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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/RemnantEvil on 2025-03-15 07:47:39+00:00.

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The year is 1932. Cricket’s still in its infancy as a sport – earlier in the year, India became only the sixth nation to be granted Test status. The limited-overs formats of One Day International and T20 International are but tickles in the testicles of Test cricket, decades from inseminating the sport. The greatest contest of cricket is underway, and it’s about to take a violent turn.

First, some background.

The Ashes are, at this time and still today, the definitive rivalry of the sport, fought between Australia and England. The burly, sunburnt convicts of the colony against the upright gentry of the mother country. In 1882, after Australia defeated England at Kennington Oval in London, English journalist Reginald Shirley Brooks wrote in the Sporting Times:

In Affectionate Remembrance of English Cricket which died at the Oval on 29th August, 1882, Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances. R.I.P. N.B.—The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.

A tiny urn, said to contain the burned remains of a bail (the two small bits of wood that sit horizontal on a wicket), became the vaunted prize contested by the two sides. Worth remembering that Australia only technically became a federation in 1901, so the original 1882 team was a “united Australia” squad. Since then, the series has been played with alternating hosts, every couple of years – the last was mid-2023 in England, then next will be in Australia at the end of 2025 – with the trophy going back and forth. Though the series hasn’t always consistently been five matches, the fact has always remained that one side needs to win to take the Ashes, and a tie will result in the current holder retaining the trophy.

In 1930, Australia goes to England with an inexperienced squad, but one name that would come to strike fear into the hearts of English cricketers: Sir Donald Bradman. I’ve waxed lyrical about this man before, but he’s as close as Australia gets to a George Washington figure – the Royal Navy named a ship after him while he was alive, he had a museum dedicated to him, he was the first living Australian to be featured on an Australian postage stamp, and the government produced a 20-cent coin to commemorate him after his death.

There were two pages in my high school history textbook dedicated to Don Bradman and Bodyline. In the national mythos, you would almost believe that a great cricket team and Don Bradman got the country through the Great Depression. You might almost be correct, too.

Prior to going to England for the Ashes, Bradman’s career was only just beginning. He would, in quick succession, put himself in the history books: His first and only ever run-out (when the batters are scoring by running to opposite ends, a fielder that uses the ball to remove the bails from the wicket has “run out” whichever batter is closest to the end at which the wicket is broken); losing by the largest margin of defeat in a Test match, 675 runs (a record which still stands); and the highest score in a first-class innings (when he played for New South Wales against Queensland, scoring 452 not-out – still the third-highest score to this day).

Though Bradman would contribute some runs in the series against England in 1928-29, it was in 1930 that he really shone. Over five matches, Bradman score 974 runs at an average of 139, which remains a world record to this day - the next most runs in a series by a single batter is 905, and even that was over nine innings compared to Bradman’s mere seven innings of batting. In fact, if you look at the top 50 scores set in a series, Bradman appears six times in that 50. Two of those series occurred in the late ‘40s, after Bradman – and every other cricketer – had to take a brief hiatus from the sport due to, you know, the Second World War.

In that ’30 series, the top two English run scorers put together totals of 436 and 416 runs, which – for those good with numbers – is not as many as Bradman even when you put them together. Australia’s captain at the time, Bill Woodfull, very correctly asserted that having Bradman in the side was like having three extra batters.

How do we stop him?

English weather once again scuppered some matches in the 1930 series, which meant that only two Australian victories were enough to snatch the Ashes away from the team favoured to win. The English would get their opportunity to try and claim the Ashes in 1932, when they toured Australia, but they were facing a hell of a dilemma: How do you win when the other side has a man who would end up being the greatest cricketer to ever live, in his prime?

Here, we meet our villain: Douglas Jardine. (In the miniseries Bodyline, which is available on YouTube, he’s played very ably by Hugo Weaving – just if you want a mental image of the man. By the way, it’s pronounced jar-deen.)

If you had to write a bad guy in a cricket story, you could do no better. Abrupt, standoffish, Jardine kept apart from the rest of the England team on the way to Australia – this is when they had to go by boat, which wasn’t a short trip. He alienated the press by being uncooperative, the press retaliated with negative stories, and the crowds at the matches turned on Jardine, which angered him further. Truly a cycle that builds for a positive spirit to the game.

The weapons Jardine brought to the 1932 Ashes: His fast bowlers, and leg theory.

Leg theory was not new. What you do with it, it’s quite simple: Place your fielders on the leg side, which is behind the batter’s back, then bowl towards that side. The batter is then forced to play the bat in close to his body, making run-scoring difficult; combined with extra fielders on the leg side, you have better chances of a catch. It really hits them from four angles. If the line is good, the batter risks a leg-before-wicket (LBW). If the batter moves, they risk leaving their stumps exposed. If the batter tries to play, they risk a nick to the fielder. And, failing any of that, it stifles their ability to score.

What was new was the pace that the English were using. They weren’t just bowling leg theory, they were bowling aggressive leg theory, and this is what made Bodyline different – they were seemingly not targeting the line of leg stump, they were targeting the line of the batter’s body; hence, bodyline.

Jardine called it “fast leg theory”.

If you’ve never touched a cricket ball, you might not understand. Though they get softer throughout the course of the game, a cricket ball is hard. If you ever see people playing cricket not wearing uniforms, you can almost guarantee they will be using a tennis ball because it’s a lot more enjoyable. In the ‘30s, cricketers wore caps. They had leg pads and gloves, sure, but fewer of the protective measures we have today.

In November 2014, 25-year-old Phil Hughes is playing in a state cricket match between South Australia and New South Wales. A bouncer – which is a delivery that drops short from the bowler and will therefore regain height to be high on the batter – strikes Hughes beneath his left ear when he mistimes a hit. Though he was wearing a helmet, the blow knocks him down. He staggers, then falls. He never gets back up.

You could count on two hands the number of deaths that have occurred in cricket in the last 50 years. Despite using a round rock for a primary piece of equipment, it’s a safe sport – most of the deaths in cricket are really just deaths that occurred incidental to what the person was doing at the time. There are injuries, sure – fast bowlers in particular are like thoroughbred horses in that they are really damaging their legs, feet and back the more they play. Though efforts were made to re-evaluate the design of the cricket helmet, ultimately it was determined that the death of Phil Hughes was a freak accident, and that nothing could be done to the helmet that would have prevented his death.

In 1932, they did not have helmets.

In order to exploit what they perceived as Bradman’s one weakness – fast bowling directed at him – the English adopted Bodyline.

Bradman missed the first Test, but the crowd saw it. Led by pace bowler Harold Larwood, who would claim ten wickets in the match, the English intermittently employed Bodyline. Only one Australian, Stan McCabe, put up a solid fight to score 187 runs, adapting rapidly to the bowling by using hook and pull shots – techniques where the bat is swing across the body at about shoulder height. An interesting piece of trivia is that an Indian prince played for the English side. He scored a century on his debut, but would be dropped after the second Test due to his refusal to participate in the Bodyline tactic; as a fielder, he was instructed to move to a leg-side fielding position and he refused.

Bradman returned for the second Test, and though he was out for a golden duck in the first innings, he contributed 103 not-out in the second. Together with a strong performance by the Australian bowlers, they managed to win by 111 runs.

It would be their only victory in the series.

The Third Test was the one that came to encapsulate the Bodyline series. Australian captain Bill Woodfull copped a blow to the chest, but he soldiered on to score 73 runs. As Woodfull’s clutching his chest, bent over in pain, Jardine calls out to Larwood, “Well bowled, Harold!” Though it was allegedly meant to unnerve Bradman at the non-striker’s e...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/AidanGLC on 2025-03-14 19:28:10+00:00.

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Foreword: This story does not involve drama in the “controversy and/or fisticuffs” sense of the word, but it is chock full of drama in the “extremely exciting and tense series of events leads to unexpected outcome” sense of the word.

In the last half-decade, men’s road cycling has come to be dominated by a handful of riders typically referred to as “the Big Six”: Tadej Pogacar, Primoz Roglic (both Slovenia), Jonas Vingegaard (Denmark), Remco Evenepoel, Wout Van Aert (both Belgium), and Mathieu Van Der Poel (Netherlands). Since 2020, these six riders have won 11/15 Grand Tours (the big three-week stage races in Italy, France, and Spain), 17/24 Monuments (the five hardest, most prestigious one-day races each calendar year), and 5/10 World Championships (every year features two WCs – one Time Trial and one Road Race).

The post that inspired this one centered on one of the seven Monuments since 2020 that wasn’t won by one of the Big Six – Sonny Colbrelli’s victory at the biblical epic that was Paris-Roubaix 2021. Today’s post is about another of those seven, and about one of the greatest heists in the modern history of the sport.

The Sport: Pro Cycling. u/Nalc’s inflategate post summed the sport up better than I ever could, so I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here, and full credit goes to them for the description below (with a handful of minor additions from me):

It’s a professional sport, these guys make peanuts compared to many other sports (a record-breaking salary for a 3-time Tour de France winner is a cheap veteran deal for a rotational linebacker in the NFL), with about 15-20 top-level professional teams that automatically are invited to every big race, plus some lower-level teams that race on an invitational basis. It’s a team sport – every team brings 7 riders, and they are all working to get one rider the victory. There may be multiple riders that are options based on how the race plays out, but once the strategy is clear, the team is all-in for that leader. ‘Drafting’, or following closely behind another rider for aerodynamic benefit, is absolutely key to cycling. Riders will take turns being on the front, which requires the most energy. Ideally, the team leader will have teammate(s) to draft behind for as long as possible. When most of the support riders are gone, the race has ‘shattered’ or ‘blown up’. Riders will make impromptu temporary alliances in order to work together, and knowing when to make these alliances (and when to break them) is what makes racing exciting. There are different styles of rider – some are bigger (faster on the flat roads), some are smaller (faster on the hills). Some are good bike handlers (faster over rough or technical terrain), some are bad bike handlers. Some can put down a big, steady power for a long time (time trialist), some can do a huge burst of speed right at the end (sprinter). Some can put out a big effort and then recover and do it again, others cannot. The riders all have individual styles, and they know each other’s styles which informs how they work together after the race has shattered. This is not a race where the fastest person will get out to the front and stay there, since that requires the most energy and even the strongest riders will likely get caught. It’s all about timing when you want to get onto the front.

Finally, some terminology – ‘breakaway’ is a small group that is off the front, ‘peloton’ is the main group, ‘chase group’ is a group in between. “taking a pull” means riding at the front of your group (doing the most work, to the benefit of the riders behind you), “attacking” is when you make a strong effort to go faster than your current group (due to the drafting benefit, you need a lot of strength or perfect timing to quickly get far enough ahead that the other riders cannot draft you), you’re “dropped” if you’re no longer able to keep up with the group you’re in, and “sprinting” is the high speed acceleration at the very end of a race.

The Race: 2022 Milan – San Remo. MSR is the first of cycling’s five Monuments in the calendar year, taking place in mid-late March, and has been raced every year since 1907 save for 1944 and 1945. It’s also the longest, around 300km running from Milan to the seaside town on the Franco-Italian border. Terrain-wise, MSR is the simplest of the Monuments – it lacks the cobblestone roads of the Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix, or the brutal climbs of Liege-Bastogne-Liege or Il Lombardia. It's relatively flat, with only around 2,000m of total elevation gain over the whole race (by comparison, Il Lombardia, the other Italian Monument, has nearly 5,000m of climbing). There is one major climb at the middle of the course (at which point the race has not yet broken apart) and then two relatively short climbs near the finish: the Cipressa (which tops out 22km from the finish) and the Poggio di San Remo (which tops out 4.5km from the finish). Both climbs are significant enough that a hard-charging team can shake loose weaker riders, but neither is long enough or steep enough to allow an attack to stick through sheer brute force. If you attack on the Poggio, timing and racecraft matter as much as power. Once riders hit the top of the Poggio, they must navigate an incredibly technical descent – hairpin turns and tight corners the whole way down – before a flat run-in to the finish line.

MSR is often referred to as the easiest Monument to finish and the hardest Monument to win. This is because there are many ways to win it: it can be won from a bunch sprint at the finish (Jasper Philipsen in 2024, Julian Alaphilippe in 2019), or from a sprint between a few riders who have gone clear earlier in the race (Jasper Stuyven in 2021, Wout Van Aert in 2020). It can be won from an attack on the Poggio, either on the ascent (Mathieu Van der Poel in 2023, Vicenzo Nibali in 2018) or on the descent. It can theoretically be won by an attack on the Cipressa, as attempted (unsuccessfully) by Nibali in 2014. It can also be won by a wide variety of riders: the names in the previous sentences include pure sprinters, classics riders, Grand Tour winners, and breakaway specialists. This makes planning for the endgame incredibly difficult: to take another Monument, there is a reliable way to win Liege-Bastogne-Liege and only a handful of riders each year who can realistically do so; there are four or five different ways to win MSR, and thus a far larger pool of riders who can potentially win it. This also means that the finish of MSR always features a lot of fireworks. Lots of people can win it, so lots of people try to win it. The first ~285km of Milan-San Remo are generally dull; the finale is the best 10km in the sport.

Dramatis Personae (and their teams)

Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates): Pogacar is an all-rounder and widely regarded as one of the 2-3 greatest men’s cyclists of all time. Equally comfortable in Grand Tours and one-day races, on the eve of 2022 Milan – San Remo he is the reigning winner of the Tour de France (in both 2020 and 2021), two Monuments (Liege and Lombardia), Strade Bianche (a brutally hard race on gravel roads in Tuscany that is sometimes considered an unofficial Sixth Monument), and Tirreno-Adriatico – a one-week stage race that immediately precedes MSR. 2022 is his second appearance at MSR, having finished 12th in 2020, and he is among the favourites.

Wout Van Aert and Primoz Roglic (both Jumbo Visma): a cyclocross racer who transitioned to road-racing in 2019, Van Aert is the most versatile cyclist of his generation. In 2020, he won both MSR and Strade Bianche, and came third in the 2021 edition of MSR. In the 2021 Tour de France, he became the first rider since 1979 to win a mountain stage, a sprint stage, and a time trial stage in the same Tour.  Coming into this race, he is the reigning winner of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad (the opening race of the WorldTour classics season) and the points classification of Paris-Nice – another one-week stage race immediately before San Remo. He is accompanied by Primoz Roglic, the reigning Vuelta a Espana and Olympic Time Trial winner and fresh off the overall win at Paris-Nice. Roglic is not generally expected to win MSR, but his presence is seen to be returning a favour – Van Aert was instrumental to Roglic’s Paris-Nice win, and he will now support Van Aert’s attempt to win a second Milan-San Remo.

Pogacar and Van Aert are by far the favourites for this edition of MSR. It's widely anticipated to end in a dual between them, either as a two-up sprint at the finish line or a contest to see who can go clear on the Poggio. However, there are a few other riders worth mentioning:

Mathieu Van Der Poel (Alpecin-Fenix): Another cyclocross racer who has transitioned to road-racing, and one of the greatest classics riders of all time. He’s from a family of cycling royalty – his father was a six-time Dutch National Champion, and his grandfather won MSR in 1961. He and Van Aert have also been rivals since childhood, having together won seven of the last eight cyclocross world championships (with the other nearly always in 2nd). At this point, MVDP is the winner of the 2020 Tour of Flanders (be...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/fantatata on 2025-03-14 18:28:22+00:00.

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Hi! I originally posted on here about ongoing drama, but given I usually lurk I wasn't fully aware of the 14-day rule. It’s now been 14 days, and I’m back with an updated post. I’ve also had some users help me fill out the gaps that I didn’t remember, so this is a collaborative effort of sorts, given I was told you guys enjoy hearing all of the details! ^_^

So, I’m a user on this website called goSupermodel. It originally started in the mid-2000s as a dress-up forum site for girls (think Gaia Online but more fashion than anime oriented), and later on was shut down in 2015-2016. Back in December 2022 the website returned after an Indiegogo campaign, and it was all fine and good for a short while. The site itself ran on a salvaged code from 2013, which caused a lot of lag on modern hardware, but we were all pleased to know our beloved website from our childhood had returned. Nowadays, while the website is still primarily used by girls, people from all sorts of backgrounds have started using it (I’m a man and I use it, so… I mean. There’s that.)

The site staff was not ready to deal with an adult userbase, and this was clear from the start. While the original site’s run (we’ll call this 1.0) was used by children, preteens and teens, nowadays on 2.0 you’ll find it difficult to find anyone below the age of 20. The majority of us are there for the nostalgia factor. Anyway, back on track — the first two years were already rocky, and I’ve decided to let you guys know about some of the biggest concerns and controversies of recent memory.

Security Concerns

At the beginning of 2.0’s run, given the website was running on code from 2013, there were a lot of security concerns surrounding the website’s address. gSm itself ran on HTTP as opposed to HTTPS, which made a lot of users worried about the safety of their passwords. This itself was already pretty bad and put the staff in a bad light, but since then, it has come to light that it’s a lot worse.

First of all, the passwords were poorly protected. Until at least 7 months ago (to my knowledge), an admin could easily find a password for the account of an user in a simple document, meaning that the passwords were not encrypted. If you forgot your password, it would simply be e-mailed to you in plain text. While some admins claim this was never true, I have received information that this was, indeed, the case. They also kept people’s accounts and alternate accounts, their passwords, e-mails, OS and IP. 

If the shoe fits, Early-mid 2023.

Given this situation happened in January 2023, it was difficult to get a hold of the information. I won’t be going as in depth into it as the other sections, but I’ve tried to summarize what happened.

A moderator, who we will call Mod A, stepped forward by leaking the messages sent in the private Moderator group chat. In this group chat, it showcased behaviour by Moderators who bullied others, and how they would target specific users in particular. One of these users was M.

While I have my own personal gripes with M (which includes her stalking a friend of mine, using hidden numbers to call people and even sharing someone’s photographs without their permission), the way she was treated behind closed doors was still gut-wrenching. She had a conversation with another moderator (Mod B), but mod B soon started to ghost her. Soon enough, M received a dm from mod B on-site, about how mod B removed her as a friend and was no longer comfortable interacting with her. This was supposed to stay confidential, but other moderators soon started removing M from their friends lists.

Mod A and user M (alongside other users) worked together to create a long google doc (which was later deleted, though archives of it still exist) which consisted of 35 pages, calling out the behaviour that happened behind closed doors. They would use her actual name instead of her username, which made M feel like this was personal to her (for good reason). M received a ban from the admin team and created an alt account to share her side of the story. After reading her post, an admin personally reached out to apologise to her.

The following is copy-pasted from the archived 35-page document which released in 2023:

[Beginning of copy-paste, names have been redacted.]

“1. The moderators have broken their own rules several times. It’s nothing new that

moderators can be more “free” with breaking the rules, rather than a “normal” player, as they

can simply just apologize for their wrong doings and be forgiven.

Another thing I’d like to mention is how moderators are treated by staff. For example, [A]

was fired due to a rule breach where she had shared some screenshots of what some of

them were saying (which is perfectly fine). But it only applied to her, even though there were

others who were sharing things from the moderator chat, including who they had timed out

and who they hadn't, which is information we should not be sharing.

1. One of the former moderators (who has now been fired) called [M] a "dumb wack

psychopathic idiot dogshit sniffer". Several moderators joined in on talking bad about her,

and nothing was done about it until someone threatened to leak the messages from the

modchat where it was written. The moderator has now been fired, but those who supported it

and joined in on the badmouthing are still active moderators today.

1. A former administrator has been caught bullying in the moderator chat several times,

name dropping in an unprofessional way, and being snarky towards people in the forum.

This admin has written nasty things about individual users without anything being done

about it before it was also threatened to be leaked. The admin deleted the moderator chat,

presumably to remove evidence.

1. Around March, we were allowed to mention who we recommended to become moderators

in the future.

It is fair, as we may have "more" knowledge of how people are in the forum. But we were

also allowed to mention people we did NOT want to be appointed as moderators. Two of

those people who got mentioned as a "no-go" to become moderators are [1] and [2] , who

are nothing but good girls with good hearts. To my surprise, the moderator who wrote it is a

good friend of those girls (which is extremely strange to do to people you are friends with),

but that moderator got what they wanted and got their best friend appointed as one of the

new moderators. [KI] was also bad-mouthed and bullied so awfully in that chat.

1. FROM [4] (one of the people who signed the document) herself: Me and [4] were fooling around in a topic, and I asked her if

she wanted to join the Murder Train game we were playing, and then she answered

something along the lines of "I can't! Me and my bf have planned playing a special game

later...", she was referring to Hogwarts Legacy, but it did come out as sexual. I took a

screenshot of the message, uploaded it with a dia and posted it on my profile. After a few

days I got a DM from [4] asking me if I had uploaded the pic with dias, and then she

advised me to take it down because the mods had agreed to not allow any pics with anything

sexual. I don’t know if I could get a warning for having the picture up, but I definitely felt like I

had some privilege for being friends with a mod in this situation.

1. In January, [C] confirmed via the staff that “[Cheating User]” didn’t cheat in the wardrobe

game, and that he simply was just being insanely good at the game.

This statement made people furious, as we all knew he was cheating which he admitted to

Himself.

People started to bash on [C] in several servers and snapchat groups, and they were

dragging her autism while badmouthing her. [M], who has ADHD herself, finds it triggering

and decides to tell [C] after asking [JS] advice on what to do.

When [M] told [C], she said that she already knew and that she is dealing with it.

For some reason, she went to the moderator chat and said that [M] lied about this all.

How does it make sense that [M] lied, when you said you knew about the situation? And

don’t you dare say you did not say that, we have the whole discord chat saved.

1. [C] also lied about [M] sending her death threats. When we asked staff about

this in the video chat we had earlier, they said sorry for assuming these things as they didn’t

have any proof. Funny right, [C] being a law graduate according to her

goSupermodel profile, but still making up such serious allegations?”

[End of copy-paste]

It also came to light in the document that one of the moderators, [I], was bullying the user [P] behind her back. [P] is a bit of a controversial user herself, but the long story short is that she is intellectually disabled and often acts out emotionally. [I] had been badmouthing her in the moderator chat frequently, without the public being aware of this. This was one of the reasons why [I] temporarily lost his moderator badge, which has since been reinstated.

The whole situation was a confusing mess, and I tried my best to summarize it in a way that made sense. It also happened a long time ago, and given I don’t have the best memory, I could only piece this together with the saved document. 

The Racist admin situation.

In early autumn of 2023, they hired a handful of new admins onto the website. One of these admins is a user I shall only refer to as K. Pe...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Inquilinus on 2025-03-11 16:55:35+00:00.

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There’s a good chance you’ve seen this clip floating around. I’ve seen it go viral several times, often with a title something like “the most intense game of rock-paper-scissors ever” or “Japanese professional rock-paper-scissors.” What this clip actually shows is the final match of AKB48’s Janken Tournament in 2016, won by long-time member Tanabe Miku. I want to explain the background of the event and why she had such a reaction to winning. First, I’ll give a primer.

AKB48: AKB48 is an idol group founded in 2005 by Akimoto Yasushi. The concept was “idols you can meet”, with a theater where they perform every day. AKB48 has a large number of members as each theater performance is conducted by a team of 16 members, and there are multiple teams alternating on different days. AKB48 also founded sister groups throughout Japan with their own members, teams, and setlists and who perform at their own theater. Akimoto Yasushi writes the lyrics for all of the songs for AKB48 and its sister groups. Members are added in numbered generations.

Theater: the AKB48 theater is a tiny venue on the 8th floor of Akihabara’s Don Quijote, a discount supermarket chain. It has 6 rows of benches and standing room in the back, with a total capacity of 250 people. There are also two massive pillars that block the stage for most of the audience. AKB48 has been performing there almost uninterrupted since December 2005. They’ve performed roughly 6600 shows there at time of writing. The members are divided into teams, with the classic teams being Team A, Team K, and Team B, and the teams perform their own setlists, known as stages.

Senbatsu: the members chosen to participate in a single. While the size of the senbatsu varies, it’s generally around 16 members. Considering AKB48 (and it’s sister groups) has hundreds of members, it’s often seen as the ultimate goal of many members to enter into the senbatsu. It features members who are the most popular, or are being pushed by management to become popular. Usually, AKB48 singles were a kind of “all star” lineup with the top members of each sister group being selected (the sister group’s singles would feature a lineup of just their own members) alongside the top AKB48 members. The frontwoman for the single is called the center.

Graduation: when a member leaves the group, it’s typically a graduation. They announce graduation publicly, then graduate a few months later. They have a graduation performance at the theater as their last activity. Sometimes members withdraw or are terminated, which is not considered a graduation. This has only happened a couple of times, typically for criminal behavior.

General Election: In 2009, AKB48 started the General Election, where fans could vote for the senbatsu of a single once a year. Due to the huge number of members, many fans would complain to the management that they were choosing the wrong members for the senbatsu. So, AKB48 created the General Election. The single preceding the Election would contain a voting ticket. For each CD you bought, you received a vote that you could put towards your favorite member. The members who received the most votes would be in the senbatsu, with the one who received the most being the center. Initially, it was the top 21 members, but was later reduced to the top 16.

The Janken Tournament

Let me set the stage. After failing to gain mainstream popularity from 2005 to 2009, AKB48 hit it big with the single “Heavy Rotation” in 2010. The followed it up with an even bigger hit in “Beginner”, which sold over 1 million copies, the first song to do so in Japan since 2006. AKB48 skyrocketed into popularity. Then, they announced something shocking: the senbatsu of the next single would be decided by a massive game of janken (rock-paper-scissors.) The top 16 members of the tournament would make up the senbatsu, and the winner would be the center.

AKB48 had established the General Election in 2009 due to fan complaints that the management was choosing the wrong members for the senbatsu. The Janken Tournament was created due to further fan complaints. To rank well in the Election, a member needed to have fans. And to get fans, they needed exposure. Very few members, the ones who were already popular or management was pushing to be popular, got exposure. There were hundreds more members who only appeared at the various theaters of AKB48 and its sister groups, or occasionally on their own variety shows. They had little chance to become known to anyone outside of hardcore fans. So Akimoto Yasushi came up with a solution: the next single’s senbatsu would be more-or-less randomly selected, with the members battling it out through janken.

The Janken Tournament would become a yearly staple. One thing was sure about it: it was a huge spectacle. It was held live in an arena packed with fans. The production value was insane, with opening VTRs that would convince you that the world was on the line with this tournament. There were celebrity guests, both in the production and commentating. The first tournament opened with Antonio Inoki, Japan’s most famous wrestler, being brought out on a palanquin. He proceeded to give SKE48 member Matsui Rena the highest honor a person can receive: a slap in the face from Antonio Inoki himself. It was refereed by famous comedians Okada Ijiri and Yamasato Ryota. The announcer was Lenne Hardt, who MMA fans might remember as “the screaming Pride lady.” Members could decide what they wore, and the tournament became famous for members doing elaborate cosplays. It was initially shown in movie theaters, but after the first two tournaments, it was broadcast on national TV. You would think a multiple-hour broadcast of people playing rock-paper-scissors wouldn’t be something people would tune in for, but the tournaments maintained an average viewership of around 8% of Japanese households.

However, the Tournament had mixed success when it came to creating stars. The first year was won by an unpopular member, who would continue to be unpopular for the rest of her career. The 2nd and 4th tournaments were won by already popular members, which led to accusations of rigging. Probably the only real success story of the Janken Tournament was the winner of the 3rd Tournament, Shimazaki Haruka. She was a young member of middling popularity who would go on to become a massive star, initially propelled by her janken win. In 2014, the format of the Janken Tournament changed, with it no longer deciding the senbatsu of a single, but instead a solo release. This was still a big deal, but not as much as being in an AKB48 single.

Tanabe Miku

Tanabe Miku, nicknamed Tanamin, joined AKB48’s 3rd Generation in December of 2006. The first three generations were key for AKB48’s identity. The 1st Generation formed Team A, the 2nd Generation Team K, and now the 3rd Generation Team B. The original members of the teams became legends, with later members added to the teams trying to fill their shoes. However, Tanamin struggled to set herself apart. As AKB48 grew popular, many members of the first three generations became stars, but Tanamin was left behind. She stuck with it, with her main activity being performing at the theater. She had no chance of being selected for the senbatsu or making a name for herself. She rarely appeared on AKB’s own variety shows or other engagements. The newer members quickly surpassed her. AKB’s popularity didn’t reach Tanamin, whose career had been stagnant from the start. She continued in this way for 10 years. By 2016, only a few members of the original three generations remained. They consisted of massive superstars who were some of the most famous people in Japan… and Tanamin.

The only place Tanamin was really featured in was the theater. But even there, she didn’t get her dues. In 2014, Team B revived their 3rd stage, originally performed in 2008. Despite being one of the original members of the 2008 main cast, a huge senpai to most of the members, and one of the members of the legendary 3rd generation, Tanamin was made an understudy. She would only perform if one of the main cast was unavailable. Despite this, due to a mixture of longevity and unpopularity to the point of always being available, she became the member (at the time) with the most theater performances, nearing 900 by the end of her career.

Through most of her career, Tanamin struggled to make a name for herself, but not for lack of trying. She was a noted otaku, especially of anime, tokusatsu, and trains. But so are a lot of members, so that didn’t really stick out. She tried DJing, which led to her briefly hosting a local radio show in her hometown in rural Shiga Prefecture. It was called “It’s Okay For You To Become My Fan.” However, this didn’t net her many fans. She did eventually find something. Tanamin discovered something about herself once she hit her 20s: that she really loves beer. She made drinking beer central to her character, and was dubbed “the world’s first alcohol-type idol.” As part of the General Election, members create a poster to advertise themselves. In 2014, Tanamin’s poster featured her as a drunk salaryman, beer-in-hand.

The 2014 Election also also, ...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2025-03-10 04:02:07+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.
• 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!

Previous Scuffles can be found here

r/HobbyDrama also has an affiliated Discord server, which you can join here:

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/GrannyMay243 on 2025-03-09 00:40:20+00:00.

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|Overcautious TW for brief discussions of homophobia|

While a number of excellent figure skating posts have been submitted to this sub over the years, few focus on the drama of the current quad—a term which here means “four year Olympic cycle.” Those who’ve given the sport more than a passing glance in the past decade will be familiar with the word in another context: quad jumps. And if you’re interested in listening, boy do I have a story to tell you involving the person who can land more of them than anyone else currently in international competition.

What the hell is a quad jump? (Scoring for the Uninitiated)

I’m so glad you asked!

Figure skating is one of those sports where you’ve got a list of elements you can execute and a certain point value assigned to each one. An easier skill could be worth two points, a harder one five, and so on. You stick a bunch of elements together into a program, which will be scored based on the starting value of each trick (Base Value, or BV); how well you execute them (Grade of Execution, or GOE); and more nebulous stuff like skating skills, interpretation, and how well you stuck everything together (Program Components Score, or PCS).

Some big ticket elements that you probably already know about are the jumps. Kick off the ice, fly into the air, spin around a few times, land on one foot. Exciting—and difficult—stuff! There are six different types, which I’ll explain as they become relevant to the story, and they’re usually listed with a number describing the amount of rotations completed mid-air. Generally speaking, the higher the number, the harder the jump, and the more points the whole thing is worth. Single jumps are worth no points at the highest level of competition, and Quadruple or Quad are worth the most.

Quad Quad Revolution!

Until around a decade ago, most elite skaters—the kind you see at the Olympics—had all their double jumps, most if not all of their triples, and maybe a quadruple or two. Then a fun little period known colloquially as “The Quad Revolution” happened, and having multiple quadruple jumps became a lot more common. There are a lot of stories involving Elton John and a woman with noodle hair and Winnie the Pooh and grandpa water and the War in Ukraine, but we’re going to gloss over most of that and focus our discussion on the status quo today.

Okay, so it’s October of 2022. The Olympics were really traumatic, but they’re over. The top five finishers in Men’s Singles had three or more quadruple jump attempts during their long programs. Gold Medalist Nathan Chen leaves active competition to focus on his studies; 3-time Olympic Medalist and “Greatest Men’s Figure Skater Alive” Yuzuru Hanyu announces his retirement. People have landed quadruple jumps of every single type… except for one.

I sort of lied to you earlier—the number of rotations in a jump does equal the number we put in front of it… unless that jump is an Axel. To put it simply and somewhat inaccurately, an Axel is the only jump you go into facing forwards, and the half rotation you do to land backwards does not count towards the total. So a Single Axel is really 1.5 turns, a double 2.5, and so on. They’re notoriously difficult, and worth the most points because of this. The aforementioned Yuzuru Hanyu, quite possibly the greatest figure skater of our time, could and cannot land the clean quadruple in competition. Four and a half rotations—partway to a Quint.

It’s October of 2022 and people are still writing jokes into their Yuri!!! On Ice fanfiction about how a Quad Axel, the hypothetical 4A, is impossible. It’s a hyperbole, a myth, a legend—there are contemporary articles suggesting humans might be biologically incapable of such a feat.

And then a seventeen-year-old boy lands one at a quiet, early-season challenger competition.

Lights. Chaos. Action.

Enter “quadg0d” Ilia Malinin.

A Foreword

So before we get into everything that’s gone down over the past three years, I think it’s important to point out that the athletes we're discussing are human beings first and foremost. I’m gonna do my best to be respectful and neutral in my record of events, and I’ll ask you to do the same if you ever make it out the other side of this ridiculously long story. Enough nasty shit has been said about skaters on the internet—I’m not trying to dunk on Malinin or anybody else, here.

Now, you can organize the history preceding Hoodiegate in a number of ways. We’re gonna go chronologically, but I’d also like you to keep in mind that these events can be broadly sorted into two categories:

• Actual Controversies | Things Malinin did or said to piss people off directly
• General Prejudices | Things that nobody did or said and are just an unfortunate symptom of figure skating fan culture

Tech vs. Artistry: Somebody’s poisoned the water hole!

‘Art or Tech?’ is a debate as old as time, and an example of the latter. It’s a dead horse that’s been beaten into such small particles that the figure skating community is in danger of causing nuclear fission one of these days.

Remember what I told you about program scoring? Half your score is element-based, with base values per element and GOE for how well you do. The other half, PCS, is meant to reward skaters for having pretty, well-constructed programs and good rhythm and other je ne sais quoi that can’t be assigned a base value.

Ideally, this would mean skaters with less tech content could defeat skaters with more by working really hard on things like edge control, program composition, and performance. Skaters with high tech content have historically had a harder time hitting these marks, so everyone would be encouraged to improve PCS to keep their competitive edge. (Caveat: There are a lot of ‘why’s and ‘well, actually's here that I’m not going to get into, but the skating part of figure skating is my favorite so hit me up in the comments if you’re in the mood for a ramble.)

Only problem is, that’s not quite how it works.

PCS isn’t worth as much when stacked against a program with a high number of quads, and judges sometimes don’t score it according to their protocol. It’s a big tool for reputation- or nationality-based judging, unfortunately, and everyone has different ideas of how it should be awarded. So you’ll have skaters like Jason Brown, who are renowned for their artistry but can’t land quads, and skaters like Ilia Malinin, who are known mostly for their crazy technical content, and—since they’re both getting high PCS—the former will never come out on top because of the sheer base value imbalance.

This causes a lot of fandom political drama, which I’ll try to explain as painlessly as possible. Essentially: People have favorite skaters. Some of these faves can’t quad/high triple very well. This means they will not win, unless the quadsters fall or otherwise fuck up their programs. This makes them underdogs, which makes them more people’s faves. This makes people angry at the quadsters, who have their own fans, and then everyone starts screaming at each other about tech vs. artistry.

Having fun yet?

Good, because nobody is.

So, it’s October of 2022…

The impossible has become the miraculous. Some random kid has just landed the quad axel—although he wasn’t exactly random.

Malinin had a pretty noteworthy 2021-22 season. It was (functionally) his senior debut, and he had three kinds of quads in his long program. Despite taking silver at U.S. nationals, he was a little too green to attend the Olympics, so they assigned him to both the Senior and Junior World Championships instead. This isn’t super common, and while it gained him some eyeballs, most people were focused on the madness that was Beijing 2022. Landing the 4A that fall brought even more attention and scrutiny down on his head, and earned him the unenviable role of ‘jumping bean poster child’ in the Tech vs. Art debate.

So there are already some bad feelings towards this kid, just because he’s not really bringing it artistically, and there’s the usual outrage about how quads wreck your body and he’ll be struck blind before reaching the age of twenty-one or whatever. Then there's the fact that he's going by the self-styled title of “quadg0d,” which is seen as arrogance in the wake of greats like Hanyu and Chen, the latter of whom was known by the fan-given nickname “Quad King.” It was around this time that Malinin developed a reputation that continues to follow him today—a reputation of self-importance and disrespect for artistic expression.

Is this accurate? Really, depends on who you ask. I’ve met a handful of internet strangers who claim to know him—figure skating is a small fucking world, so they very well might—and they say he’s actually quite nice/polite/quiet/etc., and that the quadg0d stuff is more of a persona than evidence of a prima donna personality. Others discount this narrative, and insist that all the attention on him has gone to his head. We’ll see more support for both clai...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Imaginary-Evening169 on 2025-03-05 14:10:27+00:00.

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Background

The NARUTO manga began in 1998 and ended in 2014. In 2015, a spinoff called Naruto Gaiden: The Seventh Hokage and the Scarlet Spring was released. The spinoff takes place 15 years later, and the deuteragonist daughter is the focus of it. The Boruto sequel came out a year later and it was a continuation of Naruto Gaiden.

After Naruto ended, many light novels about the period between Shippuden and Boruto were released. Since the light novels were not written by Kishimoto, this is a source of controversy in the Naruto fanbase because there are two sides: people who consider the light novels as canon, and people who consider them glorified fanfiction.

However, the greatest source of controversy in the Naruto fanbase is the main romances. Many people were dismayed by the canonization of NaruHina (Naruto/Hinata) and SasuSaku (Sasuke/Sakura). SasuSaku was met with scathing criticism when it was confirmed as canon in chapter 700, for various reasons. Here's a quick summary:

Naruto (the protagonist), Sasuke (the rival/deuteragonist, Sakura (the main female lead) are assigned to Squad 7 in the pre-timeskip material. Naruto and Sasuke both have traumatic backstories about being orphans, while Sakura has an ordinary home life. In the very third chapter of the manga, a love triangle was established between these three characters. Naruto likes Sakura, Sakura likes Sasuke, and Sasuke likes revenge. Also, Hinata's feelings for Naruto are evident from the moment she's introduced.

The pre-timeskip material ends with Sasuke choosing revenge/power over his teammates. Then, there is a 3-year timeskip that takes us to Shippuden. At the start of Shippuden, people had high hopes about Sakura's character.

Many people thought that, because Sasuke and Hinata were completely out of the picture, that NaruSaku (Naruto/Sakura) had a chance.

Now, what made NaruSaku fans even more confident that their OTP would come true is that Sasuke wasn't getting better. He only kept going deeper and deeper into his revenge quest, and became, in the eyes of many fans, "irredeemable".

However, despite everything that Sasuke did to her and other people, Sakura's feelings for him simply..persisted.

A lot of Naruto fans always hated Sakura's feelings for Sasuke because the author never really followed up on why she likes him so much, and Sasuke never got to properly bond with her before he left. So you can imagine how upset some were that Sakura not only forgave him so easily, but even got into a relationship with him.

This ended up being longer than a summary but hopefully this provides good background on why the Naruto fanbase imploded over the ending.

Naruto Gaiden

The Naruto fandom imploded again, less than a year later, when Naruto Gaiden was released, which is where we get some insight into SasuSaku as a couple. It is revealed that Sasuke left his daughter, Sarada when she was just a baby for a mission, and that he was absent from her and Sakura's lives ever since.

Throughout the spinoff, Sasuke's absence is a source of anguish for Sarada. We see her getting jealous of her friends when she sees them with their dads.

Sarada starts asking Sakura questions about her father and she becomes very frustrated with Sakura's answers. Sakura ends up destroying their house and then fainting.

While her mother is sick, Sarada does some further investigation. She takes apart the family portrait and realizes the old picture of her father includes two other people

One of those people is a woman with glasses, just like her. Sarada begins to wonder who this is. Also, she found out there were no records of her birth in Konoha, which made her question her parentage even more.

This led Naruto fans to believe that Sasuke cheated on Sakura with Karin, and that Sakura was raising the child that Sasuke had WITH Karin (on top of the absenteeism)...It didn't reflect well on Sasuke and Sakura. They are both divisive within the fandom so this got them both even more disdain from fans of the series.

Sarada herself began to question who her mother was. Sarada ends up running away from the village, with a friend, to meet her father and ask him all the questions she has. Sarada does end up seeing Sasuke, but it doesn't exactly go as planned.

After the awkward reunion, Sarada basically confronts him about everything. His absence, her parentage, and she even shows him the photo of him and Karin. How does Sasuke respond to all this? He responds by telling Sarada that it has nothing to do with her.

It's worth noting that this is the first time the Naruto fandom really sees Sasuke, after he has become "reformed", so he wasn't really doing himself any favors with the fandom.

Later on in the spinoff, Suigetsu (one of Sasuke's teammates while he was rogue), carries out a "DNA test" at Sarada's request since she didn't get the answers she was looking for. Suigetsu tells Sarada that Karin is her REAL mother.

The Naruto fandom imploded for the third time at this 'reveal', and many people just had no clue where this storyline was headed. There were some people who hoped that Karin truly was the biological mother, while others hoped Sakura was the biological mom because it would just make her and Sasuke (especially Sasuke) look even worse.

Sarada imploded also at the reveal.

Naruto actually ends up performing his classical Talk-No-Jutsu on Sarada by telling her how it doesn't matter if Sakura isn't her biological mom because connections aren't built only by "blood and time".. So, Sarada has a change of heart and decides it doesn't matter if Sakura isn't her mom because Sakura did raise her.

Towards the end of the spinoff, Sarada starts thinking that Sasuke isn't that bad because he did protect her during a fight with some alien clones (I don't feel like going into that), and he acknowledged Sakura's strength.

At the end of the spinoff, Sarada asks Sasuke if his feelings are connected with Sakura's which was basically just another way of saying "do you actually love her?"

Sasuke declares that her existence is a sign of their love.

Anyway, we also end up finding out that Sakura actually is Sarada's biological mother. Sakura confirms to Sarada that she is her child. Karin also scolds Suigetsu over the 'DNA' test and confirms that Sarada is Sakura's daughter and that she helped during the delivery

So the whole cheating plot/Sasuke having a child with someone else kind of just amounted to nothing in the end.

Although Sasuke does reconcile with his estranged family, this spinoff turned off people who already disliked SasuSaku even more and led to endless memes and video essays.

On the SasuSaku side, they weren't very happy about the Sasuke-cheating-Karin plot, or that he was written to be absent though his main motive in the original manga was to avenge his clan. Some SasuSaku fans also argued that the anime production team deliberately changed/removed certain scenes to make Sasuke and Sakura look worse.

Example #1

Example #2

Sasuke Retsuden

In 2021, it was announced at the Jump Festa that a light novel called Sasuke Retsuden (which focuses on Sasuke and Sakura as a married couple) would be adapted into a manga and eventually into the Boruto anime. The LN was written by Jun Eska.

SasuSaku fans were extremely happy about this, as Sasuke Retsuden portrays Sasuke as being a loving, affectionate, and even somewhat of a possessive husband to Sakura.

However, this didn't sit well with people who dislike the ship. They argued that the light novel is not canon because Kishimoto didn't write it, and that Sasuke's portrayal in the novel is "OOC" because it's different from how he behaves in Naruto Gaiden. They also said it didn't make ...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2025-03-03 04:00:57+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.
• 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!

Previous Scuffles can be found here

r/HobbyDrama also has an affiliated Discord server, which you can join here:

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Chazzyphant on 2025-02-25 01:01:01+00:00.

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**Key note: please read all of this under the "allegedly" umbrella as the tweets/other accounts have been private-d and I anticipate a major scrubbing of social media in the upcoming days/weeks!*

For all 12 of you who may have read my earlier posts, you know I enjoy (if that's the right word) chronicling the rise and fall (and sometimes rise and fall all over again, this time including tumbling over the staircase on the way down) of indie perfume houses/makers. I actually have *yet another* saga to unfurl after this one, making it five total, believe it or not!

This time we're taking a look at a different sort of indie maker: a viral Perfume-Tokker (someone who reviews perfumes on the short-form video social media app TikTok) turned perfumer turned liberal pariah / most disappointing entry in the "oh, crap, HER?" unfollow-saga upon which many of us have reluctantly embarked recently.

Mason Jar Dixon Line

Scout Dixon West-TikTok Instagram (frankly, that name should have been a clue, but the line between cool girl and insufferable mean girl is often very thin, especially on social media) is a musician (front gal for the band "Low Pony"--again with the just this side of eyeroll name!) perfume tokker turned maker. Her slogan on IG is "wearing my heart like a crown" which as a hobby author, makes me ache with a kind of gasoline-scented oil slick envy, while still recognizing the intense stage-managed vibez in such a statement.

And the poison-apple flavored cherry on the rubbery melted ice cream sundae: the "X" handle: guantanamocafe ... UM YEAH. It's giving the girl who wears paper thin Catholic boys' tees, sans bra, tights over vintage full cut briefs (with strategic runs, natch), and beat up Keds or Ducks, while smoking Kools or Camels on the balcony, in an intimate tete a tete with the 53-year-old elegantly scruffy, very much married professor of American Studies at a book launch party. While preening and posing to ensure every other woman in the room sees her doing such.

Also Dixon is half the tin-flute-whistle phrase "Mason-Dixon Line" so make of that what you will.

With her lambent dark eyed beauty and radiant cool girl appeal, Scout Dixon West rapidly conquered multiple artistic outlets, and seemed like one of those hashtag blessed multi-hypenate women whose next venture would be a cookbook, and some kind of achingly edgy-cool cowboy hat line collab. Many viewers said they could watch her read the phone book and noted that they particularly enjoyed the intelligent, nuanced way she spoke about perfume.

Low Pony, High Horse

American Vulgaria explains: "Scout Dixon is a model, actress, screenwriter, and the lead singer of Low Pony, whose summer 2022 debut EP, the star-/shoegazing Ascetic Star, occasioned this interview later in the fall. What followed was a lengthy, free-wheeling convo on life and death, beginnings and ends, “depression” as an identity, the power of getting over yourself, and more. Scout is one of the loveliest and most talented artists around, a true lily of the field."

Perfume website Ministry of Scent describes her thusly: "An ascendent voice in contemporary fragrance who's fostered a devoted following, Scout Dixon West knows her stuff. With tastes ranging from deep classic to hyper-indie, her sly sense of humor is balanced with deep knowledge and a sincere passion for perfume. And it's all adding up — the surprising launch of the first three fragrances in her eponymous fragrance collection proves that Scout is also a creative director to be reckoned with. El Dorado, Incarnate and (instant staff pick) Coney Island Baby resonate with aching nostalgia, set in an American landscape of bright lights, dark secrets and soaring natural beauty."

Industrial Gourmand

In 2024, SDW surprised her fans and followers with an announcement that she'd produced her own capsule perfume collection.

Reddit user u/shmogi describes the 3 fragrances: *"*I tried the sample set and here are some brief initial thoughts:

Incarnate: Interesting warm spicy incense from this, definitely getting more gothic vibes from it, the resin and white pepper really shine here as well. Wearable in cooler/cold weather, definitely a brooding but alluring scent, almost reminiscent of a candle-lit religious ceremony or ritual. Similar vibes and notes (definitely not redundant though) to Zoologist Squid or 4160 The Waft from the Loft.

Coney Island Baby: Pretty realistic with the gasoline + vanilla + wafer combo, kinda like a mix between Namba by Fantôme and Whiff of Waffle Cone by Imaginary Authors. Warm, sweet, ambery, but also plasticky, not necessarily in a good or bad way. Not my personal favorite but if any of these sound like your steez, you will go crazy for this.

El Dorado: My personal favorite out of the bunch, a truly photorealistic and atmospheric scent of a California forest after a light drizzle. Fresh, woody, aromatic, and a bit aquatic. If you like Encre Noire by Lalique, Cape Heartbreak and Every Storm a Serenade by Imaginary Authors, you might appreciate this one, although it's definitely not an identical foresty vibe than them. It's reminiscent the first waft of air you get when you unzip your tent in the morning after camping in the woods.

While a few dissenting voices noted that they felt the proverbial wool was pulled over their eyes...

From u/pushkinalexander's scathing review: "I got all three samples from this brand a little over a week ago. I was excited to try them after watching some reviews on TikTok, and all I can say is that this is the last time I will go to TikTok for perfume recommendations! Not only did none of them smell anything like advertised, they also smell poorly blended and cheap.

Incarnate*: Absolutely none of the incense that was advertised. Instead, just bubblegum and burnt plastic. Like, the Hubba Bubba bubblegum I got from the dollar store as a kid mixed with a weird, chemically and rubbery texture. Smells like a significantly cheaper and infinitely worse version of Toskovat’s Age of Innocence (which is a fragrance I love. If you want grungy bubblegum, try that instead). 1/10*

El Dorado*: I was looking forward to this the most and I was severely let down. The lemon dominates over everything in this. It’s not even a natural lemon, it smells exactly like a bathroom dowsed in lemon cleaner - very synthetic and screechy. I wore it for an hour and scrubbed it off when it started giving me a headache. Absolutely none of the petrichor notes come out in this, nor the woody notes. I’ll be sticking to Le Labo’s Baie 19 for my juniper x petrichor fragrance. 1/10*

Coney Island Baby - Initially, I didn’t mind this one. The gourmand notes are nearly nonexistent, which is perfect for a gourmand hater such as myself. It smells like rubber tires and maybe a little bit of asphalt. However, for some reason the second time I wore it (probably due to resting it for a few days), I got absolutely nothing but smoke. Just a ton of nauseating, BBQ-like smoke. Scrubbed it off after thirty minutes when it became apparent that the smoke smell was not going away, and even then I could STILL smell the nasty charred remnants of a grill after a Fourth of July block party. 1/10

Anyway, as much as I wanted to love these, I really truly disliked this brand. Every scent was a massive let down. I don’t recommend trying any of these perfumes, and frankly I wish I didn’t waste $20 on these samples. Yuck.

Most reviews overall were gushingly positive, though. So far so good, right? A cool person makes 3 interesting indie fragrances. Surely nothing could go wrong with that, right? RIGHT?

"I was born a hater..." a red flag waves quietly in the starry/shoe-y night...

Okay, buckle in, because this is a complex red flag. On 2/10 of this year, SDW made a TT in which she recommends a particular perfume by Byredo. It's full name is contains a word we now consider a slur, G*psy, and most perfume-tokkers elide this with the shortened name "G-Water", while some more politically active perfume tokkers decided not to support Byredo for consistent cultural insensitivity in doggedly keeping the name despite its updated status as a shibboleth. Scout casually states the full name, which by itself isn't a huge deal but in hindsight... (for more reasons on why Byredo's G-Water is controversial/problematic check out the video by creator jeantheperfumequeen "Your faves are problematic" from 10/01/2024). It started to add up to a not-so-cool picture for some.

Scent of burned American Flag

T...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2025-02-24 04:01:09+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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• Don’t be vague, and include context.
• Define any acronyms.
• Link and archive any sources.
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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Reldarino on 2025-02-23 14:15:04+00:00.

Original Title: [VideoGames] How a community gaslighted itself to solve an ARG that never existed. (The story of Silksong, one of Steam's most wishlisted games, its origins, development, and the long wait for a sequel.)

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This post was initially meant to be a response to a comment from u/acanthostegaaa but since Reddit didn't allow such long comments, I tried to do my best to adapt it to a post and why not, add a little extra info for those interested.

Here is my attempt at narrating the story behind Silksong, a popular and awaited videogame, why people are desperate for it's release, why an indie game is one of steam's most wishlisted game and the story of how the community gaslighted itself to believe they were solving an ARG that may have not even existed in the first place.

Silksong is a sequel to a popular indie game, Hollow Knight, that was released back in 2017.

The game is widely considered to be a masterpiece of its genre (it's not everyone's cup of tea, but if you happen to like metroidvanias -a genre derived from old metroid and castlevania games- Hollow knight is a MUST try).

This game had humble origins, with their creators opening up a page to get their game funded on kickstarter () you can see they weren't even the type of game to have wildly succeeded before release, they did manage to get their funding goals, and even managed to get some of the goals for proyects beyond, but the reality is they didn't really have much to spare.

There are some wild stories of the development of this game, and it is obvious it was made with as much love as possible, considering it was made almost entirely by 3 guys, I don't want to keep diving on its origin but suffice it to say they used ALL of their fundings to improve the game further, and they 100% would have kept working on it hadn't they literally run out of funds for it.

In the end, the game was a success, which kept getting better as time passed because their devs kept updating the game, giving free new content, and even entire new areas and challenges as part of their free DLCs.

If you did check out the kickstarter, there is ONE important thing they did get the funding to, but never really ended up developing.

A second playable character.

This character was meant to be released some time later as part of another update, though at the time is was suspected it would come out as a paid dlc, as it was expected to change the game a little more than previous ones.

People really wanted to try it out, to have more of this successfull metroidvania which happened to have everything people seemed to have been looking for in a game of its type.

But the dlc didnt come out.

It was delayed.

And delayed.

And delayed.

It seemed Team Cherry, its developers, wanted to make this dlc special. Every time they thought something would be cool, they said "huh, why don't we also add that?"

And they kept going, the dlc growing larger and larger, more and more content being added to it.

Until, at some point, it was stated that this 2nd playable character wouldn't come out as a dlc.

It wouldn't come out in the game.

It would have its own game.

A sequel to Hollow Knight

And thus, Hollow Knight: Silksong, the leyend, was born.

You can watch it's trailer in its full glory here ()

This is pretty much an introduction intended to make people outside of the genre understand why a game, an indie game at that, seems so relevant.

Team Cherry managed to create a MASTER PIECE with Hollow Knight, a game that satisfied the things its genre promises and took it to the limit.

And finally, after all that time, they would make ANOTHER hollow knight game, a fresh start, a new character, a new world and story to discover.

People went crazy with speculation and theories.

And now, years later, we are here, there is no sequel to Hollow Knight, there is no second character, just it's promise, year after years fans gathered at all game shows expecting a release date, a new trailer, SOMETHING about their so beloved and expected game.

But all there was, was the occasional tweets and messages from team cherry stating they were still working.

And eventually, radio silence, even that was gone.

I think it's at this point that the community started going crazy, some people believing the game wouldn't release, and some people clinging to whatever hope there was left to keep believing, to not give up on the hope of their dreamed sequel.

And with that, "silkposts" -fake posts (often edited twitter messages) that revealed a release date, or some statement from team cherry- went rampant.

Some silkposts were more elaborate than others, some were believable to the point the whole community convinced themselves of their information being true.

Some people would claim to be insiders, game testers, friends of the developers etc and would give random release windows which always turned out to be fake.

At some point this became some sort of competition, who would make the most believable silkpost? Who would convince the most people that something false, was true.

And that led to the eventual introduction of a legend, or a villain, neccessary for this story.

E1331

This motherf**** is a MASTER at silkposting, making very elaborate lies, at one point he convinced the ENTIRE SUBREDDIT (mods included) that he was facing charges from team cherry because of his fake tweets impersonating a member of Team Cherry.

Here is one of his posts on the matter, originally not tagged as Silkpost:

Here is a funny reaction to all that, a mod post with some comments saying they would miss their favorite Silkposter.

He convinced us all, some people made posts about missing him, how he kept the subreddit alive, etc.

Eventually, he returned. It was all a lie. There was no NDA nor did anyone reach to him, nothing.

And of course, he kept silkposting like nothing happened.

Done with the introduction, we can move to other topics, don't worry about E1331, he will come back in the story, he always does.

Recently, as mentioned in the title, a massive coincidence would strike the subreddit.

At this point most people are tired of the wait, some people claim to even forget the game really exist and that they just visit the subreddit to make fun of an imaginary game.

Granted, there was this new trailer () which, hinted by MICROSOFT THEMSELVES was a reveal that silksong would release within 6 months of the trailer reveal, which of course, didn't happen.

We haven't had news from Team Cherry in YEARS, we know NOTHING about the development of Silksong, nothing, more and more people were getting convinced the game was just never coming out, some people started and finished their careers while waiting, it was too long a time, too many silkspost, and too few actual news.

But eventually, it striked.

One of the game developers changed their username and profile picture on twitter, I believe his new username could be rearranged to form "we love a mystery, reddit" or something like that (not exactly that, but it was something similar, if you ignore that there were 3 extra letters that didnt fit lol)

And he started tweeting random things which made no sense (he always does, but these were in succession, and the community would find their way to make them special)

You see, all of his tweets linked to events that happened on april 2nd.

There were 2 things the community couldn't figure out.

Most of his tweets linked to historic events that happened on april 2nd, for example napoleon's wedding, some wine from Australia dated to april, etc

But why was his profile picture a cake? And there was one enigmatic tweet "keep your eyes closed tomorrow" which led nowhere.

The community was puzzled.

But it would strike again, first, when it was revealed "keep your eyes closed tomorrow" is a tweet Imagine Dragons made the year before... on april 2nd

And reverse searching the dev's new pfp led to a cake recipe. Uploaded on april 2nd.

It ALL aligned, no?

That was it!

After all these years of radio silence

After all this time

SOMETHING!

And it got WORSE.

THE VERY NEXT DAY, Nintendo, the company that released the first silksong trailer ages ago made an announcement.

Switch 2.

More info on the nintendo direct.

April 2nd.

The community went WILD, CRAZY!

That's another layer to the "keep your eyes closed tomorrow" too, no? IT WAS THE SWITCH REVEAL! SILKSONG MAY COME OUT AS A RELEASE GAME!

You can read a megathread of the topic here

This was no normal thing, it was SOMETHING, and it made a ruckus big enough that team cherry's PR guy FINALLY said something.

AFTER ALL THESE YEARS!

"It was nothing"

YES! HE SAID... wait... what?

And so, a new era of silksanity began.

It ALL aligned so PERFECTLY it was IT... but the devs denied it? Why?

And the community decided it COULDNT be nothing, there HAD to be something.

What's worse, Team Cherry didn't even communicate the fact that it was nothing themselves, they did it through a famous youtuber.

WHAT? WHY?

YES! OF COURSE! The dev, William, pointed...

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Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1iwb1vh/videogames_how_a_community_gaslighted_itself_to/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/wormwxxd on 2025-02-20 20:55:38+00:00.

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So this one is an oldie, but a goodie. All occurred in 2020.

Context: as has been mentioned in a couple of previous threads here, the model horse collecting community is huge and kinda crazy. There is a ridiculous amount of money floating around in the hobby. Almost furry fandom levels of ‘suspiciously wealthy’ (I say this completely with love, because I adore this community).

The model horse community has a ‘board’ of sorts on Facebook where people can post their transaction reviews with other collectors. Good, bad, etc. Warnings if people ran off with money, or packed a model badly, or the model wasn’t as described etc.

Anyway, a transaction is posted which can be summarised as: “Warning against Particular Hobbyist (let’s call her Sarah Owens). She put a deposit on an expensive model and was meant to pay me the remaining several hundred dollars by November 24th. I went to her wall and found a post from her ‘mom’ (let’s call her mom Cherry) stating that Sarah was hit by a drunk driver and is in ICU. Thoughts and prayers etc.”

“On December 1st there is an update stating that Sarah lost her battle and had passed away: Cherry asks for thoughts and prayers again and gives a small eulogy for Sarah.”

“I searched for a Cherry Owens in the area that had a connection to Sarah so that I could give my condolences but was never able to find one. I also noticed that the Facebook page for Sarah had an RIP posted at the top but it had not been memorialised officially.”

“On December 18th, I coincidentally noticed a ‘Sarah Williams Owens’ congratulating another hobbyist (let’s call this one Chelsea) on winning a model horse auction. Looking at this Sarah Owens’ profile, it appears she’s listed as Chelsea’s mother.”

“I decide to look at Sarah and I’s old conversation and it appears I have been blocked and I am not able to see Sarah’s profile any more. A friend of mine looks for me instead and Sarah has changed her name to ‘Sarah Wayne Williams’. That strikes me as very close to ‘Sarah Williams Owens’. I do more digging and notice that ‘Sarah Williams Owens’ had bid on behalf of Chelsea on several other auctions.”

“Since Sarah had put a deposit down on the model she bought from me, I decided to check PayPal and I found an email and home address. Her name shows on PayPal as ‘Sarah Williams’. Through some fellow hobbyists I learn that this is the same address attached to this other hobbyist ‘Chelsea’.”

“I approach Chelsea about the situation. She claims that Sarah has ‘shipped some things’ for her in the past and wonders if she might be distantly related to Sarah somehow. Sarah has apparently also ‘blocked Chelsea’. I see this whole thing as very suspicious and I never did receive the money, I am therefore leaving warnings on this transaction board to be wary doing business with this person as it’s very likely she faked her death to avoid paying off money owed on models.”

So of course this transaction review sparks immediate interest. Comments point out that the profile link for ‘Sarah Wayne Williams’ includes the name chelsea.owens after the /. Some point out that Chelsea previously went by ‘Chelsea Williams’.

Another comment mentions that Chelsea is posting on her profile trying to act like she had her ‘identity stolen’ to explain the whole thing.

During the entire time that the transaction review thread is blowing up (Chelsea has been tagged several times as she’s part of the group), Chelsea is listing model horses for sale and seemingly totally ignoring the whole thing (besides apparently blocking anyone in the comment thread). Chelsea eventually deletes her account.

Some time later, Chelsea creates a new account under the same name and FINALLY comments on the thread: she admits to all of it and apologises. She admits to the fake accounts (all of them), putting down too much money on model horses. She says her intentions were somehow ‘not bad’.

For most of the part, the response to her apology is met with disdainful acceptance: she’s acknowledged her wrongdoing after all and now has a massive smear against her in the model horse hobby. Many people refuse to do business with her.

Somehow though, she’s still buying and selling models. A decent majority of the hobby is aware of this incident, and she’s even had more ‘not paying’ incidents and flagged transactions on the board since, but in fairness she doesn’t seem to have created any new profiles. Because she seems to drop a lot of money on models all at once, she continues to do transactions because she’ll leap on expensive models and people are keen to sell.

The posts are still up on the Model Horse Transaction Board on Facebook, but the board itself is private, and for the sake of the long-suffering admin team, I ask that you don’t try to join the group to seek out the drama unless you’re a participating member of the hobby.

So there it is. There may be more model horse drama incoming because god knows we’ve got a lot of it including, for example, a marital affair happening at a model horse show, models leaking toxic chemicals, and a Pride-related incident that turned exclusively into alt-right collectors spamming photos of olives.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2025-02-17 04:00:59+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.
• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

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

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r/HobbyDrama also has an affiliated Discord server, which you can join here:

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/IrinadeFrance on 2025-02-17 02:58:33+00:00.

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For the record: this is a post I made on Tumblr a while ago, which I edited and revamped for Reddit. If it sounds oddly familiar to you, I'm basically crossposting my own work here. I can provide proof that the Tumblr account who initially wrote it up is mine, if necessary.

Content warning: I use the g-slur further in to reference a character's name. Just so you know.

*

Picture this: it was March 2023. A few months before, in September 2022, the world had received news of an event many never thought would happen: The Phantom of the Opera, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the longest running show in Broadway history, was to close on February 18, 2023, after running for 35 years, interrupted only by the COVID-19 pandemic. As soon as the announcement was made, however, the demand for tickets to see the show one last time became so overwhelming that the closing performance was set to April 16, 2023 instead.

For months, people mourned. Such a musical had gathered quite a fandom throughout the years, with its ups and its downs (ups and downs varying depending on who you ask, as the 2004 movie adaptation, the filmed 25th anniversary concert at Royal Albert Hall, The Sequel That Shall Not Be Named For Now, the sheer existence of Raoul, vicomte de Chagny, are still topics of fierce debate to this day). As a silver lining, the news outlet BroadwayWorld released short clips of the original Broadway cast (nicknamed amongst connaisseurs "the OBC"), namely Michael Crawford, Sarah Brightman, and Steve Barton. And yours truly, ever the clown, reblogged one of these clips to my humble Tumblr, with the following tags:

#RELEASE THE OBC PRO SHOT ANDREW #I WILL PLEAD YOUR CASE TO PATTI LUPONE IF YOU DO

I doubted, of course, that Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber would ever see my humble plea, busy as he was at the time attempting to transfer his Cinderella musical adaptation from the West End in London to Broadway, with mixed success (but more on that later). But there was an innocent soul, nay, a sweet summer child, who saw my tags, and became impressed and frightened all at once of my gutso, which amply made up for my terrible sense of humour. This sweet summer child, hiding behind anonymity in my askbox, asked me the following question: what did Andrew Lloyd Webber do to make Patti LuPone so upset?

And lo, I was summoned from my bog, cackling in sheer bliss, that I was about to tell my favourite musical theatre drama story of all time: one of the most infamous showdowns in all musical theatre history, starring the man behind the straightest musicals on Broadway (derogatory) and the one and only, the matriarch, the queen, three-time Tony award winner Patti LuPone.

*

Part 1: The Boy Genius and Perón's Flame(s)

The Right Honourable Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber, or, simply, ALW, for those unaware, is arguably the most famous British musical theatre composer of all time, if not outright the most commercially successful composer in history, according to the New York Times. Now, let's give credit where credit is due: he was, for all intents and purposes, a boy genius of sorts in his prime - he met his future collaborator, Tim Rice, when they were 17 and 20 respectively. He then went on to compose his first big musical hit, Jesus Christ Superstar (referred to from now on as JCS), at 22, with Tim Rice writing the lyrics.

JCS was a big deal at the time due to its controversial topic (namely, the Passion with rock music), drawing protests and even outright bans. It's also worth mentioning Broadway wasn't that far off from its golden age, and let's just say the music and style were very different from, say, My Fair Lady. Or The Sound of Music. Or Funny Girl. Or Hello Dolly!. It was basically the RENT, or, for those of you who are younger, the Hamilton of its time. (And before anyone runs off to the comment section: yes, Stephen Sondheim was around at that time, he worked on West Side Story which was revolutionary in of itself, but he's kind of an oddball in this case. You'll understand why later.)

Their real follow up (I'm not counting Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for a variety of reasons, not having to do with its overall quality, but because I could honestly describe it as JCS for kids) was a little musical called Evita, which you might know mainly because of a song called "Don't Cry For Me Argentina". Or at least, your mom has probably heard it once at the very least. It's that song that's oversung from a musical while being out of context along with "I Dreamed a Dream" for Les Misérables. Or "Memory" from Cats.

Evita tells the story of Eva Perón, the wife of an Argentinian dictator. Throughout the first act, she basically screws her way to the top and ends up becoming the mistress of Juan Perón and the most beloved woman in her country through guile and deceit. Yes, I know the historical accuracy is very much debated but I know jackshit about Argentina's history except the bare basics so don't come at me. After being released as a concept album, it was first produced in the West End in London, with Elaine Paige in the role, but because of issues with the Actors' Equity Association, she couldn't reprise her role for the Broadway production. So a Julliard graduate who was mostly starring in David Mamet plays back when people still liked him got the part instead, and that was Patti LuPone, over more than 200 auditionees, which included the likes of Meryl Streep, Raquel Welch, and Ann-Margret.

Patti... did not have a good time during Evita, since the part is basically the kind of score where you can tell the composer is used to writing male parts. Most female singers have a two-octave range, but Patti LuPone's Vocal Chords are blessed with a three-octave range, which she still has to this day, at the age of 75. She's one of the greatest Broadway divas alive for a reason. Nevertheless, she struggled a lot, because the role of Eva Perón, with its many octave jumps, is, along with that of Elphaba in Wicked, one of the hardest to perform 8 times a week. That being said, if you listen to live recordings of her, you wouldn't be able to tell, and the score got a lot easier to sing through later on. But she had this to say:

"Evita was the worst experience of my life. I was screaming my way through a part that could only have been written by a man who hates women*. And I had no support from the producers, who wanted a star performance onstage but treated me as an unknown backstage. It was like Beirut, and I fought like a banshee."*

This is from Patti's autobiography, which she published in 2010 - 15 years after shit with ALW went down. Nevertheless, she won a Tony Award (the Broadway equivalent of the Oscars) for Evita, and she pretty much became a musical theatre household name from then on. She played Fantine in Les Misérables, Nancy in Oliver!, Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes. Meanwhile, ALW's next big hits were Cats (I'm not even kidding, Cats was a hit, although the 2019 film is a MUCH worse product), and, you guessed it, The Phantom of the Opera, which he wrote in part to showcase his then wife Sarah Brightman's triple threat talents.

*

Part 2: Look, I Made a Mask

So, you need to understand before I continue that ALW, from my perspective, has always had a bit of an inferiority complex. He has written some classical music pieces, including a Latin Requiem Mass no one really cares about, because ultimately, he is associated to writing these commercially successful musicals that are all about showcasing a big spectacle, but aren't ultimately substantial. To be fair, I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, but I do think that if he didn't have Hal Prince, Maria Bjornson, Charles Hart and Gillian Lynne backing him up for The Phantom of the Opera (from now on referred to as POTO), it would have probably been a Rocky Horror Picture Show knockoff people would have forgotten about pretty quickly.

I'm not being unkind. See for yourselves.

Yep, that was POTO before any of the people I mentioned above (and the guy from the picture in Chad's mom's fridge) were really involved.

So, remember how I said in the previous part that Stephen Sondheim was an oddball? The thing with him is that his musicals weren't always commercially successful, but in general, in part thanks to being Leonard Bernstein's protégé, he was generally pretty well-respected and it was considered that his work wa...

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Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1ir9yak/broadwaytheatre_bathing_beauty_or_the_tale_of/

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2025-02-10 04:01:05+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.
• 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!

Previous Scuffles can be found here

r/HobbyDrama also has an affiliated Discord server, which you can join here:

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Minh-1987 on 2025-02-09 15:53:59+00:00.

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I have been missing this game lately, and there is no better way to relive the memories by shifting through good ol' dramas, of which there are plenty, but I will go through one of the biggest incidents in the game's lifetime.

Also to preface: The majority of the drama happened on Reddit & Discord (same group mostly), Facebook, and the Brave Exvius forums. Since Facebook search is actual garbage and the forums has been down permanently for quite a while so the majority of sourcing will be from reddit.

The Recap

You may have heard of a certain Final Fantasy game with multiple insane pop star and TikToker collabs, and this is the one. Final Fantasy Brave Exvius (FFBE) was a gacha game developed by Gumi released in 2015 and ended service on October 2024. Despite being a gacha game of a beloved franchise usually means the company is banking on nostalgia to milk the playerbase, one of FFBE's main shining point is its original story and characters which gets a lot of love from both the players and the developers (balancing-wise). The game is also known for the challenging battle system which gets so complex & convoluted that players needed to make a list of abbreviations with dozens of entries, or a flowchart/spreadsheet to parse whatever the hell the enemy's doing.

The Gacha & the Crystal Ball

Many should be familiar, but a gacha game is a game where people use premium resources which can be earned in-game or purchased with real money in order to 'pull' for new characters or items. Lootboxes, basically. In FFBE, the premium currency is called Lapis and you only pull for units (characters). Gacha games are sustained by a handful of heavy spenders called 'whales' or 'dolphins', but the majority of the player base is always going to be 'minnows' (small, occasional purchases) or F2Ps (free-to-play a.k.a players who spend zero money).

Gacha games have multiple ways to entice people to spend resources on the shiny new thing. For casual players like fanservice skins or nostalgia baiting. For the hardcore gameplay-focused ones, it's through powercreeping, which is the process of making new units better than the old ones, and eventually requiring you to use new units to even stand a chance at the new content. Of course, the majority of the player base, being minnows or F2Ps, can't pull on every single new unit there is, so they will save up and only pull on a banner that gives the biggest improvement to their team. But to know when to pull would require knowing the future and what level of improvement is good enough...

Coincidentally, there were two versions of FFBE, Japan (JP) and Global (GL). JP is 6 to 10 months ahead of GL in content, and GL usually just port that content over with rarely any changes, so players would know exactly what unit to pull for to get the biggest bang for their buck and would only pull on those banners exclusively. Of course, the GL devs would sneak in a global-exclusive (GLEX) buffs/units or shift the release schedules around a bit to get people to pull outside of those banners, but usually it doesn't affect the popularity of the hyped power spike banners. There are even slogans for those banners, like "Hoard for Hyoh" or "Accumulate for Akstar".

The game also has a group of dataminers running the Wiki who would update the player base with new information like stats or skill parameter the moment the info goes live. New data is usually pushed to the game during maintenance on Thursday (which would get datamined), and the banner for new units go live on Friday, so there is a one-day period where new units would get evaluated to see if it's worth pulling or not. This is especially important for GLEX unit of which people have zero information on as opposed to JP units where all the worthiness is already well known several months in advance.

Speaking of Akstar...

The Swordsman of Legend & Rumors of Easter

It was in July 2018 when Akstar was released as an unit in JP, and he's perfect. Cool one-eyed one-armed one-legged man with katana. Calls the main character a worm and becomes his mentor. Comes with a badass CG animated super attack. And most importantly, he can cook. Also he was a big power spike, easy to gear, easy to combo without external assistance, very self-efficient as he can do all the related offensive buffs and debuffs himself, and the banner was great value for lapis as you are guaranteed to get one after a certain number of pulls. In GL, it has been decided: he was THE unit to pull for. Wallets are closed until his arrival. The Accumulation for Akstar has begun. At that point in time, GL was around 8 months behind JP and just got through the previous big hype banner with Hyoh mentioned above, and having people hoard for over half a year would certainly not be good for business. So Gumi hatched a plan...

On April 2019, a month before Akstar's projected release date, two new GLEX units were announced to celebrate Easter: Esther (damage) and Sylvie (support). Initial reception was pretty lukewarm, mostly because they are complete unknowns compared to the big A-shaped spike that everyone is hoarding for, and at that point GLEX units were pretty hit or miss. Most of the hype was for buffs to old units and some event items, but nothing much for the units themselves.

[Special unit equipment] that are only fully useful for the units they are from? Easiest skip ever. Was kind of eggcited (dammit) for the Easter event but this is a bit of a downer.

Some users are hoping for an excuse to pull but only for petty reasons:

I hope Esther is as strong as Akstar (yeah, right). I'm sure most players will disagree with me but I think Akstar's sprite is so ugly...

There was practically zero hype for the units. But they didn't know...

The Visions of Bunny Domination

It was the Thursday before the Easter banner. The game went under maintenance, and as always the dataminers soon extracted data and laid out everything for all to see.

The two were absolutely fucking broken.

Preliminary calculations showed that Esther would deal double of Akstar's damage. Even if you leave her with mostly zero gear, she would only deal 10% less damage than Akstar. Esther was also very easy to use with very consistent big damage, while you would need to dance around with various different buff skills for Akstar for a while before he gets going. She is also supposedly nearly as good as the next big power spike unit, which is at least another 8 months away. So pull for Esther now and you never have to spend any lapis for a year.

Friendship with Akstar is over, now Esther is my best friend.

Sylvie herself is also no slouch either. She has all the support skills that would be divided into multiple units: heals HP and MP, cures status effects, variety of buffs & debuffs, lets anyone combo... The endgame content bosses at the time were huge on checking your elemental resistance, called elemental tetris bosses, and she basically invalidate that gimmick entirely. AND she can act like a pseudo-tank.

She is too crazy. I don't even think there is a support unit in JP that match what she offers ...

How in the fuck did they look at Sylvie and think that she was a fair and balanced unit? I mean I'm not pissed but holy shit

Apparently folka (best new support unit) wasn't future proof after all.

she is future proof ..but not GLEX proof lol

Now, dear readers, as the gacha-adverse person you are, probably expected the rates to be low or the banner to be expensive, but no. [The banner has the same safety net as usual, the rates are the same as always, and the two aren't time-limited so people who hoard their Select Summon Tickets can instantly get one or both of them 2 weeks after the banner with zero money spent.](https://www.reddit.com/r/FFBraveExvius/comments/bewnen/gl_gac...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/IHad360K_KarmaDammit on 2025-02-08 15:18:32+00:00.

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Background

Emily Gould is an author and editor who got her start as a blogger in the early 2000s. Her posts on her own blog, Emily Magazine, attracted the attention of the website Gawker, where she became a writer and eventually editor-in-chief in 2006. If you're not familiar with Gawker, they were infamous for posting private information about celebrities, not fact-checking anything, and generally being scummy as all hell.

In 2007, Gould was invited onto Larry King Live for an incredibly awkward interview about the site's Gawker Stalker feature. Gawker Stalker allowed readers to send in celebrities' current locations, which were put together using Google Maps so that paparazzi could find where they were at any time. During the interview, Jimmy Kimmel accused her of helping actual stalkers find celebrities, suggested that the site would sooner or later get a celebrity killed, and pointed out that much of what was posted on Gawker was demonstrably false. Gould responded by laughing nervously, claiming that it usually took a few hours for celebrities' locations to be posted anyway, and insisting that nobody expected the information on their site to be accurate all the time.

Gould soon followed up the interview with a New York Times op-ed defending herself, which claimed that there's nothing wrong with Gawker Stalker since privacy is a thing of the past anyway. This is the internet age!

Certainly, the stalker sightings invade celebrities’ privacy. Because of the Internet, they can no longer demand attention only when they’ve got something to promote, and are subject instead to constant scrutiny. But these stars deserve only as much sympathy as the people who get fired because their employers discover a “my boss is awful” blog posting. There’s just more information available to more people, about more people, than ever these days.

A year later, Gould followed it up with another article, in which she talked about the harassment she'd received after the interview and an article about Gawker's scummy business practices later the same year. In a genuinely shocking twist, she actually showed some self-awareness and quit her position at Gawker:

By revealing my flaws to whoever wanted to look, I thought — incorrectly, as it turned out — that I was inoculating myself against the criticism my Gawker co-workers and I leveled most often. Maybe I was talentless, bad-complected, old-looking and slutty, but no one could call me a hypocrite. I had said that everyone was subject to judgment and scrutiny, and then, by judging and scrutinizing myself relentlessly, I’d invited others to do the same. But maybe I was a hypocrite after all, because now I was beginning to feel that no one should be subject to that kind of scrutiny.

Anyway, none of that is the actual drama. That's just context before we get to it.

The Middling Millennials

Edward Champion was another blogger who became popular around the same time, running a blog and a popular podcast where he played the role of his alter ego, Bat Segundo. Champion/Segundo had something of a reputation for both genuinely interesting discussion and combative, aggressive behavior, and The Bat Segundo Show was a big enough deal to get interviews with people like Alison Bechdel, Weird Al and David Lynch. Appearing on the show could give a new and obscure author a significant boost, and this gave Champion a decent amount of clout in the NYC literary scene. In addition, he was dating Sarah Weinman, the news editor of Publisher Marketplace, which made him even more of an influential figure within the the publishing world.

In June 2014, days before the release of Emily Gould's newest book, Champion posted an 11,000-word essay called "Emily Gould, Literary Narcissism, and the Middling Millennials". For reference, that's about six times the length of this post. It set out to criticize the state of modern literature in general, but mostly Emily Gould. Why? Well, back in her Gawker days, Gould had apparently written an insulting article about Champion, and he'd waited seven years for a chance to get back at her. Unfortunately, the essay seems to have been pretty much scrubbed from the internet, but I was able to find a few quotes in various articles about it, the most notable being this one, which marks the only time I've seen anyone use the word "minx" as an insult outside of A Confederacy of Dunces:

When a minx’s head is so deeply deposited up her own slimy passage, it’s often hard to see the sunshine.

He went on to complain about female writers who "confuse the act of literary engagement with coquettish pom-pom flogging", and called Gould a narcissist for putting her name in the title of her blog. (Keep in mind this whole thing was posted on a blog called "Ed Rants".)

Now, a blog post criticizing Emily Gould probably wouldn't have caused much drama on its own, because, well, go back and read the first section of this writeup. But the vulgar, misogynistic and just plain weird tone of the whole thing (at one point he starts imagining what Gould was like as an infant and refers to her "dewy newborn hands”), along with Champion's dismissive attitude towards female authors in general, led to an enormous controversy on Book Twitter.

Not only was Twitter full of insults towards him--one person memorably described him as "the kind of guy who splits bar tabs with a calculator"--but many other writers started talking about their own bad experiences with him in the past. He'd frequently insulted other authors, sometimes threatened them, and revealed their unpleasant secrets to employers:

On one trip to New York, however, Lennon had become absorbed in a particularly painful family issue and emailed Champion explaining why they wouldn’t be able to meet up. Champion rejected Lennon’s reasons, called the family issue “a first world problem,” and broke off the friendship. Then Champion forwarded the email in which Lennon had described this dreadful, and clearly private, situation to every contact he had at Graywolf Press, Lennon’s publisher. Champion demanded that they drop Lennon as an author: Graywolf could not in good conscience support the work of a person whose family was involved in such circumstances.

He'd told Emily St. John Mandel to "go swallow a glass of cyanide", and the closest anyone came to defending him against charges of misogyny was pointing out that he'd said similar stuff to plenty of male authors. (Champion himself insisted that it was clearly a joke, since you can't fill a glass with pure cyanide.) Some accused Weinman of covering for her boyfriend and using her publishing clout to prevent anyone from calling him out for his behavior.

Various websites and blogs wrote about the incident, and Champion showed up on many of them to defend himself. On one site, he insisted that

We are dealing with words here, not actions. I did not grasp Gould’s hand and force her to read the piece. Although the language emerged as fierce and I now see why the words threatened people, I never had and do not have any intention of physically harming or confronting her. Furthermore, while I understand why some people have perceived my unfiltered essay as misogynistic, I did speak glowingly of several women writers.

I wanted to purge all this accumulated hatred I had for Gould (not as a woman, but as a writer and as a “journalist” and as someone who had harmed the careers of some utterly kind friends). That terrible negativity vanished after writing this piece.

Thank you for writing this response and for challenging my views. I am sorry that you were disturbed by them.

About eight hours after posting the essay, Champion went on Twitter and announced:

No money, no job, no gigs, no agent (a MS out with three). Not good enough. So I’m going to throw myself off a bridge now. No joke. Goodbye.

A few hours later, he tweeted that he'd abandoned his plans and was returning home, and "staying off Twitter for months, seeking help".

I Won't Be Intimidated!

As it turns out, "months" means "almost exactly three months", and Champion got involved in another round of drama that September. Porochista Khakpour, an author known for her 2007 novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects, deleted a comment that Champion had made on her Facebook page insulting another author, Dan Kois. Champion responded with a series of angry tweets about how "Porochista Khakpoour [sic] is an awful narcissist", declaring that "I won't be intimidated", and complaining about how "the publishing industry had done ZERO for me. Fuck you. Fuck all of you".

He announced that he knew a man who had nude photographs of Khakpour, and threatened to reveal publicly who it was unless Khakpour apologized for deleting his Facebook comment by 11:00 that night. Pretty much everyone involved in the NYC publishing industry frantically tweeted at him not to while he counted down the time to 11. He posted the man's...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/ShooHonker on 2025-02-05 17:47:55+00:00.

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Hi! First post on the new account. (No, you can’t know the old one.) Normally, this is where I’d say buckle in, but this one is short and sweet. It’s a ride, just a ride down the road for some milk, you know?

The First Sin

Alright, so: When Gordon Ramsay, celebrity chef and restaurateur, was shooting for Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted, his crew realized they were short on footage, and this shortly after visiting an Australian cheesemaker. Gordon’s tired. He’s jetlagged. If you ask me, he’s possibly hungover.

In a random house in the Tasmanian countryside, no grocery store for miles, he thoughtlessly throws together some video material to fill the air. He has no kitchen equipment, just a wood fireplace, and a cast-iron skillet. He has no ingredients, just a hard loaf and some artisan aged cheeses.

But the show must, regrettably, go on.

He makes the only thing he realistically can, a grilled cheese.

He slices the hunks of cheese as best he can, two kinds of fine, aged stuff. He slices the bread as thin as it will allow, which is about an inch wide. The poor guy is doing his best; he personally salts the butter. And because he can’t help but be bougie, he adds some kimchi.

He does everything as right as he can. He doubles up on fat to crisp the exterior, oil in the pan and butter on the bread. But he still makes mistakes. The fireplace blazes hot. He’s visibly sweating. In his exhaustion, he didn’t even think to oppose the two cheeses so you get both kinds in each bite.

It’s all to no avail. The bread is burnt, and the cheeses, fats locked in over months or years, have not cooperated. (Culinary nerds will know that aged cheeses melt very poorly, and when they do, the fat and oil just splits and oozes away.)

And because he’s in presenter mode, he’s forced to talk up his mistakes. You know how he talks about making everything? ‘Beautiful’? ‘Gorgeous’? ‘Delicious’? That’s how he’s talking about this sandwich as he cuts the world’s saddest cross-section.

Don’t look away. Go back to that link. Look at it. Look at what he was forced to make. This alone would hurt any chef’s pride. But Ramsay isn’t just any chef. He’s a public figure, and this was content. Which means the internet gets to judge him.

The Shame

Immediately, this video trends for all the worst reasons. Uploaded in 2020, it has since accumulated 5.4 million views. (“That doesn’t sound like a lot, ShooHonker!” That’s because people are sharing sad screencaps and dunking on him in comments, not watching him!)

And you have to admit, it’s a little funny. I mean, if you’re a random netizen and you hear that Gordon Goddamn Ramsay made that sandwich, it’s bound to be good fun to pretend he had every reason to do it right and just couldn’t.

People are saying he’d shit on this if it was served to him, people are saying he made it because he’s out of touch with the common man. -isms are tossed around, mainly classism. Here is the bourgeoisie manifest, fame and riches so alienating that even a man born in the working class can’t make a meal for children! And the ego! He dares call this beautiful?

And for years in the wake of this, he’s getting tagged. Every time you cook a scrumptious cheese sam, and you want it to reach more people, just add a dunk on the most high-profile chef in the world and guffaw. “This was so simple!” “Can’t believe you couldn’t make this right!” “Put me on Iron Chef instead!” Tom Brady even gets in on it.

A man can only take so much.

The Double-Dip

Time to take the trolls to task. Gordon is shooting in Southern California, in a public square for a live audience. You just know he’s itching to deliver this rejoinder, but he’s not being bitter. The vibe is more that he’s just eager to prove himself.

This time, he’s pulled out all the stops. He has a special-built cooking stage, with a logo of the word ‘idiot’ in a sandwich lit in neon on the front, a classic reference to the defining moment on Hell’s Kitchen.

He makes his own jalapeno jam. He sears mushrooms. He makes a chutney sauce. He cuts fine Italian country bread, and it’s actually cooperating with his knife. Aged hard cheeses? Nay: Gruyère, cheddar, and taleggio, all either soft or young. And, of course, braised shortrib, seared to perfection.

Here it is! The glory! What a redemption! At last, Gordon Ramsay has proven all the haters wrong, and demonstrated that he can in fact make a delectable and gorgeous vegetable and shortrib melt.

Wait.

The Spirit of u/Fuck_Blue_Shells, Sandwich Reaver

That’s not grilled cheese. That’s a melt! HE DIDN’T MAKE A GRILLED CHEESE! Sound the alarms! He said he’d make grilled cheese, and he made a melt! There’s other ingredients besides bread and cheese!

So yeah, that’s the consensus opinion. It’s undeniably a competent sandwich. “Well done Gordon,” we all say, “Would. That said, is the grilled cheese coming after this one?”

Naturally, the new sandwich trends again amongst those of us following Ramsay’s toddler food arc. No reply has come out, not even a year later. People are still mocking him, too, but at least they're doing it in a more light, teasing way. (Like how you'd mock a math professor for forgetting their algebra.)

My take? I say we give him one more shot. Let him make a wellington beforehand to get the itch out of his system, give him three ingredients, and let him loose. If he goes 0-3, then we can declare that this eight-Michelin-starred chef couldn’t hack it in a middle school cafeteria.

Video sources:

The initial mistake

The delicious non-sequitur

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/RadioRavenRide on 2025-02-04 20:15:52+00:00.

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Introduction

If there was one aspect of modern society that can be considered closest to magic, it would certainly have to be computers. What else would you call cutting crystals of a shiny rock and making it think with lightning? And just like any self-respecting school of magic, computers respond to special languages: programming languages. 

Programming languages are special languages that tell the program what to do (ex. “Add these two numbers”), and are what make up programs. They have been around for about as long as digital computers have, and there is a storied history of old and new languages evolving to meet different needs and niches as they popped up. This means that different languages have different strengths and weaknesses: C is used for very fast and lean programs like operating systems, while JavaScript makes websites interactable in your browser. 

In order to make better programs, there is an ongoing quest to make better programming languages by solving the problems with current languages. One of these problems is managing computer memory. Languages like C are very fast, but require the programmer to personally decide how to deal with many memory objects; this means that objects are often forgotten and not cleared (like not cleaning up the garbage in your room) or programs try to access already freed memory (like trying to find that antique you just threw in the after it got hauled away in the dumpster). On the other hand, languages like JavaScript manage memory by using a garbage collector, which automatically allocates and frees memory (like having your mom clean up after you). However, garbage collectors can lead to pauses and other performance problems (because your mom will nag you). 

One holy grail of programming language design is to find a way to manage memory that is as performant and flexible as it is in C while having the safety of a garbage collector. Some languages do this by creating rules around what kinds of programs they will allow, like having a very strict organization system with airtags on everything. Unfortunately, these workarounds can make the languages difficult to learn and slow to use in development. However, a new open-source language announced in 2019 promised to completely reinvent memory management, among other bold claims that, if all met, would revolutionize computer programming.

History of V

With this knowledge about programming languages in mind, this brings us to the subject of this post, the V language. 

As we alluded to in the previous section,  a new programming language named V was announced in 2019. That’s perfectly normal, but what caught many people’s attention were the promises V’s developers made regarding the language’s capabilities. To quote its official website, V would be fast, simple, and safe, among other traits - qualities it claimed no other language had all of at the same time. 

Remember what we previously mentioned about memory management and how it can be a tradeoff between speed and convenience? V promised to revolutionize memory management by inserting calls to free memory when necessary, which was later called autofree. In the earlier example about picking up trash, this would be like placing a bunch of trash cans in your room such that when you throw your trash out behind your back, the trash always lands in the trash can and funnels into a Rube Goldberg machine that leads to the garbage truck. This feature would essentially provide the simplicity of garbage collection without any of the runtime costs, which would no doubt set V apart from its contemporaries.

Promises and Delivery

Of course, it’s fine to promise cool new features, as long as they are feasible and are delivered in a timely manner. Has the language met the expectations they set? Let’s see:

The most substantial feature that the language is trying to push is autofree. Unfortunately, it does not work. According to this blog post, early builds of the language are far from leak-free, and current builds compiling programs using the “-autofree” tag crash. As of January 12, 2025, the official documentation on GitHub notes that “Autofree is still WIP. Until it stabilises and becomes the default, please avoid using it.” The default memory management system is a tracing garbage collector.

V has also promised “no undefined behavior”. An undefined behavior is one that has an unpredictable outcome: for example, if you divide by zero in C, you could get 0, or your computer could blow up completely. The uncertainty in this response is what makes it undefined. Compilers sometimes use undefined behavior to put in optimizations, but that is not a given.  V’s promise was essentially that it would always be predictable.

If you think that sounds hard to promise across every single program, you wouldn’t be wrong: take the earlier example of dividing by 0: if you divide by 0 in V, the code is translated into C code that divides by 0 - which is still an undefined behavior. The V developers claim that this is defined behavior because the language Go uses a similar approach, although dividing by 0 is undefined in Go as well. This blatantly goes against the common understanding of “undefined behavior” in such a way that it is like saying that you meant to spill milk on the floor in order to clean it. 

What if you like the V language but can’t afford to divorce yourself from your existing codebase written in another language, like C? Well, V has a solution for you: the compiler promises to take C code and convert it to V code, with no drawbacks. This would allow you to take an existing program like the video game Doom and then port it to V. That’s exactly the kind of thing that was promised; in fact, the website claimed that programs such as Doom and SQLite had already been successfully transpiled to V, although the articles that were used to back up these claims were either never made or have disappeared somehow. Eventually, the claims that the transpilation has already been achieved degenerated into being worked on, to eventually being planned. The current state of the project cannot transpile C or C++ to V. 

There are many other cases like this where the project’s website and developers have twisted words or lied about features, but to get into all of it would require a lot of technical jargon. This is a post about drama. 

The V Community

As a result of these unmet promises, many outsiders came to see V as a bundle of unfulfilled promises and empty hype. The top comments in this 2019 Reddit post announcing V’s upcoming release are filled with suspicion and questions about the language’s actual performance. After the first alpha build was released later that year, an article by technical educator Xe Iaso tested all of V’s then-promised features and found that they were all either work in progress or not present at all. Xe Iaso later published two follow-up articles in 2020, noting that while some of their initial issues had been fixed, the language as a whole was still a work in progress. 

Subsequent articles by GitHub user skvortsov (published in 2023) and software engineer Justinas Stankevičius (published last year) used to help write this post express similar skepticism on V’s ability to meet its own promises. 

This has led many people to call V and its developer, Alexander Medvednikov, a scam. While there are definitely people who hate V and refuse to give it any benefit of the doubt, it’s disingenuous to lump in legitimate critics with the unabashed haters and not listen to what they have to say.  

The V community sees things differently, as all three authors we mentioned above have been banned from the V community’s online spaces. Xe Iaso was blocked from seeing the V team’s Twitter and filing new issues with the language, skvortsov was banned multiple times from the V community Discord, and Justinas was temporarily muted from the V subreddit. We might be too, if Alex sees this post go up. 

Money

If V were just an experiential programming language on GitHub, it might be viewed as a simple passion project that made some unrealistic promises. Where the situation gets complicated is that the attention around V does not just take the form of Reddit posts or GitHub discussions. The official V website offers links to sponsor the project (with money), donate to a development PayPal (with money), support the Patreon (with money), or buy merch (with money, but that weasel is pretty cute). 

While the monetization of the project isn’t obtrusive and there’s nothing inherently wrong with crowdfunding, the fact that the language has continuously failed to deliver calls into serious question whether or not the money given by donors and supporters has produced quantifiable results.

Why Does This Matter

This might be a surprise, but there isn’t an infinite amount of stuff in the world. Resources are finite, so at least in the long term, effort and money moved to one project means that another is losing out. This is o...

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/SunnySatori on 2025-02-04 14:54:10+00:00.

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(Repost to correct title format.)

What are Fumos?

The Fumo Fumo Plush series, simply referred to as fumos, are a line of plushies made by the company GIFT that are based on characters from the Touhou Project series.

The initial releases, plushie versions of the protagonists Reimu Hakurei and Marisa Kirisame, were released in August 2008 to great acclaim, with many more characters receiving fumo versions and some even getting giant (deka) versions as well.

Unfortunately, fumos can be extremely expensive to get ahold of, as GIFT doesn’t ship internationally.  This means you have to buy them through a third-party seller.

Scalpers and Bootleggers

Enter the scalpers. These are people who buy fumos for relatively low prices and then sell them online through platforms like EBay with a massive markup. If you want to get your hands on a legit fumo, then it’ll probably cost you at least a hundred bucks, oftentimes more depending on the character.

Obviously, most people aren’t willing to drop $200 on a plush toy, so there has sprung up a massive market for bootleg fumos (nicknamed “fomus”, “fumbos”, or simply “unofficial fumos” by the community). If you see a fumo selling for a price that seems lower than usual, it’s most likely a bootleg.

Community Reactions

Some in the fumo community are strongly against these knockoffs, viewing it as taking money from the original creators and giving it to scammers instead. Others are fairly neutral on the matter, citing the overpriced nature of official fumos and the fact that, generally speaking, the “unofficial” fumos aren’t actually much worse in quality.

But in the end, as long as the lack of international shipping and the expensiveness of the originals continues to be an issue, the bootleg fumos will continue to be a much more accessible option.

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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EnclavedMicrostate on 2025-02-03 04:01:02+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:

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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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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Flares117 on 2025-02-01 20:01:52+00:00.

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Now that 2+ weeks has past, I can no compile and combine my 2 popular posts on SRD that was recommended to be posted here.

Original Threads (don't worry, I'll combine them here, but in case you wanna read the reactions from the other sub) -

Context :

More in depth threads when it first happened in China over at the r/gachagaming subreddit I'll post now. Ill typing this on mobile will clean it up later

• best article on the topic

• timeline of patch history post daiyan

• Announcement just a few minutes ago with comments deleted

Recommend the first post if interested.

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Context : Again first post is the best written one on the topic, but I'll try to somehow summarize it. Girl's Frontline was a relatively niche community in the west, I will abbreviate it as GFL and GFL2. GFL2, now has a MASSIVE playerbase spike due to Global server launch in the West with 2+million new players. However, unlike other gachs games, it almost died in China. It is a standard gacha, where you roll for characters or girls and they are named after guns as they are waifu robots. Every robot or T-Doll as they are called in game has an event or storyline that introduces them, many of them were from the first game.

The game heavily promotes storylines and player interactions with the dolls. You can gift them to raise affinity and marry them (or giving them "covenant rings"). Every event has allusions to you fucking them, but written as it could mean anything. "special night training sessions", "special exercise commander, make sure you have the stamina for this", "you should know I have a night bonus", etc you can visit the gfl2 sub right now to see some posts In GFL2, you can pose them and watch them sleep in their dorms. The point is, it is a very parasocial interaction with these dolls. Fans from Gfl1 proclaim their love for their specific doll with hundreds of hentai doujins, body pillows, keychains, and covenant ring. In China, there is even a themed store where you can buy wedding rings for each doll.

Gacha games are usually F2P live service video games, typically mobile with some PC versions where you "pull" or roll for characters like you would a slot machine. Costs can very from 50 cent a "pull" to 5$ a pull for some of the spendy gachas. Typically you pull for "waifus" or girl characters in the popular gachas, some games have transitioned as they found people would usually only pull for female characters. Then some added romance.

This is alot to unpack, so take your time to digest this info and read the aforementioned links before diving in. This will be a post split into 3 segments, featuring 3 gacha communities and their relation to the event. I do not expect you to read all of this drama in one go. I just had extra time cause of my last post.

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Drama

In China, shortly after release they released a new limited T Doll or girl, Daiyan who is a returning character and a Chinese favorite, as she is Chinese or Asian.

However, during the event storyline, she talked with Raymond, a name that is now infamous.

The short of it is, Raymond has the audacity to talk to our doll as an attractive male side character and our doll thanked him.

The full summarized story is, Raymond is a terrorist and heard daiyan singing at an event, he was moved, talked to her about his life story and trauma, then changed his ways. He was arrested, he wrote a letter to her thanking her and saying he loved her singing and her. She continues writing back that he can change, blah blah. That's it. She never proclaims her love for him, just trying to help him.

However, the CN community dug deep into the game files and voice files and noted Raymond was said 66 times, whereas the MC had 0 voicelines mentioning us. They also noted 50/66 lines was MR. Raymond. Then the outrage occurred. To them, this was Raymond cucking the protag. They then started saying devs want to cuck us with a terrorist, etc etc. They wrote daiyan into being a whore and the like. This is amplified by the fact that Diayan had a job as a singer and the event stated she ENTERTAINED high end clients. They took it as euphemism she is whoring herself out.

The backlash was immense. Within a few weeks, GFL2 dropped out of top 200 in revenue

Another game, Snowbreak, took shots at the GFL deva

By pro claiming they would never cuck their players

In the comments on the Chinese threads Google translated you can see players from almost every big gacha game calling everyone who plays GFL2 a green hat or a cuck. (green hat is an insult for cuck there)

Even now the stigma of being a cuck game is prevalent in the community leading to a small schism BTW gfl1 and 2 subs. See below

The incident is known as the "Raymond" incident and is a touchy subject now.

The drama became so large, the story got rewritten TWICE. with one rewrite changing Raymond into a girl, before scrapping most of the dialogue. The VA in China apologized for saying her lines publicly and the game director released an apology video.

Again, over 1event.

The game never recovered in China and is still relatively unpopular today there.

In comes Global. GFL2 experiences a massive resurgence with over 20 mill first month of global.

However, today Daiyan was announced as next character in Global and the drama is returning as the subs are extra vigilant during this chaotic time. Many wonder if the game will experience a repeat of the drama. On Twitter, and other sites, Chinese bots and some fans are stirring shit again. On the official Twitter the announcement post has dozens of mentions of Raymond NTR.

On the Chinese forums, some people and mostly trolls commissioned NTR daiyan hentai to dm users who post about daiyan. I cannot overstate how many gacha players in China harass GFL2 players for being cucks. Now with global, they are starting another campaign. As of now hundreds of new ntr posts are created on those sites (you know which ones). They are using AI to make most of them in order to flood the sites with them.

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Part 2 Update

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Prologue : Aftermath of GFL2 and r/girlsfrontline - Short segment

• Voice Actress was replaced after harassment campaign and apology statement - You can read more on that in og post. For voicing the character, she apologized, but gone quiet and the studio cannot contact her. AFAIK and from numerous posts, she is done with that side of the community.

New events are unvoiced as they transition voice actresses.

• Storyline was finally rewritten 3 times. First by changing the male character to a girl, then removing the character entirely, then removing the entire terrorist plot.
• While NTR nsfw content was spammed, CN users who participated in trying to kill GFL2 in the west stopped after realizing western audiences don't care and some enjoyed receiving free porn.

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• Snowbreak released a story update. The MAIN point (some ppl will say there is more to it and I WILL GET THERE), is in the story a shapeshifter shifts into one of your pullable girls, and sleeps with the bad guy. Your girl does not sleep with them, a shapeshifter shifts into her and sleeps with them. This sparks SEVERE backlash by the community within 24 hours (12 hours really).
• The devs had an emergency livestream, where they profusely apologized for the update -
• People in CN and the West threatened a boycott and chargebacks regarding the game (comments will be posted after summary)

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Part 1 - Snowbreak Controversy - I will put the comments at the end of the segment.

Context - Snowbreak devs initially participated in the harassment and mocking of GFL players and devs - There are dozens of posts on weibo/billibilli etc. To Summarize, the devs went, "We would never do this to our players, etc etc". So their userbreak harassed GFL players calling them cucks/greenhats.

Drama - However, last month, after the initial harassment of GFL players, they had their own controversial NTR/CUCK drama

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/nalc on 2025-01-31 15:26:50+00:00.

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Background

Cheating in professional sports is nothing new. We've had Lance Armstrong, Spygate (Patriots), the other Spygate (McLaren), the trash can at the Houston Astros, the Black Sox, NBA point shaving, etc.

However, this story is about professional cycling. The drugs that the top male riders at the Tour de France were using were - haha! I had you in the first half, not gonna lie. This particular controversy had absolutely nothing to do with men, drugs, or the Tour de France. It's the bizarre story of a race that never really happened, and I'm not talking about some old timey 1910s controversy where all we have to go off of are some old newspaper clippings, no, this happened in 2023 in the age of social media and cameras everywhere.

First, some background on professional cycling. As an endurance sport that is featured prominently once a year at the Tour de France and every four years at the Olympics, the average viewer usually thinks that it's just some special semi-pro event where the fast guy who you see out training on the multi-use-path by the park at 7am every morning signs up for. Reddit discussions are full of "Everybody in this event has been training just for this for the past 4 years"

Professional cycling, for both men and women, is organized through various domestic racing organizations for smaller races, with the larger races being organized by the International Cycling Union (UCI). The lines between tiers are a little blurrier than is typical for a soccer/football league or for an auto racing series: the top tier (World Tour) teams are required to race at every World Tour race, but are also allowed to race some of the lower tier races. And on the flip side, some of the lower tier (Continental) teams are invited to specific World Tour races. Critically, the top two Continental teams automatically get wildcard invites to all of the World Tour events, but are not required to attend. This creates an interesting dynamic, because it's actually better to be the top Continental team than it is the worst World Tour team, unlike other league systems with promotion/relegation. Because the World Tour teams must race every World Tour race, they end up spending a lot of resources to go to some of the more obscure World Tour Races. A top Continental team gets automatic wildcard invites to the Tour de France and all of the most important European races, but then can choose to skip out on some of the less 'bang for the buck' international races where the prize money / exposure isn't worth the logistics and travel expenses.

There's a complex point system that awards points to riders based on both how well they finish in a given race and how important the race is, with the more prestigious races paying out higher points. Then a team gets ranked based on how many points their riders have in total. The teams I'm referring to- here are "Trade Teams", which have a sponsor and likely pay their riders (unfortunately only the top Women's teams actually have a minimum salary, so there's plenty of women racing for no wages which is a whole different situation deserving of its own post - women's cycling might be one of the few professional sports where a majority of the professionals have a day-job and don't get paid, just get their racing expenses covered, which is part of why I'm calling this HobbyDrama and not ProfessionalSportsballMillionaireDrama).

To add a further wrinkle to this, once a year, individual countries organize a National Championship race that is only open to riders from that country, with the winner being able to be crowned National Champion for the next 12 months. These races still pay out UCI points, but since eligibility is based on your nationality, trade teams have unequal representation. You're the only New Zealander rider on Team Jumbo Visma? Guess that means you're racing with no teammates. You're one of eleven Belgians on Team Quickstep? Well, guess there's a lot of friendly competition.

Typically, the national championships are held pretty close together (since nobody can race multiples) and it's a mid-season break from the normal racing a bit like an All-Star Break or League Cup. Afterwards the trade teams re-form and it goes back normal.

Then, near the end of the season, there is a World Championship. This is a single race where the winner is crowned World Champion for the next 12 months, and teams are by country rather than by trade teams. They add up all the UCI points that a certain country has earned to determine the number of slots - most road races are only really feasible with 150-200 riders, so while normal races typically have about 22 trade teams of 8 riders each, the World Championship has more than 22 countries represented and only the countries with the most points can send big teams. It's probably also worth mentioning that the national cycling bodies determine who gets to go - if you have the most points of any rider from your country, that helps make sure your country gets a slot, but there is no guarantee that you personally are the one who gets to go. Then a national team is temporarily formed based on who has been selected, and they are supposed to work together despite being on different trade teams.

This points system is also how the Olympics selection works - different countries will get a certain number of starting slots based on their UCI points, then the countries select it. The Olympics is basically just a bigger and more prestigious instantiation of the World Championships, and it usually still takes a backseat to some of the more prestigious races like the Tour de France.

The 2023 Season

So if you're paying close attention, you may have noticed the following. A country's national cycling organization can organize a National Championship race, which pays out UCI points. The World Championship and Olympic qualifiers are based on how many UCI points all of the riders from a certain country have.

Enter the Tashkent City Women Professional Cycling Team (TCW), established in Uzbekistan in 2022 as a Continental team. It contains exclusively Uzbek riders. In 2023, TCW shows up at the Uzbekistan National Championship road race. And, wouldn't you know it, they absolutely dominate. The Top Ten riders are all on TCW, with Yanina Kuskova winning the championship, and they collect a boatload of UCI points - over 700 points from this single race, which occured in the middle of a week where there were four other races in Uzbekistan. The curious thing is that there is no evidence that this race ever happens. The Uzbek national cycling federation submitted results, sure, but there's no photos or videos of the event. Other teams claim that the race never even happened.

In addition, they collect a bunch of points at smaller events, such as some early-season races in Cyprus and in Belgrade in the summer. Other teams filed a protest, claiming that the Cyprus races didn't have enough participants to qualify for giving out UCI points, and claiming that the Belgrade race was entered by both the Tashkent City and the Uzbek National team as two separate teams which then worked together.

The other Continental teams claimed that Tashkent City was cheating by winning all these points at dubious events, just to get the wildcard invite to the Tour de France and qualify for spots at the 2024 Olympics. The UCI investigated and concluded that the National Championship never actually happened, and stripped the points. However, the team had enough points from the other events to still qualify as one of the top Continental teams and earn the Wildcard invites as well as two slots at the Olympics. There's some hand-wringing by the other Continental teams about it, and Tashkent City makes a statement like "Well, we're just happy to be here, we're going to try our best" and the 2023 season wraps.

The 2024 Season

Going in to 2024 with automatic invites to all the Women's World Tour Events, Tashkent City declined most of them, stating it lacked the resources to compete (noting that at this level of racing, it isn't showing up with a rider and a bike - teams need a bus for the riders, multiple support cars with spare bikes and coaches, mechanics, doctors, chefs, and all need to stay at hotels so it's quite expensive to attend, which is why I mentioned that the Wildcard invite without mandatory attendance is such a sweet gig, a top Continental team with limited budget can decline any event they want while the bottom World Tour teams are required to go no matter what)

Tashkent City did send a full squad of riders to the 2024 Tour de France Femmes, one of the most prestigious races on the calendar. This is an 8-day race covering almost 1,000 kilometers, with 154 riders from 22 teams. In typical stage racing rules, the fastest rider of each day is crowned the stage winner, then the rider with the fastest overall time wears the coveted Yellow Jersey each day and the fastest overall time is considered the winner of the event. The stages vary in profile - there are three flat stages, sometimes called "sprint" stages, where the terrain is very easy and the race usually sticks together in a big bunch, with the powerful sprinters going full effort just at the very end to be the fastest. There are two mountain stages, favoring the smaller climbers, and which usually determine the Yellow Jersey winner. T...

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This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Inquilinus on 2025-01-30 16:17:40+00:00.

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Warning: Discussion of substance abuse and mental health issues.

On January 30th, 2013, a video that shocked the idol world was uploaded. It featured AKB48 member Minegishi Minami with a crudely shaved head, tearfully apologizing to the members, staff, fans, and her family, and begging to continue being accepted as a member of AKB48. It was widely reported on in Japan and throughout the world, one of the few times AKB48 has gotten exposure outside of Asia. I want to explain the story behind it. First, I’ll start with a primer.

Terminology

AKB48: AKB48 is an idol group founded in 2005 by Akimoto Yasushi. The concept was “idols you can meet”, with a theater where they perform every day. AKB48 has a large number of members as each theater performance is conducted by a team of 16 members, and there are multiple teams alternating on different days. AKB48 also founded sister groups throughout Japan with their own members, teams, and setlists and who perform at their own theater. Akimoto Yasushi writes the lyrics for all of the songs for AKB48 and its sister groups. Members are added in numbered generations.

Theater: the AKB48 theater is a tiny venue on the 8th floor of Akihabara’s Don Quijote, a discount supermarket chain. It has 6 rows of benches and standing room in the back, with a total capacity of 250 people. There are also two massive pillars that block the stage for most of the audience. AKB48 has been performing there almost uninterrupted since December 2005. They’ve performed roughly 6600 shows there at time of writing. The members are divided into teams, with the classic teams being Team A, Team K, and Team B, and the teams perform their own setlists, known as stages.

Senbatsu: the members chosen to participate in a single. While the size of the senbatsu varies, it’s generally around 16 members. Considering AKB48 (and it’s sister groups) has hundreds of members, it’s often seen as the ultimate goal of many members to enter into the senbatsu. It features members who are the most popular, or are being pushed by management to become popular. Usually, AKB48 singles were a kind of “all star” lineup with the top members of each sister group being selected (the sister group’s singles would feature a lineup of just their own members) alongside the top AKB48 members.

Center: the frontwoman for the single. Only very few members ever become center. Occasionally, a single will feature multiple centers, with the members sharing the position.

Graduation: when a member leaves the group, it’s typically a graduation. They announce graduation publicly, then graduate a few months later. They have a graduation performance at the theater as their last activity. Sometimes members withdraw or are terminated, which is not considered a graduation. This has only happened a couple of times, typically for criminal behavior.

Kenkyuusei: literally “research students”, kenkyuusei are trainees. They perform their own stages at the theater. After they have proved themselves, they are promoted to full member and assigned a team. It typically takes a couple of years for a kenkyuusei to be promoted. The fastest so far has been 68 days; the slowest 1958 days. The first 3 generations of AKB48 did not participate in the kenkyuusei system.

General Election: In 2009, AKB48 started the General Election, where fans could vote for the senbatsu of a single once a year. Due to the huge number of members, many fans would complain to the management that they were choosing the wrong members for the senbatsu. So, AKB48 created the General Election. The single preceding the Election would contain a voting ticket. For each CD you bought, you received a vote that you could put towards your favorite member. The members who received the most votes would be in the senbatsu, with the one who received the most being the center. Initially, it was the top 21 members, but was later reduced to the top 16.

Love Ban: The love ban is probably the single most misunderstood part of AKB48. It’s commonly reported that AKB48 members are contractually banned from dating. This is not true. However, some fans will become extremely upset if a member is caught dating. It’s huge fodder for tabloids and sometimes develops into a big scandal. AKB48 came into unprecedented popularity in the early 2010s, so uncovering a dating scandal was guaranteed big news. Some members have graduated after tabloids published pictures of them with a man. However, for most members, nothing happened and it just blew over.

Minegishi Minami

Minegishi Minami was born in Tokyo on November 15th, 1992. She grew up dancing, doing ballet from the age of four and hip-hop dancing from the age of six. She took singing lessons throughout her childhood and had a great singing voice. Growing up, she always wanted to be a performer because, in her own words, she “liked to stand out” and “had unfounded confidence.” She also loved idols, especially Morning Musume, and even auditioned for their children-affiliate Hello!Project Kids, but failed. In mid-2005, she saw an ad for a new idol group with a theater called Akihabara48 and didn’t really understand what it was, but her mother encouraged her to apply because it was produced by Akimoto Yasushi. First there would be an initial screening and then an in-person audition. Minegishi failed the initial screening. However, when reviewing the failed applicants, one of the managers noticed that she has the same birthday as him, and decided to pass her on to the audition. She passed the audition, and became a member of AKB48’s 1st generation.

Early Days

The early years of AKB48 were rough, popularity-wise. Their first show was on December 8th and had an audience of only 7 fans. At first, Minegishi had trouble finding her character. She originally wanted to be called Minami, but fellow member Takahashi Minami had already taken it. She considered using a stage name, but settled on the nickname Miichan, which I’ll be using from now on. She wanted to be considered a cute and pure “traditional idol”, but she thought others outshone her in that regard. She tried wearing glasses to stand out, but that didn’t work. However, she eventually found her footing. AKB48 stages have dedicated talk sections, called MCs. The MCs are an important part of a stage. The members will tell funny stories, make jokes, or do skits. Miichan was really good at leading the MCs and became known as “the funny girl”. The thing is, Miichan hated being the funny girl. Throughout her career, Miichan has always been described by herself and other members as a very negative person who is extremely hard on herself.

On February 1st, AKB48 released its first unofficial single (they had yet to be signed by a major label), featuring all 20 members of AKB48. They added the 16-member 2nd generation later that month, and the 1st generation became Team A with the 2nd generation being Team K. Because they had so many members and it was difficult for fans to keep up, the management decided they needed to make one member the star. They chose 1st generation member Maeda Atsuko (nicknamed Acchan) as their star. This became apparent in April, when Team A started their 2nd stage. It included a four-member song called Nagisa no Cherry, which featured Acchan as the center, and three members as back-up singers/dancers. Miichan was one of these backups. At first, she refused to do it. She asked the management why Acchan, who was the same age and generation as her, should stand above her. She only relented when she saw Acchan crying to the management, begging them to not make her the center.

In June, AKB48 released their 2nd unofficial single, Skirt, Hirari. Skirt, Hirari was the first single featuring the senbatsu system. Only seven members were selected. Initially, Miichan was one of these members. However, at the last minute, management decided that she didn’t fit the concept and replaced her with someone else. The seven members became known as the “Sukahira 7” and were poised to be the ones to lead AKB48. Miichan was devastated and her self-esteem was destroyed.

In late 2006, AKB48 signed to DefSTAR records and released their 1st official single, Aitakatta. Miichan was included in the senbatsu. She would be a regular senbatsu member from then on. She became extremely close to her fellow Team A members, especially the aforementioned Takahashi Minami (officially “Minami”, but I’ll use “Takamina” for clarity) and Acchan, and another Team A member Kojima Haruna (Kojiharu). All three of them were members of Sukahira 7, and Acchan centered every single of the era, occasionally co-centering with Takamina or Kojiharu.

For several years, AKB48 continued putting on theater shows and releasing singles, but still hadn’t reached popularity. In January 2008, AKB48 got its first variety show, AKB1ji59fun, which was later renamed to AKBingo. Miichan, who already had developed a comedic persona during MCs, thrived on AKBingo. She became well-known for her guigui character, someone who will do anything to get screen time, and her being someone easy to make fun of.

In November 2008, AKB48 created the subunit no3b, consisting of Miichan, Takamina, and Kojiharu. No3...

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