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🫖

Welcome back to the Asylum write-up.

This is where you live now.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

In this installment, we finally take a closer look at how Emilie Autumn's hyper-loyal fanbase gradually started losing faith in her as, among other things, it became more and more apparent that she... wasn't exactly a reliable narrator – in her semi-autobiographical book, or in general.

HOW IT STARTED: A WOMAN OF MYSTERY

Willow, weep for me

Don't think I don't see

This life I'm living in two

But still it's something I must do

I'm not unique in this

Nor am I special, sweet, or kind

I court a thousand smiles

Yet I keep my own to hide behind (“Willow”, 2004 🎵)

I've previously referred to EA as an “expert vagueposter”, and this is relevant here.

For an artist who built her brand on a pledge of raw, rats-and-all honesty, EA has always been quite guarded about the specifics of her personal life. (Until her current partner, for instance, she always danced around calling anyone a boyfriend, even when the nature of the relationship was pretty obvious.) Her whole angle is telling “the truth”, but through whimsical fantasy. As early as the fairy-themed Enchant era, she had her own world, her own vernacular; she spoke in metaphors, in-jokes, and quirky anachronisms. Taxis were carriages, her electric keyboard was a harpsichord, she always capitalized Time and Art like Shakespeare does. On the Asylum forum, automatic word filters would change “fan” to “muffin”, “fairy” to “faerie”, “bra” to “teacup holder”, and “responsibility” to “ratsponsibility”.

She's a chatterbox who loves to share memories and funny anecdotes, but she usually keeps them short and sweet, Snapple-facts style. 📝 She's great at painting by touches in her storytelling, revealing just enough to let your imagination auto-complete the rest. 🔍 Even the most banal tidbits are very artfully told, very “on brand”, often dense with symbolism and foreshadowing – but also very abstracted.

She is especially elusive when it comes to her background and formative years. See the way she catches herself in this interview 📺📝 while describing her “favorite scar”, which is from an eel bite: “My – well, someone I knew... [gasp-laugh] had it as a pet, and...” (She was about to say “my sister”.)

In short, the way EA talks about her life is often very personal, but not all that candid – and sounds more like it's meant to provide a curated, coherent backstory for Emilie Autumn the character, rather than Emilie Autumn the person.

I'll tell the truth, all my songs

Are pretty much the fucking same

I'm not a fairy but I need

More than this life, so I became

This creature representing more to you

Than just another girl... (“Swallow”, 2006 🎵)

In the beginning, this guardedness naturally contributed to the mystique. It made it all the more special when, once in a while, she would briefly drop the theatrics to share something earnest and relatively unfiltered. Like this composed, but vulnerable post from 2004 📝 about her father losing his battle to cancer, and her attempts at closure over their tense relationship. Or this 2012 anti-bullying campaign thing 📺 in which she opens up about being a target of intense physical bullying in elementary school, to a point that contributed to her being homeschooled at 9.

Fans in the early years were curious about her backstory, of course – but not too prodding or invasive, to my knowledge. I think there was an understanding that EA, like many performers, wanted to come across as human and approachable, while still cultivating an “aura” and retaining some privacy. But obviously, when she announced that she was writing a Tell-All Memoir in 2007, everyone was dying to read it. TEA TIME!

HOW IT'S GOING: A WOMAN OF... MALARKEY???

LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR! (“Liar”, 2006 🎵)

As we've learned, the original 2009 release of EA's book was highly anticipated, but somewhat tainted by a bunch of shipping delays and unfulfilled promises. From the start of her career, EA had always cultivated a close parasocial involvement with her audience; many fans had as deep an attachment to her, personally, as they did to her art. So, for instance, when EA tweeted about all the personal dedications she was lovingly writing in overdue books, only for the books to arrive many months later and unsigned with no tangible explanation, it wasn't simply frustrating: it was betrayal amongst kin!

Really, it wasn't so much about fans not getting what they paid for – it was about the lack of clear communication or genuine accountability. This is pure speculation on my part, but the poppycock that EA tweeted about signing the books strikes me as the panic-lie of someone who hadn't realized just how many heartfelt, personalized dedications she would actually have to write when she came home from tour. And then she just couldn't do it, because she was overworked, paralyzed, distracted, depressed, procrastinating, whatever. Which... you know... is unfortunate, but probably not unforgivable. Especially for a touring performer who is open and vocal about their mental health issues.

I'm confident that most fans would have been happy to tell her that her well-being meant more to them than an autograph, or something along those lines. Instead, EA's cagey and avoidant demeanor around this issue left fans very salty – and newly suspicious of their favorite artist's word.

Which was regrettable timing for EA, because they had just received their copies of her memoir.

Here's a cursory look at some key biographical points that didn't hold up to scrutiny when more and more vexed fans, over the years, started looking into them.

Content warning until end of post: family estrangement, death by fire, worsening physical health issues, mention of disordered eating / weight loss / thinspiration, and LIES! LIES! LIIIIIES!

“EMILIE AUTUMN LIDDELL (BORN SEPTEMBER 22, 1979) IS AN AMERICAN SINGER-SONGWRITER...” (Wikipedia)

Every fandom has its Holy Grail. Because a number of EA's early releases were limited pressings put out through now-defunct record labels, the EA fandom in its heyday was a collector's wonderland. 📝🦠 At the height of her popularity, the original Enchant jewelcase (the one with the puzzle-poster) could easily fetch around $500 dollars on eBay, unsigned. The handwritten lyrics of an Opheliac B-side went for $940 in 2009. Don't even ask me about the hard copies of her two poetry books: those never even popped up over the five or six years that I had various alerts set up for all EA-related listings.

But the true crown jewel of EA rarities is the untitled promo version of her (also virtually unfindable) 2001 instrumental debut On a Day... No one knows how many copies exist. The darn thing is so rare that it's not even listed on Discogs. For a while, the only picture of the elusive “Violin” promo CD that was circulated online was this one.🪞 Go ahead, click the link. Notice anything odd? That black box where one composer's birth year should be?

I'm not sure why the notorious hyper-fan who originally shared this picture on the forum in the early 2010s took it upon himself to censor it before posting. I wasn't able to pinpoint when or why people started questioning EA's age, but clearly, something had already transpired to let him know that not redacting said birth year might, uh... cause an upset. In any case: at some point, people started digging – and eventually, the unredacted version of the “Violin” tracklist (as well as public records and literal receipts from eBay auctions) would be brandished as one more piece of damning evidence that EA was indeed (gasp!) two years older than she claimed to be.

“Okay, and?” you shrug. “What's the big deal?” I'm shrugging too! What can I say? People don't like realizing they've been fooled, even about something stupid. I will note that EA's fall equinox birthday (hence her ...

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This is a tale of a community centered around one of the most popular speedrunning games of all time, and how they set out to push a game to its absolute limits, and themselves to the height of human ability.

Almost everyone, even the top runners themselves, were convinced this feat of skill was impossible. They were wrong. This is the story of how Super Mario Odyssey was beaten in under an hour.

Background

Super Mario Odyssey is a platforming game released by Nintendo for the Nintendo Switch console on October 27th, 2017, only seven months after the launch of the Switch itself. After a decade of main-series Super Mario games which mostly featured 2D gameplay with linear progression (excluding the release of Super Mario Galaxy 2, which did feature 3D gameplay but still included mostly linear level design), it was a welcome return to the open-world, 3D “collectathon”-style gameplay that hadn’t been seen in the Mario Franchise since Super Mario Sunshine was released back in 2002.

Odyssey was an instant hit with both critics and players, and is still the third best-selling main-series Mario game today, with over 25 million copies sold worldwide. It is also, incidentally, a game that is very near and dear to my heart, which is why this writeup even exists.

The Gameplay

In the beginning of Odyssey, as is so often the case in Mario games, Bowser (the giant fire-breathing turtle-lizard) kidnaps the human Princess Peach and takes her across different kingdoms. This time, he's collecting an item from each one for their grand wedding. Meanwhile, our beloved Italian plumber protagonist, Mario, pursues them in order to save Peach from Bowser's evil, nuptial machinations. The game even ends with a huge showdown on the Moon itself, as Mario interrupts the wedding ceremony in the nick of time, fights Bowser one last time and rescues Peach (well, rescue’s a bit of a strong word. Yay, feminism?).

He is accompanied on his journey by Cappy, a Bonneter (a ghostly, hat-like creature) from the Cap Kingdom that possesses Mario’s torn hat. One of the main mechanics of Odyssey is using Cappy to possess different objects and creatures in the game, that allow Mario to borrow their unique mechanics to solve puzzles and move creatively. Another important mechanic involving Cappy is throwing him mid-jump and bouncing on him to gain an extra height boost.

During the game, Mario and Cappy travel around the fourteen kingdoms and collect moons (the main collectable) to power the Odyssey, their flying ship. Some can be acquired quite easily, while some require solving more complex puzzles and minigames or finding hidden locations. While the kingdoms themselves allow the player to wander around freely and collect as many moons as they desire in whatever order they please, the progression between kingdoms is (mostly) linear- a specific number of moons must be collected in each kingdom in order to move on to the next, and a player must go through all kingdoms in order to reach the end of the game.

Most of the other mechanics are basic Mario platformer moves: running, jumping, ground-pounding, flipping, and so on. Odyssey's movement is incredibly intuitive, fluid and easy to pick up, which is part of the reason why immediately after the game's release, Odyssey developed an unusually large and involved speedrunning community.

How Low Can We Go?

Let’s back up a little and talk about speedrunning in general. There are many ways to speedrun a game: collect all items of a certain kind, finish a certain area the fastest, beat everything there is to do in the game, and many other categories specific to each game. There’s even a meme category for Odyssey aptly called Nipple%, in which you need to get to the Sand Kingdom, earn 1000 coins along the way and buy the boxers outfit from the shop there (which leaves Mario with his chest proudly uncovered). As of today, the record is held at 7 minutes, 23 seconds and 667 milliseconds by Tyron18, and 907 runs in this category are registered on Speedrun.com.

But arguably the most popular speedrunning category in most games is called “Any%”. What does Any% mean? Quite simply, beating the game in as little time as possible- playing any percentage of the game required to beat it. In Odyssey, the Any% run begins when selecting the Save button on a new save file, and ends when entering the spark pylon at the end of the Escape segment on the Moon.1

When Odyssey came out, the immediate question that was asked was “what is the lowest possible time for any Any% speedrun? What is the best theoretical record?”. In the early days after release, as with any new game, new strategies and routes were being developed rapidly, with new glitches and exploits constantly being found by the eager community (and subsequently patched with equal fervor by Nintendo).

Very soon after the community had started optimization of the speedrun, people began theorizing that an Any% run with a time of under an hour was possible. Colloquially, it was called “sub-one hour”. This eventually became the ultimate goal of the entire community, and one of the greatest speedrunning challenges in gaming history- beating Super Mario Odyssey in under one hour.

The Beginning

The first record was set by MonkeyKingHero on launch day, October 27th, 2017, and boasted a 02:11:54. During the first week or so, MonkeyKingHero and another runner, IMtendo, managed to bring the record down by over fifty minutes, down to 01:18:15 on November 3rd. To understand the absurdity of the situation, two more records were set that day, and one of the only lasted for thirty minutes.

Many notable and significant glitches, skips and exploits were found in these early days. For example, one of them was Dino Skip, in which you possess the dinosaur (yes, there’s an actual T-Rex in this game) in the Cascade Kingdom and use it to jump high enough on a nearby trampoline to skip straight to a mini-boss fight. Another important exploit found was Moon Cave Skip, which allows you to, with a series of precise wall jumps from the top of the Sphinx’s head in the Moon Kingdom, skip all of the Moon Cave (a very long gauntlet of platforming challenges with a mini-boss fight at the end) and go straight to the Chapel for the wedding ceremony. Huge chunks of time were shaved off with tricks like these.

After the first week, several renowned runners began to compete for the top spot as well: Vallu, a well-respected Mario speedrunner who used to hold legendary world records, Iwabi74, who still holds six Majora’s Mask world records to this day, and Samura1man, widely known for his Super Mario Sunshine world record.

Of the three, Vallu began dominating the scene. He set seven new consecutive records in only five days, managing to shave off six whole minutes from November 3rd to November 8th, with his final record being set at 01:10:43. But then, amidst these juggernauts, a new challenger approached.

A speedrunner named Shaeden suddenly began topping the leaderboards and competing with Vallu, Iwabi and Samura1man for their hard-earned records. No one had ever heard of him before... until it was discovered he used to go by Pydoyks, and was known as one of- if the best- Ocarina of Time speedrunners of all time and a true legend of gaming, prior to his disappearance from the internet around 2013. But he returned under a new name just in time for the Odyssey speedrunning craze, and he did not disappoint.

However, Shaeden’s complete dominance of the leaderboards did not go unchallenged. NicroVeda, a Canadian speedrunner, began to break Shaedens records, and Shaeden responded in kind. Between January 11th and April 12th, 2018, eleven new records were set only by Shaeden and NicroVeda, bringing the record all the way down to a whopping 01:03:16.

But then, everything changed ~~when the Fire Nation attacked~~ when version 1.2.0 came out.

Version 1.2.0- An Omen of Change

Originally, all speedruns were played on version 1.0.1 or the functionally identical version 1.1.0. Playing on version 1.0.0 was banned because it was very hard to obtain- requring either requiring either a factory-reset Switch, or a physical copy of Odyssey that had never been updated, essentially forcing runners who played on a digital copy and wanted to stay competitive to buy a physical copy, and only made one additional glitch possible.

This glitch, known as First Moon Skip, is only possible in version 1.0.0.2 It’s an incredibly finicky glitch that requires Mario to jump and dive across the water to the left of the bridge in the beginning of the Cascade Kingdom, jump up underneath an invisible wall and do a very precise dive to the platform ahead... but it saves 26 precious seconds.

However, on February 21st, 2018, version 1.2.0 came out. It added a new minigame named Luigi’s Balloon World, and more importantly, patched out several important glitches and made them impossible. As 1.2.0 was now ...

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Welcome back to this write-up about a complicated artist's complicated book.

Don't be absurd, of course you have time!

Part 1

Part 2

Now that we've established what the book is about, let's take a look at The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls' rich publication and re-publication history. I promise, it's more scandalous than it sounds.

“HER SPEECH IS NOTHING, YET THE UNSHAPÈD USE OF IT DOTH MOVE THE HEARERS TO COLLECTION” (HORATIO, ACT IV SCENE 5)

As I've mentioned in the last installment, TAFWVG has been released multiple times, in multiple editions – four of them, to be precise. And I wish I was exaggerating when I say that three of those four releases have been veritable masterclasses in testing your audience's loyalty. In case you're wondering: the secret is to alter your source material in strange and unpredictable ways, while also constantly messing up on the customer service front.

Most of this installment condenses and combines these two excellent write-ups, which contain most of the receipts: TAFWVG: A History / The Bloody Crumpets: An Inconsistent History. 🔍 Anything that isn't sourced with links is in there.

It turns out there are good reasons why most fiction authors don't do real-life inserts so overtly – but in EA's case, it did make sense, and was warmly embraced by fans upon release. When the book first came out, some of these people had been familiar to the fanbase for years, frequently appearing in candid pictures on EA's blog and leaving comments on the forum; some were also involved in her music and show. Recognizing that one character's name was a pun on So-and-So's username was a nice Easter egg for veteran fans, and newcomers got to learn about fandom lore; it brought the story to life and the community closer.

One side character, for instance, was named after EA's best friend from Chicago, whom many fans had had direct interactions with: she co-ran EA's online stores during the Enchant years, and acted as admin, main moderator and EA-liaison of the forum throughout its near-decade of existence.

One crazy girl who thinks she's a pirate is 100% OC... but her description and illustrations 🪞 were explicitly modeled after pictures of Bloody Crumpet Vecona (one of EA's back-up performers), who became the first stand-in pirate character 📺 in the live show. Captain Vecona was also celebrated as the “Asylum Seamstress” 🪞🔍: most of the iconic early Opheliac costumes were her design. She had a following of her own, even prior to touring with EA, for her professional costuming work and her collaborations with German photographer Angst-im-Wald. (Shitty archive link, sorry - most of those badass photoshoots seem to have been lost to time. But if you were a European goth in the mid-2000s, search your old hard drives: I promise you, you've downloaded some of those pictures.)

Inmate “Veronica”, a cabaret girl diagnosed as a nymphomaniac, was a doppelgänger of her namesake, burlesque dancer Veronica Varlow 🪞 – the ride-or-die Crumpet, whom EA often lovingly called her “husband”, saying they had been lovers in a previous lifetime. Veronica was part of every single tour post-Opheliac release and developed a solid fanbase of her own, which she maintains to this day.

Even the brave and well-mannered talking rats (oh yeah, there's talking rats in the Asylum story) were named after EA's real-life pet rodents, who had featured in glamorous photoshoots. (Slight NSFW for sideboob.)

You get the general gimmick by now: EA turns her personal life into art, which she turns into a fictional world, which she then prompts the audience to inhabit with her. The whole Asylum concept was essentially an open invitation to self-insert parasocial fanfic: “Here's this very personal world that I've created, in which I, the artist, exist as a fictional persona, alongside all these quirky inmate characters that you've seen in my stage show, and who are avatars my real-life friends. Come on in, make it your home, and populate it with your own zany Victorian alter egos.”

And it worked, to an extent: like I've said, most fans were on board before they'd even read the book, and the Asylum became “real” in that sense.

But it can get a bit disorienting to find your place in a fantasy world, when said world keeps changing based on the author's shifting feelings about her story, her target audience, and her friends... plus, you'd love to read the book, but the darn thing still hasn't shipped.

ROUNDS 1 & 2: THE HARDCOVERS

~A MINOR ADJUSTMENT~

TAFWVG was first teased in spoken-word bonus tracks 🎤 on a 2007 EP. In spring 2008, EA started reading excerpts from her upcoming book at live shows. Early excerpts from the Asylum narrative featured a character named “Jo Hee” 📺; in the story, she is a cellist from “the Orient” (love that Victorian geography) and Emily's childhood confidante.

In real life, Lady Jo Hee, Center of Happiness, was the OG Bloody Crumpet. 📺 She had been there since from the very first Opheliac show in Chicago in 2006, accompanying EA on the electric cello – the only instrumentalist ever featured in the line-up besides EA herself.

In August 2008, Alternative Magazine ran a feature about the upcoming book.🔍, teasing some of its pages. Fans were quick to spot a very sisterly picture of EA and Jo Hee 🪞, borrowed from a fan-favorite photoshoot of the two. (An aside: this specific picture also became famous in the fandom for another reason. At some point, someone made an edit replacing Jo Hee with Amy Lee from Evanescence; for a while, it kept making the rounds in alt/goth internet circuits, casual onlookers kept getting excited about it, and Plague Rats kept having to step in and disappoint them.)

Anyway. For reasons undisclosed by either party, Jo Hee quietly left the Crumpets after that tour, never to be mentioned again.

By the time the book came out in late 2009, the character of “Jo Hee” had been renamed “Sachiko”. (I guess it didn't matter whether the one non-white character in the story was meant to be Korean or Japanese.) Jo Hee's face had been edited out of the (still clearly recognizable) photograph, and eerily replaced with Nondescript_Asian_Woman_023.jpg from Shutterstock.🪞

You'd think that the switcheroo would have raised more eyebrows, or at least s...

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DISCLAIMER: this post will be heavy. We are dealing with themes of racism, neo-n*zi imagery, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and things of that sort. It would be not explained in details, but i will link articles talking about it in lenght. Please be careful while browsing!

Hello again people of Hobbydrama. This time my introduction will be brief since the post will probably be very long, just wanted to say: thank you for sticking with me. Remember to read the disclaimer and also be aware that this post might contain spoilers, particularly for Life Is Strange 1 and 3!

What the hell is Life Is Strange?

“Ready for the mosh pit, shaka brah”

Life Is Strange is a series of adventure games published by Square Enix’s External Studios. Created by Dontnod Entertainment, the series debuted with its first installment which was released in five episodes throughout 2015 on PS3, PS4, XBOX 360, PC, iOS and Android. It also recived a remastered version for the Nintendo Switch in 2021. Which was…not very good tbh, but we don’t talk about that. The story of the first game revolves around Max Caulfield, a girl who discovers that she has the ability to rewind time at any moment, causing each of her choices to make events unfold differently. After predicting the arrival of a giant storm, Max will have to use her powers to try to save her city, Arcadia Bay. She starts this by saving her former best friend (and future love interest) Chloe Price by dying in a bathroom stall. Since that, the plot will also focus on the search of Rachel Amber, a girl who misteriously disappeared without leaving trace. The player’s actions will affect the game’s story, which can be rewritten once they are able to rewind time. The introduction of the possibility of rewinding time allows to go back and do any action differently from the one first done in certain narrative checkpoints. This structure also offers a polarity system: choices made modify and influence the story through short- or long-term consequences. I mean, technically is not really like that because the game has only two possible endings and the choices you make can’t change it, but they affect the way other characters see you and interact with you. Dialogue scenes can also be rewound by choosing a different response option. Once an event is restored the previously provided data can also be used in the future: for example objects found in the future will be preserved after rewinding time. This, as you can imagine, offers a lot of possibilities for puzzle mechanics and things of that sort.

The game was a massive success, winning a shiton of awards in the following years and gaining an immense fanbase. This was due to its emotionally raw plot dealing with themes such as depression and suicide, bullying, fear of abandonment, LGBTQ+ representation, growing up and of course time shenaningans that subjects the main character to an unbelivable amount of trauma! Yay! Jokes aside, the game was so succesfull that it spawned an entire franchise: a prequel with Chloe Price as a protagonist came out in 2017 and a comic spin-off was published in 2018.

Also: Life Is Strange 2 and Life Is Strange 3 were made, but they are different stories with totally different characters not related with Max and Chloe in any means, besides some minor easter eggs. For the context of this post, is important to know that when Lis became a franchise, they started to explore different stories with different characters: the only one thing in common is that in this world some people have some kinds of superpowers for…reasons that are never really fully explained. Max had time-rewind, it’s heavily implied in the prequel that Rachel Amber had some kind of fire powers or, in alternative, powers very similar to Max’s based on what some characters says about her, Sean’s brother has telekinesis and Alex has an “emotional aura” reading ability

There are also rumors going on about an Amazon Prime series adapting the story of the first game, but nothing has came out of it at the time of writing this.

With that being said, let’s move on.

The weird dynamics between Dontnod and Square Enix

Now, before we focus on the gist of the drama, it’s important to clarify one thing: Dontnod no longer holds any ownership of the Life Is Strange franchise and doesn’t work on the series anymore, only SquareEnix and Deck Nine are in charge now. To explain why this happened we need to go on a tangent here.

Development of the first Life Is Strange began in April 2013: the idea of developing it in episodes was due to creative, marketing and, above all, financial reasons. Mind you, at the time Dontnod was a little french indie game developing company. Their debut title was Remember Me, which at first they wanted it to be a PlayStation 3-exclusive role-playing game, but was dropped by publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2011 on account of cuts in funding. It was presented at Gamescom the same year to attract another publishing deal. The following year, Capcom Europe acquired the rights and reimagined it as an action-adventure game. In 2013, Dontnod was the most subsidised studio with 600 000€ aid by the French agency Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC), including aid for a new intellectual property project codenamed “What if?” (later retitled to Life is Strange to avoid confusion with the film of the same name.) for something like 200 000 euros. On 28 January 2014, Dontnod filed for rjudicial reorganisation, a form of receivership in France. The proceeding filing was discovered by Factornews and some media outlets like Polygon reported it as Dontnod filing for bankruptcy as a result of the poor sales of Remember Me. However, Dontnod responded to these reports explaining that they were in the process of “judicial reorganisation” to resize the company and denying bankruptcy..

In June 2014, Dontnod announced that they were working with Square Enix Europe on a new game, which was announced as Life Is Strange that year and released in 2015 over the course of five instalments, like i said earlier. The critical and commercial success of Life Is Strange caused Dontnod to be solicited by publishers, whereas they previously had to pursue publishers themselves. Is also important to note that Life Is Strange received attention for the choice to include a female protagonist in the game. Before signing the collaboration with Square Enix, Dontnod had in fact encountered distrust from the curators of the project, who had attempted to insert a male protagonist in Max’s place. Baiscally, Square Enix was the only company that was willing to publish them without questioning the gender of the main character. Remember this, because it will be important later.

Following the release and success of the first Life is Strange, publisher Square Enix chose American developer Deck Nine to develop a prequel game focusing on the life of Chloe Price, while the Dontnod team began developing a direct sequel. Development on the prequel began in 2016 with assistance from Square Enix’ London Studios. Ashly Burch, who voiced Chloe in Life Is Strange, was replaced by Rhianna DeVries due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. However, Burch and Hannah Telle (Max’s VA) both reprised their roles for the bonus episode “Farewell.” This prequel project went under various working titles during development and the writers researched memoirs and psychology to better understand Chloe’s character. Plus, the script for the game was over 1,500 pages, written by lead writer Zak Garriss and ...

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Hello, and welcome to the second installment of my Emilie Autumn write-up. (Per mod recommendation, new installments will be posted every two or three days – there are seven in total.)

Emilie Autumn is a singer-songwriter with an elaborate semi-fictional universe and a complicated relationship with her fanbase. I strongly recommend you check out Part 1 🔍 before reading.

In this installment, we dive into the drama surrounding the contents of The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls / TAFWVG – the half-autobiographical journal, half-historical fantasy that has defined EA's artistic output and fanbase lore for the past fifteen years. It's still more “Hobby History” than “Hobby Drama” proper, but trust me, it provides valuable context about the general vibes of the fandom.

Content Warning throughout this installment for themes of sexual and gender-based violence, including torture, sex trafficking and femicide, as well as attempted suicide, mental illness, hospitalization, and ableist discrimination; brief mention of Holocaust imagery. Oh, and obviously, spoiler alert for the whole book – but that's comprehensive investigative work for ya!

🪞 = picture / visual

🎵 = music / audio

📺 = video

📝 = primary source / receipt

🔍 = press article / write-up / further reading

🎤 = song lyrics

🐀 = anonymous fan confession

🦠 = reaction / meme

OVERVIEW: “A DOCUMENT IN MADNESS – THOUGHTS AND REMEMBRANCE FITTED” (LAERTES, ACT IV, SCENE 5)

...When the book was first released, I had only two aims - to explain myself to a growing audience that thought they knew me but didn't truly, and then to expose the corruption of the modern day mental health care system and educate in order to inspire at least a tiny bit of change.

(EA answers a fan question on Goodreads, 2018 📝)

The Book begins with Emilie Autumn...

...Well, technically The Book begins with a malapropism. Wrong “foreword”, EA! 🪞 Which is our first clue that despite the myriad revised editions this book has gone through, it could probably have done with a little more initial editing, and perhaps a bit more room to reflect, between the events related and the publication of the first final draft.

Anyway, The Book begins with first-person narrator Emilie Autumn surviving a suicide attempt, stating this to her shrink over the phone soon after. Her shrink tells her that she is currently a danger to herself, and that he won't refill her prescriptions (the meds for her bipolar disorder) unless she immediately checks herself into inpatient care. And it all goes downhill from there.

The psych ward stay at an LA hospital lasts longer than the anticipated 72 hours, and proves overall more traumatic than therapeutic. An increasingly distressed Emilie suffers through the inappropriate comments of creepy doctors, the poor bedside manners and general cluelessness of emotionally numb nurses, the intimidating presence of armed guards around the hospital, being stripped of her belongings and privacy, the lack of transparency or actual care in the ward, her partner's indifference during the occasional phone call, the bad hospital food (I can see how that would suck in such a context), having to repeatedly fill out forms and questionnaires (okay, that's annoying too), a patient eating yoghurt in her vicinity (uh...) and staff members existing while fat (wait, what?). She documents the whole unpleasant experience in a journal that she has to turn in at bedtime.

One day, upon recovering her notebook in the morning, Emilie starts finding torn scraps of ancient wallpaper between the pages. They're scribbled with letters from a young woman named Emily, who is also locked up against her will in a psychiatric facility – namely, a women's insane asylum... in Victorian England. Awaiting each new time-traveling letter with bated breath, Emilie gradually learns that the Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls (yes, that's its actual name within the story) isn't so much a hospital as it is a dumping ground / torture dungeon. Women – who aren't so much “crazy” as unconventional and inconvenient to men – are kept in chains, subjected to leechings and ice baths, pimped out as human exhibits and sex slaves, and killed en masse in gruesome medical experiments by a psychopathic doctor who's like a Disney-villain take on Dr Mengele. “My life and hers are basically the same. Nothing has changed at all in mental healthcare,” thinks Emilie in the modern-day psych ward, as a nurse offensively tells her that it's time for art therapy.

Alright, that was a long summary, and I'm showing my bias a little bit. But the contents and tone of the book are relevant to this write-up – as are, of course, the common criticisms that arose in the years after its publication.

A (BI)POLARIZED RECEPTION

In the spirit of neutrality and historical accuracy, I will quote some 5-star Goodreads reviews that I think reflect the reasons why many people genuinely loved and continue to love the book...

I don't think I've ever read anything like TAFWVG. It is amazing, horrifying, and both a work of magical fiction and brutal honesty. I felt like for the first time I had found someone who could understand how I feel. I identified on so many levels with this book, both physically, mentally, and emotionally. I appreciate Emilie as an artist so much more now because I realize just how much of herself she puts into everything she does. (...)

What scares me is that it is so incredibly real and several times, I felt as if Emilie was speaking thoughts I've had myself. (...) So many of the things she expressed during states of depression for these characters make so much sense to me, though, and I greatly value how real and honest this is. (📝)

Having some of Emilie Autumn's actual handwriting in the book made it much more personal and made it seem much more like a journal than just any ordinary book. This is a must read for any "muffin" (Emilie Autumn fan). (📝)

...and some of the less scathing and more nuanced 1-star reviews, highlighting common complaints about the book's contents and tone:

The writing was not strong enough to handle the story being told and there were so many issues from how mental health was handled to the entitled behaviour of the main character to the treatment of all the other characters, I ended up giving up in frustration. It’s a shame as this could have been a really interesting exploration of the mental health system in America paralleled with that of the 1800s, but instead just turned into a lot of, in some cases offensive, ramblings. (📝)

I was shocked in the opening pages by the voice of the main character, and I don't think it was a technique to give her depth. It sounded like genuine elitism with the flavor of "I should be allowed to kill myself." Um. Ok??? (...) I wish the prose had been tolerable for me to get to the high concept journal entry stuff, but everything that the premise promises... from the quality of what I read, it falls very, very short. There are horrible elements to being inside an institution: it's scary, it's dehumanizing, it definitely isn't the "best" space for healing... but this author does not have the knowledge, expertise, or perspective to provide an adequate critique. (📝)

The torture and rape are mentioned as daily occurrences and, while I'm sure such things did occur in Victorian times, it was so overdone and hinted to with such macabre glee, I felt I was watching someone's sordid fantasy. (...)

This is not a solemn look at mental illness from the inside.

It is a glamorized, twisted, fetishist notion of mental illness and asylums which made me feel truly uncomfortable. (📝)

...I opted not to quote this one because it was too savage and not always fair, but it's a fun read.

In short, the people who enjoy the book tend to praise the engaging storyline, the witty and eloquent writing, the raw authenticity, the depths of insight, and getting to take a peek inside EA's brain. The people who don't, on the other hand, criticize the unbalanced structure, the overwrought and rambling style, the obvious distortions or straight-up fabrications (we'll get to that, all in good time), the acute main character syndrome, the seeming lack of self-awareness or appropriate research (despite claims of “historical accuracy”), the flippant and even dangerous claims about highly sensitive topics, and being made to read stuff that should probably have stayed firmly concealed inside EA's brain.

Many critics report being put off by EA's high opi...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-04-29 06:02:58.

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

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

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.
• Define any acronyms.
• Link and archive any sources.
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Certain topics are banned from discussion to pre-empt unnecessary toxicity. The list can be found here. Please check that your post complies with these requirements before submitting!

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

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/pillowcase-of-eels on 2024-04-28 19:19:00.

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General Content Warning for this entire write-up, so everyone can have a good time:

- Extensive discussion of topics related to mental illness, including self-harm, suicidal ideation, mania / bipolar disorder, distortion of truth, medication, involuntary hospitalization, medical abuse in a hospital setting, and romanticization of mental illness.

- Non-detailed mentions of domestic violence (implied abuse by intimate partner and parents) and sexual / gender-based violence (including rape, child sexual assault, grooming, sex trafficking and torture*). These last few items feature prominently in one installment, pertaining to a work of fiction; descriptions may be a bit more specific/detailed in that segment, but not graphic.*

- Mentions and quotes of unchill bigoted behavior, including ableism (mental and physical), white nonsense / white fragility / racism, fatphobia, prejudice against drug users.

Additional CWs may be added at the beginning of specific segments when relevant.

While these are heavy topics, the tone of this write-up is generally light-hearted and aims to entertain. If this approach sounds uncomfortable or trivializing, this may not be a good read for you; please trust your gut!

*

Picture this: it's the early 2010s, somewhere in the western world. Instagram is a novelty, Harvey Weinstein runs Hollywood, almost no one on Earth leans one way or the other about RNA vaccines, and Donald Trump is that one real estate guy you vaguely remember from Home Alone 2. New player Lady Gaga is the most interesting thing to have happened to pop since Madonna, and the whole industry is attempting to catch up; Miley Cyrus is the chick who used to be on Hannah Montana; Melanie Martinez hasn't hatched yet. The time of Oddball Concept Divas is dawning just below the horizon.

You're a Bowie-loving student who skipped goth night at the club to tag along with your art school friends for a very special evening. You're a giddy sixteen-year old rocking cat ears, purple Wet 'n Wild eyeliner, a polyester petticoat, and a coffin-shaped backpack. You're an effete theater kid who sewed his own waistcoat for the occasion, but won't dare wear it to school the next day. You're a buff, bearded dude in a Venom shirt who's trying not to look too excited, since your girlfriend supposedly had to drag you here. You're a slightly bemused parent leaning against the back wall of the venue, sipping a warm half-pint, wondering if this isn't all a bit dark for a tween. (“It's called 'Victoriandustrial', mom,” you've been told in the car, “and it's not dark, it's art.”)

On stage is a pink-haired woman, with red porcelain-doll lips and a heart painted on her cheek. Among a set of antique consoles, twee tchotchkes, teacups and plastic rats, she pounces and twirls in glittery platform boots, tattered striped stockings, and a tightly laced crystal-studded corset that looks like it's splattered in blood. This is ostensibly a concert, but there is no live band. Where one would expect a drum kit or a bass, three bedazzled burlesque vixens act as back-up singers and dancers, with the occasional vaudeville act – a fire-twirling number, a fan dance, throwing pastries and spitting tea into the audience. Lots of wholesome girl-on-girl kissing, too. The music on the backing track is a genre-bender of clanging beats and beeps, lofty orchestral strings, and the frantic hammering of a MIDI harpsichord, as the pink-haired frontlady sings of heartache and betrayal and drowning. Think if the Brontë sisters had invented industrial rock.

The audience gasps in excitement when the lady whips out a vamped-out wireless electric violin. With rockstar cool and virtuoso poise, she leans into the instrument, touches the bow to the strings, and tears out a single plaintive, impeccably distorted high note. Then her fingers go wild, and for a few seconds, everything is perfect suspended animation. Uncannily perfect, almost. Just behind you, you hear someone whisper: “Wait, is she miming it?”

*

Forgive the theatrical intro, but I had to set the stage for... the drama. And I do mean drama in the thespian sense of the term! This, ladies and gentlemen, is a Shakespeare play: wordy and confusing, but it's neat how the main character's opening lines foreshadow the tragic climax. It's a Greek tragedy for the digital age – if, instead of killing his dad and banging his mom, after becoming king, Oedipus was doomed to becoming uniquely obnoxious. It's The Rocky Horror Show under the grim direction of Samuel Beckett. Like all good theatre, this story is about how fiction bleeds into reality – through the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and how all the world's a stage and all that.

WHO IS EMILIE AUTUMN, AND WHAT'S THE DRAMA?

Here's the Broadway Weekly blurb, so you can decide whether the show is worth your time: Emilie Autumn, also known as EA, is a US-American alternative singer-songwriter, author, and actor. She became known in alt circles in the mid-2010s for her violin skills, unique fashion, outspoken stances on feminism and mental health advocacy, and the way she dramatized and sublimated her own life story in her art. In 2009, she self-published a semi-autobiographical book that became a sort of bible to her creative universe and fandom. She toured extensively and enjoyed niche, but considerable success until the mid-2010s – with hordes of devoted fans adopting her fashion sense and lingo, and crediting her music for getting them through dark times.

For the past twelve years or so, EA has mostly been focused on adapting her book into a stage musical, releasing two more albums of songs intended for the libretto. At the time of this write-up, it has been six years since the last album and a decade since the last live show. Although she still talks about the musical as an ongoing, Broadway-bound project, in recent years, she's often gone dark for months at a time on social media. There is no forum, no large Discord, no active community to speak of; comments are restricted on her currently-inactive Instagram and blog.

Who is she hiding from, you ask? Why, you've probably guessed it: the hordes of devoted fans whom she infuriates every time she does anything.

And what are they furious about? (Or frustrated, flummoxed, or plain ol' flabbergasted?) Well, it depends who you ask. For some, it's disappointment in her artistic and marketing choices (what are fans for?). Others cite unkept promises or absurd release delays. For others yet, it's the AliBaba merch sold at jaw-dropping markups with three paragraphs of purple prose in the product description.. Or maybe it was the angry rants on Twitter? Okay, it's the casual bigotry that she staunchly denies or dismisses. It's the criticism she can't take. It's the fact that she won't stop lying about her own life! Either way, I don't personally know of any fanbase that has been so consistently exasperated, for so many years, and for such a diverse array of reasons, by their favorite artist.

In truth, each individual mini-scandal isn't all that juicy or scandalous. Nobody died, no one got sued; nothing of significant value, other than time and sanity, was taken away from anyone. What I find interesting here is the years and years of bizarre parasocial codependency (and antagonism) between a fragile woman who became addicted to her own poppycock, and an obsessive fanbase who cared way too much not to take it personally.

Before we even get to EA's relationship with her fans, you're going to need some lore about EA herself. A “Hobby History” of sorts. Strap in! There's romance, tragedy, laughter, character development, variety numbers, numerous costume changes, (actual) celebrity cameos – and based on how long this OpenOffice doc already is at the time of my writing this, we're probably going to need several intermissions too.

This write-up is link-heavy, both with receipts and with additional watching and listening material. Not all of them need to be clicked in order to understand the story; I'm merely providing the rabbit holes. I've tried to make things more easily navigable by including a little glossary about the nature of links; one emoji-indicator carries over the next link until I use a different one.

🪞 = picture / visual

🎵 = music

📺 = video

📝 = primary source / receipt

🔍 = press article / write-up / further reading

🎤 = song lyrics / spoken word audio

🐀 = anonymous fan confession

🦠 = reaction / meme

BAROQUE BEGINNINGS: THE VIOLIN YEARS

VampireFreaks: Do you ever smile to yourself knowing your old music teachers might be seeing your success?

EA: I smile to myself knowing they might be dead. (Long-lost interview, late 2000s)

Born in Malibu in the late 70s, Emilie Autumn, often known as EA, was originally trained as a classical violinist.

By her account, she started playing the violin at age 4, and was homeschooled at age 9 so that she could focus on her instrument. After stints at various performing arts colleges, some rather prestigious, she dropped out of formal schooling in her mid-to-late teens to embark on a solo violin career.

In 2001, after disappointing experiences with major record companies, she creat...

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Iguankick on 2024-04-27 10:55:14.

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This is something that I’ve been working on for some time, a little pet project that represents a slice of fandom history. It’s also my attempt to recapture a lot of lore that has been lost over time due to the deaths of old forums, fansites, communities and the like.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Disclaimer: A lot of this is reconstructed from memory or secondary sources, many of which have themselves been lost to time, and are recounting events that occurred decades ago. What I have assembled here is a best guess at these events. Please take everything said here with a grain of salt.

Background: Robotech is an American sci-fi franchise. Originally created from the combination of three unrelated Japanese anime series, it has spawned numerous spin-offs including novels, comics, role-playing games, toys, video games and several failed attempts at sequels. Along the way it has managed to attract considerable drama through legal battles over copyright, ownership, derivative works, development hell live action movies, failed Kickstarters, fandom divisions, big name fans, toxic gatekeeping and any number of other things. This drama has even managed to bleed over into other franchises that have become collateral damage along the way.

This series is covering the history of Robotech in comic books, an element that was a vital part of keeping the franchise alive across the decades. While yes, the franchise has been subject to a lot of drama, I will only be touching on those parts relevant to this discussion. I also ask that comments be kept similarly on-topic.

Also note that as this section is discussing media that is less than a decade old that leaves it open for spoilers.

Can I do no less?

Following the end of Robotech/Voltron (in part V), Robotech had hit another content drought. That began to change in 2016 with the announcement that the dormant Robotech TTRPG licence had been picked up by two different companies. Battlefield Press was going to be publishing a Robotech setting book for the Savage Worlds system(1), while Strange Machine Games was going to be publishing one using their own entirely original AD6 system.

At the 2016 San Diego Comic Con, Titan Comics announced that they had acquired the Robotech comic licence. Their plan was to publish an entirely new Robotech comic, while also reprinting from the extensive back catalogue of Robotech comics from prior publishers. At the same time, they also put out some promotional art for their new comic. These announcements were met with a somewhat mixed reception for several reasons.

While there was a desire for new material, all the promotional art that Titan released was based around the Macross characters and mecha. And while it was traditionally the most popular part of the series, Masters and New Generation fans were once again feeling like they didn't matter; a feeling that was somewhat justified given the focus of Robotech comics in the 21st Century. Likewise, while Wildstorm had pledged to reprint all of the Comico Robotech comics, they had only covered the Macross Saga material.

As more information came out, the fandom’s reaction became somewhat more positive. Titan revealed their creative team for the new comic, with Marco Turini providing art. More interestingly, the writing was going to be handled by Brian Wood, a critically acclaimed writer with a long string of credits to his name(2). This latter point sparked a lot of interest, especially as Wood confirmed that he was a long-term fan of the series and not just a celebrity being slapped on the book for the sake of headlines.

And then Titan dropped some previews for the first issue, ones that had been carefully manufactured to give a hint of what the story might be without giving too much away, It depicted the SDF-1’s crashing on Earth and the first exploration of the vessel. In short, it appeared that they were setting up another Roy Fokker on Macross Island story.

You won't believe the things I can do now!

Titan's Robotech #1 released in July of 2017. Despite the previews, it was not in fact a Roy Fokker on Macross Island story. Rather, at first glimpse, it appeared to be a comparatively straight retelling of the Macross Saga, albeit updated somewhat for modern sensibilities and aesthetics while downplaying a lot of the anime elements that were inherent to the series. Most notably, through a combination of the writing and Turini's artistic choices, the characters were meant to be somewhat older than their ‘canon' counterparts(3). These changes were generally well-received, even if they had some questionable moments (such as the image used as the stock depiction of Vanessa Leeds in the interior cast list that became a minor meme).

However, the next few issues showed a growing deviation from the source material in more than just characterisation(4). There was a growing air of mystery, with the implication that Captain Gloval knew something about the SDF-1 that he was hiding from everyone else, and that he was almost expecting events to unfold in a particular way. This then spun off in an entirely unexpected direction in issue #4 with the apparent death of Captain Gloval.

The artwork also had its moments; while generally consistent, there were times when it became obvious that Turini was obviously copy/pasting backgrounds or other elements. Or his gratuitous use of obvious CG objects for some scenes.

Oh, and the Waltrips were bought in to draw some variant covers because it's what you do.

Like some giant predatory bird

Issue #5 bought one big change in the writing. While the story was still credited to Brian Wood, the actual script was being written by Simon Furman(5). A long-time Transfomers writer who was basically the cornerstone of the franchises' mythology, in many ways Furman was the opposite of Wood. He was the sort of cheap writer who you could hire to slop out a book with few questions asked and lots of executive control, and then fire as soon as sales dropped(6). Furman had no prior connection to the Robotech franchise, however he seemed to be a good fit no less.

The next few issues continue with the deviation from the source material. The order of events begins to shift around. Rick appears to be slowly going blind, while rather than wining a talent content Minmei is rejected from it. The investigation to Gloval's death suggests that he was murdered by Roy Fokker, while the plot point is raised that he found something deeply disturbing in the wreck of the SDF-1 years ago. Finally, the idea of alternate universes (“Protoverses") is raised, something that had been a long-running hallmark of Furman's Transfomers writing. The story also introduces T.R. Edwards, because you have to have T.R. Edwards. Its basically a rule at this point.

The biggest change, however, came with issue #9. At that point, Furman was getting sole credit for the writing, with Wood no longer being involved with the book. While never confirmed, there was a growing speculation among the readership that the book ad actually been Furman's baby all along and that Wood had been airdropped in as a big name to punch up the book's title. This made sense for a number of reasons; writing an eighties nostalgia bait franchise book was certainly not the sort of thing that Wood normally did, and the actual title had been lacking a lot of the themes and ideas common to his writing. On the other hand, it was basically right in Furman's wheelhouse.

The book continued with escalating stakes and even more new elements, reaching a point where it was now bearing only a passing resemblance to the source material. Key to this was the introduction of Lazlo Zand, a character who had originally been created for the Luceno/Daley novels. Zand had been ‘bought in' to modern Robotech through the Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles comic, and had remained a consistent feature since. Two other notable new characters were introduced as well. The first was Sara Hayes, the mother of Lisa Hayes who appeared alive, rather than her usual status of ‘dead in backstory'. The second was [Persephone ‘Persy' Satori](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/9547...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/F9_solution on 2024-04-25 21:06:04.

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

What is Dofus/Dofus Touch?

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

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

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

The bot problem, macros, and emulators on Touch

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

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

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

Who is Fekah?

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

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

The main show: Fekah’s Dofus Touch permanent ban

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

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

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

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

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

New beginnings

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

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

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-04-22 06:02:50.

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

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

Reminders:

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

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

Introduction: what the hell is Adventure Time?

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

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

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

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

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

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-04-15 06:02:35.

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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.

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-04-08 06:02:48.

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

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

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.
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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/diamondsandglass on 2024-04-08 00:19:18.

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

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

What is “RWBY”?

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

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

What is “shipping”?

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

What is Bumblebee?

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

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

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

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

What is Black Sun?

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

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

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

Black Sun vs. Bumblebee

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

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

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

Oh god oh fuck

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

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

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

Weird accusations and conclusions

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

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

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/caeciliusinhorto on 2024-04-07 14:00:10.

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

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

Prologue: Chengdu WorldCon

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

The Hugo Awards

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

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

Statsgate

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

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

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

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

This satisfied approximately nobody.

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

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

Statsgate: We need to go deeper

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

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

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

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

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-04-01 06:04:46.

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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.

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/actually_a_demon on 2024-03-31 10:32:56.

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

Introduction: who the hell are Fifth Harmony?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gate of Hell Opens: the Sun and the Moon and the Gay Drawings

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

That being said, let's return to the main point: those people quickly started to not...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Tokyono on 2024-03-25 11:10:13.

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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Naeveo on 2024-03-23 20:48:22.

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

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

So What Is Bad Idea?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hollywood Here We Come

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

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

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

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

And Bad Idea knew it.

We Paid Gilbert Gottfried To Annoy Comic Book Shops

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

What were these conditions? To quote Bad Idea:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then COVID hit.

COVID, The Button, and The Hero Trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, two weeks later Bad Idea announced that they published The Hero Trade. Not only that, but they announced ...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/joebutmynameisntjoe on 2024-03-22 13:59:46.

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

The Mans race innit

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

Endurance Racing! Its like Racing, but Longer!

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

Yes, Mercedes once dominated outside of F1 too

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

The Prep Phase

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

The newest advancement in aviation technology

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

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

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

A scientific flip

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

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

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-03-18 05:02:19.

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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:

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• Define any acronyms.
• Link and archive any sources.
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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/WarmKitten on 2024-03-17 05:30:30.

Original Title: [Classic rock] Bad trips, Christian cults, multiple brawls, multiple lawsuits, blown out nasal cavities and more infidelity than a daytime soap opera - a brief history of the world's most fractious rock band

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/RedstoneRusty on 2024-03-16 14:55:21.

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

What is the RLCS?

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

The Dark Times

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

Regional Struggles

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

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

Young Money Clan

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

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

The Format

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

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

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

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

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

What Did We Learn?

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

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

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Turret_Run on 2024-03-16 14:41:34.

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

What happened

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

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

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

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

Honor Among Thieves

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

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

Wizards: Kinda forgive and hope you forget

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

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

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

Yes, those pinkertons.

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

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

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

Insert hype pun here

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

Nat OneDnD

In my defense, the joke’s right there!

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

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

New competitors

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

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Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1bg6cov/ttrpgs_the_ogl_11_years_later/