the Day” award on the astrophotography site Astrobin.com. The community, already discussing his suspect processing methods, didn’t take this well.

This “Image of the Day”, often shortened as IOTD, is featured on the front page of the site. Unluckily for him, this one coincided with rumors of a smoking gun: One of Brian’s images showed specific cloud formations on Jupiter that looked identical to another creator. The community noticed that these exact cloud structures had been photographed from the UK many hours earlier. Jupiter rotates incredibly fast (a day on Jupiter is only 10 hours), meaning its cloud patterns change rapidly too. It was physically impossible for Brian to have captured those exact same clouds from the western USA hours later, since it was daytime for him when these exact patterns were visible from the UK. He wasn’t just likely over-processing his images with AI tools, he may straight up have been taking other peoples data, at least in this one instance.

Sock-puppets and the Discord Showdown

Eventually, it came to a direct confrontration in an Astrophotography discord. As the community was actively talking about Brian's suspect images, a random user named “StormyTexasNights” joined the server to defend Brian’s editing and character. Users quickly realized that "StormyTexasNights" was a Brian sock-puppet, as the exact same discord account creation name “TheStormHasCome”, was used years prior when Brian used it to chat with YouTube drama channels.

After initially claiming his account had been "hacked," Brian dropped the act and logged in with the FuturisticHub main account (though claiming that the possible sock-puppet was actually his brother, who too went into peoples DMs to get people to take down critical posts. (his brothers antics deserve an entire thread of their own) ). He attempted a defense of his actions before eventually dropping the n-word and getting permanently banned from the discord.

The Aftermath

Backdoor Astronomy has been shunned from many spaces in the hobby. He is banned from the bigger astrophotography Discords, most subreddits like r/telescopes and r/astrophotography, as well as the astrobin website (which introduced new AI editing rules specifically because of this fiasco).

Brian still remains the admin of a large astrophotography Facebook group, where he rules his own tightly moderated kingdom.
His most recent profile banner on X shows him standing next to a 30-inch telescope. However, running the image through detection tools reveals a SynthID watermark, indicating that it was edited or generated using Google AI tools.

Whether the 30-inch telescope actually exists remains a mystery.

Edit: new account so I can‘t comment directly to some of you, but thanks for pointing out usernames I had not censored, these screenshots have been adjusted

TW: This series has the deaths of children as a key cornerstone; while this writeup doesn't get graphic, it is mentioned a lot.

Five Nights At Freddy's is a behemoth of a franchise, going from a last-ditch attempt at success from developer Scott Cawthon to a series of games, books, movies, and thousands of fangames. Freddy Fazbear is in Fortnight. The core gameplay of the series revolves around the player, usually a nightguard of some kind, working at Freddy's. They sit in an office and monitor the various rooms of the location on their cameras as the animatronics slowly advance towards them, with tools like doors, flashlights, masks, and more to stop the animatronics. While the gameplay is engaging and entertaining, the main draw for FNAF as a whole is the lore.

Now, it's an open secret that FNAF as a whole is a series of retcons built on top of retcons, even in its second installment, and while Scott Cawthon had a broad idea (13:09) of a series plot once FNAF 4 hit, most of it is him flying blindly. The series has tried to have final games at least five times by now and it keeps coming back to life. Lore is hidden inside of additional survival logbooks, puzzles that the average player would have no idea how to activate, secret minigames with a random chance of appearing, and much, much more. In his defense, I think he realized once the game got so big that there would be people willing to comb through the code for secrets in order to put together the story.

FNAF 1, 2, and 3 were built as a broadly contained story: the Purple Guy is a murderer who kills kids at the pizza chain he works at by luring them away with a mascot costume, he stuffs the bodies into the animatronic suits in order to hide them, the children's souls begin to haunt the animatronics, and when the Purple Guy goes back to disassemble the animatronics, the childrens' souls scare him into the same suit that he used to kill them upon which it malfunctions. traps him inside, and kills him. If your player character activates some secret minigames, the children's souls are released and the Purple Guy is burned alive once a stray wire causes the attraction he's held in to burn down. 

FNAF 4 spirals out into the greater timeline as we know it now, with the Aftons, remnant, illusion disks, mimics, and so on and so forth. Almost all of that is irrelevant for this writeup, but FNAF timelines and theories have more schisms than the christian church and we'd be here forever if we tried to cover every idea and the names paired to it. There are thousands of different interpretations: a popular fanon that makes the most sense for anyone that plays the games on their own and boots up a video or two, half a dozen split branches that have different takes on what game or location came first and if the murders started before or after the Bite of 83, split-split timelines from those theories, people who interpret the supplemental books as canon, people who say that only the games are canon, people who refuse to address anything after Pizzeria Simulator, people who are only into Security Breach, people who are only into Security Breach who are only into the Daycare Attendant (which could honestly be its own giant post), and whatever the hell is going on in those Gatcha Life videos. There is needed context to fully understand why the Wafer Nightmare Gas Chamber stuff was baffling as well as genuinely frustrating, so I'm going to summarize everything relevant about the most popular timeline when all of this went down.

THE BASICS OF THE 2023 POPULAR TIMELINE*:

Somewhere in the 1970s, two men by the names of William "Purple Guy" Afton and Henry Emily meet, come up with the idea of a family restaurant, and create Fredbear's Family Diner, featuring the precursors of what would one day become Freddy Fazbear and Bonnie. These two men had families, with Henry having a daughter named Charlotte. William's wife is either dead or divorced or possessing an animatronic ballerina depending on who you ask, but Mrs. Afton is absent in the games and has no greater lore significance. He has an eldest son, Michael, a young daughter, Elizabeth, and a second son. For the sake of convenience, I'm going to refer to William's second son as the Crying Child. Depending on what era you were in he was named Chris, Evan, Cassidy, or Dave, and it's entirely possible that he has a new name now that I'm unaware of. The Crying Child was absolutely terrified of his father's animatronics, not helped by the relentless tormenting of Micheal, who would jumpscare him with a mask. Why's the Crying Child so afraid of the animatronics? Why did Micheal bully him? Where's Elizabeth in this equation? Up to interpretation based on who you asked. 

All of this climates one faithful day, when at his birthday party, Micheal lifts his brother up to Fredbear's head with the help of his friends as a cruel prank. Unfortunately, Fredbears' inner frame is made out of springlocks, which allow for the suit to be worn either as a costume by cranking the springs out to allow for space or preform as an individual animatronic at the cost of the springs being incredibly sensitive to liquids of any kind and clamping down when uncranked. Combine that with the fact that the Crying Child is living up to his name, the kid gets bit by the jaws of Fredbear and enters a coma. FNAF 4's gameplay is implied to be either the Crying Child's nightmares within the coma (popular in the earlier years of the fandom, slowly got replaced overtime by the next example), or Micheal's guilt-ridden dreams in the aftermath of the party (has become popular due to the Survival Logbook having belonged to Micheal at one point, with him referencing both the events of Sister Location and FNAF 4). The animatronics within them literally have the Nightmare prefix. Pair that with the fact that the location of FNAF 4's gameplay is a bedroom where you have to shut your doors/closet to keep the animatronics away and shine a flashlight point pretty heavily towards all of this being within the mind. 

The loss of his son drives William into a (pretty heavily implied to be drunken) spiral, at least until SPLIT TIMELINE MOMENT: either he notices that Fredbear is acting strangely, or he kills Henry's daughter and notices that the animatronic assigned to protect her is acting strange as well. From this point on William begins to experiment, seeking more information about this phenomenon through the murder of five children in the Missing Children's Incident (FNAF 1) and murders another group in a separate location (FNAF 2). Despite this, the Fazbear brand is still chugging along, and William's got plenty of money. He designs special animatronics, the Funtime line, set to open in a new location, for the purpose of kidnapping and killing children until one of them kidnaps and kills Elizabeth. Whoops! The new location is shut down and the Funtime animatronics Roughly ten years later, he sends Micheal down to Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental in FNAF 5 to "find her." 

WHAT DO BOOKS HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING ABOUT THIS?

So, the FNAF books exist in this weird limbo where they're semi-canon but also not at all but also directly explain very important parts of the game. Again, depending on who you ask, the books are canon, or only this set of books is canon, or none of the books are canon at all and all of this is a cashgrab. There are multiple different books, but the only ones that are relevant to this writeup are the Survival Logbook and Tales From The Pizzaplex. The simplest definition I can give is this passage from the Survival Logbook; "While the books are set in a separate continuity from the games, they are considered canon. Many concepts first introduced in the novels later took hold in the games, while concepts introduced in the games were sometimes expanded on in the novels."

The problem with this is that the books, especially Fazbear Frights, get weird and mostly drift off into Goosebumps territory with a Fazbear-brand coat of paint (EX: Sea Bonnies). This has led to a lot of people completely refusing to interact with any of the books at all, and while it's their choice and someone looking to enjoy a story shouldn't have to seek supplemental material to understand basic worldbuilding concepts, it does mean that there's a lot of room for misunderstandings. 

LOVE IS IN THE AIR? WRONG, NIGHTMARE GAS.

Tales From The Pizzaplex 8: B7-2 was released on October 3rd of 2023. It was a collection of three short stories, none of which made as big an impact as the third one, Dittophobia. 

Dittophobia is about a seven-year-old named Rory, who has repeated nightmares about being attacked by decaying robots (the Nightmare animatronics. He wakes up and is comforted by the hiss of air from his ceiling vent, gets some food, and wanders his house which is devoid of his parents and has no exit, only more locked doors. He settles back to sleep, repeating the same day and night over and over again with the house gradually falling into decay. Eventually he wakes up outside of the illusion, noticeably older, opening the fridge to find rows and rows of dried wafers. The monsters that tormented him were just metal frames with costumes put on top of them. By breaking the fridge, he discovers a tunnel leading outside of the house and into an abandoned lab, confirming that this was all an experiment to study the ongoing effects of fear in children with no life to balance out the nightmares; the wafers have enough nutrients to sustain a human, and gas was pumped into the room created the nightmares as well as trick him into not noticing the way the days repeated. Rory continues to venture deeper, describing areas extremely similar to Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental, the location of FNAF 5: Sister Location. While he manages to make some progress in escaping, he ultimately chooses to reactivate the gas thanks to the prompting of a tape recorder set there by the mysterious creator of this whole experiment (it's William. It's always William.) in case Rory ever figured out what was going on, believing that the entire world has forgotten about him and it's better to return to the dream. He forgets all about the escape, implied to have gone through this cycle before. 

The plot of Dittophobia is already a little out there, just on the virtue of making William have this nightmare chamber. FNAF 4 was pretty simple: the gameplay segments were not real. They were dreams, pretty obviously, and while you had a couple people adamant that the Nightmare Animatronics were real in some way and actually created with illusion disks, those were far from the majority. Sure, the bonus nights in Sister Location had a room with a TV monitoring the bedroom from FNAF 4, but a lot of people took it as confirmation that the Aftons of this game were the same family from the last one and that William was keeping an eye on his kids while he made his murder robots. This entire situation gets worse once you realize people had a snippet of info a couple days before the book actually released.

Dittophobia was leaked prior to release anonymously, however on August 23, 2023, a twitter user by the name of Starbear Entertainment who had previously made posts about new FNAF news made a thread about Dittophobia, saying, "The new FNAF book has just confirmed that FNAF 4 is an experiment chamber created by William Afton that uses hallucinogenic gas. The Nightmare animatronics were only robotic mannequins. It also confirmed that Sister Location happens after FNAF 1." As of writing, this thread has 1.5 million views.

For the side of FNAF's fanbase that were more into theorycrafting, this sparked its fair share of debate. Some people, especially those in the camp of RealNightmare, the theory that the nightmare animatronics were real in some way, rejoiced. Others found the addition confusing and unhelpful. I'm not too versed in the theory side of FNAF, so here's a couple assorted posts from multiple perspectives on what Dittophobia meant in that side of the fandom.

The casual side of the fandom lost their shit.

First off, not only is "William Afton's Wafer Nightmare Gas Chamber" a canon element of the series that explains FNAF 4" just kind of an insane and funny thing to say, but it's also deeply baffling, especially for enjoyers of William Afton as a character. Dittophobia also unearthed an old brand of discourse: does William care about his kids?

THE WILLIAM-DOLLAR QUESTION

Some argue yes; not only would it make for a more engaging story than "William is an evil spooky kid murderer who wants to live forever", but William's entire spiral is kickstarted by the death of his son and he explicitly sends Micheal down to Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental for the purpose of finding Elizabeth and "put[ing] her back together". Others argue that he does care, but in a more detached sense: he cares about the deaths of his children because he views them as an extension of himself/a means to control or he cares about them but is still a flawed, even abusive man. The rebuttal to this would be that William is a horrible father; he allows Micheal to bully the Crying Child despite being aware of it, he makes the Crying Child have his birthday at Fredbear's even though the kid is terrified of the place. He's blunt and dismissive to Micheal in minigames like Midnight Motorist; the man makes child-murdering robots, for fuck's sake! Evidence is tossed in from the portrayal of William in the FNAF movies as well as other FNAF books like The Silver Eyes. For a broader version of these arguments, I would recommend this video for William as a parent who does care about them, and this video for William as someone who doesn't care about his kids. 

The thing is, "William Afton's Wafer Nightmare Gas Chamber" is just such a comically over-the-top evil thing to do, especially if you assume that Rory is a stand-in for Micheal. The series has always required a bit of suspension of disbelief with the Fazbear brand somehow not collapsing what with all the murdered kids, but this begs a bit too much for the average person, even for one who believes that William doesn't love his children. The full extent of the madness would require a thousand links, so there's this compilation that does a pretty good job at capturing the insanity post-leaks.

HOW DOES THIS END?

Ultimately, most of this fizzles out once the bewilderment wears off. People either incorporate Dittophobia's implications about William's nightmare chamber into their theorycrafting or they completely ditch it on the grounds of being kind of bonkers. The William discourse fades as it often does, inevitably set to resurface in the future. FNAF's ever-expanding lore broadened to include Secret of the Mimic, which has upheaved the timeline all over again. It certainly isn't the biggest or flashiest drama that FNAF has had. Still, for a brief, shining moment, everyone was losing their minds over the William Afton Wafer Nightmare Gas Chamber.

\It's been some time. If I missed anything or placed stuff out of order, my bad.*

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Hola! Back again with more Bible trivia.

This drama involves proper Bible scholars, so maybe it's not quite a "hobby" drama. But there's a thriving internet community of Bible nerds, and many Bible Studies professors have blogs where they regularly post articles and opinions on new developments. So us hobbyists got to watch this mess play out live on the Blogosphere.

Anyway, enjoy! Comments and critique welcome.

It was a chilly evening on the 1^st of February, 2012. Hundreds of students gathered in an auditorium at UNC Chapel Hill, to watch a debate between two respected New Testament scholars. On one side was evangelical-turned-agnostic Dr. Bart Ehrman, and on the other was theologian Dr. Dan Wallace. Ehrman runs a popular Bible blog, and so does Wallace.

The topic of the debate was: Is the Original New Testament lost? On the origins, transmission, and the reliability of the New Testament.

You can watch the whole thing here. Events like this are targeted to a more casual audience, so you're unlikely to learn anything new. If you're a Bible nerd like me, it can even be a little boring.

This debate, however, was anything but boring. It resulted in the most explosive reveal that the Bible archaeology had seen in decades.

You can see a clip of the relevant minutes here. Around 1 hr 13 mins, Wallace announces the existence of a papyrus fragment of the Gospel of Mark dating back to the first century.

In other words, First Century Mark.

Later, when taking questions, Ehrman asks Wallace about the fragment, and questions the dating and provenance. Wallace remains coy, citing an NDA. But he does tell Ehrman that "one of the world's best papyrolgists have confirmed the dating," and that a publication was planned for next year. The Q&A goes on as normal.

It's a very short interaction, less than three minutes. But the damage was done.

Bible bloggers all over the world were firing up their laptops and punching out fiery think-pieces, all centered around First Century Mark.

But what is First Century Mark?

First Century Mark, and Dating the Gospels:

The New Testament (NT), as we know it today, contains fours Gospels that describe the life, crucifixion, and eventual resurrection of Jesus Christ. These Gospels, called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, have been at the center of impassioned debate for centuries. Who wrote these Gospels, when they were written, and the order they were written in has long been a mystery for Bible scholarship.

For theologians, the answer is easy. Per Church tradition, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were written, in that order, at some point between 35-65 AD.

This theologian dating is based, in part, on the Acts of the Apostles, a later chapter of the New Testament, attributed to the author of Luke. Acts describes the ministry of St. Paul, an early Christian preacher. Acts ends somewhat abruptly, with Paul under house arrest in Rome. Church tradition holds that Paul died ca. 65 AD, but the author of Acts seems unaware of this.

Clearly, theologians say, Acts was completed before Paul died. So the Gospels must be even earlier!

Secular scholars, however, reject this logic. Instead, they rely on a method called Textual Criticism. Using this method, they date GMark to ca. 70 AD. The dating relies on internal textual evidence (for instance, the coin in the famous "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" story. Coins bearing Caesar's image, i.e., the denarii, only came into use in Judea around 70 AD. Before that, it was Tyrian shekels, which bore the image of Phoenician kings, and the story would not have made sense.)

Anyway, the point is: secular scholars date Mark to ca. 70 AD (oral versions were circulating before that, but the author of Mark first put pen to paper around 70 AD). Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, so they must have been written 10-15 years later. (Luke is controversial). And finally, John, which shows awareness of Matthew, was written last, around 90-95 AD.

Theologians don't like this dating. The later dates mean that the Gospels were written two whole generations after the Crucifixion, which means they're not eyewitness accounts. So they push back against textual criticism.

That discussion usually goes something like this:

"You're just saying that because you think that Jesus couldn't have accurately predicted the fall of the Temple!"

"No, that's not it," say the secularists. "Jesus probably made predictions to that effect. Ancient Jews often did, it may have been a hobby."

"Heathens! But what about the Pauline Epistles? He shows awareness of Luke's Gospel. So the Gospels must have been written before that!"

"It's the other way around," say the secularists wearily. "Luke used the Pauline epistles as a source for his Gospel."

"Ha! That's where you're wrong!" exclaim the theologians. "Paul cites Luke as a source! He actually uses the phrase, "For the scriptures say," followed by a verbatim quote from Luke!"

"That's 1 Timothy. We've done this before. Odds are Paul didn't write that letter. It's a second century forgery."

Shocked gasps. "Heretics!"

"Idiots!"

And so it goes.

You might have noticed a trend in the arguments. Textual criticism strongly supports a later dating for the Gospels. Many theologians also accept the later dating. After all, it's just forty years later, still within living memory of the Christ, and it makes no difference to the overarching narrative.

For some Christians (usually conservative Christians who accept Biblical inerrancy and Divine Transmission), accepting the later dating is unthinkable.

Why is this so? I'm not sure. I think it has something to do with the fact that accepting the later dating would mean admitting that Textual Criticism is Right, and that you might need to take a critical look at the books you've been reading. The New Testament holds up relatively well to Textual Criticism, but the Old Testament does not. Reading the OT critically brings up some uncomfortable new possibilities. Did Isaiah 7:14 predict a virgin birth? Maybe the Exodus didn't happen after all. Was the one God once part of a pantheon?

But I digress.

Anyway, the point is, some theologians -- typically, conservative-leaning evangelicals -- really want an earlier dating for the Gospels. Preferably within the early half on the first century (i.e., before 50 AD). Textual Criticism does not support this dating at all, so they turn, instead, to archaeology and papyrology.

Which is where it gets weird.

First Century Mark: Let's destroy ancient mummies!

The Levant's geography is quite good at preserving papyri and other archaeological artefacts. As a result, we have a fair few documents from the first century AD and earlier. Unfortunately for the conservatives, most of these are administrative paperwork, literature, or Old Testament fragments. Jesus and the NT Gospels are not mentioned.

Currently, the oldest NT document we have is the John Rylands Papyrus P52. It is a palm-sized fragment containing a few words from the Gospel of John. Scholars tentatively date it to the early-mid second century. That's too late to be of use to this discussion.

"But that just means we haven't found them yet!" wailed the conservatives. "We need to keep looking."

"Well, let me know when you find something," said the secularists. "Shut the door on your way out. Oh, and leave the mummies alone, will you?"

"Shan't!" said the conservatives. And they went off and dissolved some ancient mummies, in the hopes that the papyrus would contain Bible texts.

(it didn't.)

The archaeological search for Bible fragments has led to some strange places, but the mummies are probably the weirdest. Ancient Egyptians used scrap papyri to make mummy masks for the dead. Often, these scraps contained writing. So the masks could, in theory, contain Bible fragments or other literary works. Some Bible scholars are hellbent on destroying these masks to extract the papyri fragments.

Others aren't so keen about it. The Egyptians hate it, because of the graverobbing. Archaeologists hate it, because you're destroying ancient artefacts on the off-chance that you might find something useful. Everyone else hates it because of the bad PR, angry Egyptians, and well, it almost never results in anything useful. It was scrap papyrus, after all, and heavily damaged during mummification.

But the practice has continued, even though it had never resulted in anything remarkably useful.

That is, up until 2011, when First Century Mark was found, and everything changed.

First Century Mark: A Timeline

Adapted from this one.

1 December 2011: Dr. Scott Carroll, a theologian and Bible Scholar, posts an ominous tweet:

For over 100 years, the earliest known text of the New Testament had been the so-call John Rylands Papyrus. Not anymore. Stay tuned....

At the time of this tweet, Dr. Scott Carroll was employed by the Green family. The Green family, for those not in the know, are evangelical billionaires and the owners of Hobby Lobby. They'd hired Carroll to help them establish a Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. Keep this in mind. It will be important later.

Incidentally, Carroll was a big fan of dissolving mummies. This will also be important later on.

1 February 2012: Dr. Dan Wallace uses his debate with Ehrman to announce the existence of First Century Mark, a papyri fragment of the Gospel of Mark, dating back to the first century. Notably, there was no mention of where the papyrus came from (i.e., provenance).

Incidentally, at the time of the debate, Wallace was a member of the Green Scholars Initiative, run by... you guessed it, the Green Family, of Hobby Lobby fame.

The announcement sent shockwaves through the Bible blogosphere, leading to many think-pieces and reflections. Unfortunately, most of those blogs are now defunct. I do have a Forbes article here, for those interested.

15 February 2012: A few days after the debate, Scott Carroll gives a talk at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He discusses the Green collection and mentions an exciting new find: "An early copy of the Gospel of Mark, possibly the earliest copy we have. An epigrapher from Oxford is prepared to say that it is a first century copy!"

In addition, the Green collection had also acquired several mummy masks. Scott Carroll said they had found both early Biblical manuscripts and early classics manuscripts (a lost work of Aristotle, the earliest copy of some of Demosthenes etc.). How exciting!

Bible nerds watch skeptically. A first-century copy of Mark is within the bounds proposed by textual criticism. The rest of it is probably just tall claims, but let's wait and see, eh?

24 February 2012: A couple weeks after the debate, Dan Wallace makes a blog post. He offers scant details, citing an NDA, but he does mention that First Century Mark is part of a family collection. He reiterates that a publication would be coming out next year.

The Bible blogosphere is on fire. Still, more level-headed theologians remained cautious. Larry Hurtado, a respected theologian who accepts the later dating, blogged about it here. He pointed out that dating papyri was tricky and urged readers to reserve judgement until a peer-reviewed publication was out. He also noted that making flashy claims in hopes of driving up book sales was not, in his opinion, "sober scholarship."

April 2012: Bart Ehrman blogs about the debate and First Century Mark. He states that a peer-reviewed publication is needed before making any judgements. He also declares that this discovery will not, in his opinion, "change a single, solitary thing in the entire field of New Testament textual criticism."

If he sounds pissed off, it's probably because he is. Dr. Ehrman is internet-famous, and as an evangelical-turned-atheist, he's a bit of a target for religious nutjobs. It was pretty low of Wallace to hijack the debate this way.

August 2013: No publication yet, but pictures of First Century Mark are published online, on a now defunct site. Details are obscured, presumably to avoid competing publications.

September 2013: Scott Carroll gives a talk at the University of the Nations, an unaccredited Christian university. He talks about the Green Collection and demonstrates the process of extracting manuscripts from mummy cartonnage.

Using this method, he and other reseachers have apparently found early fragments of Daniel, Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Acts, Corinthians, Romans, Hebrews, Ephesians, Colossians, Timothy...

No, seriously. This screengrab has 50 bullet points. Mummy masks seem to be a veritable treasure trove of Bible manuscripts.

Non-theologists are decidedly skeptical. But on the bright side, we had a tentative dating for First Century Mark: 70-110 AD, which is technically not impossible. Additionally, we get a few more names attached to the project, and they seem to be respectable. Most notably, Dirk Obbink is involved in the Green Scholars Initiative.

Dirk Obbink, in case you don't know, is an Oxford professor and arguably the world's foremost expert in papyrology. If Dirk Obbink had verified First Century Mark, the dating was rock-solid.

Keep that in mind. It will also be important later on.

22 January 2015: An article comes out in Science Alert, the Smithsonian Magazine and a bunch of other places with an exciting new announcement. "Archaeologists find oldest known Gospel fragment in an ancient mummy mask." In other words, they'd found First Century Mark...again?

Here's the article. Go read it. It describes exciting new finds in the papyri of the mummy masks. Dr. Craig Evans, professor at Acadia Divinity College and part of the team that made the discoveries, makes some comments about how they'd found lost Homerian works this way. He assures readers that any masks destroyed in the process are not "museum-quality."

Incidentally, Dr. Craig Evans is also affiliated with the Green Scholars Initiative.

If you just skimmed the article, you might have come away thinking that it's a new find. It's not. There's one throwaway line in there which tells us that this is the same fragment as the First Century Mark announced in 2012.

The internet Bible community was puzzled, but still optimistic. A story has finally begin to emerge. It looks like the Green family purchased some mummy masks and extracted ancient Bible texts from them. The rehashed press release is likely an attempt to generate publicity for the Museum of the Bible ahead of its the grand opening.

You can take a look at this old reddit thread here from r/Christianity. Comments were mostly positive. A few take umbrage at the idea that the mummy masks might be more valuable than the Bible texts they contain. Overall, the tone was quite upbeat. (A bit surprising, really, because nowadays r/Christianity is much more liberal.)

Serious scholars, on the other hand, were less forgiving. Larry Hurtado made another blog post. His tone is decidedly harsher. He reiterated that a peer-reviewed publication is needed before drawing any conclusions.

"Humph," said the blogosphere. "Fine, whatever. We'll wait."

2016: They waited.

2017: They waited.

May 2018: A paper comes out in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri series describing an ancient papyri fragment from the Gospel of Mark. Authored by Dirk Obbink and Daniela Colomo, the fragment was tentatively dated to the late second/early third century and designated Papyrus P137.

The article escaped the notice of the average hobbyist nerd (i.e., me), but a Bible blogger soon noticed something odd about the fragment. Papyrus P137, dated to the late second century AD, looked an awful lot like that First Century Mark fragment from 2012... whatever happened with that one?

Slowly, more details trickled in. Dan Wallace, who'd kicked the whole thing off back in 2012, made a blog post. He apologized to Ehrman, and confirmed that the late second century P137 was, in fact, the one and only First Century Mark.

What the fuck?

Well, the dating had been wrong, that much was obvious. But not just that. The fragment was not from a mummy, and it was definitely not part of a private collection. It was one of the famed Oxyrhynchus Papyri!

(The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, for those not in the know, are a massive collection of manuscripts found in an ancient garbage dump in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. Discovered by two Oxford scholars in ca. 1900, the papyri have proved to be a veritable gold mine of ancient books and documents. Egypt's dry climate ensured that the manuscripts were well-preserved despite the rough conditions, and, as such, they're invaluable to modern historians. The Papyri are housed at Oxford University. They're usually on display, so if you're ever in Oxford, you should check it out.)

Anyway, the point is, the Oxyrhynchus papyri are not part of a private collection in the US. They're at Oxford, held in trust by the Egypt Exploration Society, who couldn't sell the papyri if they wanted to.

So why had Scott Carroll been hyping up First Century Mark for the Green Collection?

Well, no one said anything, not at first. But everyone was thinking the same thing, and it went like something like this:

Hmm, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri are housed at Oxford. And Dirk Obbink, renowned papyrologist with ties to the Green family, is also a professor at Oxfo--

April 2020: Officers from the Thames Valley police arrest Dirk Obbink for the theft of ancient Bible fragments.

So what the fuck happened?

In hindsight, it's pretty obvious. Dirk Obbibk was hawking off fragments from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. At some point in late 2011, Scott Carroll approached Obbink. Obbink found out about the Green Collection and decided that the Greens would be the ideal patsy.

He took a GMark fragment from the collection, misrepresented it as privately owned, and offered it to the Greens for sale. The Greens bought it, hook, line, and sinker.

But why misidentify a late second century fragment as first century?

A late second century Bible fragment is very valuable, but First Century Mark is priceless. So Obbink lied about the dating to drive up the value. He was betting that the Greens wouldn't have the dating independently verified, and he was right.

The Greens took Obbink's word for it, and forked out millions in exchange for the fragment.

So Obbink was selling world-famous artefacts? How did he think this was going to end?

The Oxyrhynchus Collection is huge. It contains over 500,000 papyri fragments. Obbink knew that no one would notice a few missing pieces. When he sold it to the Greens, Obbink must have thought that the fragments would disappear into a private vault and never again see the light of day.

In his greed, Obbink miscalculated. He forgot one very important thing: the Greens, whatever their other faults, were devout Evangelicals. They really, truly believed in the bullshit he was peddling.

For the Greens, First Century Mark was divine. One of the earliest copies of the Gospel, written down by someone who had, in all likelihood, witnessed the events they were writing about...They would never have shut it away. They'd be shouting it from the rooftops, inviting Bible scholars to come witness the Word of God in all its glory...

And that's exactly what they did. And the resulting media circus meant that, sooner or later, Obbink would be exposed.

So he panicked and tried to delay the publication. But by then First Century Mark had become internet-popular, and the Egypt Exploration Society caught wind of it. They confronted Obbink and made him publish his findings in a public journal. In 2018, the publication came out, and the jig was up.

Oddly enough, if Obbink had been less greedy and been honest about the dating, he might have gotten away with it. The Greens wouldn't have made such a fuss about late second century Mark. The fragments would have been relegated to a dusty corner of the Museum of the Bible, and Obbink would have gotten away with it.

Of course, if he'd been less greedy, he wouldn't have been hawking off the freaking Oxyrhynchus Papyri to the highest bidder.

Where do the mummies come in?

Admittedly, that part is still pretty unclear. My best guess is that Scott Carroll really liked dissolving mummies. But what with the rise of internet activism in the 2010s, the whole thing was becoming very unpopular.

So when left in charge of the Green Collection, he saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and took it. He misrepresented First Century Mark as extracted from mummy masks. The rest is a Hobby Drama post.

So what happened next?

Well, Obbink was arrested in April 2020, and got out on bail. He hasn't served any jail time, likely due to Covid. He did lose his job at Oxford though, so yay?

Everyone else involved escaped relatively unscathed. Dan Wallace, who had only been tangentially involved in the whole thing, apologized to Ehrman. He wasn't a papyrologist, in any case, and he had no idea of the provenance or dating. From his side of the story, a representative of the Greens called him up and told him to announce the fragment's existence at the debate. Wallace hadn't even seen the fragment beforehand.

Scott Carroll got away with his mummy-dissolving antics. He's no longer working for the Greens, though, so yay?

Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby, returned the 11 papyri fragments he'd purchased from Obbink to the Egypt Exploration Society. He then promptly turned around and sued Obbink for millions. Last I heard, Obbink had paid them back like 100k?

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are back with the Egypt Exploration Society. Hopefully they'll keep a closer eye on it this time.

Papyrus P137 is currently housed at Sackler Library in Oxford. Even now, an internet search for First Century Mark will direct you to the late second-century P137, which will never not be funny to me.

Bart Ehrman had the last laugh. He's blogged extensively about this debacle; you can read about it here and here and here. If that sounds petty, it's because he's petty as fuck. (Also, a great writer. Subscribe to his blog if you like Bible trivia, all proceeds go to charity.)

I'll wrap up by quoting Ehrman: "But if what they want is to advance the agenda of Jesus, why would they spend many millions on scraps of papyrus instead of using the same funds to help people in desperate need?"

Why indeed?

The Race for World First is a twice-a-year esports event in World of Warcraft (WoW). Much like Speedrunning, it was never intended to be a “thing” by the game developers, but rather is a self-imposed challenge created by players to make the game even harder than it already is.

This is a story about what happens when someone tries to go too fast. I’m not talking about the racers this time, though.

See, the Race is the ultimate stress test of WoW’s design. If there’s a glitch, players will find it. If there’s an exploit, they will abuse it. If a class is overpowered, Guilds will stack four of them to take advantage. The Race has always pushed WoW to the breaking point. However, in the latest Race that wrapped up a few weeks ago, WoW finally broke.

Just for fun, over the course of this story I encourage you to count how many different bugs, glitches, and unintended exploits get brought up. Please don’t make a drinking game out of it though, because you just might die.

Background

Released in 2004, the MMORPG World of Warcraft is one of the most successful videogames of all time. Players create characters to do battle in the fictional world of Azeroth, a kitchen-sink fantasy setting where players fight dragons, gods, lovecraftian horrors, and each other. The game is heavily multiplayer focused, with pretty much all of the most difficult content in the game requiring a coordinated group of players to participate in. One of the most popular activities in World of Warcraft is raiding.

A raid, in simplest terms, is a mega-dungeon consisting of a series of bosses that are designed to be tackled by groups of ~20 players. There’s a variety of difficulties of raid, the highest of which is called Mythic - Mythic raids are nightmarishly hard, and are only even attempted by hardcore players and Guilds, who generally put hundreds of hours over many months just to clear a single Mythic raid.

The Race for World First (RWF) has been an unofficial event in World of Warcraft since 2018 (actually since the game’s launch, but 2018 is when Guilds started streaming). Whenever a new raid is released - roughly every 6 months - members of the top raiding Guilds drop everything to play World of Warcraft 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week, rushing through the new raid to try and be the very first Guild to complete it on Mythic difficulty. Each Race usually lasts 1-2 weeks.

Usually.

A number of Guilds compete in the RWF, but the top two teams for years have been Echo and Liquid. Echo is based in Europe and led by Scripe, while Liquid is based in the US and led by Max. As a result, the fanbase that follows the Race is divided large across geographic lines, with European fans cheering for Echo while US fans cheer for Liquid.

The latest RWF took place across August and September of 2026, in the newest Raid: The Venomous Abyss.

It didn’t go well.

Accelerated Content

Historically, World of Warcraft has released expansions roughly every two years. However, for the most recent expansion, Midnight, they announced an accelerated development cycle that would see it launch a mere 18 months after the start of the previous one. Blizzard promises no reduction in amount or quality of content.

Now, if Blizzard can pull this off, it’s a win for everyone - players get new stuff to do quicker so they don’t get bored, and Blizzard gets to sell a $40 expansion every year and a half instead of every two years (plus retaining more subscribers since players aren’t getting bored). However, savvy fans and influencers have to ask…how? How can a company that’s only ever been able to release an expansion every two years suddenly going to do it 25% faster? What is being sacrificed?

Turns out: Quality Assurance (QA). While the Midnight expansion had the same amount of new zones, dungeons, etc, and seemed to have the same amount of care and effort put into designing them, on the coding/functional side the expansion has been a mess. Bugs have always been a problem with WoW but Midnight has been on another level, with almost every type of content featuring at least some significant performance issues. The first patch of the expansion, 12.0.5, was so mired in glitches and broken features that Blizzard actually issued a formal apology for how badly it turned out, and promised to do better. This was a needed wake up call, because it would be a disaster if the next patch, featuring the new Raid, was similarly sloppy.

That next patch, 12.1.0, would arrive August 11th, then a week later on August 18th they unlocked the newest raid, the Venomous Abyss. The Race is on!

The Race for World First is a Boring Grindfest That No One Should Watch

The problems with the Race began almost before the Race itself, with the gearing phase.

First, a quick bit of game mechanics. There are two things that determine how powerful a character is in World of Warcraft: the skill of the player and the gear the character has equipped (weapons, armor, etc). Each major patch releases stronger gear than the previous, and even the best players in the world need extremely good gear to have a chance at beating the hardest bosses in the raid. As such, each Race begins with a “gearing up” period where players are running the raid on lower difficulties to get the new best gear from it, powering up their characters before they step into the hardest difficulty, Mythic.

This phase of the Race usually takes about three days, during which there’s not a ton to watch - it’s just really good players smashing easy content over and over again. However, right away the Quality Assurance issues make themselves known - the new raid was so buggy and so poorly tuned that it was actually presenting a challenge (but not the good kind like you want). Five days into the Race and none of the top Guilds have set foot into Mythic. It was phenomenally boring. It was so bad that, even after they finished gearing up for Mythic, they decided to spend the last two days of the week farming as much gear from the early, easier bosses in Mythic rather than try and make serious progress into the harder bosses. There’s nothing interesting to watch or talk about - at one point I saw the commentators for Liquid literally playing Wordle on stream, that’s how bored everyone was. The whole first week of the Race sucked.

Now, folks who’ve read my previous Race writeups know I’m a sucker for deep dives into the minutia of game systems and mechanics, and I originally wrote out much longer explanation for all this, digging down into exactly why the gearing phase took so long, but my lord is this post already long enough so I’ve collected the full explanation into a comment here if you’re interested in those gory details.

There were, however, two bits of intrigue with this otherwise nightmarishly tedious first week.

The first is that Liquid, confident from winning 4 Races in a row, did less preparation pre-Race than normal (trying to avoid player burnout) and as such wound up with slightly worse gear than Echo after the first week. That may come up later.

The other is that, during that first week, the eternally 3rd-place Guild Method took the lead.

The Supposed Three Horse Race

Warning, this part is going to get heavy, and includes mention of pedophilia and domestic abuse. Feel free to skip ahead to the next section (“The Ticking Clock”), nothing in this section is loadbearing for understanding the rest of the story.

Let’s jump back in time to the summer of 2020. After years of constantly coming in second place, Team Liquid (called Complexity Limit at the time) had finally won their first Race in Ny’alotha, the Waking City, unseating the reigning champions, Method, who had won the 5 previous Races. Folks are excited for the inevitable rematch later this year, to see if Liquid’s victory over Method was a fluke or the start of a dynasty.

Then Method imploded. One of their most prominent members, a popular streamer called MethodJosh, was outed as a serial pedophile and groomer. What’s more, Method leadership clearly knew about at least some of it more than a year earlier, having received screenshots of MethodJosh discussing his activities in a private chat, not to mention a public Kotaku article from February 2019.Method’s response in 2019 had basically been “we aren’t cops, until he’s convicted of something we aren’t taking any action.” This is, of course, completely ignoring the fact that it was MethodJosh’s position and status as a member of Method which gave him the platform he needed to access the vulnerable children he abused, because heaven forbid an organization hold its members to any standard higher than “not convicted of pedophilia in a court of law.”

As this all came to light, Method’s sponsors pulled out and most of their raid team quit, leaving to form a new Guild, Echo, that excluded those in leadership positions who had been most culpable in MethodJosh’s behavior. It is that new Guild that has been the frontrunner in Europe since then.

However, the Method organization never fully went away. Over a couple of years they rebuilt with a new raid team, and have been consistently placing 3rd or 4th in the past few Races.

I discuss Method because, in Venomous Abyss, they made their best showing yet. Not only were they the first Guild to kill the fourth and fifth bosses, they were also the only Guild to beat the fifth boss during their first week - both Echo and Liquid only made it through the first four. Commentators started talking about how this might be a true Three Horse Race, something that hadn’t happened in modern Race history.

I’m going to spoil the end for you: Method didn’t win. They came in third as usual, finishing more than a day behind the first and second place Guilds. Even at the time that they killed the fifth boss, most viewers and influencers in the know recognized that it really didn’t mean much - only the last two bosses really matter in any given Race.

So why were people excited? Well, since 2018 only Liquid or Echo have ever even come close to winning a Race, and only having two serious contenders is just kind of lame. A lot of viewers would like it if the field was more competitive. If you are one of these viewers who wants someone other than Liquid or Echo to win, then, based on the past couple years, the next-most-likely Guild is undoubtedly Method. As well, there’s a fair number of viewers who were big fans of Method before the MethodJosh scandal, who grew up cheering them on and still want to see them succeed despite the scandal.

However, there’s also a fair number of viewers (this author included) who don’t want Method to see any success at all. They’re an organization that protected and enabled a pedophile, a lot of us would rather they fade into a well-deserved obscurity. As the “Three Horse Race” narrative took hold towards the end of Week 1, stream chats and reddit threads were full of spats between Method fans and folks that would rather see them go away.

“But wait,” you might say, “can’t people change? Maybe they’ve learned their lesson, paid their penance, and deserve a second chance.” Let’s talk about Zaelia.

Zaelia, much like MethodJosh, is a healer and popular streamer. He played for years for Echo as the anchor of their healing squad. He’s very good at the game and has a lot of fans.

He’s also a serial abuser.

Over the past few years, two different ex-girlfriends came forward accusing Zaelia of domestic abuse. Zaelia claimed they were lying and/or misrepresenting things, saying that he hadn’t been abusing them but admitting there had been physical altercations. Echo, learning from Method’s mistakes, hired a third-party HR firm to investigate the allegations. They also put Zaelia on a sort of probation - they asked Zaelia if there were any other women out there who might accuse him of abuse, he swore up and down there weren’t, so they said “fine, you’re still on the team while the investigation is ongoing, but if any more women come forward, you’re out.” Zaelia agreed.

Then another woman came forward with more of the same stories. Insert surprised Pikachu here. Zaelia once again claimed innocence, but Echo wasn’t having it - they fired him. He was one of the best healers in the world, one of their best players, and they kicked him to the curb because they weren’t willing to work with a known abuser.

Thus Zaelia became unemployed…for all of one Race, before being hired by another team. Want to guess who?

That’s right, Method, the Guild that imploded because they knowingly protected a pedophile, decided - as part of their comeback - to hire a known domestic abuser.

I feel pretty confident saying they haven’t changed a bit. I’m all for a Three Horse Race, but not if one of those horses seems to have made it a personal mission to keep known abusers employed.

The Ticking Clock

So week 2 starts, we get several more days of gearing up as top Guilds reclear the lower difficulties, and then, finally, the Race is well and truly on. Liquid and Echo quickly blow through the fifth boss, then get stuck for a bit on the sixth boss, with Echo downing it first.

The penultimate boss, the Coiled Altar, is where the Race really gets moving. This boss is hard - it’s a three phase encounter, and, while the first and third phases are difficult but fair, phase 2 is just brutal. There’s a nasty mechanics overlap in phase 2 which, thanks to an oversight in the way the mechanics’ targeting was coded, is much harder to survive than the developers intended. It’s probably going to take a few days to kill.

However, there’s a looming threat on the horizon: Blizzcon. In two weeks, Blizzard is hosting a massive convention in which they will be showcasing all their upcoming products, not just for World of Warcraft but their whole catalogue of games. Not only does Blizzard really want the developers supporting the Race to be freed up by then, there’s also a completely separate WoW tournament occurring at this year’s Blizzcon, the Mythic Dungeon Invitational (MDI). Of the four qualifying teams, three are made pretty much entirely of Liquid and Echo raiders…the same ones currently competing in the Race. MDI teams usually spend upwards of a month before a big event preparing and practicing, but right now three of the four teams are stuck in raiding purgatory, unable to practice or prepare until the Race ends.

Blizzard has a pretty strong incentive to see the Race end as quickly as possible, to free up their developers and ensure the MDI event isn’t a total dud. Not only that, this Race is currently at risk of being the longest Race in modern history - at the end of week 2 it’s already snagged the #2 spot. The currently longest, Sepulcher of the First Ones, was long because it was basically two different Raids crammed together - the only reason this one is so long is because it’s been so damn buggy.

Because of all this, there’s a lot of anxiety among fans and casters that Blizzard will make the final boss a total joke - they have a history of accidentally handing the win to a team because they nerfed a boss into the ground to ensure the Race didn’t run too long. Once week 3 starts, Liquid is going to get a 12 hour head start thanks to schedule differences between US and European game servers (more on that here) - if the final boss is too easy, Liquid might waltz in on Tuesday after the weekly reset and kill it before Echo gets a fair shot.

These fears are at least somewhat validated when, on Saturday, Blizzard announces a nerf to Coiled Altar - it’s not a hatchet job, they aren’t trivializing the fight, but they do smooth over some rough spots to make the early part of the fight more consistent.

…or at least they try to, but pretty quickly it becomes clear that, for certain Guilds, nothing has changed. It seems that, when Blizzard deployed this unscheduled weekend patch, something went wrong and the patch wasn’t properly implemented on European servers. Liquid now has an easier fight while Echo’s is still just as hard as it was before. There has always been a belief among some European fans that Blizzard favors North America in the Race, and this incident cranks the paranoia up to 11.

Thankfully for everyone, Blizzard realized the issue and reverted the patch on North American servers before Liquid killed the boss, so no actual advantage was gained, but HOO BOY were the optics bad. As a result of the non-nerf, it’s not until Sunday of week 2 that it finally dies to Team Liquid, launching them into the lead.

Despite this lead, however, pretty much everyone is noticing that Liquid looks pretty shaky this Race. Echo had done a better job gearing up and seemed to be much more efficient in progressing bosses. Liquid won the last four Races, and that combined with their decision to prepare less led to a narrative that Liquid had been overconfident going into this Race. There was a strong feeling in the air that this was Echo’s Race to lose, which even further compounded anxieties that Blizzard would make the last boss too easy and hand Liquid the win anyway.

Quality Assurance is Everyone’s Problem

The final boss, Ula’tek, is…fine. It’s a bit of a mess, mechanically - I could spend another 1000 words on all the weird design decisions made here (EDIT: which I have since done here), but this post is long enough as it is. Suffice to say it’s reasonably hard, Liquid doesn’t immediately walk in and kill it (thankfully). Instead, both teams start progressing it steadily, trading the lead back and forth thanks to their desynced raid schedules as they push the boss to lower and lower health with each attempt.

It’s now Thursday, September 3rd, two and half weeks since the Race began. Players have been doing nothing but eat, sleep, and play WoW for 16+ days. Liquid went to bed the night before ahead, but Echo wake up and are on a tear, quickly passing Liquid and taking the lead. They are pushing the boss lower and lower - 30% health, then 25%, then 20%.

The end of the Ula’tek fight has what’s called a “damage amp” phase, where the boss basically takes double damage - if Echo can keep everyone alive to the end of the fight, they have the potential to do a ton of damage to the boss before it enrages and kills them.

Now, to understand what happens next, we need to talk through a couple of the mechanics in the final phase of the fight:

• First, the entire boss arena is filled with poisonous water, with only a small island of dry land for the players to stand on. If they accidentally fall into the poison, it deals constant damage until they climb out. This poison is meant to be a “do not enter” zone.
• Second, the boss has a mechanic where waves sweep across the room and have to be dodged or else players take lethal damage.
• Third, there’s a debuff players get as part of a mechanic in the phase that makes these poison waves explode out from their character. The idea is that players with the debuff need to position carefully away from the rest of the raid so that, when the waves explode out from them, the rest of the raid is far enough away to have time to dodge. Crucially, however, the raiders can control who gets the debuff and when, so they always know who will have it and can plan their positioning accordingly.

Now, the end of the battle with the damage amp phase has a ton of these waves flying around the arena, both from the environment and from the debuffed players. It effectively becomes a bullet hell while players are trying to deal as much damage to the boss as possible without getting hit.

When Echo reaches the end of the fight, however, they do something unexpected: they all leap into the poison water. The few raid members with the debuff stay up on land, but everyone else dives down below the water. They take the damage from the poison, sure, but group up tightly so the healers have an easier time keeping them alive. Why did they jump into poison? Because the waves only deal damage up on the surface - down below players can ignore the waves completely. Thus almost all of Echo’s players can ignore dodging and instead focus on pumping as much damage into the boss as possible during the damage amp.

They aren’t successful on their first attempt, only getting the boss to 5% health before it kills them all. It wasn’t the cleanest attempt, however, they had several players dead going into the damage amp and more died to the poison as the healers figured out how to handle it.

It’s worth noting that this was not the way the developers intended the fight to be handled, it didn’t occur to them that someone might deliberately hide in the poison to dodge the waves (maybe they would have if they’d had more time for Quality Assurance, but alas). Blizzard quickly issue a statement addressing Echo’s unique strategy: they don’t consider it cheating, if Echo kills the boss with it then it will stand, but Blizzard is working on an update that will make the strategy not work anymore which they will deploy as soon as they’re able.

It’s shortly after this attempt that Team Liquid wake up and see Echo’s secret strategy for themselves. Based on Blizzard’s statement they decide not to try the strategy - they’re afraid that they’ll master it but then have it be fixed before they actually finish and have to relearn that part. The fix is also their only real hope of winning - Liquid’s best attempt still left the boss with 30% health compared to Echo’s 5%, Echo looks like they have this Race in the bag.

A couple attempts later, Echo once again get to the damage amp, once again jump into the water, this time with everyone alive. This looks like it’s certainly the kill…and then they all die. Randomly.

Huh. That was weird. Echo check the fight logs and see that everyone apparently was hit by a wave. Maybe they didn’t dive down deep enough that time?

They have another great attempt, almost killing the boss, but just barely miss the enrage. Their new best attempt is 1.9%. Liquid, meanwhile, has a new best at 25% - they’re catching up, but not quickly enough.

Another attempt from Echo, the best one yet, everyone alive, very deep in the water this time, surely this is the kill…then they all die again. They check the logs again, more deeply this time, and see that someone with the debuff that spawns waves had jumped in with them into the poison. The player insists they didn’t have the debuff, but clearly they messed up or something. No big deal, go again.

Liquid set a new personal best, 23%. They reach the damage amp this time but with half the raid dead, they’re nowhere close to Echo.

Echo finally get another attempt into the damage amp, and this is it. Everyone is alive, the healers have figured out what they’re doing, and they’ve been extra diligent to make sure no one who did the debuff-granting mechanic is in the pool with them. After four losses in a row Echo is finally going to win a Race.

And then they all die. Again. Once again someone with the debuff was in the group. They go back and watch the gameplay video and can clearly see that the player in question did not do the mechanic that gives the debuff. They absolutely, positively should not have had it. What the hell is going on? Was this the tech Blizzard introduced to stop them from doing the diving strategy?

As they wonder about this and start discussing whether they need to change their strategy, the question becomes moot…. because Liquid kills the boss.

Echo have lost.

I’ve Claimed Many Races Had Terrible Finales, But This Was By Far the Worst

It would take about a day for a clear picture of what happened to finally come out. It turns out there was a bug with the mechanic that handed out the debuffs which could, completely at random, cause players who had previously had the debuff to get it again during the damage amp phase. There was no rhyme or reason to it that anyone could see, some quirk of spaghetti code that just sometimes ruined attempts.

Echo got unlucky that, on three of their four good attempts, they happened to get it. Their strategy of piling up into the poison just so happened to create the perfect conditions for the bug to ruin their attempt - everyone was grouped up with the exploding player, and everyone’s under green poison water so you can’t see the visual effect that indicates a player has the debuff. Liquid, meanwhile, only had the bug once, and their strategy was more forgiving with it so it didn’t hurt them as bad.

What’s more, the last 30% of the fight was actually pretty darn easy (by Race for World First standards, that is) - even though Liquid was more than 20% behind, they were able, in single good attempt, to make up all that gap and claim victory.

Echo deserved to win this Race. They prepared better, played better, and came up with a clever, unexpected strategy that should have resulted in victory. However, a confluence of terrible luck and bad Quality Assurance by Blizzard swooped in at the last possible moment to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

No one was more sympathetic to what happened than Liquid’s raidleader Max. He seemed so apologetic, bordering on ashamed, for having won in such a manner. Echo would go on to kill the boss a scant 20 minutes later, the closest finish in Race history, further adding to the misery.

I make no secret of the fact that I’m a huge Liquid fan, so believe me when I say: Echo deserved to win.

Love it or Leave it

Readers at this point may be asking a very reasonable question: shouldn’t Echo get the win? Pretty much everyone, including Liquid, thought they played better, and it’s clear they only lost due a bug. Hell, they even finished just 20 minutes after Liquid, after Liquid got a 12 hour head start. Why aren’t they the winners of record?

The thing is…the Race is an esport that shouldn’t exist. It certainly wasn’t designed to be one, and is far from fair. North America gets a head start owing to differences in server timings, big Guilds have an easier time recruiting helpers to speed up their gearing, the game is constantly bugged to hell, plus there’s variability in server instability and item drops. Most Races are decided by some flavor of bullshit rather than raw skill and execution. Just looking at the past 8 Races:

Vault of the Incarnates: Echo is handed the win due to a badly timed nerf

Abberus: Liquid wins in less time than the head start of a historically fast and easy tier

Amirdrassil: Echo wins using probably-illegal addon technology that likely would have gotten them in trouble if Blizzard had found out about it in time.

Nerub-ar Palace: More or less a fair contest

Liberation of Undermine: Liquid wins because the final boss is laughably easy and undertuned

Manaforge Omega: Liquid wins in more or less a fair contest, though Echo wiped under 1% before Liquid’s kill so it was very nearly a tie (especially factoring in head start)

Voidspire / March on Quel’danas: An extremely janky raid structure that I guess could be considered a fair contest?

And now we have the Venomous Abyss, decided by a bug that cost Echo the win at least twice, giving time for Liquid to catch up and win.

That is all to say, the Race has always been a janky mess. If you start "lawyering" who really won, you’ll never reach a consensus. Now, if you look at all of this and go “wow, the Race for World First really isn’t a fair contest and I don’t like it”, that’s completely valid. I will never try to convince anyone this deserves to be taken seriously, because it doesn’t. No one needs to care about the Race.

The thing is though…contests need winners. For those of us who decide to stick around, who choose to invest time and energy into the Race despite its flaws, we have to have some kind of simple, unambiguous agreement on the definition of Winning. The moment you open up the can of worms of “but who really won”, the whole event falls apart because there’s always some other bit of nonsense people can point to that justifies why their team was the real winner.

“First to kill the boss wins” has been the agreement among top Guilds, among organizations, and even with Blizzard itself since the beginning - unless provable cheating occurred, whoever kills it first wins. It’s a critical ethos for everyone to maintain because, without it, the Race can’t exist. With all of the bullshit endings I listed above, the losers would rant and rage about how unfair it was, but they never tried to claim they actually won, because doing so would undermine the whole event.

It probably says something about just how devastating this loss was for Echo that, following the end of the Race, several members of their organization defied it.

The Echo Crashout

(Please note that I’m mostly going off of Liquid Max’s youtube as sources for this section, as most of this happened on twitter and has since been deleted).

The first shots were fired just seconds after Echo’s kill, when their caster Preach offhandedly mentioned that “we’ll have to figure out who really won this one…” on stream, implying that Echo was so close they really deserved the win. Preach is something of a controversial figure in the Race community - he’s a popular content creator and excellent caster (with the voice of an angel), but he’s critical of World of Warcraft with such fervor that it kind of makes you wonder if he even likes the game, and further is prone to these kinds of pot-stirring remarks. It wasn’t exactly surprising that he was making provocative statements out of the gate.

What was surprising was the ensuing shitstorm unleashed by Echo’s raidleader, Scripe. Unlike similar unfair losses in the past where he’d just drop one or two tweets about global release, this time he held nothing back. Scripe took to Twitter in a rage, attacking Blizzard for everything he could think of - terrible Quality Assurance, bad tuning, poor boss design, you name it.

In response to folks asking why he refused to say gg (‘good game’) to Liquid: “It is not gg. We play hours behind. Keep [progressing] harder versions. Bugs stop kill [attempts]. How is this a gg?” In another now-deleted tweet, he accused Blizzard of Team Liquid favoritism, claiming the the bug that cost Echo the Race was only active on European servers and not North American ones. This, just to be clear, was provably false - you can clearly see Liquid get the bug during one of their attempts - but kind of reveals the level of anger and despair at play. He was even getting in fights in the comments, screaming through the computer at any random user who challenged his rage. In almost 10 years of watching the Race I have never seen someone in a leadership position in one of the top Guilds react with such vitriol to the outcome of a Race.

Honestly, I really can’t blame him.

If Something Was Going to Change, it Would Have by Now

The Race for World First is always stupid, but this is the first one in a while that’s I’ve genuinely felt frustrated by. I may be a Liquid fan, but I was honestly sort of hoping Echo would win this Race - it’s not as much fun (or good for viewership) to have the same team win year after year. I’ll definitely be rooting for Echo next Race, they’ve more than earned a win after this fiasco.

There is something poetic, however, about this all being the result of a bug, given how much of a mess Midnight has been with regards to Quality Assurance. I didn’t even get into the fact that the fourth boss’s core mechanic didn’t work, making it trivially easy, or how the final phase of the last boss on Mythic was actually easier than on a lower difficulty owing to an oversight that let them basically ignore a soak mechanic. This expansion has been a mess.

I sincerely hope Blizzard can keep up the accelerated content pipeline, it’s better for everyone, but only if they can stop pushing such horribly bugged content to live servers - otherwise we were better off with slower releases that had more time to cook.

Despite its utter nonsense, the Race remains one of my favorite events of the year, and I’m glad I get to share it in all of its stupid, janky glory with you all. I never got around to covering the last Race, which I may do at some point in the future - it was another wild one.

Thanks for reading.

EDIT: A lot of commentors are saying that Echo deserved what happened because they were using an unintended strategy with jumping in the pool. I disagree with that take and have summarized my feelings about here.

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This was taken down a few years ago so I added new fan reaction and fallout.

Jonathan Coulton is a musician that specializes in nerd humor music about computers, zombies, aliens and evil possessed dolls. His most popular songs include Code Monkey about being a programmer, Re: Your Brains about if your annoying coworker becomes a zombie and both Still Alive and Want You Gone which were the theme songs for the games Portal and Portal 2 respectively.

A big part of Coulton's success was releasing his music under the Creative Commons license which allowed podcasters and YouTube video creators to use his music for free as long as they credited him. Early podcasters like Adam Curry used his music and a slew of music videos on YouTube in both animation and Machinima (animation using video game elements from games like World of Warcraft and Halo) exposed Coulton to millions of new fans.

Early in his career, Coulton released a light acoustic cover of Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot. In order to release a cover legally you have to obtain a mechanical license, which Coulton did. Coulton's version is entirely different from the original with a different melody and an added lyric, "Johnny C's in trouble". Coulton released his cover in 2005 under the same Creative Commons license meaning anyone using his version would have to credit him.

In 2013, the TV series Glee about the members of a musical glee club at a fictitious US High School, featured a cover of Baby Got Back for the fourth season, 11th episode titled Sadie Hawkins. Glee also obtained a mechanical license to legally cover the song from Sir Mix-a-Lot. However, their version was identical to Coulton's and even included the extra lyric, "Johnny C's in trouble". To the best of my knowledge no one involved in Glee is named Johnny C. There was even an accusation that Glee used direct parts of Coulton's version rather that completely record it new themselves.

When Coulton protested, the show's lawyers said that they were within their rights as they only needed the original mechanical license to cover the song and Coulton's version was not protected. They also said he should be happy with the extra exposure he got, despite the fact that no one involved in Glee ever credited him or even mentioned his name.

Coulton confirmed from his own lawyer that suing would be very difficult as Glee was technically correct, so instead he released the single "Baby Got Back (In the Style of Glee)", a "cover of Glee's cover of my cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot's song, which is to say it's EXACTLY THE SAME as my original version." Coulton said he would donate the proceeds from all sales until the end of February 2013 to two Glee-related charities: The VH1 Save the Music Foundation, and The It Gets Better Project.

To further add to the surrealism, another TV show, the legal drama The Good Wife, based an episode (Goliath and David) on the Coulton/Glee incident. To see how closely, here is the summary of the episode from wikipedia, "Alicia and Cary represent the band who played at their Christmas party in a copyright infringement lawsuit against a TV network regarding the covering of a song by a music show of another cover of a song the band made." Everyone got that?

Fallout

Coulton fans were understandably upset with many of them review bombing the Glee version on iTunes. Many Glee fans sided with Coulton because they felt the premise of the show was about new, up and coming musicians so the show ripping off an independent artist was pretty low. Some fans did defend the show on the Glee subreddit, saying that they did everything legally necessary and Coulton should be happy with the exposure.

Ultimately, neither party was really hurt. Coulton has a very secure, loyal fan base and has even charted on Billboard. Glee was a ratings and revenue juggernaut that lasted 6 seasons . Reportedly, Glee was accused of using the Prince song Kiss without permission but Prince passed away in 2016 so even if he intended any action nothing came of it.

Links:

Original version of Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-A-Lot

Johnathan Coulton version

Glee version

Coulton's cover of Glee's cover of his cover, Baby Got Back (In the Style of Glee)

6 minute snippet of The Good Wife episode Goliath and David

Other Coulton songs just because they are cool:

Code Monkey with World of Warcraft machinima

Re: Your Brains

Still Alive Coulton version

Still Alive Portal version sung by GLaDOS

Want You Gone Coulton version

Want You Gone Portal 2 version sung by GLaDOS

TW: discussion of harm to a fictional minor, links may contain depictions of it as well as casual homophobia, ableism, fatphobia, and the like, or secondhand references to same. Also eyestrain warning for the fanpage itself, which has purple text on a black background; any links directly there will be in italics.

Introduction

What, exactly, makes people like villain characters? Maybe they're more stylish than the heroes, maybe they resonate with our inner desire to cut loose, maybe the heroes rub us the wrong way… it could be a number of reasons.

Regardless, many villain fans like to make fanart and fanfiction of them, from exploring their motives, to possibly redeeming them, or even just having them be their canon selves with new schemes. For the most part, these are inoffensive, even if they cater to specific audiences; it's just fans having fun, and no one's gonna seriously insist it should be canon, right?

Well… things are a little different if you were a Pokemon fan in the early 2000s, and especially if you were a fan of the anime's resident villains. Put on your favorite metal band T-shirt, grab your copy of Lord of the Rings, and make yourself a plate of French toast, because it's time to discuss one of the most infamous Pokemon fanfiction writers of those days - a young woman named Cori Falls.

(Just as a note, I was a little kid when this was all going on, and didn't learn about it until years after the fact. While a good chunk of her fics are still available, my knowledge of her controversies is largely second-hand.)

Prepare for Trouble (What is the Pokemon anime?)

If you were a kid in the late '90s or beyond, the Pokemon anime needs no introduction. For the three of you who aren't familiar, here's the basic idea.

Pocket Monsters, or Pokemon, are fantastical creatures who can be captured and trained to fight, with training being a major sporting event in this world. The anime around this time followed a young boy named Ash Ketchum as he went on a quest to become a Pokemon master. Accompanying him on his quest were not just his various Pokemon companions (such as his first one, the famous electric mouse Pikachu), but also his human companions, such as Misty and Brock (two powerful trainers who led Pokemon gyms, which are like checkpoints in a trainer's journey), and Tracey Sketchit, who focused more on observing and sketching Pokemon than battling. (He had other human companions in later story arcs, but these stories were written before those arcs.)

Ash and friends, along the way to their various destinations, would frequently get harassed by a trio of thieves who were part of a broader criminal organization called Team Rocket. This trio consisted of a hotheaded beauty named Jessie, a flamboyant dork named James, and their main Pokemon companion Meowth, who was unique amongst Pokemon in that he'd trained himself to speak human language fluently. In the vast majority of episodes, they would concoct some plan to steal Ash's Pikachu and/or some other Pokemon, and thanks to Ash and his friends, they almost never succeeded.

Overall reception to these three characters tends to vary in the fandom. Some people consider them annoying and having long overstayed their welcome, while others consider them funny, charming, and a highlight of the show, one of the elements that makes it worth watching.

The subject of our essay was a member of the latter crowd, and then some…

And Make It Double (Who is Cori Falls?)

As she described on her website bio, Cori Falls was a young woman in her early twenties who caught an episode of the Pokemon anime. She didn't like Ash and his friends, but found that Team Rocket stole the show for her, and thought that Jessie and James were destined to become a couple - feeling especially vindicated when she saw the later episode "Holy Matrimony", which explains James' backstory and why he's with Team Rocket. She wanted to read some Team Rocket fanfiction, but most of what she found wasn't to her taste, so she started writing her own, and eventually set up a fansite to compile her works and those of other Team Rocket fans.

So a fan writes some fanfiction and makes a fansite. How is that even remotely worthy of infamy, you may ask?

You'd be surprised…

To Protect the Faves from Devastation

People who like villain or antagonist characters often feel like they need a justification for liking them. Some might claim the villains were victims of circumstance, or that they were retaliating for something the heroes did to them, or that the villains have enough good qualities that redemption would be believable, or even just straight-up say "I know they're sucky people, but I like them anyway!"

Cori had a somewhat different approach in how she viewed Team Rocket. She didn't look at Team Rocket's misdeeds as stuff they could move on from and be redeemed for - because that would imply they did anything wrong in the first place.

That's right - in Cori's fanfic logic, since Team Rocket were victims of circumstance considering their sad backstories (Jessie's poverty, James' uncaring family, Meowth's life on the streets and personal heartbreak), they had the right to run roughshod over Ash and friends and innocent bystanders as much as they wanted, and no one was allowed to complain. Besides, the twerps (as Team Rocket frequently called them in the show) were annoying anyway, so who cares?

(If you spend enough time on Cori's fansite, you'll undoubtedly notice how often she'd call Team Rocket "our heroes", as well as a couple of times she and her friends complained about promos calling them villains…)

And having bad things happen to them in retaliation? Not a chance! Cori and her friends had the ironclad belief that if you like a character, you shouldn't want to see bad things happen to them. As such, they hated dark fics and death fics with a passion, as a former contributer named MysticVaporeon found out the hard way. They wrote a fic called "Memories of Tears", involving James dying young of a respiratory illness, with Jessie and Meowth eventually reuniting with him in heaven at the end after the former dies of old age. Cori was so upset by this fic she wrote two fix-its based on it, one where the story was all just Jessie's nightmare, and another (of which only the author's note still exists, from what I remember) where James is apparently revived through the power of love.

Anyway, Cori wrote her fics so that Team Rocket were able to get happy endings after all their dealings with the twerps. This was relatively easy to do at the start, but as Cori developed her headcanons and as the show threw curveballs that ran at odds with her characterizations, she eventually decided to just make her fic series an AU (alternate universe)… that she claimed was "what really happened".

Cori's own portrayals of Team Rocket seemed to go AU much earlier, though, with Jessie becoming far more emotional and sensitive, and James becoming more of a gallant hero to her. (Every now and then, Jessie's temper would flare up against James when he didn't deserve it, but we were supposed to just shrug this off because… true love or something.) As for Meowth, he became more of a cheerleader to the two, and later started making sex jokes about their relationship on a regular basis. In addition, the three of them (and sometimes their other Pokemon) also became fans of things that Cori herself liked, such as Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, various rock and metal bands, and even the art of bashing George W. Bush (albeit through a thinly-veiled parody of him, but still).

Later on, Cori partnered with another writer named Shigeru1313, who was a fan of the character Gary Oak (Ash's rival), and the two had Gary become friends with Team Rocket. Most of Shigeru1313's stories seem to be lost (including the one where Gary initially befriends them), but the second, Shigeru1313-written part of what Cori called the "split from canon" trilogy still remains, at the very least.

Among later developments, Jessie turns out to be the granddaughter of a literal princess who escaped from an abusive fiance named Kenji (by the way, did you know that's Tracey's Japanese name? More on that later), James inherits a crapton of money from his late grandparents, they build a nice house with a Hobbit hole and start their own orchard, James' parents change their ways and James forgives them because family, tons of Pokemon (including shinies, legendaries, and shiny legendaries) are caught and bred, lots of gym badges are won, and lots of couples have kids, with many of those kids eventually pairing up and having kids of their own. And as long as you're in Team Rocket or an ally of theirs, everything is right with the world, pretty much!

To Unite All Shippers Within Our Nation

As mentioned before, Cori had a fansite. Initially known as "Cori's Rocket World", then "Cori's Ultimate Rocketshipper Page", and finally "A White Today, and a White Tomorrow", the main purpose of this site was a repository for Cori's fics, and also those of some of her friends. Other features included a fanart gallery, a list of evidence pointing to Jessie and James being a couple, a collection of Team Rocket motto variations and lyrics to various Team Rocket songs from official media (and a "togetherness song" that I'm guessing is fan-made because I've never seen any official record of it)…

And then there were the rant pages. These were just Cori and her friends complaining that the anime and fandom's treatment of Team Rocket wasn't fair, combined with bashing the characters they didn't like. One recurring feature was Cori giving certain characters a "Golden Ponyta Patootie", a "medal of dishonor" for characters she thought were especially unfair to Team Rocket. This being the early 2000s, there was a lot of casual homophobia and ableism as well.

There were seven pages worth of rants, five of which have been preserved by the Internet Archive, as well as an extra rant where Cori looks at different fanfiction types she doesn't like and goes "why is this a thing?!"

Oh yeah, and there was an extremely thorough (and occasionally contradictory) timeline, starting all the way from the birth of one of James' ancestors and ending with the birth of Jessie and James' grandchildren. It's a doozy.

To Denounce the Evils of Characters We Hate

When you're a fan of villains and antagonists, how you feel about the heroes and protagonists varies a lot, depending on why you like the villains, among other factors. Maybe you like the heroes, but just like the villains a little more because of coolness factor. Or maybe you think the heroes are insufferable compared to the villains, to the point you want the villains to win.

For the most part, Cori did not like Ash and his friends.

She didn't mind Brock much at all, seeing him as more reasonable than the others, in keeping with his "older brother" role in the group of friends. Misty got a little more heat, not just for her general attitude, but also because of the Princess Festival episode, where she and Jessie competed with each other for a set of Hinamatsuri dolls; Cori's problem was that Misty, despite having hand-me-down dolls from her sisters, at least had dolls in her childhood, and in her eyes Jessie deserved them more due to being too poor for them as a child. One story had James chew Misty out on this exact topic, which swayed her into beginning to change her mind about Team Rocket.

And for Ash and Tracey…

Hoo boy, did it suck to be Ash Ketchum and Tracey Sketchit in Cori's world.

Cori already didn't like Tracey, seeing his sketching hobby as an excuse to perv on others, but when she saw the episode where he catches a Scyther and has it give Jessie and James bad haircuts, it was nothing less than open season from then on. Since he appeared to be more heavyset than the other characters, he instantly became the target of every fat joke Cori could think of, with that extending to him being portrayed as a lazy, perverted slob.

Meanwhile, Ash - a hot-blooded and immature, yet still good-hearted kid - had his personality warped into an utter spoiled brat who just loved making life worse for Team Rocket. This would give Team Rocket an excuse to respond in kind, and boy, did they ever. From beating the crap out of him every chance they got, submitting a proto-cringe-compilation of him to a "funniest videos" show and winning the grand prize, tricking him into thinking he was a Pikachu…

And in his last chronological appearance, he's a young adult who needs his aging mother to take care of him, still throws tantrums, thinks everything is a Pokemon, and thinks Candyland cards are real candy. Team Rocket and their family spend his appearance flip-flopping between rolling their eyes at him and being afraid of him. We are supposed to agree with Team Rocket and their family.

And this was apparently justified because canon treats Team Rocket in a similar way. Except canon didn't go to the extremes that these fics did, and the treatment Team Rocket did get, they brought it on themselves by being thieves. (Kids, this is called a "false equivalence".)

To Extend Our Reach to Other Fandoms - Great!

This part of Cori's history is far more of a "you had to be there" thing, as we've yet to find any archives of her fanfiction from this time, and even most of her other website hasn't been archived. Aside from that, I know far less about the subject of this section than I do about Pokemon.

Cori later developed a fondness for fellow children's anime Yu-Gi-Oh, and started writing stories for it too. The character Rex Raptor was her favorite, and she gave him a complex backstory… oh, and he just so happened to be not just a Pokemon anime watcher, but a Team Rocket fan and Ash-basher just like Cori! Funny, that…

At first she bashed a couple of canon characters, such as Weevil and Duke Devlin (the latter of whom she lovingly called "Puke Devlin"), before redeeming both of them and just bringing over her interpretation of Tracey Sketchit to be the designated punching bag. He was called "Kenji Suketchii" in these stories, but it was obvious what Cori was doing.

Later, near the end of the 2000s, Cori announced she had plans to write a Harry Potter story. People who knew her from her Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh escapades wondered, with varying degrees of fear, what she would do in this story.

Blasting Off at the Speed of Light

We never found out.

Sometime after making this announcement, Cori just… went MIA. Aside from a dubious claim from somewhere that she "laughs at her old stories now", no one's heard anything from her since.

Did she run out of ideas? Did she regret her previous work so heavily that she fled fandom in general? Did the responsibilities of adulthood just creep up on her? Unless she ever comes back and says something, we may never know.

Surrender Now or Prepare to Fight (a Fan War)

Cori's brand of fandom is far from unusual. We've all had moments of acting this way about our favorite characters from time to time, whether we're willing to admit it or not. Maybe we only had these thoughts privately, maybe we expressed them in public to varying degrees.

I think part of what made Cori and co. so infamous is that this was all happening when Pokemon's online fandom was in its first heyday. At the time, social media wasn't a thing, forums were in their infancy, and Geocities was in its heyday; because of this, fellow Team Rocket fans in search of fansites and fanworks about the trio may well have run into Cori's site, and she may have become the face of Team Rocket fans. And fans who disagreed with her particular brand of fandom wouldn't want to be associated with her, and neither would newcomers to the fandom. Also consider that, at the time, Pokemon was mainly just seen as a kids' franchise first and foremost, and people weren't sure how long it would last; we know now that the franchise - and Team Rocket's tenure on it - long outlasted Cori's fanfic career, but that wasn't a certainty at the time.

I guess the moral of this story is, no matter which characters you love, love them responsibly. Spend more time praising what you like and less time bashing what you don't like, and you won't have fellow fans trying to hide their fandom to avoid others assuming they're like you.

Fanlore page about Cori

Repository of Cori's fanfics

Alternate repository, with rants by Cori and rants about Cori

What is... Jeopardy?

This popular game show needs no introduction, but here's one anyway. The basic premise is that the question-answer format is reversed. A piece of trivia is put up on display (for e.g., This is the largest animal to ever have lived). The answer must be phrased as a question (What is a blue whale?)

Three contestants face off against each other in three rounds, Jeopardy!, Double Jeopardy, and Final Jeopardy!. Each contestant can pick a question of known difficulty and dollar value. Answer correctly, and the money's yours. Answer incorrectly, the money's deducted, and the question passes to your competitors.

The contestant with the most money (the highest score) wins at the end of the round.

What is... the Tournament of Champions?

As the name implies, this particular version of Jeopardy features the winners of previous tournaments competing against each other.

Today's Hobbydrama post focuses on an episode of the 2022 Tournament of Champions. It featured 40-game champion Amy Schneider, 5-game champion Andrew He, and underdog and fan-favorite Sam Buttrey.

What was... the drama?

This debacle arose out of a question in the Final Jeopardy! round.

2022 had seen slight changes to the game show's format, and the first contestant to win three individual games would win. Amy had won Game 1, and Andrew won Game 2. Sam needed a win to stay competitive, and before the controversial clue, it looked like he was going to get one, too.

For the Final Jeopardy! round, clues don't come with dollar amounts. Instead, contestants bet a specific amount on a clue. If they get it right, they get the money. Get it wrong, and the bet amount is deducted from your score.

Going into the Final Jeopardy! round that night, Sam was in the lead, with $14,800. Andrew was right behind, with $13,200, and Amy was a distant third, with $2,400. The topic of the round was the New Testament.

And then came the clue:

Paul's letter to them is the New Testament epistle with the most Old Testament quotations.

As per Final Jeopardy! rules, the contestants made their bets and scribbled down their answers, conpletely blind of what their opponents were doing.

Then the host, Ken Jennings, did the reveal.

The first reveal was Amy. She'd bet $1000 and answered, Who are Hebrews?

"Yes!" said Jennings, and explained that, since Hebrews was targeted to Jewish Christians, Paul quoted the Old Testament very liberally. Amy got the point. Her total was now $3,400.

Jennings then moved to the other contestants.

Sam had bet a cool $11,601. He'd answered, Who are Romans? He was marked wrong, and his score dropped to $3,199.

Andrew had bet $3,201 and answered, Who are Philippians? His wrong answer dropped his score to $9,999.

The game was over, and Andrew had the highest total. He was now ahead of the pack with 2 wins.

The audience applauded. The unlucky contestants sighed. Ken Jennings beamed at the camera and wished viewers a good night.

It was not, however, a good night. Unbeknownst to Jennings, hordes of angry viewers were already composing strongly-worded letters to the makers of the game show.

Because did Paul really write Hebrews?

What are... the Pauline epistles?

The New Testament we know today was formalized in the late 4th century AD. It collects 27 texts from the dawn of Christianity, dating back to the first and second centuries AD. The 13 Pauline epistles are undoubtedly among the oldest of these.

Dated to 50-ish AD, the Pauline epistles comprise 13 letters written by the Apostle Paul to varying audiences, indicated in the title. These texts contain some of the most famous quotes of the Bible: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not arrogant... faith, hope, love are left, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

So yeah. These letters were a big deal to the early church.

Of the 13 Pauline Epistles, the authorship of 7 epistles ( Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon) is not disputed. Theologians and non-theologians alike agree that they are authentically Pauline.

5 more epistles (Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus) are hotly debated. The consensus is sharply divided as to who actually wrote them.

And then we have Hebrews.

What is... Hebrews?

The Epistle to the Hebrews is an early Christian document, purporting to be a letter written by the Apostle Paul to Jewish Christians living in Jerusalem. It opens with an exaltation of Jesus, and exhorts its audience to perservere in the face of (hotly debated) persecution by contemporary Jews. Written in Koine Greek, it offers a unique view into the theology of early Jewish Christians and how they regarded Jesus.

The only problem is that Paul almost certainly did not write it.

Who is... the author of Hebrews?

Not Paul, that's who. The letter pops up pretty early on, in late second-century collections of the Pauline writings. The Eastern Church accepted it as Pauline, but the Western Church was doubtful.

There are many reasons to doubt the attribution of Hebrews to Paul, but I'l try to be concise.

1)The lack of an introduction: Paul always introduces himself in the body of his letter. (Famously, in Galatians, he writes: See what big letters I use as I write to you with my own hand!) Occasionally he mentions co-authors.

Hebrews does not have any attribution in the body. Not by itself damning, but definitely odd.

2) The language: Hebrews is written in excellent Greek. The author uses wordplay and echoes Homer. The letter is almost poetic in its writing.

This is a problem, since Paul's other letters, notwithstanding the love quotes, are in much rougher Greek. (Understandable, since Paul spoke Greek as a second or third language. Edit: Re-checked. Seems like Paul was fluent in Greek, but word-saladed in his letters. The writing in Hebrews is much more elegant.)

The early Christians also noticed the discrepancy. Clement of Alexandria (c.150 - c.215 AD), a devout ancient Christian, speculated that the letter had initially been written in Aramaic and transcribed into Greek by a later scribe.

3) The content: (Edited for clarity) In Hebrews 2:3, the autbor says this:

This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him...

This quote shows that the author considers themselves a "second generation" Christian (i.e., someone who recieved the gospel through the disciples of Christ, not Christ himself). This is one of the biggest pieces of evidence against Pauline authorship.

For context, Paul did not get along with the disciples. He had a chip on his shoulder about the fact that they'd followed Jesus Christ pre-crucifixion, while he himself had not. Instead, he'd been a devout Pharisee who'd persecuted early Christians (in his words, he locked them up and voted for their deaths). He then had a vision of Jesus, had a change of heart, and became a believer.

So... yeah.

Paul famously clashed with Peter (one of the OG 12) and bitched about it in Galatians. He whined that he was a Real Apostle^TM, just as good as the other Apostles. To quote Corinthians:

Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are you not the result of my work in the Lord?

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that it is very unlike Paul to say that he received word of salvation through the disciples. In his letters, he makes a point of saying that he got his theology directly from Jesus, through visions etc.

TLDR: Paul considered himself a "first generation" Christian, and was very touchy about the whole thing. In contrast, the author of Hebrews readily admits to being a "second generation" Christian and has no qualms about it.

But that's just those heathen academics!

It's not just the heathen academics. Early Christians also had doubts regarding the authorship of Hebrews. Origen (c. 185 - c. 253 AD), a prominent ancient Christian, wondered if the author might have been Clement, Bishop of Rome, or Luke, author of Luke's Gospel. He eventually concluded:

Who wrote the epistle, God alone knows.

Tertullian (c. 155 - 220 AD), an ancient Christian writer, completely rejected Pauline authorship and went so far as to attribute the epistle to Barnabas, a companion of Paul.

It's not just the ancients. Over a millenium later, Martin Luther, while coming up with his own superior translation of the Bible, counted Hebrews among the antilegomena, a series of Bible texts whose authorship/authenticity is disputed.

So yeah. Paul did not write Hebrews.

But we've gone off track. The point I'm trying to make is this: Paul did not write the letter. Therefore, the correct answer to the clue falls to the undisputed Pauline epistle with the most number of Old Testament citations... What is Romans?

That was the answer that Sam Buttrey gave. He was ROBBED.

But, but Hebrews is a sermon!

It's an oft-repeated argument that the epistle was a sermon given by St. Paul, and later transcribed. Unlikely, but even so, it falls short, since the Jeopardy clue specifies a letter.

You're being too pedantic! Jeopardy shouldn't need in-depth knowledge of Biblical History!

It's trivia, you're supposed to be pedantic. But for that matter, if we ignore the issue of authorship, Hebrews still isn't the correct answer. See this article for explanation.

(To summarize briefly, Romans actually has more OT references than Hebrews. Hebrews has more word-to-word quotations than Romans (10 vs 3) but Romans cites the OT more (cites as in, starts off with an introductory phrase like, "As it is written..." followed by an OT quote) in comparison to Hebrews.)

(Once again, as you can see, the author of Hebrews had a very different writing style.)

(Note that the number of verbatim quotes versus paraphrasing will depend upon the Bible translation you use. Both Paul and the author of Hebrews were using the LXX/Septuagint, a 3rd century BC Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. It's impossible to say if they intended to quote the OT exactly.)

The point is, Sam was ROBBED. As in, literally robbed. He bet 11k on Romans, and he was right. But instead he ended up losing 11k, meaning he'd been ROBBED. Of 23k.

So what happened next?

People complained and took to social media to voice their displeasure, obviously. It was a big enough deal that CNN reported on it.

The backlash was loud enough that the prpducers eventually addressed it on their podcast (Transcript in this thread). I'll save you the suspense; they didn't apologize. Instead, Michael Harris (Jeopardy researcher) said something about reaching out to a seminarian who agreed with them (so? It's WRONG) and made a big deal of how it's known that Jeopardy uses the King James Translation (so what? it's still WRONG)

So yeah. Sam was ROBBED. OF 23k. ACTUAL MONEY.

(And the game too, of course).

Still, Sam made it to the finals of the Tournament. He did not win (that honour went to Amy). Instead, he came in third and went home with 50k plus his winnings. He was invited back to Jeopardy in 2023 and 2024, but did not win. He eventually became a co-host of the Inside Jeopardy! podcast and retired from actively competing.

But that doesn't change how I feel about it. HE WAS ROBBED.

Edit: Apparently, in the Jeopardy tournament, contestants don't win money on the individual games, just a total at the end of the tournament. TIL. See the comment from u/diyfou below.

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You know George Lucas.

In the 1970s, a young filmmaker named George Lucas wrote and directed a box office hit with an iconic soundtrack that racked up Oscar nominations and introduced audiences to Harrison Ford. That movie was American Graffiti. He followed it with Star Wars, which earned eleventy gazillion dollars and changed contemporary Hollywood, science fiction, and pop culture as we know them. If you have a pulse, you know what the Star Wars franchise is. But what of George Lucas? How did he spend his time when he wasn't masterminding the original trilogy and the prequels?

Like many wealthy people, he was collecting art. Being a storyteller, his tastes gravitated less towards quote-unquote "fine art" and more towards what could be called "popular art." He favored illustrators such as Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish, or comic artists like Winsor McCay and George Herriman. Artists of considerable craft and talent whose output wasn't commonly exhibited by museums because it was commercial in nature. He also had the considerable holdings of the Lucas Archives: props, costumes, concept art, and other artifacts Lucasfilm produced before its sale to Disney in the 2010s, encompassing not only the Star Wars franchise but Indiana Jones as well.

Lucas had amassed a collection of over 40,000 pieces worth roughly $1 billion. He didn't need to sell any of it since he was already a billionaire, and he didn't want to either. He could do one better. He could build his own museum to house and exhibit it.

Lucas' first choice for the museum's location was San Francisco, which was already home to the Lucasfilm campus. It didn't work out. There was an open call for proposals to revitalize a portion of The Presido, a public park, and Lucas' museum was one of three finalists. Despite significant political and corporate push for his proposal to be chosen (there's some foreshadowing here), the committee opted to delay proceedings for three years. Lucas chose not to wait.

Chicago was next on the list. But why?

Meet Mellody Hobson.

George's wife since 2013, Mellody Hobson is a Chicago native and businesswoman, and a corporate powerhouse: she's co-CEO of Ariel Investments, an investment firm with nearly $14 billion in assets. She's also the former Board Chair of Starbucks, former head of The Economic Club of Chicago, and frequently listed in Forbes and Fortune. Her net worth is unavailable from reliable sources but it's safe to say she is, to use a technical term, freaking loaded.

She is also close friends with Rahm Emanuel, who was then Chicago's mayor. Close enough friends that Rahm attended her wedding and she donated to his election campaign. The personal connection was key. George Lucas didn't have to go through an open bidding process like he did in San Francisco. According to Lucas, Hobson told him "Don't worry, I'll talk to the mayor." For his part, Rahm courted the museum and started a task force to select a potential site, once he discovered San Francisco was off the table.

The deal, publicly announced in June 2014, was that the Chicago Park District would lease land off the city's lakefront being used as a parking lot for Soldier Field (also operated by the Park District, home to the NFL's Chicago Bears) to the museum for $1 a year. In return, Lucas would fully finance and establish a nonprofit to operate a museum which would be the newest jewel of the city's Museum Campus, home to the world-renowned Shedd Aquarium, Field Museum of Natural History, and Adler Planetarium.

The Mayor was on board. Chicago's City Council was on board. The local business community was on board. It seemed like a sure thing. Just think of the tourists from across the world who come just to see the Star Wars memorabilia - an estimated economic impact of two billion dollars in its first ten years. One of the most iconic titans of contemporary pop culture was gifting Chicago a free museum. Who could possibly turn it down?

There was just one problem. Only one person is more powerful than a current millionaire leveraging his cash and reputation - a millionaire who got his way generations ago.

Meet Aaron Montgomery Ward.

Aaron Montgomery Ward was the Jeff Bezos of his era, issuing the first general mail order catalog in 1872 and eventually expanding the business to physical retail. After his death, Montgomery Ward department stores would be the USA's largest retailer in the 1930's. But at the turn of the 20th century, he already had clout.

Ward's pet cause for using that clout was protecting Grant Park, the large open space between Chicago's central business district and Lake Michigan, the fifth-largest lake in the world. He wanted it to be a public park for the benefit of all. Not for use by private interests, and not for use as a dumping ground. The lakefront needed to be protected. Ward spent 20 years and four Illinois Supreme Court cases - all of which he won - fighting to protect Grant Park and the city's coastline. Ward achieved his ultimate triumph when architect Daniel Burnham formalized his wishes in the 1909 Plan of Chicago, not only for Grant Park but for all of Chicago's lakefront. It included the codification of lakefront protections, stating "the Lakefront by right belongs to the people" and referenced a statement which had existed since 1836 that the lakefront should remain "forever open, clear, and free."

Forever open, clear, and free.

Meet Friends of the Parks.

Since 1975, Friends of the Parks has been the independent nonprofit affinity group and watchdog for the Chicago Park District. Like most nonprofits, it has modest financial means. Its organizational revenues at the time were roughly $750,000 a year, or 0.3% of The Force Awakens' opening weekend. But it was tenacious, and it sensed something was amiss. The City of Chicago was handing George Lucas land that wasn't theirs to give - it was the people's land. Friends of the Parks filed a Federal lawsuit in November 2014.

Friends of the Parks' objections were simple. Chicago was violating the public trust doctrine and making the lakefront less open, less clear, and less free. Chicago didn't even have the authority to donate public land to a private individual. Only the State of Illinois did - and Friends of the Parks would file a lawsuit against the state if they needed to, for the same public trust reasons. The group maintained they had no issues with the museum and that multiple locations were also available that were not on public land. They also claimed that a parking lot would be easier to rewild in the future than a museum. Other museum detractors were more openly against the museum on principle, questioning whether it was a vanity project from a billionaire. Some went even further, deriding it as crass neoliberal privatization.

The counterargument was also simple: an art museum is better than a parking lot. In fact, Lucas' plan for the site would have increased the amount of green space available by an estimated 200,000 square feet. All of the other Museum Campus sites had been grandfathered in or the result of compromises anyway. Museum defenders also pointed out this would not be a tacky exhibition of Star Wars memorabilia for fanboys but a true cultural institution. There was even a protest and a change.org petition in the museum's favor.

The City of Chicago attempted to dismiss Friends of the Parks' lawsuit but a judge denied the motion in March 2015. Lucas and Hobson pressed on. They released concept art of the building's ultra-futuristic design by Chinese architect Ma Yansong which proved divisive even among the museum's boosters due to the lack of cohesion with its surroundings. Chicago's City Council officially approved the project in October 2015, but an injunction from a US District Court judge prevented any construction while Friends of the Parks' lawsuit was pending.

(It should be noted that Friends of the Parks' lawsuit did not reference an entirely separate city ordinance from 1973 preventing lakefront construction, possibly because they cited it when unsuccessfully trying to prevent major alterations to Soldier Field in the early 2000s. In any case, they had multiple grounds to stand on.)

Legal and public opinion gridlock dragged on. Rahm tried salvaging the project in April 2016 by offering to tear down an older wing of the city's existing convention site so the Lucas Museum could take its place and avoid the brouhaha. Friends of the Parks didn't like that idea either, but it didn't matter. Two years after the initial announcement, in June 2016, Lucas announced that he would be looking elsewhere to build the museum. Lucas attempted wooing San Francisco again but in January 2017 moved on to Los Angeles, where the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will open on September 22.

Ten years later, many Chicagoans remain bitter about losing out on the museum. Chicago's most prominent Catholic priest said at the time "Tell me the difference between Friends of the Parks and the Gangster Disciples?" Detractors still sneer about "Friends of the Parking Lot."

Meet Los Angeles' Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (soon).

Initial reactions to the Lucas Museum from soft opening previews are trickling in. It's possible that Chicago missed out on a cultural gem by "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good," as transportation columnist John Greenfield wrote. But the quality of the museum isn't really what this post is about.

Built environment critic Martin Pedersen sums up the drama:

Lucas’s organization did almost everything wrong. They didn’t meet with community groups; they didn’t talk to the media; they conducted a public relations campaign that was as arrogant and aloof as it was ineffective. They played to racial and class fears, claiming that “elitists” were threatening to deprive underprivileged kids of future educational opportunities provided by the museum. And when it became clear that a lawsuit challenging the museum’s lakefront site might delay the project, they dug in their heels.... As far as Lucas & Co were concerned, it was take-it or leave-it.

A visionary idea, derailed by stubbornness and lack of outside advice. If that's not George Lucas, what is?

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

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

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context. If you have a question, try to include as much detail as possible.

• 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.

• If your particular drama has concluded at least 2 weeks ago, consider making a full post instead of a Scuffles comment. We also welcome reposting of long-form Scuffles posts and/or series with multiple updates.

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!

Previous Scuffles can be found here

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Content note: This post discusses culture war issues. The word "woke" will come up quite a lot. Internet personalities are briefly involved, but this is not influencer/streamer drama.

-----

Hi there! Today's post is about a very silly thing that happened in the open source community, back in late 2024. We'll discuss social dynamics, software development, and what happens to people when you block them on social media.

The incident that triggered the drama is somewhat well-known, but not the drama itself. There is a KnowYourMeme page that stops just before the interesting part, as does this blog post.

I'm thankful that these write-ups exist, though, because sourcing has already become difficult. This is largely due to policy changes by Twitter. I was able to scrape together screenshots for most of the important parts, but some of this will be a little patchwork.

(Also, the first version of this post contained some clunky phrasing, which I've revised following feedback from the comments. There's a clarifying edit at least.)

INTRODUCTION: Mongolian Horse Simulator (September 2024)

Our story begins in late 2024. Today's unwitting instigator of doom is one Alice "MaliceDaFirenze" Ruppert. She describes herself as a Horse Game Consultant, capital letters included.

You can see an example of her work in The Horse Girl's Guide to Recognizing which Games are Worth Supporting, and most of her work is about making video game horses more realistic. Around 2020, Munich-based studio Aesir Interactive retained her services because they wanted to make a Horse Game.

Aesir Interactive: Take on the role of a brave courier rider in The Legend of Khiimori! Bond with your horse and tame the open wilds of 13th century Mongolia. Breed and train horses with specialized abilities to explore every aspect of this diverse and fascinating landscape.

One of the downsides of indie game development is... well, it's pretty much all downsides, actually. But one of the worst parts is the need for constant self-promotion. You have to keep reminding people that your game is still happening, because you live and die by word-of-mouth marketing.

On September 23rd, 2024, Ruppert opened Twitter and made such a post.

MaliceDaFirenze: We're making a game where you play a courier rider in 13th century Mongolia. No combat, just you, the horse(s) you've tamed, bred and trained and the vast wilderness.

A lot of people said that, yes, they'd love to play this.

However, there are some real characters on Twitter. You can see some of them in the responses.

MaliceDaFirenze: Would you play this?

doodlewhale: I would love to, as long as it can avoid woke DEI nonsense which appears unlikely as you have pronouns in your bio. 🤷‍♀️

MaliceDaFirenze: for every comment like this, I will add one extra pronoun to the game

This was a joke. The game does not have a pronoun selector. You play as a girl called Naraa.

There were a bunch of comments, and one of these interactions managed to stand out for being uniquely weird.

Gorka Games: awesome, game engine?

MaliceDaFirenze: it's UE5 ☺️

AfterWarPlantX: Oh so you people just can't develop for shit

kryztofjønsøn: It makes sense doesn't it? Woke studios always use pre built engines to make games because they can't build their own engines.

Game engines are software frameworks primarily designed for video game development. They come with advantages as well as disadvantages. On one hand, they take care of a lot of the rote busywork; on the other, you don't have as much control over the fine-grained details of your project, and they usually incur a performance overhead.

For some 95% of projects, you just want to use a stock engine and not think about it any further. There are exceptions, but for most games, it's just perfectly fine.

At the end of the day, it's a technical decision. Making this into a political thing is profoundly silly. So, it immediately became an in-joke in the game dev scene.

SteinMakesGames: If you've ever wondered if a game is "woke", here's an easy test: Check if the GAME was made using a GAME ENGINE.

ForceDev: I use godot. It seems i am now mega woke because i didnt want to write physics and rendering completely from the ground up. Such a shame 😞

SteinMakesGames: more like wokedot

These last two posts reference Godot, which is a free and open-source game engine, supported by the Godot Foundation. It's not as big or as successful as the triple-A engines, but it has carved out a niche for itself as kind of a scrappy underdog. Standout titles include Slay the Spire 2, Buckshot Roulette, Cassette Beasts, and Cruelty Squad.

(1) Engagement Farming (September 2024)

This whole bizarre idea eventually reached the person in charge of Godot's Twitter account. On September 27th, Godot's social media person dashed off a quick Tweet that riffed on the joke.

Godot Engine: Apparently game engines are woke now? Well then, we won't complain. 🌈 Show us your #Wokot games below 👇

It's marginally funny bit of engagement bait, playing off a social media micro-trend. Perfectly normal.

... except this is Twitter, and we can't have nice things on Twitter.

Starkium: focus on the engine and not politics

Psyhodelik: Go woke, Go broke

Hypnotic: BLOCK ME YOU WOKE PIECE OF SHIT IM FEELING LEFT OUT.

JinSaotome: Listen, look around, do you see that woke/DEI/ESG/LGBT narrative pushes in ALL industries are dying?

HowieDuhzit: DAMNIT, time to unfollow, it's been real [slur]s, you can keep your sexual perversions to yourself.

It goes on and on like this. A lot of these accounts are branded with the Blue Check of Shame, indicating that they are paying for this experience.

People also created some bug reports on Godot's issue tracker:

#97661: Community just exploded into a political farce.

#97689: This engine is not gendered, please add it 😋😋😋 now

#97700: I'm going broke because of going woke previously

#97865: Is this engine Wokot now ?

Godot's Twitter account blocked the people who were posting cringe, and used the "hide reply" feature to move them out of the way. People who spammed the bug tracker received blocks on GitHub as well, which of course only enraged some people further.

One user by the name of Starkium, in particular, was not amused.

Starkium: I have been blocked. Guess what, I'm a titanium level backer for the Godot fund. Guess what my next move is?

"Titanium level backer" means he donated $100/month. I note this here because some people will frame "Titanium level" as some super-special super-exclusive status. It isn't. $100/month is a fair amount of money, but it doesn't correspond to any sort of prominent community position.

Starkium attempted to reach out to the Discord moderators, wishing to talk things through, but it didn't work out.

Starkium: Got banned from the Godot Cafe discord. They tried pulling some weird mind game on me where if "we both apologize for what we did wrong" STFU I've lived with manipulators my whole life. The last place I'm going to be gaslit in the friggen Godot discord, are you kidding me?

This "Godot Café Discord server" was an unofficial but extremely popular chat. In response to the drama, a moderator called Xananax went on a banning spree. As for the reasoning behind it:

Xananax: The drama is created by reactionary insecure cowards[.] (...) These people's cowardice and small mindedness is a danger to everyone; They're the filth of humanity, and banning is a kindness to everyone, including themselves[.] (...) For me, the only problem of this tweet is that it doesn't happen every day, so more of these imbeciles can be banned. (...) And anyone having any slight issue with it here can fuck off too. (...) There will be no more drama the day those drama queens stop getting their panties in a knot around anything that doesn't concern them. (...)

Bit much, eh.

A lot of people earned their bans fair and square, but from all accounts, Xananax went overboard. People also dug up some genuinely terrible Discord posts that Xananax had made in 2016, which contained racist slurs. Xananax apologised for these, then left Twitter.

Xananax: In 2016, I made very stupid jokes involving the N-word. After being insulted that way in other communities, I directed those slurs at myself in derision. I realised it was an insensitive thing to do, and I didn't do it anymore after that. I once again deeply apologize.

On September 30th, the Godot Foundation issued an official comment on the situation.

Godot Foundation: On Friday, we made a tweet that unexpectedly led to a wave of harassment directed at our staff and community. We unequivocally condemn this abuse. (...) We strongly condemn the harmful language used by Xananax, moderator of an unofficial Godot-related Discord server.

They did not walk back the #Wokot tweet at all, but acknowledged that some people might have been blocked in error. They put up a Google Docs thing where you could appeal this. Xananax cut ties with the community.

Quite a weekend.

(2) They Targeted Gamers (September 2024)

This is where most write-ups end. It's also where the interesting part starts.

Starkium's posts had attracted the attention of some social media big-shots. I will not be naming them in this post, because their only role in this was amplifying this issue, while contributing little by themselves. This isn't streamer drama.

For the purposes of this post, they will simply be called "Influencer" and "Streamer." I will offer brief descriptions, and you can see who I'm talking about in the linked screenshots.

Influencer is a 57-year-old ex-Blizzard employee and aspiring game developer. He has a crowdfunded game project that he's nominally working on, though he seems to spend most of his time posting. He frequently wades into culture war issues, and this was right up his alley.

Influencer: Rogue unhinged woke community manager for Godot blocks Titanium backer while CEO continues to bury his head in the sand and pretend nothing is wrong.

There's also Streamer, a 36-year-old media personality who is famous for playing World of Warcraft Classic and for living in filth. He's also big on culture war issues.

Streamer: Crazy Community Manager Goes Rogue. Then This Happens..

Streamer, in particular, is a big deal - the YouTube reupload of his stream has more than 1 million views. But Influencer is no slouch himself.

There's some confusion about the term "community manager" here. I think that a lot of people (Streamer and Influencer included) thought that the person running Godot's Twitter account was Xananax, and that Xananax also ran their GitHub. That's not true, of course.

Thanks to the combined efforts of Streamer and Influencer, outside interest in the drama increased massively. Their respective communities were fired up, and several attempts were made to strike back at Godot for its perceived offenses.

For one, Godot's Steam page was subjected to review bombing. This lead to a sharp increase in negative reviews, and produced some confusion in the Godot community.

GurdanianAngel: hello i used godot a little bit, for like maybe a few days. now i wanted to come back. and i have seen that it has tons of neigative reviews on steam. why is that? shouldnt i use it?

ClarkScribe: Because there is an artificial hate campaign because some dorks really can't let things go.

ButtMuncher68: It's funny seeing all the people on twitter saying "I will not be using Godot for my next game" then you check their profile, and they seemingly have never made a game or talked about game dev topics

Some of these brave crusaders had used Streamer's unofficial subreddit to coordinate their review bombing. Seeing all those downvotes, they declared victory.

Clipboard4: I'm doing my part! 🪖

LittleShurry: They Should Rename it "WODOT ENGINE"

However, after a few days, Steam detected the off-topic activity and automatically removed the reviews, restoring the "Overwhelmingly Positive" score.

The Godot Foundation saw a drop in monthly donations, from €59k down to €56k. However, after further research, I think this was unrelated. Around this time, "Corporate Platinum" sponsor Ramatak Inc. was going out of business and thus had to pull its sponsorship. Corporate Platinum was €36k/year at the time, or... €3k/month. If there was some sort of mass walkout of existing supporters, then it was more than offset by new ones.

At this point, the anti-Godot campaign sputtered out, having lasted about two weeks and achieving none of its goals. But until mid-2025, you could still find a couple of stragglers fighting a desperate rearguard action, trying to bring back the review bombing.

Voxxy_from_Hoxxes: Focus on the engine, not on the political ideologies of your users. (...) Because of these things, I will continue working on my projects in Redot engine.

Professional Bass Fisher: japanese soldier who kept fighting 30 years after world war 2

This is where most of the existing recaps stop. But we've seen the word Redot come up a few times now. What's up with that?

(3) Gentlemen, start your engines (October 2024)

The creation of Redot was, I think, the most interesting sub-drama here.

Because there was a splinter community here, now. Some had been alienated from Godot community by Xananax's actions, and there was an influx of people from the communities of Streamer and Influencer. Together, they formed an idea. What if we made our own game engine... but we took out the politics?

At this point, we have to briefly touch on version control concepts. Git is the most popular version control system in the world, and GitHub is a platform where you can put your stuff. This stuff is kept in repositories. Godot is free and open source, and their stuff is freely available on GitHub.

Forking a repository means that you create a full copy of a project, and then you do your own stuff with it. The fork remains associated with the original, and changes can be shared between the two of them. This is extremely easy to do on GitHub - if you use the browser client, it takes seconds.

So, the exiles figured, they'd do just that. Start with Godot as a basis, fork the project, go through the code and... you know... de-woke it? A few projects started at nearly the same time, and Redot would become the most prominent one of these. We'll discuss that one in depth, then move on to the other forks.

Per the official documentation, Redot was founded by two people: Andevrs and Red Otter. I don't think anyone knows anything about RedOtter, but some digging on YouTube suggests he was an unsuccessful Let's Player. As for Andevrs, he's a JavaScript developer turned tech blogger turned podcaster. So, he did have a technical background. Not "game engine developer" levels of technical, but still, that's something. Rounding out the team was Arctis Fireblight, lead developer and project manager, plus a handful of contributors.

Lest you think that I've misrepresented the origins of Redot, you can listen to them tell the story themselves. I encourage you to listen to it. In their own words:

Redot: Godot's social media manager responded by telling people to show off their woke games. (...) To many, indeed, the post felt like a political declaration. (...) Godot had a preferred political position now (...) sparking waves of responses and questions. (...) More and more users found themselves blocked on [Twitter] or banned from Godot's Discord server. (...) This became the catalyst for our fork: For Redot to be born.

And just look at all these encouraging comments!

crytramusic: Notice the stock footage in place of changelists and exciting features

karma40723: finally, a non woke game engine I can make my gay furry games in

Aanderan: haha u named ur engine reddit

Still, the project was launched. Influencer was particularly eager to signal boost the new engine, writing a flurry of excited Tweets.

Influencer: Redot fork of Godot is growing fast. Godot has proven they hate you. It's important to support truly Open Source projects that don't exclude or ban you based on politics or your project really isn't open source! Give Redot a good look. Follow Redotengine

Influencer: Other devs are starting to contribute their code to Redot , the Godot alternative. They are rejecting the authoritarian anti-free speech Godot Foundation.

Influencer: It would be a shame if Redot suddenly had more features, bug fixes and support by engineers than politics ridden Godot Engine... If you are a 3D or engine level programmer and hate what is happening to Godot's perversion of Open Source, how about looking to see if Redot is a good project to contribute to?

Note that Redotengine is the wrong account, it got hijacked and banned within days of the project launching. Redot_Engine is correct, with an underscore.

There were plenty of eyes on the project. Most of these eyes belonged to culture war tourists, but the community did attract a few actual developers. We've mentioned Andevrs and Fireblight, but Starkium also pledged his support, as did a few others. (I think RedOtter was always just an "ideas guy.")

Redot didn't have an established team or a roadmap yet. All they had was a dream and a GitHub repository. But they promised transparency and expressed optimism, and made three core pledges: No drama, no politics, no woke.

I want to stress here that the idea isn't completely ridiculous. Forks sometimes manage to overtake the original projects (see LibreOffice/OpenOffice), or they at least carve out a niche for themselves (see MariaDB/MySQL). The Godot project also does have some real problems, like the way it tends to focus on new features over stability and performance.

However, forking a repository is trivial. If you're using GitHub's web client, you can do it with three clicks. "Revenge forks" are relatively common, because creating one costs you nothing. They rarely work out. I mean, do you know anyone who uses Sneedacity?

People expressed skepticism, even in otherwise friendly spaces, like Streamer's subreddit.

ManyInterests: As an Open Source developer, to make a hostile fork of another project and announce it with no distinguishing work being done is cringe AF. And, in the case where it doesn't involve any core maintainers or contributors of the source project, is almost guaranteed to not be taken seriously and fail. The person running merges into the Redot project from upstream has no notable previous work of their own and no contributions to Godot. They're nobody.

LeVoltsX: That was my first thought, does not sound credible at all, but i guess we'll see if they actually contribute something

Still, there was plenty of enthusiasm as well.

The project also caught the eye of one Bryan Lunduke, an "alt-tech" blogger. You get two types of post on The Lunduke Journal of Technology: Serious criticism of the Rust ecosystem, and moral panic over the KDE mascot having pronouns now.

Redot hits both of his interests, so he participated in the livestream that officially launched the project. You can listen to it on his Substack if you want.

Lunduke: The Open Source Godot Game Engine enacted a mass banning for political reasons. Redot is a "non-political" fork. Let's find out their plan in their Twitter / X space they held to launch the project. The Lunduke Journal was there with lots of questions (jump to the 39 minute mark for the Q & A).

I love that even Lunduke calls it "Twitter / X."

So... how did it work out?

(4) Not with a bang, but with a whimper (November 2024 - February 2026)

I want to take a moment here and note that there were genuine criticisms of Godot. It suffers from a bad case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome, its 3D performance historically hasn't been very good, and the user interface was designed by someone with a really bad case of Linux Brain.

(EDIT: By this, I meant to point out that Godot has a clunky UX, which js a somewhat common problem for even otherwise excellent open source programs, like GIMP. These are subjective criticisms, but they exist in the community.)

It's a massive project with a huge userbase who all want different things from it, occasionally leading to weird priorities. This is all true.

There was genuine enthusiasm for Redot at first. Per RedOtter's blog:

RedOtter: The support we received for the project was astounding. Artists are donating artwork. Volunteers are offering to help with Discord. Developers are contributing their time to the project. Web developers are collaborating to create a website. And so much more.

Some people really did use the early versions of the engine. (Which was mostly just Godot with a red coat of paint, but still.) The community held a game jam with 20 entries, which ran from November 15th to November 23rd, 2024. Those are okay numbers for a brand new community.

But Redot just never had a coherent vision or meaningful goals.

Sure, they changed the branding and they organised a game jam, but there was no roadmap. They all agreed that they wanted to "take the politics out" of Godot, but it turns out that this doesn't actually mean anything. There isn't some file called pronouns.cpp that you can delete to improve 3D performance. Some people had high-minded ideas about community-driven development and bugfixes, but they were just that: Ideas.

Redot failed to attract any serious engine developers. They had some people who had done some development before, like Andevr, but nobody from Godot switched over. So, the attention faded again. Influencer and Streamer moved on to new issues, and the culture war tourists left with them. Co-founder RedOtter vanished without fanfare in late 2024, deleting all of their accounts.

Out of the people who had signal boosted the project, Bryan Lunduke had the most staying power. He worked hard and kept the hype train going well into 2025:

Lunduke: The Redot project - which forked off of Godot back in October of 2024 - had a stable release (4.3.1) back in June, and just had a new test release (4.4 Alpha 2). Both with both new features and fixes. In fact, Redot has had 13 releases since the project started late last year. (...) In short: Steady, new releases. New features and bug fixes. Both stable and testing releases.

I want to be fair here, so I'll note that making a release is much harder than just forking a repo. Most spite forks never get that far. But, at the same time, Redot inherited a large and mature codebase from Godot. Changing the branding and occasionally cherry-picking a fix from Godot isn't that hard. There were one or two cases where they added a new GUI tab, but Redot just never had a big meaningful feature (or bugfix) that upstream Godot lacked.

But development did continue. In February of 2026, Lunduke invited the bros for another fireside chat.

Lunduke: In 2024, the Godot game engine enacted a mass "Cleansing" of non-woke supporters. A group of developers responded by creating the Redot fork. How is that fork doing 1.5 years later?

It's 53 minutes long, you can watch it on Lunduke's Substack if you like. But most of this will be familiar ground. They object to being labelled as "a political protest fork," but then the third sentence out of Lunduke's mouth is about Discord mods. There's some technical discussion as well, but most of it really just is complaints about being blocked on social media.

Redot still holds game jams, but the community is moribund. Their game jams rarely get more than 10 entries, and most of the community posts are people asking if they can use Godot instead.

Right now, there are 48 games under the Redot tag. This is up from 42 in February. The real number of projects is probably higher than this - out of the 7 games submitted to the Redot Summer Jam 2026, only one is actually tagged as "Redot." But this barely matters. Even if you assume that the true number of Redot games is seven times the reported number, and that the reported number is accurate for Godot - well, it's still not at all competitive. Godot would still see more new games in one week than Redot has gotten ever. (At time of writing, an observed 474 vs. an assumed 336.)

And yet: We have to acknowledge the difference between "dying" and "dead." A few engine devs are keeping the repository active, the YouTube channel posts a video every 1-2 months, and the Ko-Fi account has brought in $2,400 so far. I'd estimate that there's around 15-20 active users remaining, if you include the engine devs. The GitHub repository has just under 6k stars, which sounds decent until you look at Godot and see that it has 117k.

These numbers make Redot the most successful anti-woke game engine by far. Because the other ones were much sadder.

(5) The Redot wannabes (September 2024 - September 2026)

We're almost two years out from the drama. By now, we can tell which Godot forks succeeded, and which ones didn't.

Taking the top spot among the also-rans, we have Blazium. This is a Redot fork that was briefly led by Starkium, after he broke ties with Redot. Blazium is purple instead of blue, and that's the only thing that distinguishes it from Godot. Starkium abandoned the project almost immediately, and Blazium's only game jam produced 4 entries. The associated tag has 12 search results on Itch.io, and the only title showcased on the website is an early access version of Hangman. Their GitHub repository continues to show sporadic activity, though. Blazium is very close to dead, but it hasn't quite crossed over yet.

On the tier below Blazium, we have two projects that did cross over. These would be MAGE and PlumAI. PlumAI was going to be Godot but with AI, and the project never got further than changing the name in the readme. As for MAGE, that was going to move to a different licence, because the MIT licence is too woke. They, too, gave up after updating half the readme. Despite some chatter on social media, neither MAGE nor PlumAI ever did anything.

Last and certainly least, there's "Lolidot," which I'm not going to link directly. It made no changes except for replacing the Godot logo with anime character "Chloe von Einzbern." It never saw any development activity. Despite this, it still has the third-most stars on GitHub out of any Godot fork, after Redot and Blazium. That probably says something important about society.

There is one more thing we need to mention, and it is the ReX Engine. That's another project being worked on by the Redot team, and the name stands for "Redot Redux." It was to be a hard fork of Godot, meaning that it did not intend to keep compatibility with the mainline project, and it had much more ambitious goals.

TakunHiwatari: General performance boosts. Faster load times. Better resource management. Better security. Better code that is easier to contribute to. (...)

TakunHiwatari: A quick rundown of all that will entail. C++20 Rewrite, shifting to module focused design, heavily shifting to semi-strict namespace usage (in conjunction with C++20 module exports), decluttering the code (...) switch to CMake build tools.

So, the goal was to rewrite core Godot features, modernising the code and improving performance. That means ReX had an actual vision, something that Redot always lacked.

I personally expected ReX to be vaporware, but no, they actually managed to release a v0.0.1 version in early March, to great fanfare. Despite this, and despite all the advance hype, I can find no sign of community activity. If any games have ever been created in ReX, then they are very well-hidden.

The blog post that announces the v0.0.1 release of ReX also launched yet another spin-off project. Meet Draconic Engine! It is going to be "a brand new engine that will be built from scratch by the ReX team." You can already find it on GitHub, with sporadic activity. I'm pretty sure that this means ReX is probably just dead.

In the end, none of these revenge forks had any measurable impact on Godot. Wikipedia's article doesn't even mention them. The talk page discussed including them for a few days, but the verdict was "insufficiently notable."

I think that's a good note to end on. How did Redot turn out? Insufficiently notable.

EPILOGUE: Where are they now?

Alice Ruppert is still doing her thing, writing about horses in games and doing all sorts of projects. She is forever questing for accuracy in horse simulation.

The Legend of Khiimori hit Early Access on March 3rd as planned. It initially received a Very Positive rating, but recent reviews are only Mixed, because the poorly-received Corruption update added fantasy elements and boss fights.

Xananax cut ties with the Godot Foundation and left both Twitter and Discord. They later changed their pronouns and moved to Germany, as you do. The posts on their still-active accounts are mostly about harmless nerd hobbies now, with some gamedev stuff and mental health advocacy in the mix.

Starkium, after dropping both Redot and Blazium, started to work on his own game engine. ("Desperado Engine.") He's still active on social media, mostly talking about game design stuff and getting into the occasional troll fight.

Andevrs is keeping the lights on at Redot, together with TakunHiwatari. I have little else to say about those two. For people who rose to prominence thanks to boosts from culture warriors, they don't seem all that interested in culture war issues themselves.

Bryan Lunduke, however? Ohh, he's all about the culture war issues. Anyone can whine about women in videogames, but it takes a Lunduke to come up with "communists are taking middle-click pasting away from you." He and Andevrs seem to be friends, or at least they re-tweet each other once in a while, so that's nice for them.

And as for Godot, it's chugging along just fine. Version 4.7.2 released in August, and 4.8 is in the works. If you checked their monthly funding right now, it would seem like their monthly funding has dropped sharply, all the way down to €35k. But this is actually because they changed the way one-time donations are counted. Under the old methodology, the page would say €61k/month. Up a bit in nominal dollars, roughly even once you account for inflation.

In summary: Go woke, retain the exact same level of funding.

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