#lily orchard is bad at video games

[rambling-crerchur]

So we have here: 2 Souls games, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Kingdom Hearts. Now for context, I havent played any of these, but like. Lily. These, and especially KH and Soulslikes, aren't comparable. Stop pretending KH is as hard as Dark Souls. Its a game for children that you have a chronic skill issue at. KH isnt as hard/harder than Dark Souls, you're just extremely bad at video games, ones that are for children might I add

Also, and I forgot this entierely when writing that first paragraph but: THOSE ARE ENTIERLY DIFFERENT GENRES. Comparing those is like comparing apples and oranges

[apintofguinness]

Laughs in Orphan of Kos

So on her stream yesterday Lorch played footage of her terrible Kingdom Hearts gameplay taking L after L from a boss rush in a kids' game and proceeded to say with her whole chest:

"I'd like to see any Dark Souls player do this"

Well you hear that Soulsbros? Sounds like a challenge!

[lilyvalerieorchard]

So you admit that you NEVER watched Arcane? That you instantly dismissed as garbage, sight unseen, because it was a dark, serious fantasy-drama series? Because it was based on a video game you're snobbish towards because you hate its fanbase?

Uh, Lily? Mortal Kombat, Warcraft 1, Wing Commander, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil and Max Payne are FANTASTIC GAMES. They're classics for a reason. Just because they had terrible movies does not automatically make them garbage. Then again, you never even played them because anything that isn't your precious Kingdom Hearts, World Of Warcraft, Knights Of The Old Republic II, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Coffin Of Andy And Leyley, Baldur's Gate II Incest Mod is "absolute junk devoid of any merit whatsoever".

You're not a critic, you're not a taste-maker. You're a shallow, narcissistic snob.

Once more: LILY ORCHARD ADMITS SHE NEVER WATCHED ARACNE.

[sjbattleangel]

Special thanks to @agramuglia for inspiring this awful joke.

Everyone: "Steven Universe/She-Ra/Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend Of Korra/Star Wars: The Last Jedi/The Last Of Us/The Last Of Us Part II/The MCU/G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel run/Gail Simone's Birds Of Prey run/The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance/The Persona games/The Sandman/X-Men/The Simpsons/Everything by Dan Slott/Everything by Tom Taylor/Everything by Jason Aaron/Everything by Donny Cates/Everything by Brian Michael Bendis/Everything by Devin Grayson/Everything by Jonathan Hickman/Everything by Scott Snyder/Everything by James Tynion IV/Everything by Joshua Williamson, etc are anti-intellectual, regressive, pro-status quo, far-right Trojan Horses pretending to be "diverse and progressive" just so they can take advantage of naïve leftists."

Me: "No. That's Velma".

[lilyvalorchard]

Solid Lily: "You know what would Mortal Kombat, Warcraft 1, Wing Commander, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil and Max Payne ACTUALLY GOOD GAMES? Make them all Kingdom Hearts clones with Andy and Leyley-styled art. Plus, TONS of sister-sex minigames!"

[punkishtoxtricity]

a comprehensive list of problems with lily orchards pokemon video

there is a point to where my criticisms just repeats so they’ll get different down the post

generation 1

-she claims that blue is a friendly rival when the whole point of him is that he’s a dumb kid. he’s a cocky 11 year old who thinks he’s better than you and grows to realize it’s not all about strong pokemon

-complains about length of dungeons such as lavender tower and silph co but for some reason likes rock tunnel??

-complains about other youtubers strategies for gyms that are usually meant for nuzlockes and challenge runs when she’s playing casual

-acts like she is so much better than everyone else for her strategy when it’s been done to a more extreme degree before

-acts like having butterfree on her team is some feat of strength

generation 2

-thinks silver is the worse character ever and all around a jerk

-complains about the ai of the game beating her when in reality her team just kinda. sucks

-complains about having bad pokemon and then doesn’t catch the good ones that the game literally hands to you

-straight up does not do kanto. has me thinking she just didn’t wanna fight red

generation 3

-this is the start of her being very weird about gardevoir. she calls ralts her child and then throughout the video has art of her being romantic with it which is. eugh. apparently she has incest accusations so i’m not that suprised

-calling magma and aqua the best teams of the series because “they don’t impede on the story”

-complains about the legendaries

-complains about the water routes and proceeds to throw out ideas that don’t make sense for an ocean

generation 4

-this is the start of her hacking in ralts as her starter. it’s very funny because it’s legitimately obtainable in every game she plays besides gen 5

-complains about parts of the game being too hard when she’s using ralts. which dies if it gets touched by a slight breeze

-whines about there being too much dialogue and then genuinely does not understand the story. common theme around all the story driven pokemon games

-she’s VERY annoying about the rivals. like they’re there for a reason

-the start of her acting like her calm mind strategy is the best thing ever. calls other youtubers stupid once again for their cynthia strategies. she can’t choose between gardevoir being the most broken pokemon and blaming ralts sucking on the game(the whole video is a big contrarian fest)

gen 5

oh boy. there’s a lot

-complains about there being too much story in the game and calls the game a peta reply. which is funny because peta is an american company and pokemon is japanese. (also the peta criticism of pokemon didn’t come around until AFTER black and white)

-compares a character who is a victim of abuse and has been indoctrinated by what is basically a cult to a podcast alpha male incel. looking at the allegations against her this also makes sense as to why she doesn’t like him

-whines more about there being too much reading. at this point i started believing she was straight up illiterate

-whines about the amount of rival fights and how it’s “impeding exploration” i don’t think she wants to play an actual video game she just want a pet sim

-misunderstands the whole moral of the game, being that not everything is black and white

generation 6

-complains about not being able to get gardevoirs megastone before the post game, so obviously she hacks it in.

-goes on a tangent about shiny pokemon and how their community is stupid, misunderstanding that people just do it FOR FUN

-also complains about something she calls “damage inflation” with the opponents being able to 1 shot ralts. this is all actually because ralts has god awful defenses, which she ignores.

-loses to what is one of the easiest gyms in the entire series. not really anything wrong with this i just honestly think she sucks at the game(skill issue)

-says x and y are the best games because there’s not much dialogue

gen 7

-once again spends the whole hour complaining about the amount of talking and then doesn’t analyze what the characters are actually saying. still believe she can’t read

-compares gladion to a hitler youth which is??? he’s hawaiian and light skinned but he’s still just an abused kid trying to find his way in lofe(doubt she actually read his dialogue)

-complains about team skill being “an unfunny joke” when the whole point of the team is that guzma was an abused kid who took in those in need and just formed a group of thugs

-still complains about “damage inflation” instead of actually changing her strategy or stepping out of her comfort zone pokemon wise because ralts sucks against the water trial

-goes on a tangent about how lillie should have been the main character while still choosing to mash through her dialogue

generation 8

-whines about dexit and calls dynamax the worst mechanic when it is in fact loved by vgc players

-calls milo a twunk (she doesn’t know what that means)

-a lot of the same problems of the previous gens, can’t read and doesn’t understand the story

-she’s also weird about gardevoir in this one. i think she just REALLY wants to fuck it

generation 9

-whines about dialogue some more

-literally all of the complaints at this point are the same. she can’t form an actual opinion of it bc she can’t FUCKING PAY ATTENTION TO WHAG THEYRE SAYING

overall

-she’s a racist creep to japanese folk outside of the video so hmmm

-has apparently assaulted someone so i see why she has no sympathy for the characters that are victims of abuse

-the weirdest about the pokemon and the characters. compares them to nazis a bunch

-is unfunny

anyway thanks for reading all the way through. the vid made me loose 200 brain cells and i will never stop hating

[crimsonender]

Why do you care so much about Lily Orchard

Actually getting this a little backwards. I took notice of Lily Orchard as an individual earlier this year, back in January to March, when she was listed amongst a series of trans creators that are unfairly scrutinized. As she was the only one who had a Tumblr at the time I began following her because I wanted to basically spite transphobes. I've come under fire myself for being trans in the past.

What I discovered in the months I followed her is that she had awful takes and was really dismissive and sometimes outright mean to her fans. I went to a live stream or two, and I watched a couple videos. I soon became critical of her, and decided to do some research. This lead me to Hiding in Private and Sai Scribbles. At the time, I was focused on Lily being a bad YouTuber, both in terms of content and how she treated her fans.

I knew that no one else was going to cover her video on the Coffin of Andy and Leyley because most people dismiss this gothic horror game as problematic and incestuous. As a fan of the genre and the game itself I decided to cover the video. Then as a spur of the moment decision at the end of that stream I decided to cover her latest Kingdom Hearts video as well. This would turn into a an edited video later on where I was very insistant on not focusing on Lily's actions and the allegations. I was mostly concerned with her rhetoric and behaviour as a YouTuber, because I had been wanting to talk about media analysis for a long time. As you can see from my coverage on MatPat, Anita Sarkiseen, Anthony Gramgulia, and iDubbbz. I think there is something fundamentaly flawed with the way the modern internet analyzes media. Each of these individuals has contributed negatively to this rhetoric in their own way, but where people like Anthony and iDubbbz and even Sarkiseen have tried to improve (and in Anthony's case a large reason for the majority of his writing that is worthy of criticism was how he was editorialized by the publications he worked for) Lily has always doubled down and gotten worse. Moreover my biggest issue with Lily right now is how she interacts with her fandom, which is unique to her. She has been publically very sexual towards them, she encourages anti-intellectualism, has a history of abuse, so yeah that definitely is a factor. My last two videos were less about her media analysis and more about how she interacts with her audience and the world around her. I think people like Lily are dangerous.

I don't hate everyone I cover. I'm friends with Anthony and I like his videos and style of writing. He's not perfect but he's also very open to criticism. iDubbbz I'm not a big fan of but for the most part I'm fairly indifferent to. MatPat's videos while I'm highly critical of them, are somewhat of a guilty pleasure for me and I've been watching him since he released his first Starfox video. Sarkiseen I am more critical of but acknowledge she was one of the first people to make videos about feminism in modern media on the scale she was doing it. I wouldn't say anything these people are doing is dangerous.

If Lily was just some woman on the internet with a bad opinion then I probably wouldn't care. It's Lily's control over such a large number of people that worries me. Dismantling her rhetoric is how we show the people she has control over a way out. It's how we teach people that have been trained to turn their brain off that they should think for themselves. Videos like Joon the King's covering her allegations are important don't get me wrong, but unless we teach people to think for themselves, they're just going to fall for the next grifter to come along. The crux of the matter is that no one person should dictate what your opinion is based on how big of a fan you are of them. This problem is so much bigger than Lily. Lily just represents this issue to such a large degree.

[saiscribbles]

Sorry for all the Lily Posting today but... that's what the tag is for block it if you don't wanna hear it lol. It's not my fault she keeps making wild posts. Trigger warning for weird sex pest shit:

Lily did you talk about incest in "a clinical fashion" when you just randomly brought up 4 books about incest for no clear reason?

Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma | Goodreads Flawed by Kate Avelynn | Goodreads Flowers in the Attic - Wikipedia

While saying you just toooootally didn't know the content of Forbidden before reading it despite also claiming to go into everything "pre-spoiled" in your second Dungeon Meshi video?

Hale by K. Webster | Goodreads

Via my stream VOD on Lily's "Wholesome vs Dark media" video as she's deleted this post.

This is the synopsis blurb of Forbidden by the way:

So Lily is expecting people to believe that she just happened to oh so coincidentally pick up 4 books specifically about brother sister incest.

Did she also talk about it "clinically" when she compared herself to Andy and her sister Courtney to Leyley from the Coffin of Andy and Leyley? Her sister who has accused her of rape when they were teenagers, well before Lily transitioned? And how she keeps comparing Courtney to Leyley? And keeps using music from the game when talking about Courtney's accusations in videos that are ostensibly supposed to be about media?

Were you talking about it "clinically" when you said this shit, Lily?

Also fun bonus! When looking for the part Lily says she goes into everything pre-spoilered I stumbled across this lovely exchange in her comments:

So Lily really did just up and spoil the ending of the Dungeon Meshi manga in her second video just to spite the people who told her the first video was bad. Just like I said. Lily you are so fucking predictable once one figures out how you tick.

Luckily you can watch my stream on her videos and how bad they are where I went in and actually redacted the manga spoilers because I actually care about the experience of my audience:

More digestible cuts of those reacts coming eventually.

[cherrytea556]

Just because someone turned out to be a bad person doesn't mean that bad thing didn't happen to them or that person was entirely wrong. I hate the internet's narrow view that just because someone got exposed as a bad person, it suddenly dismisses their claims against another.

Ava Kris Tyson is a child predator, that doesn't mean SunnyV2 video was suddenly correct. Context matters. It was still a transphobic video that didn't even suggest any of the actual harmful things Ava has done.

Synnibear03 is a child predator and Birdie, while so far I wouldn't say he's a child predator, was exposed to be inappropriate with kids (commenting on a 15 year old's fanart of his hypersexual ocs when he shouldn't, the whole dating a 13 year old thing that I've been iffy about) That doesn't mean Deadwingdork 'won' (and I find it gross how his fans used synni being exposed as a groomer a bloody celebration. Wow, way to say you don't actually care about kids being affected guys!) He didn't won because even in that situation, he was whiny for such minimal reasons like a fictional room and trigger warnings, commented on things like he knew when he didn't know them like defending Birdie's parents and is also transphobic (constantly using 'it' to mock Birdie's pronouns as he called it dehumanizing instead of just using 'he') Deadwingdork had his own problems that shouldn't be negated or excused just because these two people turned out to be bad.

The situation with Cody Ko where people dismissed Tana's claim of him saing her when she was a minor. Just because she's been exposed as a bad person before doesn't mean bad things couldn't have happened to her or someone taking advantage of her, especially when she's a minor in an online sphere.

And now I'm worried people are gonna do the same thing where Courtney claims of her sister, Lily Orchard, saing her would be dismissed as she's now revealed to be a bad person. Lily especially will definitely fucking use it to negate her own issues and I need everyone to be aware stop with this mentality towards bad people. All that's doing is letting other bad people like Lily get away with their actions when we shouldn't be doing that. Don't dismiss Courtney's claims just because she's a bad person.

Bad people aren't always wrong and can get mistreated by others and those by negating those others issues, your essentially giving them a pass. And you don't want to do that. Especially Lily. Don't play her game.

[oblivionbladetd]

The Fatal Flaw of Lily Orchards Entire Body of Work: Immersed like Wearin' Combat Boots on a Floor that has been Mopped at Some Point in the last 24 Hours.

I was saving this, but Lorch showed her whole ass again, so I moved it up.

Now, just the other day, I was playing Cyberpunk 2077. Despite being two dashes from the nearest fast travel station, I summoned up my personal favorite car and proceeded to cover 2/3rds of the map to my next job I felt like doing. Nothing really happened on the way there either. I was not bored, though. I was still having fun. I loved the subtle shifts in the environment, the sound design of the world, just existing in the wonderful world CDPR had made. I was immersed in the experience.

I bring that up because I am getting the feeling that Lily... Kinda just can't. Or, at the very least, doesn't 90% of the time. For even when she likes something, she doesn't seem to look very deep in it.

It goes all the way back to that Steven Universe video. A lot of stuff that is not directly plagiarized is her own very surface level takes. Like the Diamonds as Nazis comparison only works if you don't open your mind to the fact that they are inhuman beings that do actually need to be taught humanity, they don't have being reasonable people.exe on board, for gems are a made to purpose race. The show does even spell it out for you in a song, specifically What's the Use of Feeling Blue?, Yellow doesn't ever try and wave away depression, she's literally asking her "sister" what the point of emotions are as they were never made to ponder them until very recently. Because even they are purpose made Gems.

It becomes quite obvious in her fanfics. Niva gets to be measured in giga-Kyoshis because?... she actively despises the cultures that she'd need to fully internalize to use the bending styles with any level of efficiency? Sure fuck it, who cares about living breathing worlds when FACTS AND LOGIC say it's possible therefore she can! Losing childhoods to bloodbend without a full moon? Sounds like a skill issue, Fucko! There's no reverence, no respect, not even a token gesture of balance. It is possible so she can just do it despite it being straight up improbable.

Her streams and retrospective on pokemon even paint it as somebody that can’t be assed to just let themselves IN! Dragon Age is a very high fantasy game. The game wants you to be part of its world! Meanwhile, we have Lily charging an unwavering, perfectly straight line to the next set of end credits in each game, and from what I can tell of her pokemon retrospective does so with most rpgs. She made it sound like Gen 2 ends at the elite 4, and the other half of the game is a waste.

Now, despite these humongous paragraphs... in a vacuum, all this is fine. Like fuck it play how you want, watch how you feel is right, write what fucking ever. I can't be assed to stand watch as a holy arbiter of how to enjoy things. Though in a vacuum, this is just your everyman just chilling and doing their own thing...

Lily is, in her own words, a career critic. There are expectations I am not wrong for having. I do not expect the world from Lily, but it has to be asked what Lily actually adds to the conversation of Critique! She refuses to experience stories as a fantasy to get lost in. It's swimming advice from somebody who has never been in a body of water. Asking a social recluse how to best socialize. Asking the illiterate to write an award winning novel. Taking culinary tips from someone who would happily fucking starve if not for the chicken nugget and French fry combo. She likes to attack fandom all the time but probably couldn't comprehend being that genuinely invested in fucking anything.

I'd probably even feel bad for her if she wasn't such a vile human.

[confused-rat]

Honestly, I feel bad for Lily Orchard. There’s a plethora of great movies, shows, and video games, and she manages to both hate them and find the most mind numbing ways to detail how these things are garbage.

Lily should watch Bluey and calm the fuck down.

[salsaseth]

After hearing my friend, James bring it up in a call, we started watching Lily Orchard's video about Pokemon to see all the bad takes in it.

When she starts playing the DS games, she uses a mod to smooth out the aliasing and uncap the game's framerate to 60. And gah damn does it look fuckin bad. Even worse is during the 3D games where she uses another mod to smooth out the 3D models and it looks like peeled oranges. Unnaturally smooth. But it does get funny when she talks about the game running like garbage when she's fucked with the game's logic. Like no shit, it's running at a framerate it was never meant for.

Something really funny also begins in the DS games. I don't know why, but she replaces one of the starters with Ralts, cuz she's got some favoritism for Gardevoir. All well and good, but you know, Ralts is weak as shit until it learns confusion and it's still frail. So it gets its ass kicked all the way until it evolves into Gardevoir. But because of how much asskicking it receives, and I swear this is true, she suspects the game is artificially raising the strength of the enemy pokemon, as a way to explain for why's she losing.

Almost as if the game is designed to use a stronger than average pokemon to get you through the early game. ;) ;) ;) ;) ;) Still, I don't fully understand why she refuses to use the regular starters. Especially when you can catch Ralts and Kirlia for most of the games. save for black and white. Speaking of.

One takeaway I've had from listening to it is what she says is more revealing about herself than what is intentional. The most telling thing is when she's going off about the Black and White characters for speaking about their ideals and opinions. I mean, she mashes through that with the A button (VISUAL NOVEL HATER SPOTTED), so it's when she's paying attention. I don't know if she just doesn't know what the game is supposed to be going for, or if she's just purposefully ignorant for the sake of contrarianism, but the game's themes are about truth and ideals. The truth is out there, but the ideals we have shape our perspective of the truth. Even Cheren, who represents the truth, is still shaped his ideal. It's a little more deeper than, 'Characters excited that they all have opinions,' but what do i know?

She rails against these characters, N in particular for having opinions and speaking them out. Meanwhile in X&Y, which its cast and characters are there to mostly stroke the character's dick, she vastly praises and prefers these characters to the ones in B&W. Hmmm. Characters that have opinions and speak them out are hated, while those that don't and heap praise on her are loved. I wonder if this says anything about her?

The video gets pretty boring the longer it goes on. The hot take well starts drying up and it quickly becomes a bad screenshot let's play. "Then I did this, and then I did that!"

That's all I got to report. Besides the shoehorning in of lefty takes. I don't know if it's because she's not funny or if she wields everything with as much subtlety as anvil-nunchuks, but when there's an opportunity to make a joke with a leftist-slant, it's as heavy handed as a Titan's ballsack and as funny as stale bread. I'm a leftist bastard myself, but every time the jokes were shoehorned in, I'm like, "The funny? Where is it?!" Especially when it was about Looker and Nanu. I get not liking the police, but this isn't the time or place for it. Leave the jokes to the professionals. Like my friend Plate. Several unemployment jokes were made at Lily's expense, and each one was funnier than the last.

I'll report back if there's anything worth commenting on. Me and the friends got to the end of Sun and Moon, so we have SwSh and SV left.

And if you had time to read this 'post', Lily, I think you had time to 'post' your resume to get a job ;D ;D ;D

[purpledemonlilyposting]

It's almost impressive how much incest shit Lily's been shown to have saved/written/whatever. She's got to be DIGGING to find this shit cause where to did that stupid slut phone game even come from???

Let's just catalogue all the incest shit Lily has broadcast across all her videos, streams and posts shall we?

Games:

Kana: Little Sister

Mentioned 17 seconds into her 2nd Dunmeshi video with an image of the little sister from Digimon on screen.

A game where the MC can bang his infirmed 15 year old sister.

That Lily didn't have much of a problem with back in 2011:

A Slut Phone

One of the ones Lily accidentally Vaush'd on screen while saving something to her downloads folder like a boomer.

This game appears to be about the titular "slut" being sexually exploited and raped by her father and brother.

Sisters: Ruby & Yang

The second game Lily accidentally Vaush'd on stream:

Not sure if its an actual game or not but it's at least a collection of porn of the two sisters from RWBY by incest porn artist Khartemis.

The Imoen Romance Mod

Written by TC Dale, a known incest erotica author, the Imoen romance mod allows players to romance their half-sister Imoen in Baldur's Gate 2. Lily won't ever shut up about this mod, acts like it's essential to the game's experience and calls it the best romance she's ever read:

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley

The only one Lily will admit to and the only one that gets kind of unfairly characterized as "the incest game" when that's a small part of it and also the bad ending.

But since Lily won't shut up about it and doesn't seem to realize its her third most popular video because she released said video when the game was a hot topic I can only assume she heard "incest game" and slammed the buy button.

Books

[Evidence of Lily's post, she may have deleted this]

Flowers in the Attic

The most mild of these as its actually considered a classic book and wasn't written for titillation but we all know Lily's motivations for mentioning it aren't pure. She mentions it at 16:22 in her Wholesome vs Dark media video and put it on her chart up there.

Forbidden

One of the books on Lily's chart up there that she mentioned at 19:57 in her video on siblings. She claims she tooooottally had nooooo ideaaaaa what the book was about when she read it. Here's the description:

Hale

A book Lily flashed in at 7:53 in her Wholesome vs Dark Media video. Let's look at the description shall we?

You know K. Webster who got banned off Amazon for writing father daughter incest among other things.

Flawed

It's up there on Lily's chart and you'll never guess what it's about!

That's right! Brother-sister incest again!

MISC:

This one is a little more tenuous as I'm not sure which video it was in but someone claimed Lily brought up a film called The Cement Garden which is about... YOU GUESSED IT!

So that brings us to a total tally of

10

10 pieces of media about incest Lily has either referenced or been caught with. The majority of which were clearly produced to be sexually stimulating.

[lilyvalerieorchard]

Um, the reason everyone loved Baldur's Gate III is because it had a GOOD WRITING. "Fanfiction-level porn writing?" Lily, YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT SENTENCE MEANS.

Sure, while it is barebones compared to later Bioware games, Neverwinter Nights is still a good game.

Jade Empire is one of Bioware's best games. You never played it because it was too Asian for you. We get it, you hate Asians and Asian culture.

"A disappointing dud...Dragon Age is usually met with a "oh yeah, that's right. you're here....unlike Bioware's other duds, Dragon Age managed to sell well enough to stick around". DRAGON AGE IS ONE OF BIOWARE'S SHINING JEWELS. It's brilliant series filled with strong world-building, storytelling and characters. If it "sold well in spite of nobody liking it" as you claim, then explain why it has such humungous devoted fanbase, @saiscribbles included. Then I remember, just like BG3, you barely played through any of the games, only ever skipping every single line of dialogue, every cutscene, only to rage-quit and skim though online video playthroughs and their TV Tropes page which, you know, ISN'T THE SAME AS PLAYING THEM.

"Two weirdly emmeshed siblings".

[sjbattleangel]

Oh, it's easy. While Doug Walker (The Nostalgia Critic) laid the groundwork for terrible analysis, these three hacks, or as I prefer to call them: The Three Prime Evils*, came charging in...

....and destroyed media literacy for an entire generation. As result, all discourse surrounding films, cartoons, video games, comic books and other nerd media have been tainted by their influence.

*In reference to the Diablo series main villains: Mephisto, Lord Of Hatred; Baal, Lord Of Destruction; Diablo, Lord Of Terror. Yes, I am a dork who loves video game references.

Double D facts book: When we said "Be critical of the media you love"... we didn't mean "nitpick and tear it to shreds" to the point of seeing things that aren't there such as "pro-status quo Neoliberalism" or "Nazi apologia".

[imoenhatesthis]

Lily Orchard and Imoen: Is the Mod Popular?

So unfortunately, Lily Orchard talks about the Imoen Romance mod in her 'Addressing Allegations' video (starting at 39:31, ending at 41:13) in regards to Courtney, whose made allegations against Lily you can hear for yourself here. Please heed the trigger warnings in both videos, though I won't be going in-depth here.

In this video, Lily describes that Gorion's Ward and Imoen are "the best of friends whose closeness borders on romantic at times...", (40:13) who discover being siblings in BGII. That isn't true but whatever, I'm not here to talk about the game itself. After going through her other sister OCs, she ends by going, "[I] talked about one of the most infamous and positively received mods for one of the most popular RPGs ever made," (41:05) end quote, so clearly this doesn't have anything to do with the real life allegations.

Two issues: One is that this is a deflection that does not address Courtney's allegations at all, or why she would find the fascination with those characters suspect. But the second is that this idea that the mod is popular and well-loved is just not true, and I'm going to spend time arguing against. If anything, how decidedly unpopular it is says that Lily is the one actively seeking out this content.

So why didn't Lily show proof about the mod's popularity in her debunking video? Maybe include a positive review? Well...

There was once a forum dedicated to the mod, populated only by people who'd want to play this kind of thing. So, if Lily is remembering this forum, that information is going to be skewed one way with any negative reviews chased out. It's long gone now, so I can't pull numbers. Instead, I'll be using general forum spaces that are probably the most popular with general BG fans, Beamdog and Reddit.

On the official EE mod release thread on the Beamdog forum... the total combination of posts from the author/coder and players only total 30 pages, with posts as recent as this month. 25 posts a page equals 750 posts altogether from across 10 years, though the most recent page is just 1 post, so 726. If we're SUPER charitable and say that's about 700 people playing and posting there throughout 10 years, not including mod authors, that's a minuscule audience. Especially when the original BGII game sold about 2 million copies, as well as Steam estimated selling about a million copies of the Steam release of the Enhanced Edition. Let's say the old deleted forum had about 1 thousand, maybe 2 thousand members, let's say there may be 10,000 downloads of the mod--that's still such a small percentage as to not matter. Definitely not enough to call it popular in the community.

Googling for lists of the best mods for BGII will bring up mods for the UI, general tweaks, difficulty, visuals, and portraits/voices. Especially portraits, people really like portrait mods. Sometimes the BG1 NPC Project is mentioned (which has it's own controversies, it's just probably the most talked about of any of these), but all of these will come long before a mention of NPC mods. So, NPC mods, especially romantic ones, are a niche of a niche.

On a few forums where I do see someone recommend the Imoen Romance as a "required mod"... most of the time they get a negative response.

(Source)

(Source)

Just straight Googling Imoen Romance mod or mod reviews will bring up forums with pages in the single digits, with general discussion devoted to "Is this incest?" questions. It's impossible to go onto any forum post about the romance without at least one person weirded out by it's existence. So, there's at least a variety of opinions on the mod, it's not overwhelmingly positive.

But fine, that's general forums. What about BG mod reviewers? ONCE AGAIN, never ever reach out to these people.

Lily uses the Smoldering Mod Bar's review of Saerilith Romance to condemn that specific mod for its bad writing and taboo themes. It sure would be something if the mod reviewer also had a negative view on Imoen Romance...Oh wait:

(Source)

Okay, well, let's look at positive reviews instead. Lily has also quoted a Beamdog forum review to defend her views on the mod:

(Source)

Why didn't Lily link to the review in question? It would prove to everyone people love her favorite mod just as much as she does, right? Well, I can link it below:

(Source; scored on a 5/5 scale)

Oh, that's not quite as positive as she'd have you believe. Still liked it, but not quite to the level Lily does.

Here's another Beamdog mod reviewer making similar negative points, despite overall loving the mod:

(Source) Even reviewers who champion the mod as great can point out "Wow, this talks about incest quite a lot in a way it didn't even have to." And about it's other flaws too, things Lily never does.

I'm not saying NO ONE thinks the mod is good or that no one has ever mentioned it. I included positive reviews for a reason.

The issue is lying about how popular and well-liked the mod is in order to paint her sister as a crazy obsessed stalker whose just overreading into things. Especially saying this in a video about those allegations, and especially after saying the Gorion's Ward and Imoen are "romantic at times" all in the same breath. Putting ANY lie in this specific video is a serious stain on the credibility of Lily, thus it's important to call it out.