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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Tokyono on 2024-05-20 14:01:26+00:00.

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This is my first Hobby Drama post in 8 months!. I am back with some more modern hobby drama! Usually, I write historical stuff, but wanted to change it up a bit :) Oh and prepare for lots and lots of carpentry puns!

Wood you look at that: Reality TV in the UK

When you think of reality tv, the words “trashy”, “exploitative”, “rigged”, usually come to mind. However, in the UK, another word comes to mind…

“Cozy”.

What do I mean by this?

Shows like the Great British Bake Off (GBBO), Antiques Roadshow, Sort Your Life Out With Stacey Solomon, Great Pottery Throwdown, etc. Shows that have a calm, relaxed, atmosphere, with a genial host, where the contestants are (for the most part) kind and cordial towards one another. However, as wholesome as these shows appear on the surface, they have their fair share of controversies. Especially the GBBO, which has a whole section on Wikipedia about its numerous controversies. Everything from issues with product placement, to contestant favouritism, to unfair elimination, production woes, leak of a winner, and even accusations of “racism” aimed at its “Nationally themed weeks” (a post for another time).

All of these issues pale in comparison to the controversy I am going to cover today. Also, unlike the show I am going to discuss, the GBBO has survived every controversy that plagued it. After 13 seasons, it is still running strong.

Chop Chop Chop: What is the Chop?

Announced in June 2020, The Chop: Britain’s Top Woodworker, was a show unsurprisingly about carpentry. It was originally planned to air on the Sky History channel. Sky is a British broadcaster.

Here is the full description:

Hosted by comedian Lee Mack, TV Presenter Rick Edwards and Master Carpenter William Hardie, The Chop: Britain’s Top Woodworker sees 10 of the country’s finest carpenters gather in Epping Forest to whittle, carve and chop their way to the final, to see who will be crowned Britain’s Top Woodworker and the chance to stage their own personal exhibition at the prestigious William Morris Gallery in London.

Master Carpenter William Hardie oversees the construction of a grand and spectacular cabin in the woods, adding a new room every week, each on a different historical theme, including Nelson’s cabin on HMS Victory, a Victorian pub, a Gothic bedroom, a Georgian hunting lodge, and a 1960s’ Mad Men-inspired lounge.

It followed a standard reality show format. Every week, someone wood be eliminated until a clear winner emerged. Viewers had a lot to look forewood to. Hopefully the show would be able to carve out its own niche. Okay, enough would puns. I know you’re all on-board.

Like most British reality tv shows, The Chop had a comfortable atmosphere, with friendly presenters that would engage in ribbing with one another and the contestants. Here are some early trailers for the show: one and two. The show was filmed pre-covid lockdown.

Mack, 52, said: “It’s quite ironic that everything was filmed pre-lockdown and pre-Covid and yet most of the contestants spend most of the time with a mask on, because it’s woodwork.

“So people will watch it and go: ‘Well they’re obeying the rules but Rick and Will aren’t’, but actually it was filmed a long time ago – this time last year.”

So, the winner was set in wood, long before the first episode aired. If you want to know more about the contestants, I found their official show biographies.

The focus of this writeup will be a guy named Darren:

Name: Darren

Age: 40

From: Bristol

Occupation: Carpenter/Joiner

Background: Darren has been working in woodwork since he left school, he loves the variety that each day brings. Darren has two children and loves building them wooden items. His favourites were special beds and wardrobes he made for his children which included LED lights.

Meet Darren: Aka “The Woodsman”, Aka “the-Bloke-With-All-The-Tattoos”.

Early on, out of all the contestants, Darren was hyped up as a potential audience favourite:

It remains to be seen which of the contestants, seven men and three women, will become the viewers’ favourite, although Darren, a furniture maker from Bristol, is an early frontrunner.

Nicknamed ‘The Woodman’, his entire face is covered in tattoos and he’s not averse to making controversial statements.

‘He’s quite a character,’ says Lee. ‘We met him again at a photo shoot recently and he’d had more tattoos etched on top of his other tattoos, which I thought showed an incredible level of commitment to the cause.’

His tattoos became a key part of his marketing for the show. This was reflected in his character trailers, as well as in interviews about the show.

Darren is probably one of the show’s most striking characters, due to the fact he is very heavily tattooed – even on his head and face.

He started having his head and face tattooed around 10 years ago.

“I had other tattoos already,” he said.

“But about 10 years ago I saw someone with facial tattoos and started to work with my tattooist on my look.

“I have my daughter on the back of my head and my son on my cheek.

“When some people first meet me they are a bit shocked, admittedly.

“But they soon warm to me after a few minutes.

“Some people ask for selfies with me. I’ve never had a negative reaction to my tattoos. They are just me.”

Darren says his appearance on the show, since the trailers have gone out, has prompted people to recognise him.

“I’ve already been stopped by people who have seen the adverts.

“No one went on the show to become famous.

“But hopefully it will come across on the show that I’m a bit of a character.

There was another difference between Darren and the other contestants: he had prior experience with reality tv.

In 2007, Darren (without any tattoos) starred in “Dumped”, a show in which 11 contestants lived in a garbage dump for three weeks, in a shelter they constructed from discarded rubbish.

Darren quit after three days. He said he did it because he didn’t believe in the aims of the show

Not all the participants were convinced. Darren Lumsden, 27, owns four cars, only recycles because his rubbish would not be taken away otherwise, and throws away his pants and socks at the end of every day. He left the dump on day three. "With me it's a bit like the smoking ban – I'll only be green if I'm forced to be." Lumsden also says rumours that some local authorities only recycle half of what goes into their green bins reduce the incentive.

He also told fellow contestants: “I don't believe that what we are going to do is going to achieve anything. If I don't believe in it I won't be doing any good for myself or other people.”.

Well, he certainly achieved something with his next reality tv appearance…

On the chopping block. The controversy

The first episode of The Chop aired on October 15, 2020. Shortly afterwards, some viewers noticed certain...things about Darren’s tattoos. Certain numbers and symbols…were linked to white supremacy.

“Darren appears to have these two on his face 88 = HH = Heil Hitler 23/16 = WP = White Supremacy There's also: 18 = AH = Adolf Hitler 1488: a reference to the so-called 14 words, coined by white supremacist terrorist David Lane.”

Darren also had a sig rune on his nose…the SS symbol used by the Nazis.

Sky History was criticised by historians and antisemitism groups.

After the trailer for the programme was aired, historian Dr Elizabeth Boyle from Maynooth University in Ireland said she had seen "at least five recognised Nazi/white power tattoos".

The Campaign Against Antisemitism group also criticised Sky History, saying it had ma...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-05-20 04:02:24+00:00.

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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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• Link and archive any sources.
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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/pillowcase-of-eels on 2024-05-19 11:18:16+00:00.

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🪞

Welcome back to the Asylum write-up, where we explore the decade-long slow-motion car crash that is the Emilie Autumn fandom.

Sorry this installment took so long to upload! Just a heads-up, I may take some time to deliver the last one too – these posts take forever to format on Reddit's finicky-ass editor, and my dumb real life is currently keeping me from precious Internet time. Thank you for your patience! You have my word that everyone who pre-ordered the final installment will receive a PERSONAL, HANDWRITTEN letter autographed and illustrated by me, a list of the snacks I consumed while composing this write-up, some exclusive behind-the-scenes secrets, and a pony.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4.1 – Part 4.2

Part 5

Places, everyone

This is a test

Throw your stones

Do your damage

Your worst, and your best

(...) And if I had a dollar

For every time

I repented the sin

And commit the same crime

I'd be sitting on top of the world today

(“God Help Me”, 2006🎵)

Quick recap of where we left off. First, there were five to ten halcyon years of pleasant and meaningful interactions between EA and her blossoming fanbase, prominently by way of her official forum. Then, circa 2009-2010, EA's online presence shifted towards sudden anger outbursts, ban-hammering, and an increasingly top-down communication style.

This created a sort of primordial rift within the fanbase, between those who supported EA's right to speak her mind and regulate her own fan spaces however she pleased – and those who thought that her reactions were rude and inappropriate (at best), and that even fan spaces should allow for reasonable, non-abusive criticism of the artist.

Between a poorly-handled book release (see Part 3), the controversial (Part 2) or dubiously true (Part 4) contents of said book, and serious shade from various former collaborators (Part 5), more and more fans had pressing thoughts about EA's work ethic and choices. EA attempted damage control through drastic forum rules that made it virtually impossible to voice any “serious” critical opinion. It didn't work, of course: instead of squashing the mutiny, she created a schism.

Critical fans and active haters started congregating on unofficial platforms.

“WITH MUFFINS LIKE THIS, WHO NEEDS ENEMIES?”: TROLL LIKE A GIRL

So here we were, the early 2010s. The official forum (which had about 700 members in 2006, if you recall) was now thousands-strong, reaching just over 12,000 registered users in 2012 – not all of them active, but still. In terms of sheer numbers and content creation, the party was POPPIN'... but increasingly in parts of the Asylum that escaped EA's jurisdiction, such as Tumblr, where they could speak their mind freely.

You play the victim very well

You've built your self-indulgent hell

You wanted someone to understand you

Well, be careful what you wish for, because I do

(“I Know Where You Sleep”, 2006🎵)

In one wing of Asylum Tumblr, a smattering of call-out blogs emerged, which laid out EA's various lies, faux pas, shitty takes, and general deep-seated terribleness in detailed timelines and screenshots (or, short of that, long-winded bullet points). While many such blogs framed it as “serious” whistleblowing and did their best to remain as fact-based and neutral as they could, there was some genuine disgust, animosity and creepiness towards EA on that side of Tumblr; for some ex-fans, “exposing the truth” was mostly justify obsessive hatred, prying and verbal abuse. Some, for instance, felt the bizarre need to side with EA's mother in their estrangement. (One user, with the URL “emilyautumnfischkopf”, argued in a serious and down-to-earth tone - but with zero sources - that EA's upbringing had been nothing but peaceful and supportive until she ungratefully kicked her loving family to the curb for no reason at all. They were later revealed 🔍 to have an alternate handle as “eaisalyingcunt”.)

Either way, through these blogs, a number of potential drama bombs that had mostly flown under the radar were dredged up from over the years – some of which were hard to ignore, even for supportive fans. Where to begin?

There was that nonsense in-joke song, captured twice on camera during the 2009 tour (to very little outrage, at the time), crassly called “Manatee Retard”📺. Or EA's scathing response, in print, to a wheelchair user who found it insensitive that she used a bedazzled wheelchair as a prop to do sexy acrobatics on stage. (“Your offence taken at my hard-won self-acceptance proves that I indeed have something to fight against”, she wrote). Spoken word tracks where she made trivializing knock-knock jokes about serious mental illnesses she didn't have, like schizophrenia and OCD. Multiple instances of calling Britney Spears a “bimbo” and a “Hollywood fucked-up”, resentfully claiming that she only shaved her head because she was “hopped up on drugs” and certainly not because she was “bipolar”, a word the press liked to wield as an insult anyway. (“That's almost like calling someone a retard!” Yeah, heaven forbid.) The meanest, most distasteful paragraphs in the book. Basically everything problematic EA had ever said or written.📝 In retrospect, it had been a long time coming, but it was a lot to take in – and certainly more off-putting, even to less emotionally invested fans, than silly lies about her age and last name.

In another wing of Asylum Tumblr, some fans had had it up to here and just wanted to have fun. 🎵 If Plague Rats had learned one valuable lesson from EA, it was how to crack a joke in the face of absurd tragedy – and the general state of the EA fandom certainly warranted a few.

In 2012, Fight Like a Girl was released. After six long years, three of which had been peaceful, the Opheliac era was officially over. The new album and ensuing tour confirmed that the Asylum had entered a process of glamorous Broadway-style militarization. 🎵📺

The mood board was “Roman general meets Vegas showgirl meets Victorian street urchin”.🪞 The color palette was, to naysayers, “musty pink and rotten, stale piss yellow”. 🐀 The keyword was “REVENGE” (through the power of... self-expression! sorority! brutal assault with rusty medical implements!). The chorus of the title song had an intriguing run-on line about getting “revenge on the world, or at least 49% of the people in it” 🎵 – which seemed like an awful lot, and was widely interpreted (to cheers, boos, or uncomfortable sighs) as a misandrist jab at literally all men on Earth.

The show was essentially a demo version of the musical, in that the setlist vaguely reflected the order of events in the story – but prior reading was essential in order to get what the hell was going on on stage. This one Broadway reviewer had not perused the literature before seeing the show 🔍, and hated: the set, the choreography, the skits, the plot, the lyrics, the music, the concept. (Seriously, you should read the review. It's not even my show and I feel like quitting show business.)

Pre-show VIP encounters, now violin-free, were lorded over by EA's new manager🐀, whose official title was “Asylum Headmistress”. (Interesting choice – she sounds fun!) The swag bags were less substantial than before, and the “greet” part of the meet-and-greet was rarely more than a quick hug and photo op.

On Twitter, EA continued to embrace her “I am very badass” fronting attitude...

Often wonder if cyberbullies r aware they’re fucking w/ a girl who’s BFs w/ maker of the SAW films & is marrying a knife-throwing scorpion. ([🐀📝](https://waywardvictorianconfessions.tumblr.com/post/125384149499/of...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/CarpathianStrawbs on 2024-05-18 05:41:28+00:00.

Original Title: [Gardening] Norfolk making seed history + How Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, one of the largest "traditionalist anti-GMO" seed distributors in the US, accidentally featured and tried to sell a Genetically Modified seed.

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I'm just some hobbyist, correct me if I'm wrong. I repost now that the drama is "old", per the rules this time.

Background

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Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

A popular US seed company. If you would like more background see my post below.

Heirloom vs Non-Heirloom vs GMO

• Heirloom seeds are grown with the intention to isolate desirable traits across many generations in order to produce one stable inbred line of plant genetics, resulting in predictable, genetically similar offspring. This is referred to as "true to seed".
• Non-heirloom seeds are not inbred and carry a lot of variability. When two plants cross pollinate, they create a hybrid of the parents that results in offspring that express an unpredictable mix of genes.
• Genetically modified seeds are engineered using gene editing technology, sometimes with genes from unrelated sources.

GMO and Patented seeds entering the consumer gardener market

• In the consumer market, patents can be granted to plants such as roses and apples. One of the stipulations is that these plants have to be propagated asexually by cutting or (non-seed) tissue culture. This means that it is permissible to save, sell, and grow seeds from these plants (if not sterile), because the offspring are not exact genetic copies.
• Patent granting on seeds stipulates that the traits expressed cannot be the result of open pollination breeding (wind, insects). As a result, these patents are mostly applied to GMO seeds, where genes are manually influenced in a lab.
• Previously, there were absolutely no GMO seeds sold to the consumer market due to USDA/FDA restrictions. Companies fearmongering about GMOs were easily dismissed. You simply could not buy GMO seeds outside of commercial applications.
• The implications of GMO seeds, which are almost all patented, hitting the market is that the plants can cross pollinate with a non-patented plant, and pass patented genetics on to the offspring. The offspring would be the lawful IP of the company that owns the patent.
• Almost all gardeners rely on open pollination between their plants, so there is untread territory on what may happen down the line when more seeds of this nature become common place.
• Despite this, the reception of new GMO varieties like the purple tomato and glow in the dark petunia has so far been largely positive.

Purple Tomatoes

• Until now, attaining a tomato variety that was purple both inside and out and could reliably hold that genetic trait in its offspring was just out of reach for tomato enthusiasts. There have been many purple skinned varieties of tomatoes, and many that came close to having perfect anthocyanin rich insides, but a company called Norfolk was the first to make it happen through science.

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The Controversy

Timeline

• After 20 years of work, biochemist Cathie Martin and her team successfully isolates the gene that codes for color in a purple snapdragon flower and integrates it into a tomato, making a first of its kind stable variety of purple fleshed tomato.
• Norfolk makes headlines for getting the first USDA approved GMO seed out to the consumer gardener market, obtaining a utility patent.
• Around the same time, Baker Creek releases a seed catalog boldly featuring a mysterious new purple fleshed tomato they called Purple Galaxy, as well as making social media posts and videos claiming it is non-GMO.
• Across social media people begin to notice the striking similarities between the new tomato and the high publicity Norfolk Purple Tomato, finding the timing strange.

Speculation

• Speculation begins 1

+ "I think you’re right that these look suspiciously related to Norfolk’s GMO purple tomatoes due to the unique purple flesh and also the deep purple gel. But I find it highly unlikely that these actually are related since the purple GMO event was patented and anybody trying to monetize it would be clearly open to litigation." + "It’s funny how non-gmo is a thing with home gardeners. You can’t even buy gmo seeds as a consumer."

• Speculation begins 2

+ "This looks shockingly similar to Baker Creek's Purple Galaxy Tomato that mysteriously disappeared from availability this year." + "Baker Creek are lying liars who lie. That whole catalog is a festival of photoshop, and then if you fall for it you'll only get about 30% germination." + "I’d be unsurprised if they are hypocrites, in addition to being wacky." + "I really suspect that whoever bred the "Purple Galaxy" variety advertised by Baker Creek somehow got some leaked germplasm from Norfolk Healthy Produce's GM breeding program. I don't doubt that it's possible for a natural mutation to pop up that makes purple tomatoes"

Baker Creek responds

• Baker Creek responds to concerns on social media:

"We have had every possible genetic test ran on these tomatoes to ensure they are Non GMO. This is a product of many years of selection work."

• Shortly after, Baker Creek abruptly halts the sale of Purple Galaxy Seeds citing unspecified "production issues". Screenshot credit: @Buckeye on growingfruit.org
• Baker Creek pulls the listing and deletes all social media posts about it, appearing to not acknowledge the tomato any further.

Norfolk responds

Norfolk releases a response to the speculation that has flooded the internet:

Is NHP's Purple Tomato related to the "Purple Galaxy"?

We have received many questions about the purple tomato marketed by Baker Creek as “Purple Galaxy” in their 2024 catalogs. We understand from Baker Creek that they will not be selling seeds of this variety. Given its remarkable similarity to our purple tomato, we prompted Baker Creek to investigate their claim that Purple Galaxy was non-GMO. We are told that laboratory testing determined that it is, in fact, bioengineered (GMO). This result supports the fact that the only reported way to produce a purple-fleshed tomato rich in anthocyanin antioxidants is with Norfolk’s patented technology. We appreciate that Baker Creek tested their material, and after discovering it was a GMO, removed it from their website.

r/Gardening reacts to Norfolk statement

Turns out the "Purple Galaxy" tomato advertised by Baker Creek was a GMO

• "Whatever your stance on GMO, I think we can all agree that companies have a legal and moral obligation to accurately represent their product to their customers."
• "Baker Creek lied and possibly ripped off another company's IP? Color me absolutely not shocked."
• "Baker Creek doesn't produce the majority of the seeds they sell, they buy them from seed farmers. But they should have known better when they saw a variety that appeared identical to a "first ever" gene edited strain in development."
• "The problem is that they [Baker Creek] lied and said they tested it for GMO several times"
• "Being that Baker Creek has in previous years jumped all over the anti-GMO fearmongering, I'm howling at the irony."
• "typical baker creek hot mess"
• "Bakers Creek lost my care or business with its shenanigans."

Norfolk goes ahead and posts the seeds for sale at $20 for 10 seeds

• Seeds, fruit and plant material are only allowed in the USA.
• The seeds are a patented variety and are sold to enjoy in your home garden and with your local community.
• No sales of fruit, seeds or plants are permitted in this agreement, including any derived varieties.

r/Gardening reacts to the patented GMO Purple Tomato seed itself

• "This is why I grow heirloom."
• "It will be interesting when people start making crosses with the trait."
• "Really cool thing about this is that anthocyanins also delay rotting, so these tomatoes are more shelf-stable, making them more environmentally friendly. Anthocyanins are also good for us (like blueberries). It’s a pretty nifty and elegant design, I’m excited to try them out."
• "Just ordered some of these, can’t wait to try them! I ho...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2024-05-13 04:02:29+00:00.

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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.
• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.
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Certain topics are banned from discussion to pre-empt unnecessary toxicity. The list can be found here. Please check that your post complies with these requirements before submitting!

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/ShornVisage on 2024-05-10 20:56:00+00:00.

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Man, a sort-of-hobby-history post. From me. Who’da thunk it? I’ve tried to source this up better so it won’t get removed by the mods this time, but we’ll see how it goes. And do bear in mind, since a fair bit of this is about capturing player sentiment, a lot of the sources will be ancient, dead forum threads where players ‘theorycrafted’ reasons for their outrage. Let’s get started.

What is Warhammer?

Warhammer is… a lot of things. On its most basic level, it’s a set of two tabletop war games, but on another much more real level, it’s about so much more that saying it’s about two games is unforgivably reductionist. Spanning multiple universes with common and distinct elements, Warhammer comprises four universes, five settings, a hundred series of novels and comic books and video games, several expansive repositories of lore, and a thousand micro-communities that, together, comprise one overall community that spans the globe.

But let’s not get masturbatory (leave that to Slaanesh); all of these things exist to prop up the one, central point of Warhammer: Minis for a game you play on the table. But as you fall inexorably down the pipeline towards the hobby’s tootsie center, you will hear one warning, again, again, and again: Don’t waste your hobby money on Finecast models.

Why is Warhammer so expensive?

Look, I won’t lie to you: Collecting Warhammer, whatever the setting or side game, is never cheap. But the prices aren’t arbitrary, despite popular player sentiment. It’s easy to say offhand that these little bundles of plastic are more expensive than you’d think, but let’s consider all the production that goes into a single Warhammer model for a minute. (Mostly taken from here!)

The initial phase of modern model creation is that someone has an idea. Generally, that idea gets described to an artist, who creates a 2D rendering of what they’d have the model look like. Maybe this appearance prescribes the lore, maybe the lore prescribes the appearance.

Either way, a bundle of those renderings get passed to a 3D artist who turns renderings into something they can print. Maybe they do only a handful of these for a single character model. Either way, that highly-detailed 3D sculpture gets 3D printed as a large master mini, and sent to the crew in R&D.

Because half the enjoyment of the hobby comes from assembling the models yourself, this team has to figure out the best way to break down the components into multiple parts that fit together when cut from a single-piece plastic grid, called a ‘sprue’. If there’s no way to make it work, even if you split the model bilaterally down the side, the model is rejected and sent back to the 2D guy to make some new renders.

If the model passes the ‘breakdown’, however, another 3D artist reverse-engineers the model, breaking it down into component parts as agreed, and arranges them onto a sprue file.

At this stage in production, Games Workshop, being the only industry giant able to practically afford this part, rents supercomputers to run an advanced fluid dynamics simulation on the sprue file. Since melted plastic is injected into molds during production, they need some assurance that there won’t be constant production errors where a certain pocket doesn’t fill, and that the pressure won’t build too high and cause the machines to burst scalding plastic onto factory workers. If they find out that the injection won’t work, it’s time for the breakdown crew to get cracking again, and if they’re out of ways to skin that cat, this entire process starts over from the very beginning.

However, if the sprue simulation gets the green light, the file is 3D printed to create the master sprue, which is used to create a master mold, which is used to make the molding plates for the company factories and then lovingly placed in careful storage. Wouldn’t want to waste all that work, now.

This is the kind of rigor that modern GW products need to pass to finally be sold, and in the face of covering the costs of all of that, plus the actual production of the model you bought, plus the extreme cost of shipping low-density, low-weight products possibly overseas, is $40 USD for a single dude on foot and $55 for a squad of ten dudes really so bad? I say no. ~~Although since I started updating this project to fit the subreddit rules, another price increase has been announced.~~

That is, unless something is wrong with the dude being sold on a more fundamental level.

Finally, let’s talk about Fineca- wait, shit, material history.

Like I said, that’s the modern production process. Several of those steps were impossible in, say, the 90s.

For one thing, Warhammer in the modern day is not sold primarily through a company-produced Sears catalog called White Dwarf, (although that magazine is still kicking around, amazingly) but via the internet. For another, model molds don’t have to be carved by hand by artists into green blocks, so a lot of finer detail and less awkward proportions are possible. And because less awkward proportions are possible, they’re able to use less crude materials than what they started out with.

You see, early Warhammer models were sold in White Dwarf, if not in your local hobby store, and the molds did have to be hand-carved, and so awkward proportions were the best their artists could do, so they did have to use a more basic material: Metal.

That’s right, early minis were made through a much more traditional kind of molding, not a stone’s throw away from how medieval blacksmiths made swords, where melted metal was more poured than injected into the molds and then refined in the factory, with byproducts that were punched out or shaved off the sprues getting recycled.

Upsides:

• Metal just feels higher-quality compared to plastic.
• Metal is generally more durable than plastic.
• Metal is good at holding its shape, even if a heavier bit is dangling off of a comparatively thin portion of the model.

Downsides:

• Part of that high-quality feel comes from the fact that metal is heavier, which means that it’s harder to transport, and, if you like magnetizing your miniatures’ bases, means you need larger, more expensive magnets for every model. But not too large; too strong a magnetic pull, and you could rip the mini off of its own legs.
• That durability is a bit of a joker’s trick; if you drop a metal mini, it could snap the same as plastic, same pain in the ass either way, but it’s less prone to punctures than it is to dents, which sounds better, but painting over a small hole is actually much easier than filling in a dent in a hollow object.
• Most company competitors are using some kind of plastic for their figures, and it’s harder to ‘kitbash’ different model kits together when their materials aren’t very comparable. (This was during a time when GW encouraged kitbashing, mind you)
• There aren’t really any modeling materials that are great at adhering to paint, but metal in particular isn’t very amenable to paint coating its surface, and this is a hobby about painting things. This, as you may expect, causes problems.

In other words, metal did the job just fine, but the medium was evolving by the late aughts, and Old Man GW was falling behind. With them resting on their laurels, other companies had started to leverage new tech, and profits were hitting a gulley. Then, around 2010, some overpaid fellow in R&D came across an alternative: Resin.

Enter stage left

It is very difficult to say how it happened, of course; model companies are understandably cagey about their preferred material formulas. What we do know is that GW saw resin as the upgrade it needed, and the benefits seemed pretty clear.

Upsides:

• Resin is much, much lighter than any metal. Say bye-bye to those transport problems.
• In part because it’s so light, and in part because it isn’t dug out of the ground, resin is cheaper than metal as well.
• Resin is flexile; where other materials break, it is more likely to bend, and what can be bent can be unbent.
• Resin is much nicer to paint than any metal; its surface is much smoother, and paint binds more uniformly to the surface.
• Resin is capable of a lot more theoretical accuracy in modeling. More accuracy, more detail. Who doesn’t love more detail?

So in May 2011, GW announces the switch, and it’s out with all metal production, in with the newly-dubbed Finecast Resin (So named after all that fine detail it can pull off). It should be a slam dunk, right?

Well……

What you may have noticed in that last paragraph was that I didn’t say, “Games Workshop conducted a long series of tests to ensure that Finecast was up to the task of replacing metal across the entire model line,” and that’s because they didn’t. GW already had perfectly good mold plates; why bother checking every single one for production issues? Just swap the metal with the resin pellets and start printing the money.

And the answer for that “why bother?” is that when you change from melted metal to resin, you...

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🪞

“It's much easier to get in that it is to get out,” Emilie Autumn used to say.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4.1 - Part 4.2

She was not wrong. Welcome back to the Asylum write-up!

In this installment, we're finally getting down to the nitty-gritty of the enmity between EA and her fans.

It's time for war. It's time for blood. It's time... for tea. 🎵

THE PRESENT DAY: “ASK ME ANYTHING (WELL, NOT QUITE)”

"Ask me anything" titles are catchy, and that’s why I’m using one. But, obviously, don’t ask me anything, by which I mean that, if you think I wouldn’t answer it, you’re probably right. Ask me something really good. I’d love to answer you.

I’d love to have comments on these posts, in fact, so that I could answer questions there regularly and ask you things as well, but insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, or so Einstein is supposed to have said, and attempting to create yet another interactive online venue after every previous attempt has ended in heartbreak—forums, facebook groups, social media accounts—it would indeed be insanity to think that this time would be any different.

So there are no comments. This too is heartbreaking in the sense that, and you may not realize this, but I desperately want to connect more completely with you—to be able to intelligently converse and share and exchange. We can do that in person, of course, because the wrong people never show up in person. Isn’t that funny… So, perhaps we’ll have to arrange that;).

I’ll start you off with an example question I’d want to know if I were you (I can almost guarantee that you do not want to know this).

Q. Hey EA, how do you keep your wireless bodypack transmitter secure when you are leaping about in skimpy costumes and doing frequent costume changes? Also, dye your roots.

A. Fantastic question, EA, and I just dyed my roots thank you very much. ...

(Deleted blog post followed by a year of radio silence, 2022 📝)

Sooo. For the past five-ish years, the vibe in the Asylum has been that of a protracted Christmas dinner where everyone is tensely moving their food around in their plate, bracing themselves for whatever will trigger the screaming match. Wondering what it's going to be this time. Weary old-timers make small talk about the food because no other topic feels safe. Every glance, every forced smile, is fraught with eons-old grudges and unspoken regrets; every nervous pleasantry sounds like a thinly-veiled accusation. Aunt Emilie always insists on hosting, but not-so-secretly hates having people over. Sooner or later, she finds a way to get all of these assholes out of her house. Most of the adult children are daydreaming about going no-contact.

Everyone ready for some dysfunctional family history?

CW for discussion of bullying, online harassment, mental illness stigma.

YE OLDEN DAYS: CUCKOOS OF A FEATHER NEST TOGETHER

In the beginning, it was beautiful.

EA had the excellent instinct to start banking on her online presence📝 long before MySpace was even a thing. She had a website, several online stores, an active LiveJournal and a ProBoards forum right from the turn of the millennium.

In 2004, she attached an official forum to her website; the earliest archive shows 74 registered users. By the time Opheliac came out in 2006, that number had grown tenfold. And it was, by most accounts, a pretty dope place to be! (I should specify that this write-up focuses on the anglophone side of the fandom: there were also thriving fan-run communities in at least German, French, and Spanish. Because EA doesn't speak any of those languages, the lucky bastards were mostly left alone.)

Forum users enjoyed interacting with some of EA's closest IRL friends and associates – and with the mistress of the house herself (user flair: PsychoFiddler), when she occasionally responded to comments under her own posts. But that wasn't even the main appeal for many. For a long time, on top of all EA-related topics, the official forum had very active “Off-Topic” subforums, with lively and friendly conversation on a variety of subjects. (There was even a “Filthy Libertines (18+)” sub for a while, which was closed due to preemptive concerns about minors.) Swear words (not slurs) were allowed and encouraged, and moderation was overall pretty loose beyond basic enforcement of civility. There was a lot of mutual support, creativity, and solid banter going around.

It wasn't just about Emilie on the forums. People could chat about almost anything with near free reign, making connections and lifelong friends. ... This community mattered SO MUCH to people. They felt included, accepted, and understood within the walls of the Asylum. People invested their time and creative energy into keeping the forums a vibrant, active community, and made sure that carried over into the real world. ... I've never seen anything like it in a fan space. I doubt I ever will again. (@Asylum_Oracle - “Fandom History” Instagram highlight 🔍📝, which contains most of the sources for this segment.)

And it did, indeed, carry over into the real world. There were numerous meet-ups – a few organized by EA, many more spontaneous. People who didn't know any other EA fans in real life, or were just excited to add new Plague Rats to their friend group, would regularly connect with other forum users from their area to meet up and hang out before EA shows. “Who else is dressing up??”

In 2008, for instance, EA held an afternoon meet-up at Lincoln Park in Chicago. 📺 The event was free to attend; it featured live acoustic music and a reading from EA's upcoming book, the intriguingly-titled Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls.

On the appointed day, EA rolled up in a fabulously tousled red wig, bedazzled white corset and steampunk-altered wedding dress. She had brought friends alongs. Sporting blue hair and a pink bustle and corset was her Chicago bestie, the main forum admin. Rocking a guitar and a top hat was EA's sound engineer, the soft-spoken wizard behind the Victoriandustrial sound, who was also a forum mod. The photographer from the original Opheliac cover art was there as well; he was formally introduced by EA and got his own round of applause.

People who would never normally be involved in an artist's fanbase were in EA's world. And not only were they known – they were respected and incredibly active with the fanbase. These people who managed an online message board were willing to engage in real-world meet-ups (with no security??) because of how tight-knit the community they had built was.

People turned out to this event. People traveled to go to this event. It was a short reading of a book that hadn't been released yet, and wouldn't be for some time. Why? Because not only was it a chance to meet Emilie and listen to parts of the new book, but it was also a chance to hang out with their friends from the Asylum. ... The fandom really was a family for a lot of people. (@Asylum_Oracle)

“SERIOUSLY, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE.”

It all started with The End.

The End Records, that is! Quick refresher: in 2009, after three years or so with Trisol, EA split from the label over allegations that the owner was embezzling money from ticket sales. A few months later, she signed with The End Records. Understandably, EA still wanted to sell the album that had made her famous, and to which she had smartly retained the rights – which meant a brand new, “Deluxe” release of Opheliac. (Remember, from part 3? The one you could pre-order as a bundle with the book? Some projects are just cursed, I guess.)

At that point, Opheliac had been released three times already, as recently as the year before, with only slight variations in format and tracklist. (Yes, that is a theme in this story.) The End Records version would feature new cover art and a handful of new tracks, but overall, it was... you know... the same album.

(The following paragraphs are largely sourced from this excellent recap 🔍📝, which also provi...

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

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[Note to mods: I am SO SORRY to break the rules, but my comments are too formatting-heavy - Reddit keeps giving me error messages when I try to post them, splitting the length changes nothing, and the formatting (embedded links, etc) DOES NOT carry over when I copy-paste and try again. I've been at it for an hour. I decided to just make a separate post before I lose my mind - hope that's alright.]

“MIXED MEDIA AND ACRYLIC PAINT ON CANVAS”

You're so easy to read

But the book is boring me (“Misery Loves Company”, 2006 🎵)

It is June 2023. An alert pings on your Instagram. Butter my muffins – your problematic teenage fave just posted! What has she been up to?

It's been almost a full year since EA's last communiqué. She was going to do an AMA on her new blog, Stark Raving Sane. Fans would submit their burning questions, and she would select twenty of them to answer in her next post. You could fill out a form with your name and email and question. Clearly, she didn't like some of the questions.

(Since then, the one interesting that's happened in the Asylum was when EA was listed as the opening act for one single Maroon 5 show in the Netherlands 📝, but that turned out to be – most likely – a Spotify glitch.)

You tap the notification to check out EA's comeback post. The caption reads:

Introducing 'My Heart Is A Weapon Of War,' and I painted her and I love her. Medium: Mixed media - digital (Procreate, Maya 3D Sculpting) and acrylic paint on canvas.” 🪞📝

The art style is yassified-oil-portrait-realistic, unlike anything EA has ever drawn or painted before.🪞 It's a pastel-colored portrait of a button-nosed, elven-faced woman shaped like a Rococo centerpiece. She's got an ethereal smile, a sheer pink heart on her cheek, flowers in her towering hair, and rockin' anime titties. The gold lamé of her skin-tight top blends with her actual skin at the neck, and her arms are non-existent.

You rub your eyes. This surely isn't... no. She can't possibly be serious.People in the comments are trying to be diplomatic:

EA, I've always loved and defended you, but this is clearly AI.

EA does not respond to the diplomatic people in the comments. Instead, she posts another portrait of a diaphanous woman with a cheek-heart and a weirdly levitating necklace. In another post:

Oh, if anyone is curious about my general process, I'm happy to share, as I'd love to see other artists try it. It is thus: I start in Procreate with an Apple pencil, move over to Maya/Zbrush and do some 3D sculpting and lighting to flesh things out and create otherworldly elements in incredible detail, go back to Procreate and... 📝

Commenters are now having mostly civilized back-and-forths over the ethical implications of AI. Many hope EA is reading, wondering if she is aware of those issues. Many say everything would probably be fine if EA would just admit to using AI.

EA admits to nothing and apologizes to no one. No: EA posts more art, in a slightly different, less generic style, that still looks nothing like her own. “Digital painting”, she maintains. Many are imploring EA to please end this charade and stop insulting her fans' intelligence. But then again, some fans are defending her (“She literally just explained that it was digital painting!”), so maybe she's right to do it...?

EA posts a picture of a “buried treasure” that she just randomly chanced upon – a pencil drawing from her teens, once posted on her website in the early 2000s. (It's the one I linked to earlier – the one with the “EAF” signature, and the false age, and the fire reference. Yes, this is the context in which she was posting that.) She's posting it, à propos nothing, because she literally just noticed that she still draws eyebrows the exact same way to this day! In fact, you can clearly, definitely, unmistakably see a very similar eyebrow shape in her most recent art! See?

People are gobsmacked, and dragging her to filth. Desperate loyalists are gently pressing EA to please just post a Procreate timelapse of one of her new “digital paintings”, so that people will stop calling her a fraud.

EA is happy to oblige, and posts a mini-timelapse 📺📝 of what looks like color splotches and blurs being removed from the top layer of a finished piece with the eraser tool.

I'm shriveling with second-hand embarrassment on her behalf. How is she not mortified...? 🐀

EA keeps posting. More generic AI girlies with pale skin and sad eyes, more abstract sploshes that she calls her “morning pages”, but also more Asylum member-berries (“...the original Unlaced violin part... someone please learn this!” 📝) – and more of the massive, medical-themed mixed-media sculptures that she started making the year before, even presenting a few pieces at Art Basel 2022. The difference in style is obvious to everyone but her.

She ignores the peasants screeching about AI, won't even deign address the existence of such a thing; it's all EA, OK? OK. She makes it look easy, because it is to her:

4 hours start to finish in Procreate only with Apple pencil. Did you know that [the art for a card deck she released in 2019] was the first thing I drew on an iPad, because I was recovering from a disastrous TMJ jaw surgery and my face was bandaged and I couldn't get out of bed? I didn't either until just now. 📝

...Because... because you just made it up...??

People are going full tinfoil hat now – she has to be doing this on purpose, right? She just has to.

I can’t help but find it extremely suspicious that she came back after a year of inactivity just to drop the very obviously AI-generated art pieces, refuse to forwardly acknowledge the controversy, and then immediately move on to posting a bunch of artwork that is very clearly hers. A part of me is genuinely convinced that this is some sort of publicity stunt... 🐀

What other explanation could there be to this madness?

Not everyone loves the modern art sculptures, but those are definitely her work. Some of them really have The Vibe. About a piece entitled “Manic Phase” 📺📝:

This is (...) a blueprint of brain activity during a very... interesting period. Just one of many over several years, until a very particular combination of chemicals conspired to bury them just below the surface (...) Every single day, right now, I am afraid of going back there.

Hoop, there it is. Girl... you just spent days covering every inch of a canvas the size of a patio table with spirals of text from your decade-old journals written in minuscule all-caps, after a disastrous three-week bender of trying to pass off obvious AI art as your own. Is it perhaps possible that you may be “there” already...?

The more art EA posts, the angrier people get, and the harder she doubles down. Some AI pieces are accompanied by lengthy blog posts where she elaborates on their meanings. Mostly old Asylum talking points and metaphysical ramblings (that, in some cases, only seem loosely related to the art), but also some concerning news... and another spoonful of denial for the road:

Biscuits has no tits and neither do I at present. I’ve lost them, along with my arse, and most of my muscle mass, because that’s what happens when you’ve got an auto-immune issue and it hurts to eat because your body is attacking itself. (I never say auto-immune “disease” because it’s an ugly brown and I don’t like the way the “s” that is really a “z” feels in my mouth, and it also sounds unnecessarily dramatic and that embarrasses me). I prefer not to talk about this. With anyone. I will fix it. I am fixing it. And I will be able to sing and dance. And that is all.” (“Biscuits” - Blog entry 📝)

...Well shit.

Despite her track record and the context of this disclosure, not many fans accuse EA of malingering (well, okay, some are really pissed and they do 🐀). An auto-immune disease does line up with things she has mentioned in passing for years (bad blood-works, diet restrictions, hospital visits...) – and she did look so thin in those Art Basel pictures that some people accused her covertly creating thinspo.

In light of this, some fans choose to cut EA some slack, or at least temper their disappointment with [earnest sympathy...

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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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Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

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

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.
• Define any acronyms.
• Link and archive any sources.
• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.
• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

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

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

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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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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.

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Tokyono on 2024-04-18 21:11:39.

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Hello hobbyists!

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

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/actually_a_demon on 2024-04-15 15:59:48.

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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.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context.
• Define any acronyms.
• Link and archive any sources.
• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.
• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

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

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

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

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

---

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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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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