#megalia

[gacha-incels]

thoughts from a Korean user on Reddit in the comments of her post recapping the maplestory, studio ppuri and genshin impact incidents. right now I’m reading through a woman’s 160 page ethnographic dissertation on megalia and I plan to post some relevant information here when I’m finished but I thought this a was an interesting first hand account that hits on a lot of main points for westerners to read, especially from someone who does not have english as a first language. I think it’s important to read and share first hand accounts like this so when I happen to see them I try to post here. I’m grateful to anyone who spends time and effort explaining in english the history of movements that typically get completely written off by westerners (trust me this happens a lot especially on Reddit) and how they themselves view these movements. not that you personally have to completely agree with everything here of course but (and this should be a given for anything you read imo) it’s definitely worth a read.

[cyborg-squid]

saw a video thumbnail, with a picture of Molar Boatwork Ishmael of course cause it's talking about Vellmori's harassment and departure, wih the text "Gender War" over it

like. no. it's no "Gender War" (and it's not about Molar!Ishmael not being "fanservice" enough either), it's violent misogyny pure and simple. and while these Korean instances of it (dating back to well before PMoon was involved) are super shocking to some of us because it may be the first we've heard of the situation over there, it's not like a unique thing either. there's shit like this all over the globe, it's not uniquely Korean or Chinese (see the Black Myth Wukong stuff) or anywhere else, some people are just noticing it in those places when it affects the media (mostly games) from there they consume, but you can find it here in America or in the UK or across Europe, we just tend to be more desensitized to it in our 'homes'. cuz the PMoon thing led me to looking up some of the history prior, and wow, the levels of misogyny in Korea are super high and super scary! and then you can go look at another country, and maybe the forms it takes are different cuz of socio/political/economic/cultural/etc reasons and the ways it manifests may look different, but it's scary bad there too! and you remember that misogyny is a global force that is nowhere near done being fought.

that was a long digression. but anyway it makes me mad when people say that the PMoon situation was part of a "Gender War" when it really was. not. One, things in Korea is not a "War" it is feminists getting beat into the ground (metaphorically and literally) at any sign of resistance and using alternative methods to push back, that is not a "War". and Two. well i almost said that, in the case of the PMoon stuff, misogynist "fans" were jumping at shadows or seeing things where there was none, but that's not the right way to put it actually. it's that some men will find any excuse to use violence against women (and those who associate themselves with them) and if they can't find a "reason", they will make one. because there was no "reason" to go after Vellmori and PMoon, and hell it's even unlikely that any of them knew enough about her to dislike her as a person, and it was not like she was a female in a position of power they were striking at yadda yadda, but they were able to take out their hate for women as a whole on her because she was one they were able to reach, and almost wholesale fabricated "justification" for doing so.

and while i'm willing to cut PMoon a lot of slack, and I truly believe their views and intents are in no ways aligned with the harassers, they really really fucked up with how they handled things. for now i believe what they said about Vell leaving voluntarily, I don't think she was 'fired' and I imagine being on the receiving end of such harassment, specifically because she is more 'visible' as one of PM's artists, would make anyone inclined to leave a position. but then I can also imagine that a legal/PR department/whoever at PM breathed a sigh of relief when she did because "Whew, she's leaving voluntarily, saves us the trouble of firing her". not that they were planning too, idk who knows, but her leaving on her own (IF! IF that is what happened) removes that option from the table. but then any goodwill they could have earned by not!firing goes out the window with their vague statements and long delays and threatening legal action against some fans who just wanted the truth. like i said, i don't think PM was a bad faith actor in this or trying to acquiesce to harasser's demands, i am willing to chalk some of their response up to just. idiot management in a time of crisis, bumbling and focused on appearances but not actively malicious, which is again understandable, but still a really fuckin bad look. and i guess while leaping to Vell's defense and really pushing back against the misogyny would have been the right thing to do, it probably woulda made the harasser crowd even more mad at them, and would confuse more normal fans who hadn't heard about what was happening (which explains a lot of PMoons long silences, "If people don't know, why bring it up?". Roosterteeth did a lot of the same thing and, i mean, it's not a dumb move. just a shitty one)

Anyway. It's not a "Gender War", it makes me mad when people call it that, especially when people Youtubers are only talking about it in respect to their/our vidya games. It is misogyny and violence.

[magnetisticc]

kis

[primarining]

"the 4B movement is actually revolutionary for women! it's not exclusive! it's a safe movement!! it hasn't been co-opted by radfems!!"

the people saying it's not a radfem movement:

[etirabys]

TIL the largest wave of South Korean feminism in the past decade (Megalia) split and broke down over whether or not to be homophobic

[necronatural]

Context on Project Moon discourse

I did some digging and watched some internet slapfights between Korean users, and collected as much context as humanly possible, trying to avoid hearsay where I can:

Misogynistic dudes start complaining about how sexless and non-waifu-female-heavy the game is, feeling the skimpy Sinclair outfit with the thotty little collar VS the fully covered Ishmael outfit is pointed feminist jeering (a law Hawkeye Initiative). Korean anti-feminists are really sensitive to pointed feminist jeering. More on that in a bit

Upon learning the identity artist is male, they trawl the rest of the staff to prove their stupid-ass theory.

They latch onto the lead CG artist, who has tweeted about feminism before.

Project Moon receives countless threats and people marching on their office IRL demanding to speak to the CEO.

The resulting hate campaign leads to Project Moon firing the lead artist for violation of contract; it was specifically requested by the company that all users delete political statements and controversial topics before joining, and the tweets the incels are using seem to prove that the worst case scenario for not adhering to the request has come to pass.

The thing is, she did delete the tweets.

This user has screencapped incels scrambling to justify their belief the game is for man-haters, including a statement that he had dug up deleted tweets. These are old records.

These are the retweets, all made before joining the company (but again, the policy was that the tweets like this should be scrubbed). Most of them are just being catty. The most extreme statements are a scathing satire even a child could understand, and some general feminist sentiments which are not incendiary in any way. It seems they were screencapped to cement a pattern of passionate feelings on feminism.

In Korea, feminism is considered a wedge issue, which means basic activism becomes extremely politically charged. Think of it like how trans issues are being treated in America at the moment, or how "Critical Race Theory" was a wedge issue like 2 years ago. Nevertheless, the most hateful statements in these tweets are not "feminist", but rather annoyance at misogyny, and pretty obviously jokes.

The tweet that the incels are latching onto here states "if being a feminist makes me Megalia, I am Megalia. If being against patriarchy makes me anti-social, I am anti-social". Megalia was a scumbag leftist radfem group originating from Korea's 4chan (anonymous messageboards). It was bad enough that banning gay slurs created a splinter group. Megalia was well-known for mirroring misogynistic behaviours back onto men. They were reviled. An actress lost her job for wearing a T-shirt this group sold, even though the funds were going to supporting women seeking legal actions. Association with Megalia was reputation poison.

Notice I refer to them in the past tense, because Megalia shut down in 2017. The tweet was in 2018. You could not get any more obvious that the statement being made was "you can insult me by calling me Megalia, but I still believe in feminism". There is no association with this incendiary group.

Incels "supported" their argument with an image of Yi Sang holding a vial in basically one of the only 2 ways you can hold a vial, calling it a reference to 🤏, an emoji used as the Megalia logo interpreted to mean "men have small penises". This insane interpretation is being used to cement the whole company as misandrist.

Therefore: Project Moon fired their lead artist even though she didn't violate her contract because insane incels did a "how dare you say we piss on the poor" bad faith misinterpretation of deleted tweets in order to justify their belief that Project Moon is a man-hating company, and as a man-hating company deserves to be annihilated, leading to threats to staff.

The artist for Leviathan later stated that Project Moon pushed the comic forward with no buffer, and when the schedule became unbearable, they just cancelled it. They were told there was an issue with production (supported by the fact the company dropped the translation in favour of focusing on the game), but this news has made the artist pessimistic about the company's treatment of their art team. (Update: deleted, with a statement they feel they felt attached to their debut work, and struggle with feeling like they ran away.)

Here's the artist Vellmori's twitter if you would like to support them through this period.

[mourntomidnight]

Fyi South Korea has a pretty bad history of genuine r*dfem/t*rf extremist movements that have committed literal violence in and out of the country there and that’s why I was always sus of movements like 4b. Which fyi is a very fringe movement that doesn’t represent why the birth rates in South Korea are declining (which is just a very intense cost of living crisis).

For further reference on the types of r*dfem groups to be aware of it’s:

Just a reminder that men are not born misogynistic, it is a learned behavior and anti men sentiments can quickly turn into transphobia and straight up racism.

[euryale-far-roaming]

Do you know if japanese feminism...Radical feminism is prominent? Any keywords?

Also have you been keeping up with korean feminism and womad?

That is an excellent question. I know that Womad and Megalia don't exist as online communities anymore, but not if they're active elsewhere.

They got a lot of backlash, to the point where Korean women now hesitate to label themselves feminists.

That doesn't mean Korean women are giving up on the 6B4T movement, though. The birthrate really doesn't show any signs of improving!

Maybe @radmoonpriestess could talk about Japan?

[duckiemimi]

wait why are people calling gojo a feminist nfsd;jkvndfl I think it's funny but I srsly am curious if there's any truth in it

i'm not sure about recent discourse (i am so thankful every day, bless, bless, BLESS), but i do remember this:

basically, that hand sign he's doing (probably an in-between frame honestly) is the logo of the Korean feminist movement and online community, Megalia. i don't know too much about them, but i do know shrimp dick in sign language when i see it.

here's the wikipedia page on "Megalia!" (click)

[mithliya]

I’m the anon who sent the womad posts. I sent the english ones because I didn’t know if you could speak korean. There are many posts by korean womyn who say the same things. There used to be a radfem website called megalia but they had an argument about homophobia and when the administrators decided to ban homophobic posts, most of the womyn left the website and created womad and made it a rule that no intersectionality is allowed. Womad says they aim for complete desexualisation of women, and they criticise anyone that’s in a relationship whether straight or gay. They think lesbians sexualize and objectify women. They can openly say gay ppl should be killed and the administrators do nothing about it.

A woman posted child porn of an Australian boy and said she raped him and everyone in the comments praised her and said they would pay to watch the video of her raping him. Another woman posted a picture of a nude man without his consent and the members doxxed him and cyber bullied him.

sounds like a quite toxic place that was formed out of toxicity. i think the only people who would support this would be homophobes themselves.

[squooshit]

this is such a black and white approach and ops information seems outdated. I support op's rejection towards k-feminism bc of transphobia but I would like to mention, it is also not right to just completely shit talk Korea's feminist movement

like "4b is an effective feminist approach to Korea's misogyny" and "Mainstream korean feminism is transphobic" are literally two statements that coexist and are both true.

radical feminism is already being criticized in korea bc of the alt-right pipeline and the whole "women want men to suffer" thing is literally like a handful of people online who learned all their feminism from twitter terfs, and is not like the main theme of k-feminism. kinda touch some grass.

also, the radicalization of men is not exclusive to the military, it's literally a systematic cultural issue. Op makes it sound like the military is the center of patriarchy in korea, when it's just another branch in country built on misogyny. Especially with the current administration, right-wing politics are almost exclusively anti women and misogynistic, femicides aren't even making the news bc it's happening so often. There is a RADICAL anti-women anti-feminist wave that's happening, and saying that in the midst of all this Korean Feminism is entirely problematic as a whole, is such an out-of-touch statement. Also WOMAD and Megalia have not been active for a long time.... like WOMAD/Megalia have not been a part of Koreas feminism conversation for a long time. Nobody is putting WOMAD as the leader for the Korean feminist movement anymore.

Also (idk about the western one) 4b movement is focused mainly on and built upon women's reaction towards an anti-woman government and society, and not an exclusively transphobic movement. Although, yes it is true that terfs are partaking in this movement.

Also, 1 more thing. The people fighting for trans rights are probably also Korean feminists. The people who are against military conscription and propaganda are probably also Korean feminist. Queer korean people are korean feminists. People who are gender-queer and trans themselves (like me) are Korean feminist.

Terfs in korea are a legitimate problem and I literally hate them as well, but op taking korea's feminism out of context and generalizing it to a transphobia black and white conversation is problematic as well.

I need people to stop glorifying the 4B movement in Korea, from a Western (white) perspective. Stop it. If you are blissfully unaware of this (having not been on TikTok) - in theory, it makes sense. No sex with men, no dating men, no child rearing with men, and no marriage with men. But. BUT. Feminists in Korea are problematic AF. I know this from both personal experience (having been on the receiving end of their ire online) and everything I've read about them, in Korean. I see all these white TikTokers (and even some in the Korean diaspora) fawning over how "we" in the US need this and, no. If your feminism is transphobic, hates gay men, hates men in general, that's not the feminism I'd endorse. Why is Korean feminism transphobic? In 2020, Korean feminists ACTIVELY CAMPAIGNED AGAINST a woman who was accepted to Sookmyung University. An all womens' university. But she was a woman, you say. What could be their problem? According to Korean feminists, they didn't want a "man" in their space. Because she is a trans woman. This is not unusual for Korean feminists. Having lived there for 5 years, to some extent, I understand their anger against misogyny. But if you are truly against the toxic patriarchy that exists in Korea, you must also help dismantle military conscription because that is where a lot of men become radicalized, bullied, etc etc and "grow up" to be the most toxic form of men seen on this earth. But Korean feminists don't give AF about that and in fact, I've read a lot of them express that it's good for men to suffer. Guess what? That view is internalized misogyny and toxic patriarchy, too. And I don't want to hear it about the movement being so "young". Korean women have stepped up to the plate before in our history. We are capable of better than this fucking nonsense. It's a bunch of transphobic, gay hating radicals that have hijacked what was supposed to be about social justice. WOMAD (link is to the Wikipedia article, not their site) and Megalia are the two sites they stem from. It is the most toxic group of people I've ever had the displeasure to encounter online. Any form of criticism is, at best, ignored and worst - I've been "called out" for being Korean-American, and therefore, to "butt out" of "Korean issues". Amongst other bullying I've personally received. And yes, not just on forums but on public articles that I've commented on.

I know it's a catchy title and it appeals in theory but please, please do not glorify these transphobes and TERFs. They don't deserve your attention.

[fencethetrader]

I really hope you take my message to heart and take the time to learn more about the problems with the 4b movement and ones like it. I am old enough to remember the birth of this mess all the way from its megalia days, right through womad too. it has always been horrible and no movement like this ever does any work to support or uplit women :/

10-4 (understood).

[necronatural]

Project Moon Discourse part 3: DCInside meeting

There's a lot of misinfo about the DCInsiders who went to the office; they did not "storm" the place or "break in". They self-reported as being very polite and cordial, which explains why, when they were allowed a meeting, they were pissed off that PM didn't treat them politely. They repeatedly act like making them wait was an affront. Dude, you showed up at their offices to demand an impromptu meeting with the CEO. Did you expect a red carpet?

And yet, they were still allowed a meeting. A twitter user has, to the best of their ability, translated the transcript.

Here is the doc.

Things to note:

As some have pointed out, DCInside believes male gamers are being listened to less than female players, so they actually spend a lot of time talking about the bungled numbers in the game meta.

They leverage their status as fans to pressure PM.

pizzo-ass "If you don't give us a concrete statement on feminism, some people might interpret it to mean you're feminist".

They repeatedly use this manipulation tactic and it is easily defeated by "we can't make an official statement in an unofficial meeting [this interaction is equal to you emailing support IRL]" every single time to the point they start getting pissed off. pretty funny

Project Moon was already composing their statement on firing Vellmori before these guys showed up. It is not that they caved to pressure a mere 4 hours after the arrival of DCInside users, but that they were already almost done their statement at the time.

Important to note The Project Moon Twitter announcement was a 2-part thread, with a majority of the update being about the screwed data with nerfs/buffs. It was also very rushed and Korean-only. Based on the transcript, we can assume they put it all together in order to answer all of DCInside's complaints and appear attentive to their feelings, without thinking about, say, the misogynistic social climate that is extreme by the standards of the remainder of your playerbase.

Not in the doc but they did in fact go in full cosplay.

In summary.

Also notable is that they came to the office with a manifesto. You can see the Yi Sang image they ended up going with for "proof" that the artist is affiliated with radfem group Megalia (the 🤏 being the logo of this community that shut down a year before the retweets. lol)

Imagine bringing this to a company office.

[natb00]

GESTANTE: Paciente en buenas condiciones generales, conciente, orientada; hidratada, tranquila, sin signos de dificultad respiratoria. Estado de conciencia: alerta. Glasgow: 15/15. Cabeza y órganos de los sentidos: Conjuntivas rosadas, mucosas húmedas, ORL sano, sin lesiones. Cuello: Móvil sin adenopatías, no ingurgitación yugular. Tórax: Ruidos cardiácos rítmicos sin soplos, murmullo vesicular conservado sin agregados patológicos. Sin evidencia de uso de músculos accesorios para la respiración. Abdomen: Globoso por útero gráviso, AU: ***, feto único/ en situación longitudinal, dorso */cefálico/ flotante/ FCF: 148min, blando, depresible, doloroso a la palpación progunda en epigástrio, sin masas ni megalias. No se evidencia actividad uterina durante la examinación. Genitourinario: No realizo tacto vaginal / Cuello anterior/posterior, duro/blando, permeable… sin evidencia de sangrado. Extremidades: Símétrícas; sin edemas; sin alteración de los arcos de movimiento, buen llenado capilar.

Examen neurológico: No déficit motor ni sensitivo, fuerza 5/5 en las 4 extremidades, ROT ++/++++ en las 4 extremidades.

[gacha-incels]

Hi, sorry for sending this, I'm trying to gather information on Shift UP's ideological verification of its employees, and the CEO's stance on feminism. would you happen to have sources and articles on the subject?

Thank you in advance.

sorry this is a bit late, I’ve been ill recently so I’ve had to spend my free time sleeping lol 😭

article regarding SHIFT-UP removing an artist’s work from their gacha game “Destiny Child” after she said there shouldn’t be a problem being a feminist and voiced support for the VA, Kim Jayeon, that Nexon fired for taking a photo of herself wearing a shirt that said “Girls Do Not Need A Prince”. The shirt was part of a fundraiser to help victims of domestic violence (see the npr article linked below) , the rates of which are especially high for women living in South Korea. You can note here that literally anything vaguely feminist is met with “are you megal?” (referring to the defunct website megalia) and it doesn’t even matter how she responds. This woman made some simple statements and is smeared as some feminist terrorist. tbh sometimes it’s an uphill battle trying to explain to anyone, especially on the western internet, that these women aren’t making some evil dogwhistle to the feminist illuminati when they make basic feminist statements. I’ve gotten called “terf/terf sympathizer” (???) for trying to explain that the artist Vellmori was being smeared on the western web with the term “terf” as a targeted campaign by Korean incels who know that term puts a target on your back and nothing else about it. I am of course not saying megalia was a totally unproblematic site with no ideological problems but none of these women being smeared are saying anything like “yeah the homophobia was great” they’re literally advocating for basic women’s rights. I’m also not saying “basic” in a condescending way, on the contrary I think these women are brave for speaking out and have created complex feminist ideologies and movements. “Basic” and “simple” are meant to show the absurdity in the reaction (extreme male anger, firing, censorship, etc) in relation to the original statement (molka is bad, it’s fine to be a feminist, etc).

this is an article in English regarding the VA who wore the shirt:

SHIFT-UP’s gacha game “Nikke” recently engaging in 🤏 male freakouts

article in Korean regarding this, I’ll add it but idk how “peripheral” you want to get since i don’t think it’s directly SHIFT-UP (?)

as far as more opinion pieces go, there’s this article written by an artist who was a victim of feminist ideological verification that talks about SHIFT-UP’s gacha “Nikke”

Edit- the actual post seems to have been deleted, I screenshotted and pasted the entire thing on the linked post above but idk how using this would come across since the original post is gone.

I posted some images and MTL on this post

this is a paper that goes over just some of the basics of megalia’s mirroring tactics and how it got started

If anyone has anything else specific lmk and I’ll update this post too, I hope what I’ve posted so far can be helpful

[agender-witchery]

I don't think it's any secret that there have been updates to this situation since I made this post. I'm not gonna do a whole 7000 word essay on the situation as its developed, but I do wanna note some of the big ones.

-The incels brought a manifesto with them. I'll include images at the end of this post, but the short of it is that they are very insecure about their dicks.

-Many people, in response to my accusations of violence have, on other platforms (not here thank god) insisted that no violence occurred, and if they were feeling particularly bold, even denied that Project Moon was threatened when I pointed out that violence doesn't have to be physical. A transcript of the visit was posted by the incels and Project Moon was, in fact, threatened.

-Kim Ji-hoon kinda sucks apparently. Thank you for the translations, @pocasu

-You may have heard that VellMori was fired over the phone. This is inaccurate, she was notified of dismissal over the phone. This is somewhat of a bigger detail than it seems as it is illegal to fire someone in Korea without sitting down with them and doing the appropriate paperwork. Regardless, I've been told that the notification over the phone is still unusual, as is the extreme haste with which the decision was made. VellMori will not be fired in writing until next week, so maybe they'll change course, but I'm not hopeful.

-You may have seen people make mention of megal/Megalia. I'm not going to make a comment on Megalia, however my understanding is that the usage of megal in Korea is not dissimilar to the usage of feminazi in the West. It is a way to slander someone for holding any feminist ideals and liken them to extremists. If someone tries to bring up Megalia, they are either acting on bad faith or have been informed by someone acting on bad faith. The most convincing argument for VellMori's involvement that I've seen thus far is a retweet that translates more or less to "If being a feminist makes me extreme, then I am extreme". If that sounds bad to you, why are you on tumblr?

-Lastly, while I don't believe this really needs clarification, I want to make it abundantly clear that i am not Korean. I lack cultural context for many of the things I am talking about and I have relied on friends and strangers for a lot of translations. Most of what I have said and have continued to say is sourced from other people, I just happened to make a big post collecting all the details that lots of people saw.

Anyway, here's pictures of those weirdo's manifesto.

On Project Moon

Hey, this is gonna be long, I'm putting most of it under the cut. This post is about the recent firing of VellMori from Project Moon, I know that it warrants some tags for triggers, but I have no idea what's commonly used, so if I miss something, please tell me.

Additionally, I have written this up in a way that if it escapes the target audience of Project Moon fans, it can still be understood, so with that in mind, there will be Library of Ruina spoilers.

The tl;dr for those who don't wanna read the full thing is that Project Moon was put in a very bad position with some violent extremists targeting them and that I'm not happy about any of what happened.

So, for those unaware, Project Moon has fired VellMori, the CG artist for Limbus Company. Now, a not inaccurate statement that can be made from this is "Project Moon fired a woman for being a feminist" but this is... somewhat reductive. Let's immediately get out of the way that VellMori did absolutely nothing wrong. Some people have said she is a TERF. I've seen no evidence of this. Some people have said she wished death on all men. I've seen no evidence of this.

What I HAVE seen is that VellMori thinks sexual abuse is bad. Now, why would this lead to a firing? The short answer is that a bunch of violent incels, one of which was literally dressed as a clown, came knocking at their office doors.

See, Limbus Company has a "beach" event coming up. In this event, we are getting a water themed outfit for two of the characters, one male and one female. For Sinclair, the guy, he has been given an EXTREMELY slutty mechanic's outfit. For Ishmael, the woman, she has been given a very skintight wet suit outfit. Now, I wanna take care to note that VellMori is the CG artist - she had no hand in these designs, a man made them. I would also like to mention that both outfit designs are amazing, and I will be including them at the end of this post for reference.

Now, upon revealing the wet suit design for Ishmael, a bunch of whiny incels on what is basically Korean 4chan got upset that Ishmael, instead of being in a bikini as is usual for gacha games, was wearing a wet suit. Nevermind that the designs in Limbus Company have always been conservative and that the Sinclair design is the most skin we've ever seen and it's just an open shirt. Again, the wet suit is still super revealing, it's skin tight and this is literally the first design of her that doesn't make her look flat chested. They're not rioting over the lack of sex appeal, they're specifically mad that it's not a bikini.

The incels come to the conclusion that the lack of any skin being shown on Ishmael's outfit is a result of evil feminism. No, I'm not exaggerating. They initially begin harassing the artist who is actually responsible for drawing the outfits, but upon learning that he is a man, set their sights on VellMori because she's a woman, and being an artist is good enough I guess. What they do from here is they start digging and digging and digging on VellMori's twitter, making use of archived pages because many of the "offensive" tweets had been deleted.

I'd like to take a moment to point out that VellMori never actually tweeted anything out here - it was all retweets from a 4-6 year old archive, and retweets that have been long deleted. These retweets contain such transgressive statements as "I'm sick of misogyny" and "If being against patriarchy makes me antisocial, then so be it" and just... mirroring back to men what those men were saying to women. Some people would like to have you think she was calling for death to all men. She wasn't. She ALSO retweeted all this stuff while she was a teenager and well before she worked for Project Moon.

Nonetheless, the incels had decided that feminism was the reason Ishmael had a wet suit and not a bikini and they had found a feminist working for Project Moon. It is at this point that we must take a brief detour and talk about Library of Ruina, Project Moon's previous game.

See, in Library of Ruina, one of the protagonists, Angela, has this whole arc about escaping her abuser and becoming a human. Yes, she is literally a robot, but Project Moon isn't exactly a stranger to symbolism in their stories and a feminist reading of Angela is ridiculously easy. The main antagonist in Library of Ruina is Argalia, the Blue Reverberation, and his crew is called the Reverberation Ensemble. Every member of the Reverberation Ensemble is a violent lunatic who each want to reinforce the status quo in their own unique shitty way. In addition to this, typically in order to reach the titular Library, you would need to be invited. The Reverb Ensemble are the "uninvited guests", the ones who managed to reach the Library and knock down the door without an invite.

Why am I talking about this? Well, the incels decided to start calling themselves the Reverb Ensemble, and referring to each other using names of the Reverb Ensemble members such as Pluto, Elena, and Oswald. Having taken on the moniker of the uninvited guests, they then showed up to Project Moon's office to protest. Over the lack of a bikini. Now, remember how I mentioned someone was dressed up as a clown? One of the Reverb Ensemble members, Oswald, is a clown with an extremely tenuous grip on reality. So much so, that his ideal world is one in which there is no meaning whatsoever. That is the character they chose to dress up as. This is either a case of extreme self awareness or extreme self unawareness.

Eventually, the incels were let into the office possibly as a form of damage mitigation to prevent the crowd of protestors from getting any bigger. This was a questionable decision, but they had a group of violent incels at their doorstep either way, and I don't exactly have full details on this. Regardless, Project Moon had on their hands a group of violent protesting incels, who they felt compelled to let into the building, and who had demands including the firing of their feminist employee.

So while "Project Moon fired a woman for being a feminist" isn't inaccurate it also isn't the full picture. More appropriately, it'd be "Project Moon fired a woman because a group of violent incels who weren't satisfied with a form fitting wet suit instead of a bikini showed up to their office demanding that an artist who did not make the wet suit design be fired because she retweeted some feminist stuff 5 years ago while she was a teenager".

I'm not happy with this. None of this is good. People are allowed to be feminists, and Project Moon stories have always presented progressive ideas to anyone with half a brain to do some basic literary analysis. I can understand why they would cave to the demands of people who were threatening them and showed up to their actual place of work, but at the same time, that's someone's livelihood gone and proof that in the future, the same sorts of people can use the same sorts of tactics to bully Project Moon into doing whatever they want. All of this sucks.

For those who would like to see the retweets in question alongside translations: https://twitter.com/danghwangs/status/1683884236888223744

And for people who would like reference as to what the artworks these incels were up in arms about, Ishmael in the wet suit and Sinclair in the mechanic's outfit.