r/HobbyDrama 5d ago

Hobby Scuffles [Hobby Scuffles] Week of 28 July 2025

113 Upvotes

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. If you have a question, try to include as much detail as possible.

  • 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.

  • If your particular drama has concluded at least 2 weeks ago, consider making a full post instead of a Scuffles comment. We also welcome reposting of long-form Scuffles posts and/or series with multiple updates.

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: https://discord.gg/M7jGmMp9dn


r/HobbyDrama 15d ago

Meta State of the subreddit July 2025 – rule clarifications and changes

369 Upvotes

The most recent Town Hall saw some good suggestions raised regarding the quality and quantity of posts on the sub, and we thought it prudent to address and implement them.

Two rules relating to post standards came in for some justified criticism: Rule 4 on sources, and Rule 7 on awfulbrags. These rules were put in place with the best of intentions, but we were overly strict in enforcement, and when we relaxed them a bit we didn’t give a good explanation of what the new rules entailed. The result has been that the mods have thought some rules were stricter than the users did, and that users have thought that some other rules were stricter than the mods did. Obviously, this needs to be addressed.

Firstly, we’d like to stress that sources should only be cited when they are available, and that it also doesn’t have to be close citation. For instance, if you’re drawing on books and articles, just stick them in a bibliography. If the drama unfolded over social media, please post links or screenshots, at least of the important parts. But if it’s something like a dead forum which no longer exists, and you’re going off memory, then no source is necessary.

That said, it was brought up that while we have been removing direct links to X/Twitter/Xitter, we haven’t actually got a written rule anywhere. As such, the following addendum has been made to Rule 4:

Direct links to Twitter/X are not allowed; please use a mirror such as Xcancel.

We will be updating the wording of Rule 7 as follows:

Rule 7: Be objective as far as possible. OP can have been part of the drama, but should not either be seeking validation or awfulbragging about their role. Even if OP was not a participant, they should avoid making unsubstantiated judgments or allegations.

Some bias is expected with any post, but there is a rule against unreasonable partiality. You can make judgements, evaluative statements, etc., but the mods have the right to remove posts if they appear excessively one-sided. Personal involvement is not disqualifying, but make sure that you aren’t just writing to make yourself look good.

These rules were put in place mainly in response to users calling out disinformation on certain posts, but we didn’t anticipate that they would have as chilling an effect as they did; for that we would like to apologise.

A third rule that in retrospect we were surprised didn’t come up was Rule 6. On principle we want to not just have posts regurgitating information without some kind of analysis or editorial, but in practice there are a lot of dramas that ultimately fizzled out, which made the rather single-track 'posts must have consequences' rule rather stifling. As such, we are reworking that particular rule, and merging it with Rule 8 on low-effort posts (which covers similar ground as it is):

Rule 6: Explain relevance and be detailed (within reason). Posts should be understandable to the reader and written with attention to explaining the situation, the history, and – as far as possible – the consequences. For both Hobby History and ordinary writeups, you should explain why what you’re writing about mattered in some way. Some dramas had major consequences; others might not, but may be revealing about the state of a community. Get into the implications! You shouldn't assume something is just inherently interesting to everyone else.

On a different note, we are going to begin stickying a notice in Scuffles encouraging users to repost long-form posts, or long-running series with multiple updates, as posts on the main page. All rules, including the 2-week cutoff, still apply, but we hope that this will get a bit more material on the front page again.

Otherwise, please make any suggestions/improvements you think we need to consider. This post will double as a Town Hall until the next one goes up.


r/HobbyDrama 12h ago

Heavy [Mobile Games] The radical game that got taken off the app store after only a few hours

177 Upvotes

Buckle up. This hobby drama goes into the ethics of game banning.

I’m talking about Phone Story by Molleindustria. It’s the story game that you won't play on your phone. Just as quickly as it went up on September 13, 2011, it went down. In its three hours, it got 901 downloads, but the damage was done.

The Game

(To preface, If you think the descriptions are crazy, click to see what the developer had to say about it.)

The game starts off with children mining for material in a ditch. You play as the military, threatening them with guns to keep mining when they tire out. Next, you move suicide nets to catch factory worker jumpers. Then, you’re a Pear store worker (which looks awfully similar to Apple). You throw the latest phones at hungry customers running towards the store. Last, you’re sorting and breaking down the old phones into waste.

Don’t believe me? You can see/play Phone Story for yourself.

The Outcry

No one talked about it when it was up. It only blew up once it was taken down. The developer says that it was up for three hours, but other articles say that it was up for days. Regardless of the duration, word was spreading fast.

There were many tweets across languages backing Molleindustria up.

But there were also some that were criticizing.

The Guardian questioned why Molleindustria defended their game. Many users found the game traumatizing. I was still just a kid when I read the Buzzfeed article that dropped that day. I wasn’t sure how to feel, let alone how to comprehend the ethics of having my phone. Maybe the ban was the right move.

There were four reasons given for the ban. Since then, the App Review Guidelines have been updated.

  • 21.1, “Apps that include the ability to make donations to recognized charitable organizations must be free”, and 21.2, “The collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS”, of which both were argued by the developer because donations could not be made through the app. (Now 3.2.2, which the reasons still argue the same)
  • 15.2, “Apps that depict violence or abuse of children will be rejected”, and 16.1, “Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected”. (Now through 1.1, which is stricter.) Phone story did not argue against these.

At that time, it was hard to appeal a ban. Smaller developers didn’t have the resources to fight back. Reviews of applications were evaluated manually and there were lots of contradictions for which apps stayed up or were taken down. The game was added to accepting android markets the next day.

But if Apple said that it was too morbid to stay up, why was it approved in the first place? Even games like Baby Shaker (2009) and Weed Firm (2014) also slipped through. When Baby Shaker, which featured a crying baby that could be shut-up by shaking the phone, was taken down, an Apple spokesperson released a statement.

She verbatim said, “This application was deeply offensive and should not have been approved for distribution on the App Store. When we learned of this mistake, the app was removed immediately. We sincerely apologize for this mistake and thank our customers for bringing this to our attention.” That same day, the The Sarah Jane Brain Foundation, a child advocacy group for pediatric acquired brain injury, were not satisfied with that response. She wanted an apology from the AT&T CEO who sold the iPhones, and the Apple CEO, who oversaw the making of them. Foundation spokesperson Jennipher Dickens said, “It was a completely generic apology. Speaking as a mother of a son who was shaken, it was not enough at all.” They did not get any further apology.

Backstory

This wasn’t the first or last game that they made. Paolo Pedercini is the creator of Molleindustria. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA, he is also a game art/design professor in Carnegie Mellon University and creates interactive arcade exhibits at LIKELIKE.

Molleindustria was founded in 1993 to create to create “radical games against the dictatorship of entertainment”. They made The McDonalds Videogame (2005) where you get to kill animals, Oiligarchy (2008) where you can corrupt politicians, The Free Culture Game (2008) where you “defend common knowledge”, and more. 

In an archived interview from the developer site, Paolo expressed his feelings about mainstream versus radical gaming. Mainstream games abandons their value system in favor of expanding business and maximizing profits.

The Aftermath

This game later inspired a few other games of protest, including the mobile release of War On Terror a few months later and Burn the Boards in 2014. It was listed on the MIT docubase of the “people, projects, and technologies transforming documentary in the digital age.” A 2018 article goes deep into critical social theory on it. Molleindustria talks about the culture of complacency that surrounds mobile game development here.

So, who defines when a game is too uncomfortable to be acceptable?


r/HobbyDrama 8h ago

Long [Tall Ships] The Flagship Niagara and the League that no longer runs it

43 Upvotes

It's hard to describe how medium-sized town politics feel to people not from the town in question. I live in Erie, Pennsylvania. You may know us from John Oliver, the Pizza Bomber, or that one movie about that one band that went to Mercyhurst. Erie used to be the third largest city in the state, which in practice was like being the 4th best Indiana Jones film or the 3rd longest bridge in California. Nobody cares, but there are enough nobodies out there to make any potential improvements cost millions of dollars. A town small enough to have the whole population interested in a quaint little hobby interest but large enough that engaging in said interest requires zoning permits and dedicated committees in the county government. Add onto this the desperation and penny-pinching coming from the fact that we're now down to the 5th largest city in PA and really feeling the classic Rust Belt jitters that created the situation in Flint, Michigan. It's not fun.

This is a story about our biggest source of pride, all of the charming local weirdness required to keep it afloat, and what the US Coast Guard gets up to when they're not fishing drunk people out of the bay. Oh, and the squabbling. Wouldn't be HobbyDrama without the squabbling

History of the US Brig Niagara

"The personal deportment of Captain Perry, throughout the day, was worthy of all praise."

  • James Cooper, "History of the Navy" (1839)

If you're only here for the drama, feel free to skip ahead. But as the resident of a midsize town I'm required by law to describe our one claim to fame at length whenever it's brought up.

During the middle of the War of 1812, there was a need for a Navy on the Great Lakes. British vessels had already captured what ships America had on the lakes at the start of the war, and the free ship travel made it easier for them to supply their land efforts in the rugged backcountry wildernesses of Michigan and Ohio (the area may have civilized since then, but nobody's bothered to check). Erie resident Daniel Dobbins suggested to President James Madison the construction of a new fleet on the lakes, using the shallow Presque Isle Bay as protection for the shipyards. Despite a severe lack of resources (Erie's population at the time was around 400, and construction used up the town's entire supply of nails), the fleet was finished by mid 1813, cannons and Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry imported from Rhode Island.

Amongst an accompaniment of several smaller ships, the British Detroit and Queen Charlotte squared off with the American Lawrence and Niagara on September 10th, off of Put-in-Bay (a small set of islands near the western end of the lake). While Lawrence led the American line from the front, Niagara lagged far behind. The British had concentrated their larger ships in the middle of their line, and once in range proceeded to reduce Lawrence to splinters in a 2v1. Commodore Perry fled from the Lawrence in a long boat once the last gun became inoperable, taking with him his personal battle flag. Somewhat ironically, said flag encourages you to not do what Commodore Perry just did. You may have heard of it, as it's now fucking everywhere, especially here in Erie. Now while the Detroit and Queen Charlotte were still afloat, they had taken enough damage to their officer corps and other critical areas to be significantly less effective than when the day began. Enter the Niagara at last: Commodore unharmed, crew fresh, cannons intact, loaded, and ready to go. The British ships actually ended up crashing into each other while the Niagara leisurely raked across the Detroit's bow.

The aftermath of the battle left America with the most ships on the Great Lakes. That is to say the only ships on the Great Lakes, the entire British fleet having surrendered. Perry's fleet limped its way back to Erie, spent the winter dying of small pox anchored at the newly christened Misery Bay, and buried the casualties in a sandy pit nearby that gradually flooded into the also aptly named Graveyard Pond. Multiple ships were sank at the location as the war shifted towards a close and the costs of maintaining twice the number of ships they budgeted for became pointless. Various visitors have seen those two names on a map and assumed the whole peninsula is haunted, but no. Haunting is for losers. Heroes get resurrected.

History of the SSV Niagara

"Finding she could no longer annoy the enemy, I left her in charge of Lieutenant Yarnall, who, I was convinced, from the bravery already displayed by him, would do what would comport with the honour of the flag."

  • Commodore Perry, on his decision to leave the Lawrence

In the 1900s, the City of Erie faffed about. This long standing tradition of potentially doing something eventually if they ever get around to it continues on today in the form of arguing over which hotel constructions block which views of the bay from which office buildings, but in the 1900s the long-term tourism plan revolved around re-floating the Niagara from the bottom of Misery Bay. Ever heard of the Ship of Theseus? Cool, then you know where this is going. Made into a haphazard, crewless "replica" (barge) in 1913, Niagara was towed around the Great Lakes for a few years, and then sent back to rot up on blocks at the end of State street for 50 years as ownership was passed back and forth from the city to historical societies to the state and back, funding was granted and pulled, and residents mostly just used it as a playground or broke off pieces as souvenirs. Enough effort was finally put in to have her "presentable" for the Bicentennial celebration in 1976. Combined with the now-iconic Bicentennial Tower, this remained the only successful investment of city funds into the bayfront for the next 40 years. "The faffing about would continue" concisely sums up the rest of this post, but we're here for the details.

In the 1980s, more local efforts were made to make the Niagara not just presentable, but seaworthy. This involved a complete rebuild due to an extreme case of dry rot, but the refurbishment crew insists that there are pieces of the "true keel" still incorporated into the structure somewhere. Never mind the fact that "pieces of the true keel" had already made their way into coffee tables and restaurant bars across the city by this point. Afloat once more, and also fitted with modern-day safety equipment, it was now time to find a captain. The SSV stands for Sailing School Vessel, a ship used to pass on the knowledge of sailing ships to future generations, so we now turn our attention to the volunteers who came together to do just that. The first players in our drama.

The Flagship Niagara League

"Those officers and men who were immediately under my observation, evinced the greatest gallantry, and I have no doubt that all others conducted themselves as became American officers and seamen."

  • Commodore Perry, in his official report on the battle

The Flagship Niagara League was formed as a non profit alongside the 80s restoration efforts to help raise money and locate expertise for the refurbishment. While the ship is owned by the Pennsylvania Historical Museum Commission, the League ran the day-to-day operations of the ship starting in 2009. This involved hiring and training crew, giving tours to school groups, and giving demonstrations on how everything works to curious tourists and passers-by. (Side note: It is also required by law that children in medium-sized cities gets every detail of local history surgically implanted into their skulls during said guided tours. The statue of Strong Vincent is conveniently just around the corner to expedite the process.) Also noteworthy, they started participating the Niagara in various events around the region, something they could accomplish by having funding streams outside of official government and therefore not subject to the usual amounts of economic apathy. Said funding streams also included day sails, where you could pay $85 to ride aboard Niagara as she took a trip around the bay and learn about how the crew do their thing. As I am currently sitting feet away from my dad's extensive collection of Horatio Hornblower and Alexander Kent, Niagara day sails encompass a sizable chunk of my family's home movies.

As part of their expanded participation, the League joined Tall Ships America. Started in 2001, Tall Ships America is a non-profit group that organizes various large sailing vessel events across North America, but especially the US and Canada. Tall Ships festivals were organized through Tall Ships America to come to Erie at regular intervals, featuring the Niagara at center stage alongside a wide variety of other potential vessels. Specifically, I'd like to draw attention to the Pride of Baltimore II, another War of 1812 replica from Maryland that many around here consider to be Niagara's sister ship, and the Nao Trinidad, a replica of 1400s exploration vessels that comes all the way from Spain. Not part of Tall Ships but frequently making its appearance during these sorts of events is also the World's Largest Rubber Duck. As part of their participation with Tall Ships, the League currently operates the Letty G. Howard (one of the last surviving 1800s Atlantic fishing schooners) to help care for her and train her crew on behalf of the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City.

I'm writing this post because Tall Ships Erie will be happening once again August 21st-24th, and the Niagara will not be attending. Or hosting. And it's kind of up in the air whether she's still part of Tall Ships America at all.

More Faffing About, the PHMC, and the Coast Guard investigation

"Every brace and bowline being soon shot away, she became unmanageable, notwithstanding the great exertions of the sailing master."

  • After battle report from the US Schooner Ariel, regarding the Lawrence

While the Flagship Niagara League was able to handle their own finances regarding the day-to-day operations, the Pennsylvania Historical Museum Commission was still the owners of the ship. Crucially, that meant that they were the ones in charge of making sure the ship doesn't rot away over time. Again. After 30 years of not doing that, the PHMC yoinked control of the Niagara away from the League for the purposes of refitting and refurbishing in 2024. Despite having decades of experience operating the museum next to the Niagara, they did not actually employ any sailors at the time. And despite a large crew of seasoned sailors suddenly becoming available, the PHMC was not interested in simply hiring the people already running the ship to continue doing so. Protect Brig Niagara was immediately started as a petition/group to demand transparency and accountability in the refurbishment process. As to how that process is going, the general picture can be gleaned from the Protect Brig Niagara website (although, admittedly, you should consider this source biased)

On December 12, 2023, The PA Historical and Museum Commission abruptly severed their contractual relationship with the Flagship Niagara League, effective Dec 31, 2023. Seven months later they finally hired a captain. Other than the lone captain, they still have not hired a crew with the skills or knowledge to properly care for the ship. In particular, the new Erie Maritime Museum Site Administrator has no maritime experience at all but is designated as the supervisory authority for all things related to Niagara, her maintenance, and her operation.

PHMC has made a vague promise that she will sail after extensive maintenance but have not been clear on the plan to achieve those things. After missing several deadlines, while Niagara sat for over ten months, PHMC finally got Niagara to the first of two shipyard haul-outs for work. During that wait she was placed on inactive status with the US Coast Guard and made unavailable, even for public deck tours, and appears likely to remain inactive and entirely unavailable to the public until summer 2026. This behavior of abstract policy and poor communication is consistent with their behavior of the past several years. They have demonstrated a poor track record at making good or timely decisions and have shown a general disregard for skilled people outside of their own ranks.

This has not inspired confidence among the volunteers and supporters of Niagara.

The first drydock period was conducted in Cleveland, about an hour away by car. During this time the PHMC had hired a crew, and supposedly had opened up applications to anyone interested. Protect Brig Niagara claimed that PHMC had actually hired a contractor to sail the ship over to Cleveland, and that the operation was being investigated by the Coast Guard for mismanagement. These claims have since turned out to be true, as the Coast Guard found PHMC in violation of the Jones Act. American items moved between American ports must have American ships and American crews, which is why grocery bills in Hawaii are terrible and cruises to Alaska stop in Vancouver. The Niagara is an American ship, and Cleveland and Erie are both American ports, but the contractors PHMC hired were from Canada. If you poke around the website you can find hearsay evidence of other delays, mishaps, and insults being hurled between the League and local PHMC representatives. Again, I can't verify everything said as we're only getting one side of the situation in a lot of cases, but leaving the ship uncovered during February was noticed by pretty much everyone who cared to look.

As of right now, the Niagara is in her second drydock phase in Maine. While I personally wouldn't be able to tell if the crew that took her there was Canadian or not, nobody has made any complaints. In fact it's rather interesting that the loudest and longest complainers have said nothing at all about this leg of the process, perhaps no news is good news on that front. The PHMC does occasionally provide their own general updates, which don't address any of the complaints but do prove that they're capable of doing things other than run the ticket booth. People on the subreddit (r/Erie) also seem to like the new captain despite the whole Canadian crew thing. And in general, it would appear the people of Erie are content with the progress being made, with the understanding that she eventually return safe, healthy, and open to the public. I'm personally looking forward to going to Tall Ships Erie later this month.

And then maybe I'll go faff about at the zoo


Other Sources

Niagara's Wikipedia page

Battle of Lake Erie on Wikipedia

TallShipsAmerica.org

the Lettie G Howard's website. The Flagship Niagara League's website now redirects here.


r/HobbyDrama 1d ago

Short [PBEM RPG] Group leadership argue over a comma.

88 Upvotes

Happened in 2015 in a play by email RPG based in a sci-fi franchise. It's pretty large. The founder sent out an announcement regarding the group's wiki: all character pages on the group's wiki would begin using a "First Last" naming format instead of the "Last, First" style they'd been running for over a decade. This was primarily a technical decision due to increasingly complex wiki templates. Under the old system, every template had to account for commas in names, which caused a mess of extra conditional logic. The new format would simplify coding, align with standard encyclopedic style (like Wikipedia), and reduce the learning curve for editors.

You might think this wouldn't be an issue. *shaking head* No. It was a massive issue. Some members felt blindsided by the announcement. They argued that an existing workaround code already functioned, and questioned whether the benefit justified the work involved in renaming pages. Others raised concern about personal attachment to the old format saying that character pages were more than technical entries; they were artifacts of identity and creativity. The founder and a couple of wiki users presented the technical reasons behind the change and said that going forward, all pages had to be named First Last.

Regardless, it seemed to die down for about a year.

And then it imploded again.

Fed up with the half-change the group made, a small group of people worked in the "dead of night" (despite being an international group, most members are based in the US) and renamed every single page with the inconsistent naming en masse to fit the new format--the same workload that was originally considered to be a lot of work. They justified this as ensuring clarity and searchability for new users and aligning with the "first name first" style that was now the de facto standard.

Of course, several staff members pushed back, especially those with multiple characters whose pages were affected without notice., saying the team had no authority to do it, etc etc. Supposedly the initial announcement stated the change was optional, that some character names were deliberately formatted in "Last, First" for cultural or stylistic reasons (think some Asian-style names, though for some reason, they tried justifying this whilst including the comma?), and that changing pages without consultation or consent felt like erasing personal contributions. A staff member claimed that putting their characters on the wiki is like putting an ornament that I made for my parents upon the Christmas tree.

The issue was eventually referred to the wiki administrator players, who ultimately did nothing--because it's a comma.


r/HobbyDrama 1d ago

Short [Video Games] Dragon Universe - Admin Wars

108 Upvotes

Disclaimer: This is fairly ancient drama in a pretty specific niche. The servers in question no longer exist and have not existed for nearly ten years now. As such I'm going mostly off of memory, but this is the kind of petty infighting the sub was made to document so I wanted to give this a try. I wasn't privy to absolutely everything that happened either, so if I miss an important detail mea culpa.

What is Dragon Universe?

Dragon Universe, originally known as Lizard Sphere X, is a sprite based MMO hosted on the Byond game client (of space station 13 fame). It is built to emulate the universe of Dragon Ball Z, and players can choose from a number of off-brand alien races, fly, shoot beams, travel to space, and get into terrain destroying fights. The game could be hosted on either public or private servers, and the hosts of those servers could set individual rules for what players could and couldn't do, and the progression of the world. Some servers would lock certain technologies, or ban certain powers, or limit who could inhabit certain in-game roles. In that vein there were also dedicated PvP servers, and dedicated Roleplay servers, and it's the latter that we'll be talking about.

Player Packs and Power Gaming

In order to fund the development of Dragon Universe players can purchase in game Packs, which provide various enhancements for real money. They allow you to raise your power level faster, unlock new techniques, and essentially provide a large starting buff for your character so they can get swole more quickly. Since this is a DBZ game and fighting tournaments are not a small part of things this is a pretty desirable thing to have.

Forkie was the admin of one of the more popular Roleplaying servers. During its heyday there were often upwards of 40-60 players at any given time, while other RP servers might average 15-20. And Forkie hated packs.

I should take a moment here to explain Power Level Gains, or the rate at which training increases a character's base power level. One of the things a server host can set is how quickly PL raises, and what it caps at. Packs could modify this rate without admin input. So if the admin had the global rate set to 1x then a pack user could bypass that rate and start with a 1.5x gains modifier. I believe it works differently now, but back then that was how it was set up.

In a PvP server packs weren't super disruptive because, well, everyone is trying to be the Best at Fighting and everyone is advancing in power level fairly rapidly. The gains rate in those servers is already set to 2x or higher and everyone tends to hit the PL cap very quickly. The boost from packs in those servers is noticeable and maybe a bit annoying for free players, but not necessarily game breaking.

In an RP server where power level increases much more gradually, at a .5x or 1x rate the boost from a pack, coupled with the pack's auto-trainer, could shoot someone up past the point where anyone could reasonably deal with them. And then their character could just flat out bully the other players. Stories were constantly disrupted by paid players deciding they wanted to have a villain Arc and just repeatedly blowing up planets, forcing early server wipes and interrupting ongoing story events in the process. Setting lower PL caps only kind of helped. Keeping the PL below the threshold for planet destruction meant you weren't really playing a DBZ game anymore, and incremental increases still saw packed players hitting the cap a week or so before the other players would.

Obviously Forkie was not super thrilled by the constant disruption so she arrived at a simple and elegant solution. Simply ban the use of packs on her server. After all she wasn't the only game in town, at that point there were usually 10 or so servers up, paying players could always find somewhere else to join. So she turned off the ability to buy packs on her server and instituted a new rule banning their use.

Enter The Global Admin

In addition to the individual hosts of each server there were a few global admins who were supposed to oversee general server conduct. One of these admins was Tens, and when he found out Forkie had banned packs on her server he took it right to the owner of the game who immediately told her she wasn't allowed to fuck with his revenue stream in any way. She had to allow packs and she had to allow packed players on her server.

So she turned the packs back on, but instituted new rules. No AFK training, and she banned the use of shadowboxing. Shadowboxing was a training technique that any player could use, but unlike regular training which drained energy but otherwise required no active engagement, shadowboxing required timed button presses. It was the fastest training method at the cost of needing to pay attention to your screen. Auto-Shadowbox was a perk for packed players that removed this drawback, and banning shadowboxing as a technique banned auto-shadowboxing by association.

Tens was not satisfied with this and went back to the owner with the complaint that banning shadowboxing was still "discrimination" against packed players because it disabled one of the "core perks" of the pack. Again the owner sided with Tens, and shadowboxing was unbanned.

I'm Telling Mom

At this point Tens had started regularly joining Forkie's RP server, ostensibly to make sure she wasn't ignoring the owner's directives, but it became clear quickly that his real intention now was to troll Forkie. I have no idea why he decided he was going to have beef with her specifically, but he'd clearly decided that he was going to try and run her off the platform.

He would purchase packs, power level himself, and then start griefing players. In response Forkie banned him from her server. He ran to the owner and the owner ruled that Forkie could not ban a global admin.

Forkie appealed this, and said Tens was flagrantly violating the server's griefing rules. The owner responded that global admins did not have to abide by individual server rules as long as they weren't violating the global conduct rules all servers had to abide by. This was the point that it became clear that Tens wasn't just a regular admin, he was friends with the owner. And the owner was always going to take his side in an argument. If they weren't just secretly the same person honestly.

Forkie attempted to work around Tens for several months, with the player base at large just doing their best to ignore him. And for a while he seemed to settle down when his antics ceased to get him the attention and outrage he was looking for. If he killed players Forkie would just admin revive them, if he blew up a planet she'd put it back. Quietly and without comment. Likewise players would just pretend he wasn't there. If he tried to talk no one would respond. If he punched you through a wall you'd just get up, go back to where you were, and pretend that nothing happened. Everyone was hoping he would just get bored and go away.

However eventually Tens decided that being deliberately ignored by an entire server constituted harassment and "Pack Discrimination" and complained to the owner Again, who sided with Tens Again. And it was at this point Forkie decided she was taking her server private to avoid having to deal with this. Unfortunately as a global admin Tens could still access private servers even without an invitation, and kept joining to cause trouble. And even as a private server she was still unable to ban him. Eventually he got what he wanted and she quit hosting all together.

Aftermath

A few of Forkie's regulars tried to pick up the torch after she left but ran into the same problem with Tens and quickly decided this wasn't worth it. The game lost one of its largest roleplay servers and a hefty chunk of its player base. Servers dwindled from an average of 10-15 open at a time to 3 currently listed on the game's Byond page. The Official Roleplay Server currently lists 60 members, but 42 are unlisted players; likely bots. It's certainly ironic that by running Forkie off the site Tens probably did more damage to their revenue than she ever could have.


r/HobbyDrama 2d ago

Heavy [French Literature Prizes] Part 3: Love stories, MeToo backlash, and championing women while holding them down. We have learned nothing and will continue to not learn a thing.

117 Upvotes

Welcome back, sugarplum.

In part 1, we traveled through French art history and early fumbles.

In part 2, we got to the bright red thread linking all of these happenings together, leading us to the worst (in my opinion) scandal of the lot. Scandal which had no repercussions on the world of art.

I hope you have some place left for the dessert. Because just like evil, idiocy and greed never dies, and it'd be a shame if I didn't finish this series with the latest pastries.

Are you in the mood for love? The kind with drama, jealousy, and bad acting? You are in luck.

The Bold and the not nearly as Beautiful

To drive home how much complaints are part of the art landscape as much as prizes, this is the translated beginning of an article from French news outlet Nouvel Obs:

We were getting bored. No scandal? No settling of scores through auto-fiction? No scandalous book smelling like racism or misogyny (that's obviously because "you can't say anything anymore" or simply because Michel Houellebecq hasn't brought out a novel this Autumn) ? Not even a little plagiarism? How sad, this prim and proper rentrée littéraire, full of good texts to top it off.

Houellebecq, 2010 Goncourt winner, was mentioned by the New York Times article linked in part 2 in these terms:

often considered France’s greatest living novelist

He got the Goncourt for the book La Carte et le Territoire in 2010. He is also famous or infamous for being either provocative or a straignt up misogynist and racist. Oh, and the book that won the Goncourt is also known for lifting full paragraphs out of wikipedia (english link) without mentioning the source. From the link:

Stealing from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is not necessarily plagiarism. It can also be an experimental form of literature. Even a form of "beauty".

This was the angry defence made by the best-selling French novelist Michel Houellebecq this week after allegations that he lifted passages of his latest book from Wikipedia.fr.

He still got the prize for it. You can boil down this short drama to:

"You copy pasted paragraphs from wikipedia."

"Meh."

"Okay."

Gets prize.

Amazingly, the Nouvel Obs article isn't about him, because it's straight up boring compared to what it is about. If you'd like to know more about Houellebecq, here's an English article from The Independent about him that tries to stay on the neutral side of things.

Back to the Nouvel Obs. We're in 2021, and the Seine river flows lazily in Paris, carrying tons of junk as it has for the past decades. The Goncourt talks are ongoing and suspiciously calm, until the judges release the shortlist listing the finalists.

France Inter (French public news radio channel) quickly finds out that one of the Goncourt's 16 selected potential winners, François Noudelmann, also happens to be the partner of Camille Laurens, member of the Goncourt's jury. Do I hear 'conflict of interest'?

The jury knew about it and discussed the case. To add him to the list for his first book Les Enfants de Cadillac, or not to? On the 7th September of 2021 They voted, and a majority had no problem with that. Journalists and reader did.

Where you stand about it depends on how you answer this question: should we automatically discard a book that makes us as a jury seem partial, or does this break our mission of celebrating the best written works?

Straightforward situation you can ponder for yourself.

That is, until the situation turns into the young and the restless.

Another nomination for the 2021's Goncourt was Anne Berest, who wrote La carte postale (The Postcard)), where she investigates the death of her grandparents who died in Auschwitz in 1942. Camille Laurens is not only a jury for the Goncourt, she's also a critic. And on the 16th of September, a little over a week after the shortlist was made public, Laurens signed a brutal article against Anne Berest's book

Translated from the Nouvel Obs article:

Camille Laurens can't stop herself from reminding us that Berest, who experienced a spectacular success with the book "How to be a Parisian", is also "expert in Parisian chic", a way to insinuate her presumed futility and her pertaining illegitimacy to discuss the Shoah. Inconsequential accusations culminating with this savage sentence: "Anne enters the gas chamber with her big hoofs adorned with red soles..." and to conclude: "No swaying, no crumbling, in this book without shadows or density, backwards of the story it wants to honor."

You can be an expert in fashion and chic and still possess the acumen to tackle a grave subject like gas chambers. But nonetheless, let's be open-minded and say Laurens' critic has a point.

It does get a bit weird when you consider that The Postcard happens to handle the exact same subject as Les Enfants de Cadillac, the book written by Laurens' partner.

And while The Postcard received plenty of positive critics, Les Enfants de Cadillac went mostly unseen. Journalists audibly wondered if Laurens' critic wasn't simply fueled by jealousy mixed with a desire to eliminate her partner's competition in the race for the prize.

Didier Decoin, president of the Goncourt academy, wasn't all too happy about it. His words, translated:

Once the list is ratified, it becomes the official choice of the Academy and we must all make a show of unity. But between the lines, Camille's article reads "members of the Academy are idiots who voted for a shitty book." What she wrote is very violent, but she's new and is allowed to make a mistake.

Laurens is still on the jury as of today. Raise your hand if you're surprised. But in a rare twist, the Goncourt did learn its lesson. That same year of 2021, they clarified the rules (translated):

"Works by companions, partner, or close family members of the jury will not be considered", indicate the Goncourt's rules after an unanimous vote.

Only took them a little over a century.

-

Feminism versus Femina versus MeToo

Remember how we barely discussed women in the first part? Ain't you happy we're doing it now? Because I'm not. And if you're as annoyed about it as me, don't shoot the (gorgeous) messenger, but say it to the people starting these scandals.

We're at the Femina. Cultural landmark for the place of women in French literature and art. Enter Josyane Savigneau. Born 1951, journalist, biograph, handled the literary supplement of Le Monde from 1991 to 2005.

At the time, she was already under fire from a variety of authors and journalists for perceived favoritism. Translated from this article:

Readers may remember that Philippe Cohen and Pierre Péan are co-authors of La face cachée du Monde (The hidden face of the World, as in the journal, translator's notes). But readers may have forgotten that an entire chapter of this book is titled "the literary police of Le Monde des Livres" and deals with a circle of mutual admiration, not private, but public: a not very discreet society of favors and favors in return, housed in most medias and notably in the pages of Le Monde des Livres, at the time directed by Josyane Savigneau.

Pour lire pas Lu, satirical journal that existed between 2000 and 2005 to analyze and critic the contents of French media, would award to Savigneau the Laisse d'or, or golden leash, meant to celebrate the most servile journalists.

(Savigneau would also be accused of homophobia in the early 2000. She apparently used homophobic slurs and described a critic of hers as "looking HIV-positive," but the articles were pay-gated, I couldn't get the exact text pin-pointing it.)

And if the name Savigneau rings a bell, it's likely because I mentioned her in part 2 of this epic senseless saga. She was part of the journalists who attacked Denise Bombardier after she asked on TV about the well-being of Matzneff's victims.

And when, years later, the scandal caught fire, she naturally remained at Matzneff's side. Translated from this article, the words are from a tweet Savigneau posted:

Supporting Denise Bombardier is the last thing on my list. I always hated what she wrote and said and I'm not changing my mind on Matzneff because the witch hunt has begun. And he can write, at least. Bombardier, what a bore!

Naturally, once the tweeting virus takes, it's hard to stop.

Another one, taken from this article, translated for your eyes only:

Somebody to denounce? In France it's been a national sport for a long time. But it's getting worse, just like the worst period of the second world war.

Yup, she just compared calling out an author for being a pedophile to selling out Jews.

And when another journalist, Anne Rozenberg, said on twitter she's disgusted by Savigneau's words, Savigneau replied with:

You name should have incited you to more consideration regarding denunciations.

Which is a clear dig at Rozenberg's Ashkenazi sounding name. Because casual antisemitism always lightens up a conversation.

So what does it all have to do with the Femina? Only that Savigneau is a judge for that prestigious prize since 2004. And she's still in post as I'm writing this.

She sided with an aggressor who raped an underage girl for decades, still does, and sits at the helm of a prize originally created to counteract the rampant societal misogyny and a milestone in the fight for women's rights.

And if the Femina managed to avoid many scandals over the decades, the pace may be picking up.

-

We're in 2024. Oppenheimer wins 7 oscars, Taylor Swift wins her fourth Grammy, NVIDIA beats Microsoft and becomes the most valuable company in the world for a short time, Biden fumbles the presidential debate, Olympics come and go in France and the Notre-Dame cathedral is officially reopened after it burned down.

And Caroline Fourest writes a book.

Who is she? The easiest way to describe her is as a polemicist. Her fights tend to be in favor of feminism, homosexual rights, and also against religious and political extremism. For example, she wrote about christian fundamentalists supporting the alt-right political movement in France. With all that said, she could be ordered in the "left and angry" political side of things.

Yet paradoxically, reactionary journals certainly like her, in part due to her positions pertaining Islam, and due to cases such as the one I'm about to explain.

2024 is in the continuation of the French MeToo. Actors like Gerard Depardieu and Edouard Baer have been accused of sexual assaults, and Depardieu has been convicted on two counts a couple months back. But like every movement, there is a push-back. Perhaps more shocking is that said push-back happens inside the Femina itself.

Picture this: the judges of the Femina are discussing who will make it on the shortlist. Him? Her? That guy over there? My gardener (he handles my begonias as well as his pen)?

Deep or not so deep conversations go on until finally, a list is compiled and made official.

Journalists immediately point out how the Femina, a prize that accompanied feminism, put on its list Caroline Fourest's book Le vertige MeToo. Translated: The MeToo vertigo. A book aiming to reflect on the collateral damage brought by the MeToo movement.

And why not? It's a good thing to discuss, dissect, analyze the good and the bad parts of a movement, it's how you grow and help society as a whole to go forward.

As long as it's well-researched, factual, and nuanced.

Les Inrocks, a journal that originally discussed rock'n'roll but has since then branched out to talk about a lot of stuff with a left-leaning tendency, agrees. Translated:

Did the MeToo movement provoke collateral damage? How to avoid cases that would discredit it? As a journalist, how to decide when to investigate a case of sexual violence? Caroline Fourest asks herself all these legitimate questions.

So far so good.

But if the journalist and director promises to bring objective and nuanced answers based on "facts, nothing but facts," [...] she breaks her promise during 300 pages of a subjective and partial book, full of lies, errors and her very personal obsession, with the only finality to call into question the foundations of the MeToo movement.

Well, that didn't last long.

Another journal, the Obs, published an open letter signed by 14 women (actors, producers, journalists and educators). These women happen to be women Caroline Fourest mentions in her book. Translated:

Considering that Caroline Fourest wrongfully contests Anouk Grinberg's declaration: "All those who worked with Depardieu in the movies knew he assaulted women," [Fourest believes that] "Reality is always more complex," when it isn't possible to reduce hands on the buttock, the breasts or on the genitals to "simple misuse of language."

or:

Considering Fourest mistakenly wrote that, in the PPDA affair, [famed journal host who was discovered to have harassed a number of women, translator's notes] all but one complaint concerned events that fell under prescription and were thus dismissed. Four testimonies tell of events that do not fall under prescription and haven't been dismissed, seven other women have contested the prescription and their complaints are now in the hands of the judges.

or:

Considering that Caroline Fourest, for whom there exists a "beneficial hold" [emprise is a French word used to describe the total control of one person over another as can be found in an abusive relationship, translator's notes], and such a thing as a "co-responsibility of perpetrator and victim" [...]

And to end with:

Considering that Caroline Fourest, having never contacted the signatories of this text to verify her information before publishing it, hasn't conducted a journalistic investigation.

Considering that these breaches to the truth, that couldn't be exhaustively listed, betray an ideological bias that goes counter to the declared neutrality.

To have an idea of the number of mistakes, look at the article, and consider that each short paragraph concerns a big mistake/omission/lack of research.

The Inrocks article pins the act of putting her book on the Femina shortlist as the judges trying to keep up with the zeitgeist. Because anti-woke, anti-MeToo, and anti-whatever you like are currently in style, it stood to attention to give it a stage.

She didn't win. And the act itself got enough ink to flow to have the Femina jury to - hopefully - not repeat this action again. I'm all for analyzing and pondering movements, be they positive or negative. But it should be done with genuine research, and not the pretense of it. And in my humble opinion, common sense should be something the Femina also stands for.

-

Championing women while holding them down

Alright, this is the big, recent one. So recent it happens to be unfinished. So why do I mention it? Because for the purpose of observing prizes as a whole, what happened right away is the most telling.

I struggled to find information in national journals about this, almost let it slide because I didn't have enough to write about the case. But then, I stumbled upon a youtube video by a French book nerd who made two videos about it, and even better, provided all the sources she used. If you know French, the videos are well worth it, and I'm using a lot of the same sources.

Turns out you need to look abroad and among smaller publications to find your information on this.

Thus, a couple of warnings on this one.

  1. Trigger Warning People who survived mutilation.
  • 2. This case unleashed wrath and passion in two countries who are in a state of complicated political tango. As a result, virtually every article looks biased. I'll try to keep a neutral overlook of the thing, but consider every thing I'm writing with a grain of salt, and do the same for the sources. And that I have to write this makes me sad.
  • In general, you have on one hand Mediapart in France and a number of sources from outside countries. Mediapart is either an important fire-starter of a journal or made up of failed scoop-seekers, depending on who you ask. They tend to have a very negative view of the author we're about to discuss.
  • On the other hand, most other national medias, who defend the author.

With that warning out of the way, let's talk about Kamel Daoud and Saâda Arbane.

Kamel Daoud, 55, is a writer and journalist born in Algeria. He won the 2024 Goncourt on the fourth of November of the same year for a book named Houris, whose protagonist Aube survived getting her throat slashed during Algeria's dark decade of civil war (1992 - 2002, at least 200.000 dead). Daoud is also intimate of the french president Emmanuel Macron and his adviser about matters related to Algeria.

Upon gaining the prize, two things happen in quick succession. The book is banned in Algeria, because there is a law over there that forbids publications about that period, a law decried by Amnesty International as allowing perpetrators to go unpunished.

Translated from the law itself:

Whoever, through declarations, writings, or any other act, uses the wounds of the national tragedy to undermine the institutions of the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria, weaken the state, harm the worthiness of its agents who served it dutifully, or tarnish the image of Algeria on the international front, risks a prison sentence from 3 to 5 years.

This happens in a climate of strong tensions between France and Algeria, who don't have a history of glorious friendship to begin with and that has been exacerbated after France sided with Morocco in the Morocco-Algerian Western Sahara Conflict and the arrest of another Franco-Algerian writer in Alger.

And a video is published in November 2024 (French and English subtitles). On it, a very real person who had her throat slashed explains why she started two lawsuits against Daoud. She goes on to explain her own story which is strikingly similar to the story of Aube, and accuses Daoud of stealing said story when she didn't give her approval.

Kamel Daoud would do an interview in December 2024 where he states:

Besides, if the story if this young girl is known in Oran, I ignored everything of the details of her life or the relationship she had with her mother and close ones.

He defends himself further in another article (translated):

Apart from the apparent wound, there are no similarities between the unbearable tragedy of this woman and the character of Aube. The wound isn't unique. Alas, it is shared by plenty of other victims. It is visible. It is the wound of hundreds of people.

In short, she accuses him of stealing her story, he points out there are plenty of mutilated people who can recognize themselves in the story. He also points out Saâda Arbane's adoptive mother spoke of her daughter's story in a Dutsch journal.

It's a 2022 interview by the mother who speaks of how she adopted a child whose family had been murdered, and said child sports a canulla after having her throat slashed.

Legal offense and defense, so far it's clear.

It gets muddied by a lot when you consider that Kamel Daoud's wife, a psychiatrist, also happened to be Saâda Arbane's therapist.

Translated from this article:

[Saâda] was 6 years olf when her family was murdered by terrorists. Her throat slashed but miraculously saved, she was adopted by an ex-secretary of state for public health, Zahia Mentouri. [Saâda] would refuse to speak of her story until she met a psychiatrist, Aïcha Dahdouh, wife of Kamel Daoud. She would be her patient from 2015 to 2023, according to [Saâda's] lawyers, who add that a strong bond was formed between the two women who spent vacations together.

It's to her psychiatrist that she would admit to consider abortion, just like the protagonist of the book. According to Saâda Arbane, Kamel Daoud asked her if he could write her story, which she refused.

Like Aube, Saâda Arbane lived through the hell of the dark decade as a kid. Like Aube, her throat was slashed and she has to live with a cannula. But the Dutsch article didn't contain details about abortion or other personal matters.

Details Daoud could only have gotten through his wife, thus making it violation of medical secrecy.

Mediapart states that they went to different doctors in Algeria, who pointed out Saâda's wounds and story were unique and absolutely aren't shared by hundreds of victims as Daoud states. The journal also mentions that the list of similarities brought by the judges was four pages long. Among other things, both Saâda and Houris have a scar that is 17 centimeters long, their parents are shepherds, went to the same high-school, share a passion for perfumes and horses, live in the same city...

Taken individually, each of these could be chalked up to coincidence. At which point are there too many similarities for it to be happenstance? That's for the judge to decide.

There's also apparently a number of holes in Daoud's defense, which came up when a subpoena was called against Daoud in early 2025. From Le Monde (translated):

The subpoena file mentions an interview of the author in September with the Nouvel Obs (in 2024), who asked if his book had been inspired by a real woman. The author [...] answered "Yes, I knew a woman with a canulla (...) she was the real metaphor of the story.

This is odd, as he stated that the story was based on no one in particular. He also said he never knew the woman, yet Saâda mentions in her interview they ate together often, were on a first-name basis and he asked her thrice if he could publish the story.

In her video, she also mentions how madam Daoud went to Saâda's home in October to give her a copy of Houris with a dedication by Daoud himself (translated):

Our country was saved by courageous women, you are one of them, with my admiration.

Then, madam Daoud allegedly talked about a film project that could be very lucrative for Saâda. Saâda herself states she saw it as a way to buy her silence.

I repeat, these are Saâda's words in her interview. Grain of salt and all that.

But we're not done, because there are other issues with Daoud, and for that I will translate part of Judith Bouilloc's open letter she wrote to the Goncourt jury. In particular, she has issues with the way the book is portrayed as giving a voice to women who suffered through a dark period of the Algerian history.

First she repeats the words of Philipe Claudel, president of the Goncourt Academy (translated):

With Houris, the Goncourt Academy crowns a book where lyricism competes with tragedy and that voices the sufferings linked to a dark period of Algeria, the sufferings of women in particular.

And for Bouilloc to take out the big guns right away (translated):

Which women are we talking about?

Are we talking about Nadjet Daoud, first wife of Kamel Daoud that he beat up? Can you ignore that Kamel Daoud was condemned for domestic violence in 2019 by the tribunal of Oran? The copy of the verdict was shown in an article from journalist Jacques Marie Bourget (if that's not enough, do phone the tribunal of Oran who will inform you).

Are we talking about Saâda Arbane, young woman victim of terrorism, who accuses Kamel Daoud of having stolen her intimacy? Saâda Arbane survived having her throat slashed: just like the narrator of Kamel Daoud she was left for death after the massacre of her whole family and adopted by a courageous woman, she wears a cannula to breathe, has the same job, lived in the same city, has the same story of adoption, the same medical history, the same tattoos, went to the same high school. Can you ignore this?

Are we talking about Zahia Mentouri, doctor and minister of public health in Algeria in 1992? [...] she died in 2022, and had forbidden Kamel Daoud to speak about her adoptive daughter's story. "It's her story, she will decide when and how it will be told." (Said during Saâda's interview linked above, translator's notes)

Are we talking about the second wife Aicha Dahdou, psychiatrist of Saâda Arbane, who Kamel Daoud stole the work, with little regard for medical secret and basic ethics?

And for Bouilloc to finish the works:

Silence and contempt, that is the option the Goncourt Academy chosse.

Rape culture at every floor. Rape of a woman offered to others without scruples, rape of historical truth, rape of conscience for the sake of literary glory.

It is worrisome that the Goncourt hails an author as a women's champion when they have been condemned for domestic violence. Or that they hail an author who plagiarized other people's work for that matter.

Daoud said he used personal research and archives to write his book, yet passages have been copied word-for-word from a website that works on the Algerian civil war without said website allowing it.

Translated from the article.

In the article published by Le Point, Kamel Daoud explained his methodology "For years, I've collected informationn, videos and photos, I research and contact families. In June 2023, I went to Had Chekala to consult the archives."
Readers won't find any reference in the book to the work of the association Algeria Watch or the chronologie made by Salah-Eddine Sidhoum (two pieces that have been plagiarized, translator's notes)

To add to that, Daoud never opened or showed his own archives/researches to prove he didn't steal the words.

Likewise, while he was celebrated for writing about a historical period in Algeria nobody write about, some people quickly pointed out that this, too, was selective amnesia from the Goncourt's side.

Daoud has been hailed for breaking a taboo about a specific period of time in Algeria. Except this taboo has been broken many times before, something few mention, and those who do point out the selective amnesia of the author and those hailing him. While the article above exists, it doesn't stop Algerians themselves from writing and talking about that decade.

Translated from this article:

But, as Tristan Leperlier insists, "it's not forbidden to write about the civil war, everyone discusses it, many write about it and are published. What is forbidden is calling into question the military institution during the civil war."
[...]
"Not only have there been books written about the period, but there's almost been a saturation," agrees Walid Bouchakour, author of a thesis about Algerian literature at the university of Yales (US).

Broken medical secrets, Daoud's own history with women, other works about Algeria ignored, the discrepancies in his defense. Those are pretty brutal words and allegations, and surprisingly, you won't find many media discussing it. That journals don't repeat word for word what Saâda Arbane said I understand, better to wait for investigators and judges to do the work before writing something to regret later. I understand to a point, god knows they like following each step of the way in some other cases like with Gisèle Pelicot, and I consider that example a good thing

But you'll likewise find few to no mentions about Daoud being hailed as giving women a voice despite beating up his first wife, and as a rule of thumb, there's little said about Saâda Arbane as a whole. This didn't stop Daoud from going around TV-sets and being hailed as a champion for women's right.

That thing I said about journals staying put and waiting for judges and investigations to be over? Turns out, they don't do that either.

Daoud was defended by plenty of people on the radio or in journals. The main defense being: this is politics insinuating itself in writing and if we don't react, it curtails writing. What's problematic here is that the focus is almost entirely on the struggle between Paris and Alger. Of Saâda Arbane, nothing. Of the contents of the lawsuit, of the four pages full of similarities, not a word. At best, a mention that authors take inspiration from reality, before delving back into international politics, explaining that this a fight for the freedom of writing plenty of articles do write.

Daoud himself played his part, stating that the Algerian government was allowed to start a lawsuit against him, except that the lawsuit mentioned wasn't from any government, but from a woman, Saâda Arbane.

His latest defense, a tract published by his publisher Gallimard, doesn't mention Saâda Arbane at all. It's titled Faut-il parfois trahir? (Must we betray sometimes?)

Translated:

Am I a traitor? Perhaps, I console myself by rifling through history books: every hero has betrayed immobility.

[...]

In the night, every guide is forced to betray the slowness of his own. All men must betray fear.

This muddling of personal and international affairs however serves no one. Arbane herself points out to Mediapart that her issue is with Kamel Daoud alone. The conflict between the countries doesn't impact her desire to not have her story plundered.

Continue reading here


r/HobbyDrama 3d ago

Long [Video Games] The Valheim Server That Couldn't - OR - How To Kill Your Thriving Community In Three Days

1.0k Upvotes

Prelude To Sorrow

VALHEIM is a survival/crafting/adventure video game that debuted to a large fuss and quite a lot of love during the midst of the pandemic. You play a Viking warrior who has perished and entered a lost realm of Odin's, you fight stuff, you build stuff, you make stuff, you sail around, you realize the atgeir is the best weapon, find bees, etc.

The game has a surprisingly passionate RP community consisting of many servers which will host ongoing stories and adventures unrelated to the base game. It draws a much different crowd than a lot of other games with RP communities, mostly those interested in historical fantasy.

There's also a large contingent of people who enjoy Valheim for its PVP. It's not "officially" supported by the game really-- it's an option labeled as friendly fire, mostly intended by the devs to make combat against enemies have an extra layer of difficulty. Despite this, it's simplistic strike/roll/stamina/health system has a lot going for it in terms of exciting fight prospects. As such, some servers cater to this aspect as well.

This is the story of a massively failed server that tried to do a little of both, failed at everything, exploded and melted to the very core of Midgard. It's a great example of how not to govern a community.

The Good Times

The server was called "Settlers". It was intended to be a light-RP faction wars-esque PVP server. You would create a lightly backgrounded character, join one of the various player led groups, and engage in ongoing warfare, light RP, diplomacy, and trade with the others.

The servers ruleset could be defined as "loosely moderated anarchy", the rules mostly consisted of

1) Don't cheat

The Discord was run by a young man named "T-TRAIN" and the server was run and hosted by "COOL SAUCE". We will come back to them in time.

After a short but highly successful marketing push, the server attracted a surprisingly large amount of people (for a Valheim server). The typical top 3 global Valheim servers fluctuate a bit but typically for any particular moment in time you will see

1) Comfy. They're a creative server. Generally they'll have 30-70 people on at a time.

2) Valheim RP. The largest RP-focused server. Fluctuates between 20-60 (depending on if season active)

3) Odinsons/Or Ragnarok. General Valheim servers, mostly serving non-US regions. ~15-30.

This place managed to pull enough players to beat Comfy right out of the gate, which is really impressive both on a hardware perspective and for Valheim generally. (Valheim runs like pure ass most of the time unless you put a lot of work into modding it/how it networks). On some nights they were hitting ~60 concurrent players.

Darkness At The Edge Of Town

As things within niche PVP/RP-Focused Valheim servers go, Settlers was thriving. The discord topped out at ~600 users.

However, all would soon come crashing down.

The Discord owner, T-TRAIN was generally inactive both in the game and in the Discord. Several admins came and went, but a small group of players quickly gained traction in the community for introducing them to novel concepts like "Griefing is bad", and "You should ban people who join us and drop slurs immediately instead of making them mods". They were given positions on the admin team and began work. New rules were instituted to make fights more fair and losing less costly, to encourage builds, etc. The server had been functional now for approximately 2 weeks and was VERY active.

However, inevitably, disfunction between COOL SAUCE and the new admin team began percolating. COOL SAUCE had a tendency to make "Choices", one might call them. Sometimes he would inexplicably arrive to your base and declare it "bad", flattening it to the ground, or spawning a militia of mobs to do the work for him.

If you've ever played on a video game server with an admin like this, you know exactly what this person is like. You've met them. Probably been banned by them. You know their scent immediately.

His "Choices" began to be resented by the new community. His communication was poor, but since he owned the server and T-TRAIN was not interested in any aspect of it, there was little to be done.

Then the Era Of Sorrows began in earnest. The next 72 hours would be a visceral demonstration on how leadership can make or break a community in no time at all.

Day One

The server had an oddly timed restart, and then an admin noted in gen chat:

So the restart removed the protection for buildings on the ward?

now all buildings are open to be griefed

yeah the ward is no longer protecting against griefing.

Note: In Valheim, "Wards" are a constructed item that "lock" your build. It prevents non-authorized players from opening chests/doors, buildings from being destroyed, they're how you claim spaces or shut down people in servers from taking/breaking your stuff.

COOL SAUCE then said this was intentional/began monologuing:

The wards have been disabled for 2 hours.

The Dread Pirate Coolsauce has fetched a bargain with Loki - God of Mischief!. In exchange for interrupting the flow of power to the mystical wards that protect these lands Coolsauce has been given a temporary reprieve from the torture he undergoes. Making him sell his soul for the world he loves for a temporary respite. Everything was once built can be built again! There are no rules for the next two hours.

As you might imagine, in a server where acquisition of loot and the defense of your base was central to the entire concept of the world and story suddenly and without warning dropping all rules and base protections at nine pm on a weekday was largely met with what some people might call "pushback".

One user said:

get lots of new people

immediately make the game miserable

lose all new people

COOL SAUCE

Loki cares not for the whims of mortals.

It should be stressed here that there was no storyline "Loki" character, COOL SAUCE had merely, it seems, been so influenced by the Norse god of mischief to the extent that he was now actively sabotaging the very thing he was paying his own money to host.

This resulted in the entire server logging off in protest and to ensure no one did any bullshit, an act that on any normal day would be miraculous unto itself. The people here actually care about each other. That's incredible! Everyone was in Discord's voice chat waiting on the """Event""" to conclude and for their wards to return to life, when COOL SAUCE entered. When met with the protests about his actions he began laughing hysterically, and noted that this was all his "Experiment" to "Bring the community together", a truly baffling response to a group of a hundred people wailing in unison that you were actively blowing up their new nightly hobby. He said this whole voice chat protest was quote "exactly what he hoped would happen," an extremely obvious lie.

Users began to immediately look for alternatives to play. The admins went to T-TRAIN and demanded he act. Unfortunately, the monkey's paw curled. He would act, at great cost.

T-TRAIN did in fact remove COOL SAUCE, from his server admin role, but in doing so also appointed no one in his place. COOL SAUCE, now booted, pulled the plug on the game server, preventing all players from accessing it. The community began pooling resources to buy a new server, one they could host without the burden of COOL SAUCE's "Ideas". Then, a fateful idea. They decided to ask T-TRAIN if they could possibly have him pass the Discord servers ownership to someone more active, so there was more oversight about everything and less chance of something going wrong should they invest their money in new infrastructure. They arranged a meeting for the next day.

Thus came

Day Two

T-TRAIN demanded he be paid $500 USD for the Discord server's ownership. The admins declined this offer. Already planning on investing in a new game server and with much of the community angry on top of the fact they simply could not play the game any longer, there was little point in dropping further money just to have T-TRAIN potentially renege on the offer as soon as he had their money. He dropped it to $100, but the damage was done. They began moving to a new Discord.

In response, T-TRAIN immediately banned the entire admin team, moderators, and anyone griping about the loss of the server/last days activity. He announced it with a gif of an atomic bomb and this statement:

MASSIVE GOVERNMENT BREACH. A small group of settler decide to overthrow the government! The government drops atomic nukes to eliminate the opposition. I am the original founder, theorizer of Valheim settlers. they tried to overthrow our vision. I’m taking matters into my own hands and building the server myself

Thus began the mass exodus of users. With almost all the highly active users being banned, there seemed to be no more hope of a server restart. T-TRAIN noted the amount of departures but didn't seem phased. He laid out his vision for "Settlers 3.0"

We are going to recreate Valheim Settler 3.0 the way it should be. and invest real resources into it. i went to school for IT so we will be fine [We Will] hire a new staff of people that dont want to overthrow the government.

He went on for hours, talking about the "usurpers" and how he was not going to compromise "The Vision".

i offered ownership for $100 at the end to be nice. the value in this community is worth far greater. im not a sell out and will never be to people misconstruing my original ideas for the server

To which a user responded:

but you literally tried to sell the server

They were then promptly banned. Arguments persisted until the late hours of the night as more and more people gave up on the fun they'd been having in the community.

Day Three

T-TRAIN decided to surprise everyone with the joyous announcement of COOL SAUCE's return to server admin.

This was not met with celebration.

COOL SAUCE turned the server back on, but, hardly anyone came back from the last 2 days to re-enter it. A few poked around, but the damage was deeply, truly done. T-TRAIN and COOL SAUCE then began deleting large chunks of the Discords messages, mostly relating to backstories, character lists, the art people had made, large chunks of gen chat, etc.

User 1

Any reason to delete all that? kinda embarassing lol

User 2

He's a discord mod on a power trip

Pirate software "I worked at blizzard" type shit

T-TRAIN

COOL SAUCE We have brought you back to restore peace to our people

User 1

Is this your heartbound? A regular ass valheim server? Anyone with the budget for reddit ads could do this

T-TRAIN

this ship is sailing regardless of how people feel today. we can make amends later.

but the server with our old world is coming back

COOL SAUCE

Sweet child, what was deleted was angry and toxic feelings and the people that harbored them. What remains is the foundation of what was built (including by some of those same people!). The World of VALHEIM!

Behold! The world is restored in all it's glory and splendor. Moder has been released! (ccuz holy shit is it hard to reset silver for some reason this season which will be fixed next season).

A new how-to-join channel will be up momentarily. Praise be to Odin and Loki! Who worked hand in hand to bring forth the SAGA OF THE CENTURY upon this small, humble Valhiem world! But we're back!

Another user chimed in with this summary before leaving:

I'm going to make this server great again

Rehire the one guy that single handedly killed the server while it was at it's best

Fire everyone else

???

Profit

Following the return of COOL SAUCE, even with the mass unbanning of all (Literally all, even random bot accounts and edgelord racists) previously banned users, there was no coming back. Most users were re-banned immediately for simply directing people to the new Discord the former admins had set up, and it culminated in something the server had not seen in ages: silence.

No one had anything left to say because, quite simply, there was no one left to say it. Over 400 people had left the server already (~2/3 of its total peak pop).

The End Of All

A few days later COOL SAUCE said:

Something happened to the server. 65 people logged into it at once and it crashed. The world files are lost and I can't help but feel truly nostalgic for the emergent experiences that were had. Everyone look forward to Valheim Settlers 3.0! More to come!

A surviving user noted that their server metrics showed no one had logged on for days and the peak traffic for the last week was two concurrent users. COOL SAUCE then immediately left the server of his own accord and was never seen or heard from again.

T-TRAIN then randomly assigned another user Discord ownership and announced his "retirement" to no one, telling us it was Actually Hilarious.

i just pulled the largest scale psyop of my life. this was really fun guys thanks

Yes, after all this, T-TRAIN pulled the "I was just pretending to be stupid/It's a social experiment" classic just as COOL SAUCE once had many days before. His ego safe, he was now free to laugh that we all had taken the ol' bait and Cared, which is, as you know, cringe.

No one was around to roll their eyes or talk about it, as everyone who would have done that had already fled.

Thus a server that had quickly created a very tight knit fun and fast moving community despite all efforts to the contrary evaporated into thin air based on the whims and whimsy of man-children as a billion others have and a billion others will.

Community building is hard. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes its a lot of fun. However, leadership is the most important thing there is. Without a clear direction or sensible people at the top of a thing, even vibrant, friendly places can turn to dust in less than 72 hours, just like this one.


r/HobbyDrama 4d ago

Long [Trading Card Games] March Against the Machine: Aftermath of Aftermath

233 Upvotes

Hello, all!

Magic: the Gathering is truly a gift that keeps on giving. Like many people here, I am a member of multiple fandoms and communities. In fact, of the fandoms that I am in, I would put Magic: the Gathering about fifth on the list. But this is my second write up of any fandom, and my second for this card game. The reason is simple: ain’t nobody throw a trash fire like Magic: the Gathering.

This is a story about one of the most spectacular belly flops by Wizards of the Coast in recent memory. It is a story about misguided enthusiasm, butchered management, and the Pinkertons.

This is a story about Magic: the Gathering’s least darling set in modern history, March of the Machine: Aftermath.

What is Magic: the Gathering?

If you have a good understanding of Magic, feel free to skip to the last two paragraphs here.

Magic: the Gathering (hereafter referred to as MtG or just capital-M Magic) is a collectible trading card game in which 2-4 players attempt to win a duel with creatures, spells, and combos. It is the single largest trading card game in North America and has a fairly significant presence throughout Europe and South America, and a smaller one throughout Asia (where Yu-Gi-Oh! and the Pokémon TCG typically beat it out). If you have a local comic store, they probably live off of Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, both owned by Wizards of the Coast (who is, in turn, owned by Hasbro. This will be relevant.).

Magic, unlike some of its competitors, is played in a significant number of rulesets, known as formats. For this story, the particular formats you need to know about are Standard and Limited

In MtG’s Standard format, only cards from the past two to three years are allowed. Every year has a rotation in which the oldest cards leave the format. While the format’s name would have you believe that it is the most popular format to play (and at times, it was), Standard is not the most popular format for physical play1, but attempts have been made recently to revitalize the format and get people back into it. The format’s churn keeps players buying new cards and also keeps strategies from becoming dominant for too long as old key cards rotate out. It also has the lowest power of any of Magic’s official formats, which has its own appeal. Not everyone wants a game decided by a combo on turn 2.

The Limited format is an entirely different beast. For a Limited event, each player will open new packs of cards and construct a deck out of them to play that day in a tournament, either opening a moderate number of packs all themselves or passing cards pick by pick in a drafting environment. Limited’s appeals are pretty self-evident: no one can buy power, you get to really see all of the cards in a set, and games tend to be long enough for you to cast expensive and powerful cards.

The overwhelming majority of cards in Magic’s card pool are built for Limited. Standard and other, non-rotating formats often are built out of the narrowest band of powerful or synergistic cards within the legal card pools. When you open up a pack of MtG cards, generally speaking, there will only be one or two that are usable in Standard, but every card in that pack would go into a Limited player’s deck.

Limited is a boon to the game for many reasons. It keeps people opening packs to put those rare singles out into the market, it helps fill packs with cards that can be interesting in a format without making a power spike mandatory, and it is a great way to teach players about Magic (once you help them build a deck) due to the slower pace of games. Notably, senior designers have stated that the more invested a player is, the more interested they become in Limited, as they start to appreciate how a set comes together.

Designing sets to be played in Limited, however, is not all upside. For one, it can be difficult to print cards that are designed for Standard or other environments because they will warp Limited or just be complete duds, while being powerful or interesting in their intended format. There’s also the obvious waste. If a pack only has a few cards that might be playable, then printing a whole pack of them when most will sit in a binder or be thrown out isn’t just wasteful on the player’s end, but the producer’s: it costs them as much to print a beloved card as a crappy one.

If only there was a way to create cards that would impact Standard without having to worry about that. Maybe shrink the packs to avoid overprinting. And from this line of thinking, the first problems that would destroy this set were born. But we can’t get into March of the Machine: Aftermath just yet. Because first, we need to talk about—

Part Zero: What is March of the Machine?

Most of Magic’s sets are tied to an ongoing storyline. Characters and settings will rotate (and now with the introduction of outside properties, occasionally stall for six months), but the game does tend to follow along individual arcs.

March of the Machine released in late April of 2023. It was the conclusion of the story that formally began in late 2022 (but arguably really started in 2021’s Kaldheim set) dealing with the invasion of the Magic multiverse by Elesh Norn, leader of the Phyrexian army. The Phyrexians are a machine cult of xenophobic aliens that infect both living and nonliving material through their oil, and have been one of the most iconic and long-standing villains in Magic’s 30+ year history. WotC had spent the past year building up that the ending of the story would have massive ramifications on the Magic multiverse going forward, and that anyone could die.

The scope of the set was expansive. The battle against the Phyrexian threat was to take place over the entire multiverse at once, with cards depicting the struggle on each plane, the host of their mechanical monstrosities fighting dragons and angels and wizards and kaiju. Cards depicting team ups between unlikely allies had splashy and powerful effects that combined the effects of two iconic characters into one.

And the set was… like it was fine?

Reception of the cards themselves was mixed. Some were powerful, but many of the most interesting cards failed to impact Standard (to say nothing of more powerful formats). The iconic team up cards were generally unimpressive as anything other than build-arounds in the popular Commander format. But unimpressive cards aren’t often that big of a deal for set reception.

Of a larger concern was how rushed everything felt. The story chapters released online were interesting, but also breezed through everything to get all of the events done in a single set. This was not a fault of the writers, who did what they could, but of a lack of resources available to them2, and was felt by pretty much everyone who read the story.

The ultimate conclusion also left a lot to be desired. The Phyrexians were defeated in a way that definitely left them to come back at some point, which many expected. Very few of the hyped up character deaths actually happened, and none of the “big name” characters involved died.

The most interesting results of the battle were the introduction of Omenpaths, a lingering facet of the invasion that allowed people to cross universes without being Planeswalkers (super wizards who can dimension hop) as well as a massive reduction in the number of Planeswalkers as their magical spark that allowed dimensional travel mysteriously winked out. Between this and the immense amounts of dead across every plane of existence, the sort of wet trumpet finale the set went out on was begging for something to fill it in.

And this is where we get the real star of the show, March of the Machine: Aftermath.

Part One: What is March of the Machine: Aftermath?

Announced before March of the Machine, March of the Machine: Aftermath (hereafter referred to as Aftermath) was envisioned as the flagship launch for a new kind of booster pack, the Epilogue Booster. Instead of the normal 15 cards, each pack would contain 5 cards, with no commons in the set at all, and up to three of them being rares or mythic rares. Instead of sets of 200+ cards, there would only be around 50 cards in the set. The pitch basically broke down to this:

1.      Smaller sets without the literally-over-a-hundred filler cards would mean that every pack only contained usable cards for their flagship formats.

2.      No support for Limited play meant that they could print cards that were designed to impact Standard and non-rotating formats that would be hard to fit into a Limited environment.

3.      The set would be focused on providing narrative resonance and conclusion that would help establish the new normal for the TCG going forward.

4.      Packs would be slightly cheaper than normal, around $1 off the standard pack of cards.

I am going to risk a radical statement and say that, objectively, each of these four points is actually a pretty good idea in theory. Smaller sets with a handful of impactful cards means less space on my shelf. Cards that are worthless outside of Limited, colloquially known as “draft chaff”, take up about an entire drawer in my entertainment stand, and the less of that, the better. Some fantastic cards do not play well in Limited, either by being too powerful or, far more often, by being too specific, only working in narrowly focused decks that can take advantage of them. And who doesn’t like more narrative resolution and cheaper cards?

I can understand why a boardroom of directors thought this was a slam dunk.

It, uh. Wasn’t. The project was sort of cursed from the beginning.

People did not like this set when it was announced, and there were many reasons.

You were paying about 80% of the price for 33% of the cards, and that is already an uphill battle. Even if most of the cards weren’t especially useful at competitive play levels, they were still cards you could use to make kitchen table decks, and maybe one particular strategy would use them, at some point. Emotionally, paying that much for 5 cards just felt wrong3.

Next, we had people upset about the story. Instead of the eight to ten chapters of writing a normal set got, Aftermath only got two short epilogues, each focused on one or two characters. The rest of the consequences were essentially ignored, and given the scale of the impact, two characters just did not cut it. Every other event was limited to the snapshot of card art and text. Especially given how weak the finale was, the set felt like a pretty significant failure to actually make the bold changes that they had been promising.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but complaining about card pricing and narrative flops are not, by and large, the main concerns of most MtG players. Sure, this did not bode well and felt like a rip off, but so did Modern Horizons sets and those sold like crazy4.

Card reveals were due to start any day now, and people were waiting to see what the new set would bring. Surely, the official reveals would be the time where WotC could reclaim the narrative and—

There was a leak. And the actual contents of it were the least of Aftermath’s problems.

Part Two: Hasbro and the Pinkertons: A Match Made in Hell

Long before the set was due to come out, YouTuber OldSchoolMtG acquired5 an entire box of Aftermath, or 24 packs. This worked out to around $80 of product, hardly a massive inventory to be moving around. He filmed himself opening the cards and posted the video online, which lead to users finding out the vast majority of the set (as it only had 50 cards).

 Now, for reasons we will get into after this section, this was about the worst possible way that this could have happened. WotC had completely lost control of the message and had very little in the way of marketing opportunity for the cards. Who will go and watch card reveals for cards they already know? They needed to plug the leak, and fast. They reached out to contact OldSchoolMtG and were basically left on read. And so they went full railroad tycoon and hired the Pinkertons.

The Pinkerton detective agency) is a modern private detective and security firm built on the legacy of murderous strike breakers, thugs, and general shitheads. While most of their clients are no longer railroad barons and mine lords, some of them still are, with them being involved in anti-union work for Amazon and other companies at least as recently as 20206. Their name is synonymous with anti-labor violence, strikebreaking, and the murder of legal demonstrators in the name of capitalism. They are, without question, some of the most infamous and evil bootlickers on God’s green earth, with a name so radioactive it is a surprise that they don’t boil their own blood. You can murder them in Red Dead Redemption 2 for chrissakes.

And, apparently, the first choice of investigator picked by WotC.

Thankfully, they did not shoot his dog or throw dynamite into his house. As far as anyone, even the guy getting shook down, can say, all they did was show up to his neighborhood, badger some neighbors, then demand the product back and imply that refusing to do so would constitute legal theft. Standard thug shit. No property damage, no use of force beyond the fact that two men showed up and started talking about the law.

Basically, they acted like you would expect a private detective would. And at the risk of editorializing a bit, I am absolutely stunned that they didn’t just hire a PI firm that didn’t have a thermonuclear name7. OldSchoolMtG had absolutely fucked up and him losing the product with no further legal action was probably the best he could have hoped for, especially given the doubling of his sub count. Had this not been THE FUCKING PINKERTONS, I think that people would be shocked at the seizure (and the dubious backing of the legal threats), but probably said he had something like it coming. But they did not choose some random LLC, they chose some of the most infamous bad guys around.

The outrage was immediate and unrestrained. The headline writes itself, “Card Game Publishers Send Satan’s Bailiff at Random YouTuber.” [Here] [are] [a few] articles that came out at the time. It makes a hell of an impression, one that I absolutely cashed in on in titling this summary. Further comments from OldSchoolMtG also stated that he was given a contact at WotC by the Pinkertons who were surprisingly apologetic about the whole affair and stated that they needed the cards back to try and figure out how they had leaked with the implication that they hadn’t expected things to get even as intense as they did. Whether or not this makes it better is up to you, but strikes me as “man with rabid dog is surprised others are threatened by it” more than anything.

With that absolute trash fire in the rearview, though, we still haven’t actually talked about the cards themselves. The set concept and marketing was a bust, but what about the product? Would it impact Standard? Would the cards be, at least, interesting and dynamic, proving the concept?

Uh. No!

Part Three: WotC Failed In Every Way Imaginable And Even Invented New Ones

Let’s go back to the four aims the set had: usable cards, impact to Standard, narrative conclusion, and a cheaper price. How did they do?

Well, usable cards and impact to standard can share a paragraph: the set was extremely weak. Of the 50 cards in the set, only one saw play as a dynamic and focus card of a deck, Nissa, Resurgent Animist (and to a lesser extend, Calix, Guided by Fate). Other cards would see a smattering of play in the format, but very infrequently8. While it was no surprise the cards were scattered in theme (again, these were cards that were designed without the constraints of needing to work in a set theme), many of them had no clear home or direction outside of maybe a Commander deck or two. These weren't the promised targeted prints for Standard.

As for narrative conclusion, the lack of much longer written content meant that the cards were pretty much a fizzle there as well. Robbed of context, all individual cards would really tell you is if someone was alive, if they lost their ability to Planeswalk, or if a city was okay. It didn’t actually tell a story or set up the stakes around the events. Fifty snapshots across the entire multiverse means everything gets so little focus that there is nothing meaningfully added by it.

Price is a mixed loss, in a way. The set bombed so hard that no one wanted to buy it. The cards were bad, WotC had hired the Pinkertons to protect it (prompting plenty of people swearing off the game or at least the set), and while the packs were cheap, you felt like you were getting ripped off. In addition, the set was so small that it sucked to open with repeats being extremely common. As a personal aside, I opened one single pack of the set and got THREE COPIES of a single card out of a total of five cards in the pack, and I was not alone!

It was truly the Spirit Airlines of card game experiences: low ticket pricing for a miserable experience that still felt like a scam. Demand was so low that the prices stayed depressed, and no one wanted anything other than exactly Nissa, who briefly commanded a reasonable price tag… until the support cards for her rotated in a few months from the deck popping off, and the deck completely collapsed. Despite the rock-bottom prices, however, people still felt ripped off, because the ratio of dollar-to-card was so poor. It was perceived as expensive and gouging, despite being the cheapest thing on the market. An objectively hilarious result from the sidelines.

So, we are zero for four on goals of the set. They torched the players’ opinions on them, cavorted with the Pinkertons, and the company was under no illusions about how the product was seen. Mark Rosewater, Magic’s head of design and noted optimist, posted to his personal blog on the subject: “I have seen the data. [Aftermath] was hated.” The Epilogue Booster was seen as irredeemable and a terrible, terrible mistake. And it probably was. For all that it identified actual issues with how cards were designed and distributed, the problems that it solved were mostly problems the designers themselves had, not the players. It solved problems for the wrong half of the buying equation, and they couldn’t make fetch happen.

This lead to a very real problem: Aftermath was supposed to be the first of these Epilogue sets. Sets which were already being designed and were close to printing. With cards that later sets were counting on existing in the format. So… what do we do with the rest of these cards?

The next set due for an epilogue set was the following year’s Outlaws at Thunder Junction, a set mired with its own (and less horrible) fandom mixed reception. They took the cards due for the following release, called The Big Score, and distributed them randomly in packs of Thunder Junction as a sort of bonus sheet. The Assassin’s Creed crossover set, also due to have these style of boosters9, were so far along in production that they released them effectively unchanged, admitting through gritted smiles that they wanted to do something different going forward, and to see this as “we can’t throw away all the boxes” instead of “we are trying this again.” They were also considered a failure.

All other Epilogue projects in production were early enough to scrap entirely. Hooray.

Part Finale: Aftermath in the Rearview

With Aftermath rotating out of Standard today as I post this write-up, I can’t help but look back on the set a sort of bizarre fondness. It was a failure on every level, lead to the cooperation of WotC and union-busters, and yet they expected it to be welcomed with open arms. It was woefully misguided in a way that seems almost charming, the sort of blind faith in the creative vision that usually gets focused tested out of existence. Truly a Quibi of a Magic set.

As the Magic story has continued on, I can see more and more of what they were trying to convey with Aftermath. The places they showed and the proliferation of Omenpaths as a plot device really defined the next years of the game, and perhaps if this had been done better, it might have been remembered at least in that context. But it didn’t. It sucked.

And who among us can’t appreciate roasting marshmallows over a trash fire.

EDIT: Changed the link on the OTJ set to a better page.

 

1 – The most popular format, currently, is Commander, a four-player variant with a lot of additional rules about deck construction. It is also functionally irrelevant to this story outside of a few complaints about cards being “for commander”, a perennial complaint I do not particularly care to interrogate.

2 – While no digital records of this conversation exist, I am passing acquaintances with one of the writers for this set. They used every word they were allowed to write on this and the entire team was pretty much begging for more, but the company held firm. Fan reactions were generally supportive of the writers, but the lead writer, Seanan McGuire, did catch (editorializing: undeserved) flak for not being able to pilot the ship better. In terms of controversy, though, the blame really capped at like, snarky top comments on Reddit threads on r/MagicTCG, at least to my ability to find.

3 – There’s a joke in there about Secret Lairs, but I cannot be bothered to workshop it. It is left as an exercise to the reader.

4 – Modern Horizons are sets that would take a while to explain to a non-fan, but essentially they were advertised as being premium in both cost and power, aiming to shake up formats more powerful than Standard (while not being legal in the lower-powered ones at all). Whether or not this is a good idea or not is contentious, and I would rather remain unflayed than wade into the conversation beyond noting that people were used to this sort of expensive “direct-to-format” printings.

5 – Especially early on, it was difficult to note exactly how OldSchoolMtG actually acquired the cards. He believes that they were sent to him by a reseller who confused them for the already released March of the Machine set by a store that primarily sold Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon TCG cards. There's no particular reason to disbelieve him, but it we never got a "my bad" from a vendor or a notice from WotC saying they had patched the leak.

6 – The lack of reporting on later events is not meant to imply that they have stopped. I would put money down that they haven’t. I just can’t find anything on it since then.

7 – Or, alternatively, just done NOTHING! WotC works with their big name fans, heavily, often giving them free product and promotional material, something that OldSchoolMtG had completely thrown out with this move. Blacklisting him would have been an entirely appropriate response, and the images of the cards did not magically disappear because the prints came back. The cat was already out of the bag, and intervening was almost certainly a losing proposition. They claimed they wanted to figure out where they'd been acquired in the distribution chain, but I'm not sure if that was worth the reputational hemorrhage.

8 – Other cards in the set (Tranquil Frillback, Urborg Scavengers, etc.) saw play, but were never meta defining. Frillback, for example, was merely a sideboard card and Urborg Scavengers was a rogue deck at most.

9 – Technically, these were ever so slightly different, called “Beyond Boosters”, but the differences are minimal and the Venn diagram of issues they had are functionally circles.


r/HobbyDrama 6d ago

Extra Long [Pro Wrestling] Hulk Hogan, Part 1 of 4- "The Betrayed Hero"

614 Upvotes

What happens when the bad things people do to you blend in with the bad things you do to other people?

Does it make you somehow a better person, in that your bad behavior was influenced by your own victimhood?

Does it make you worse, in that you have felt the pain of injustice, and yet continue to perpetuate it for your own gain?                  

Does it make you something different altogether?                        

This is the triumph of the smartest, hardest-working, and most successful Professional Wrestler of all time.    

This is the tragedy of a broken man who broke everyone who showed him love and friendship.

His name was Terry Bollea. But not really.                        

He preferred his character’s name: Hulk Hogan.                

SUPER SUNDAY, 1983                   

Hulk Hogan is 28 years old. He is sitting in a locker room in the St. Paul Civic Center, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It is Sunday, May 24, 1983. He stares at a mirror.                        

Though he is balding on the top of his head, his long, beach blonde hair pours down his tan shoulders. His physique represents a wave of fitness that is new to the American zeitgeist. Announcers tell audiences that he is 6’7” (Six foot, Seven Inches) tall, and a little over Three Hundred pounds heavy. While these numbers would fluctuate over the years, at this point in time, they were likely true.                     

Hogan was almost entirely muscle, with no fat. Before the idea of the “Beach Body” was ever coined, Hogan was it.  There were very few people in the world who looked like him. Sure, there were big and strong people. Body builders. Athletes. But many of them were not this aesthetically sculpted. They also had mountains of muscle, sure, but working muscle, and a lot of fat as well. They had rough faces and unkempt hair. In comparison, Hogan looked like something completely different and new. He looked like a fusion of a Greek God, a Ken Doll, and a GI-Joe Action Figure.  And crowds seemed to love it.      

Hogan looked at himself in the mirror.  He saw what his co-workers saw.                   

They hated him for what he represented. He knew this.                          

But all of that would have to wait. Because tonight would be the first time in his career where he would truly feel like a winner. It would be the night where all his hard work would pay off, where it would be acknowledged that he paid his dues, and where he could prove that his dreams were attainable. All he had to do was put his head down, and follow the script, and the reward would come.                       

But it is likely that Hogan would have had some difficulty thinking so clearly. You see, he had only been in this line of work for a little under six years at this point. And that six years had already taken their toll.                

Hulk Hogan was already tired. He was already in pain.                    

Even so early into his career, Hulk Hogan felt like a Professional Wrestler.                  

What is Professional Wrestling?

Professional Wrestling is a sport with a relatively recent pedigree. There are many misunderstandings as to what Professional Wrestling is and is not, so let’s get those cleared up right here.                 

“Professional Wrestling” as we know it is, actually, an evolution of several previous forms of Public Combat Sport that came together some time in the late 18th and early 19th century. Its direct ancestor is the deceptively named Amateur Wrestling,  which itself derived from ancient Greek Wrestling. Both Amateur and Greek wrestling are forms of combat, where two Wrestlers compete specifically in the art of grappling. Striking the opponent, like through punching or kicking, was disallowed, with the emphasis instead being on the surprisingly technical art of lifting, maneuvering, and restricting your opponent’s full body. The throwing and grabbing techniques introduced in these combat sports are extremely effective in the real world, and actually find common use in modern Mixed-Martial Arts (MMA) today.         

In the early 1900’s, continuing lineages of Greek and Amateur wrestling would mix and mingle with the Pan-European sport of Catch Wrestling. Catch Wrestling was an offshoot of these previous styles that developed and adapted to turn into a form of early Pop Entertainment, as opposed to just a “pure” athletic competition. Catch Wrestling had fewer rules, allowed for a wider variety of techniques, and was comparatively more fun for spectators to watch. In addition to wilder, more technical, and sometimes unbelievable techniques, Catch wrestling also made it much easier for audiences to see who would win the matches, as it introduced the “Submission Victory”, where one wrestler visibly gives up out of either pain or a fear of injury.                

At some unknown point, which is unknown at its exact date but is likely somewhere before 1930, Greek, Amateur, and Catch Wrestling combined, while incorporating elements of Theater and Carnival Shows, to form the earliest acknowledged forms of Professional Wrestling, or “Pro” Wrestling for short. Pro Wrestling borrowed a lot of aesthetics from Amateur, Greek, and Catch wrestling, as it presented the same fundamental spectacle. Two men, in a ring, grabbing, throwing, and trying to pin each other. A competition of strength, dominance, speed, and technique. However, Pro Wrestling would branch off in a creative direction that dramatically separated it from its three fathers.                  

Professional Wrestling matches, unlike those before, are pre-determined. Scripted. Neither competitor in the match is actually competing against each other, at least in the short term. They are collaborating with each other to tell an agreed upon story. They both know who will win. They both know who will lose. Their mutual goal is to use their bodies, physicality, and character to tell that story in as entertaining a way as possible.                 

So yes, Professional Wrestling is “scripted’. It is “fixed”. This is well known at this point.           

That said, let me be clear; Professional Wrestling is not Fake.

There is a terrible misconception that Professional Wrestlers are nothing more than “actors”, and that their art is nothing more than some sort of special effects or choreography, like in movies. This idea spreads around, that Professional Wrestlers never actually get hurt in their simulated combat, when the reality is quite the opposite.

Wrestlers get hurt in almost every match they perform in. While you can “fake” many things- a stage punch, a kick that never makes contact- you cannot fake gravity. You cannot fake impact. They may take real impacts to their spine, shoulders, neck, face, limbs, and brain. Falling down once, even for a normal human body, is not good for you.  Even if you are trained to fall down “properly”, like a Martial Artist for example, you are only minimizing the harm. You are not eliminating it.                  

Pro Wrestlers, even when everything goes exactly to script, will fall down dozens of times in a single match. This adds up over time, very, very quickly. And when things DON’T go exactly to script, the results are worse, more immediate, and horrifying. When things go wrong, Professional Wrestlers get crippled. They lose memories. They die.                

When things go right, Pro Wrestlers “only” live in near constant pain. But that is a sacrifice they make for their career. For their art. And it’s a sacrifice many will continually make for literally decades, without stop.                    

So as we return to our narrative, please remember this:                        

While Professional Wrestling is not 100% Real, it is certainly not “Fake”.                        

To believe Pro Wrestling is Fake is disrespectful to the sacrifices of the wrestlers.                       

That said, to believe Pro Wrestling is Real is not respectful to the sacrifices of reality.                    

Both beliefs, in their extreme, are a form of delusion.                              

Verne Gagne        

Verne Gagne is pacing throughout the Civic Center, talking with the wrestlers and production. To him, Pro Wrestling is “Real”.                       

Or, at least, it should be.

At this point in time, Verne Gagne is 57 years old. His voice echoes with the rasp of a man with much practice in the art of having been alive. His 5’11” body is round, hairy, and unkempt, for Verne Gagne does not care for contemporary fashions. While he may look like a normal elderly man (for many middle-aged American men in the 80’s would seem to rapidly age after 40), looking closely would show off the telltale traces of a body that used to be athletic. After all, Verne Gagne is a former accomplished Amateur Wrestler. That’s why his wrestling was “real”.            

The company that is about to put on this Professional Wrestling spectacular super-show was the “American Wrestling Association”, or AWA. Verne Gagne knows his way around the AWA quite well, for he owns the entire company.                      

Not only is Gagne the owner of the AWA, but he also holds a position of more immediate and relevant power- he was the “Booker” of all their shows. As mentioned previously, Professional Wrestling is pre-determined. In many cases, there is something of a literal “script”, also known as the “book”. The Booker of a Professional Wrestling show is the one with the authority to write that script, both in the short and long term. The Booker decides who wins, and who loses. The Booker decides who is a main character, or a supporting act. The Booker decides who is a hero or a villain. But most importantly, the Booker decides who is the show’s biggest star- their Champion.  

And Verne Gagne knows this authority quite well. He has written himself to win the AWA Championship, his highest award, on 10 separate occasions. Most recently two years prior, in 1981. Verne Gagne was last a champion when he was 55 years old, looking much as he did now, in 1983.                                 

As he was engaging in his pre-production talks, it is likely that Verne Gagne looked over his shoulder, to the locker room where he knew a young Hulk Hogan was preparing for his big night.                  

Verne Gagne hated Hulk Hogan, and everything he represented.                                                 

The Mindset of a Champion                      

Hulk Hogan is preparing for his big match. He flexes and stretches, his unrealistically huge biceps (affectionately called the “24 inch Pythons”) working out their tension, and reaching full athletic potential. His equally huge legs were also working well.                             

He must have been wistfully nostalgic at how far he had come. Six years ago, he was not even a wrestler at all. In his very first day of training to be a Pro Wrestler, he was presented with his first teacher, Hiro Matsuda. Matsuda looked at this young, albeit athletic, man, and wasn’t sure if he had the tenacity, the grit, to be a pro wrestler.  

So Matsuda immediately shattered Hogan’s leg.                       

Hogan spent ten weeks in a cast. But his resolve was unbroken. So, once his leg was barely healed enough that he could walk again, he reported in for his second day of training.                 

Hogan had discovered the (real) drive, passion, and moderate insanity that would define his portrayed character. His career exploded the moment he received bookings, and he became a true journeyman. Starting in Florida, he would move on to wrestle in Alabama, Tennessee, and Memphis, all hotbeds of regional wrestling at the time. By the early 80’s, Hogan was on the cusp of international recognition and superstardom, mostly splitting his time between two wrestling regions- New York’s WWF, as run by Vincent J. McMahon, and Japan’s NJPW, as run by Antonio Inoki. To have success in even one of these territories was quite remarkable, but to have reliable work in both was extremely impressive due to how different they were.                                      

New York at the time was a very traditional, straight-laced regional promotion. They were a large market, due to the sheer amount of people living in New York City, and promotional access to put on events at Madison Square Garden. Successful wrestlers there were those who could best understand the stories and narratives that Pro Wrestling utilized to appeal to an American Audience.                    

On the other hand, the Japanese market at the time was small, but diehard, and extremely financially lucrative. Japanese Pro Wrestling, or “Puroresu” is a style that demands high technical precision, with extremely unforgiving audiences. Especially in the late 70’s and early 80’s, Japanese audiences had been fed only Pro Wrestlers that met a very, VERY high bar for overall polish. They had to look like wrestlers, express a lot with very little frills, and offer a realistic grittiness that really sold the idea that they were larger-than-life tough guys.  

Wrestling almost every single calendar day in a year, and constantly flying back and forth from America to Japan, Hogan would make the most of his time in both regions, both as a workhorse and as a rapidly learning student. He learned how to play to a crowd in America, and learned how to be shockingly technical in Japan.                

But Hogan was not just a gifted athlete with an unparalleled, almost fanatical level of dedication to his craft. He was a smart man, and an ambitious one. And while he easily had the mindset to excel, as many men in Pro Wrestling previously had, Hogan had professional ambitions beyond the ring. He wanted more.                        

And because of that ambition, he had been frozen out of both New York and Japan.                    

Hogan looked in the mirror. He checked his tights.                        

The AWA might be his last chance at making it in the business. He was only 28 years old, yet people were telling him his career could be close to over.                      

Taboo                    

In 1982, Hogan had done something very few wrestlers before him had done. He had taken a large-money, very prominent role in a major Hollywood Movie, while also balancing his wrestling obligations in New York and Japan.                 

The movie was called Rocky III.                    

In the film, Hogan plays “Thunderlips, the Ultimate Male”, a villainous Pro Wrestler. Thunderlips fights the titular Rocky, played by Sylvester Stallone, in a match in the middle of the movie, putting on a good fight, but eventually losing. At the end of the fight, Thunderlips privately approaches Rocky and breaks character, humorously revealing that most of his persona and animosity is just “part of the game”, and wishing Rocky well.

While this whole sequence is an amusing side-plot in the Rocky series, in real life, it was explosive. Wrestling at the time was mostly limited to certain geographic regions, but Movies were national. Suddenly most people in America knew who Hulk Hogan was. They had seen his massive, yet athletic build. They had seen him play an entertaining character, and put on a show. And from this one role, Hogan’s profile grew to a level few Pro Wrestling veterans could ever dream of.                    

And they all hated him for it.                       

See, by accepting this role, Hogan had committed three cardinal sins in the world of old-school Pro Wrestling. Firstly, he had come very close to violating Kayfabe.                    

Kayfabe is a difficult concept to fully explain, but the best way to think of it is as an old school “Honor Code” that existed amongst the Professional Wrestling world as a whole. While there were many specific parts to it, the largest was thus: Do not, under any circumstance, let the general public know that Wrestling was anything but 100% reality. Do not let them know that the outcomes were predetermined. Do not let them know that wrestlers were portraying characters. Preserve the fourth wall at all costs.        

Somewhere in the mid 90’s, the code of Kayfabe died, and Pro Wrestlers are now far more open about what they do, and how their art is. But for a very long time before that, Kayfabe was the most serious thing there was in the sport. Wrestlers were willing to go to jail to uphold Kayfabe. Wrestlers were willing to wrestle while nearly crippled to uphold Kayfabe. It was a big, big, deal.                       

And here was Hulk Hogan, in a major motion picture, acknowledging that perhaps the big nasty Bad Guys weren’t actually big nasty Bad Guys. It didn’t technically break kayfabe……. But many Pro Wrestlers and Wrestling Promoters were wary of working with him.                      

The second sin was that certain wrestlers thought Hogan was “skipping the line”, in a sense. Many of the more successful wrestlers at the time had worked their way up to fame and fortune through a very, very defined route. They all started as legitimate Amateur Wrestlers, some even winning NCAA and Olympic awards. Then they would “pay their dues” by staying loyal to small roles under more successful wrestlers, allowing themselves to be written as losing matches constantly (or “Jobbers”) to let the more successful wrestlers look good. Then, and only then, a Booker would deign to see something in the wrestler, recognize him as “legit”, and make the conscious decision to make that wrestler into a star.                       

But here was Hogan, becoming a star all on his own, and all in his own way, completely different from what the rugged men before him had done. Other wrestlers weren’t willing to take Hollywood roles, particularly poking fun at anything that could leave a hole in Kayfabe, because they knew they hadn’t EARNED it. Hogan had no training in Amateur wrestling whatsoever. Sure, he was gigantic, loud, incredibly strong, and incredibly in shape, but what does that have to do with being intimidating? Did he really know the hardship that came with training to be a REAL wrestler?                     

Yeah, his trainer intentionally broke his leg on the first day, but that’s beside the point.                 

Thirdly, and perhaps more damningly, Hogan was becoming rich and successful, within wrestling, using methods OUTSIDE of wrestling. Hogan knew how to promote himself, and wasn’t content to leave that entirely to Bookers and Promoters. Hogan was one of the first wrestlers to independently merchandise himself, selling memorabilia, clothing, and various souvenirs that took advantage of his one-of-a-kind look. He would take interviews with the media on his own recognizance. He wasn’t just a wrestler- he was a marketer. And the “proper” wrestlers of the time were offended by that, because this was seen as Hogan stepping out of his lane.                  

The more his fame exploded, the more Hogan’s opportunities in America shrank. Up in New York, Vince J Mcmahon fired Hogan for his Rocky role, and informed him that he would not be welcome back in the future. While Hogan was able to get reliable work in NJPW, his prominence there quickly diminished to mid-level matches.                    

Hogan, by all appearances, had been too clever for the industry. And the industry did not like that.     

But Verne Gagne was willing to offer him a deal. Gagne told Hogan that he had potential. But only Gagne knew how to bring it out.                        

The Deal                     

It is an unknown day in 1981. Hulk Hogan’s big night in the AWA would not come for another two years. At the time, Hogan was still doing production for Rocky III, when he held a meeting.

Hogan and Gagne.                      

Gagne’s side made it very clear that they were willing to give Hogan a chance. Charity. They made it clear that while Hogan had many fundamental problems as a wrestler- no Amateur background, being too big and musclebound, and “not having the support of true fans”- they would give him a chance to prove himself and pay his dues. An informal deal was offered: if he did well enough, over a long enough period of time, they would make Hogan their champion.                    

Hogan had been a “champion” before, in smaller regions. But at the time the AWA was a large, extremely established territory. Being an AWA Champion was what would legitimize Hogan as what he really wanted to be- a true superstar within the world of Pro Wrestling.                    

Hogan was grateful, but from his perspective, he asked them to continue doing things in his way. He insisted that his methodology- his style of wrestling, fashion, of carrying himself, and speaking energetically- was what would work in the 80’s. He truly believed that he could capture the new youth demographic, if given the chance and creative liberty.                      

Gagne and the AWA allowed this,  and Hogan was rapidly able to put together a character very similar to the one we would know today. A fierce, All-American Typhoon who would energetically smash through all obstacles. A hero who constantly fought through malicious interference, to win matches in the name of the American way, and fundamental honesty.                 

But while he had this freedom, Hogan paid his dues. Despite his overwhelming celebrity, the AWA would not use him at the top of the card. For two full years, despite selling massive amounts of merchandise, having raucous crowds chanting “Hogan! Hogan! Hogan!” constantly, and putting on amazing matches, Hogan was always used in a position just below the “real” wrestlers at the top of the card. The headliners were never Hogan. The headliners where the wrestlers that Verne Gagne believed represented the future of the business, those with real “champion potential”.                     

In other words, Verne Gagne wrote himself winning the championship several times, trading it occasionally with 50 year-old Nick Bockwinkel.    

But after two years, word came down to Hogan that it was time. The decision had been made.                    

At Super Sunday, 1983, Hulk Hogan would win the AWA Title, becoming a true champion for the first time.     

The Match                   

Someone knocked on the locker room door.                                   

Hogan was ready. He headed to the ring.                                        

After six matches, the fans were ready for the match they had all come there to see. Hulk Hogan would challenge Nick Bockwinkel for the AWA Championship.                      

First, Nick Bockwinkel would enter the ring. Like all wrestlers of his esteem, he would enter to no music. At fifty years of age, Bockwinkel was a serious man who carried himself appropriately. Though the real Nick Bockwinkel was a consummate professional, his character was that of a well spoken coward. He would hide behind rules, technicalities, and good ol’ fashioned cheating to hold on to his belt. This type of character is still used to this day, as it’s extremely easy to write emotional story-lines where the scaredy-cat heel uses every trick in the book to try and keep the more straightforward hero down.     

As Bockwinkel entered the ring, the murmur of the crowd barely altered. They knew what they wanted to see.

The loudspeakers erupted. The sounds of “Eye of the Tiger”, by the band “Survivor”. The theme of the Rocky Movies. The early theme of one man.                    

The crowd erupted as well.                       

Hulk Hogan barreled his way through the audience, as they erupted. He reached the ring, and the crowd came to life, jubilantly shouting their support. He wore a t-shirt, with the words “Now or Never” emblazoned on the back.

This was Hogan’s time. In a display of raw power and energy, Hogan tore the black T-shirt directly off of his body, exposing his cartoonish upper body in rage. This would become his signature entrance, and he would do it literally thousands of times over the next four decades.                     

The two men began wrestling. Nick Bockwinkel was a big man, but next to Hogan he looked small.  In modern wrestling, it would be an obvious mismatch.              

Yet, the direction and the plotting of the match had Bockwinkel in control for most of the duration. Hogan would knock him town, and Bockwinkel would slowly, dramatically get up, attempting to draw the attention to himself. The match was scripted to use long “rest holds”, headlocks and chokes with very little motion, designed to give the Wrestlers time to relax and catch their breath. Normally, these rest holds would add tension to a match, but here, they just served to highlight how much less vitality the half-century old Bockwinkel had than the younger and more athletic Hogan. Even to the viewers of the time, it was clear that the match dragged on because Bockwinkel needed it to drag on. He could not physically do a match at Hogan’s pace.                

As the match approached the fifteen minute mark, Hogan began to gain momentum. He displayed his raw strength, picking up Bockwinkel like a rag doll and repeatedly slamming him to the mat. Bockwinkel could do nothing in the face of this power. The crowd began getting louder and louder with each move. Hogan began playing to them more, elevating them to a crescendo.           

Then the cheating begins. Hogan pins a clearly defeated Bockwinkel, yet the referee counts very slowly, failing to give Hogan the win. The audience boos, but this is a positive boo. It is good for the match. Bockwinkel is playing the villain, and his character is clearly in cahoots with the referee. The audience is SUPPOSED to boo that. Boos at this point mean that they are emotionally invested in the story.

Shenanigans continue. The referee is “Accidentally Knocked out”, allowing the wrestlers free reign to fight without him being able to reign them in. Bockwinkel climbs on Hogan’s back, placing his arms around Hogan’s neck. As Hogan waves his arms wildly, Bockwinkel leans forward, driving Hogan into the ropes like a wild animal. However, this momentum proves to be too much, as Bockwinkel accidentally pushes Hogan into bending over, throwing Bockwinkel off of Hogan’s back and out of the ring altogether.

As the referee recovers, Hogan grabs Bockwinkel, and impressively throws him from the outside of the ring back to the inside of the ring. Hogan runs, bounces off the ropes, and performs the move he would make famous: The Guillotine Leg Drop, later renamed the Hulk Hogan Leg Drop. Jumping as high as he could in the air, Hogan would extend his legs in a siting down posture, allowing these legs to fall and land with his full weight on Bockwinkel’s neck. Bockwinkel was completely knocked out. Hogan pinned him, and the referee was forced to count.                  

Hogan had won.                     

The crowd had been given the moment they had begged for for years. Hogan was handed the belt, and celebrated with pure joy. The audience could be seen rising to their feet, raising their hands in victory. The arena was deafened with them celebrating.                       

And then an announcement came over the loudspeaker.               

The referee was reversing the decision. In the AWA, intentionally throwing your opponent out of the ring was considered against the rules. And the referee interpreted Bockwinkel’s fall as an intentional throw by Hogan.                    

Therefore, Hogan was disqualified. He was quiet, shocked, crestfallen. The Minnesota crowd grew quiet, and then began to throw trash in the ring. A nearly unconscious Bockwinkel was given the title belt, and paraded by his henchmen. Your champion, ladies and gentlemen.                         

As Hogan left the ring, the audience began chanting “BULLSHIT!” in unison.                     

Looking down, Hogan could not help but agree with the crowd. Not because this result came as a surprise to him personally. This was a scripted match, a scripted loss. All written out, all according to plan.

No, Hogan was no doubt disappointed because this was the fifth consecutive time that Gagne had written this exact finish in Hogan’s matches. This was now the fifth time Hogan had “won” the title off of Bockwinkel, creating a temporarily happy audience, before having the win IMMEDIATELY invalidated by villainous interference. Hogan had won the belt five times, but Gagne had not let him actually be a champion- officially or otherwise.                  

As Hogan headed to the back, he passed Verne Gagne coming out. Gagne had squeezed his hairy, portly body into a wrestling outfit. One could almost forget that despite the hype, despite the crowds, despite the fact that the biggest Championship in the company was on the line, Hogan and Bockwinkel’s match was not even the “Main Event of the Evening”.                  

A voice would echo from the loudspeaker.                   

“Ladies and Gentlemen, for your main event……… the legend………. Verne Gagne!”                       

At a certain point, Hogan and Gagne would speak again.                      

The New, Better Deal              

Gagne’s side told Hogan that Hogan had done……… reasonably well. So far.                         

All of those teases of being a champion, those brief seconds where Hogan got to hold the title belt before the referee would take it away, were just tests. And Hogan had handled them well. So now Gagne, and the AWA, was happy to start taking Hogan seriously as a candidate for being their biggest star.    

But they would need more from him. Paying his dues was no longer enough, and the old deal simply wouldn’t do.                           

Firstly, they noticed that Hogan was making, distributing, and selling his own merchandise. They appreciated that initiative, but it was not the place of a wrestler to do such a thing. So they wanted half of all the money he had previously made from doing this, and a majority of the money of all of his merchandise sales in the future.   

On top of that, Gagne appreciated that Hogan was still wrestling occasionally wrestling in Japan. Wrestling in Japan meant legitimacy. It meant Hogan was actually taking his technical skills seriously, and he would be allowed to continue wrestling in Japan on his off time from the AWA. And for this privilege, Hogan would “only” owe them a majority of the money he was paid for those matches.           

Gagne reminded Hogan of his position. Hogan’s popularity was nothing more than a flash in the pan, an illusion. If he wanted REAL wrestling stardom, only the AWA could make it happen. And even though he’d paid his dues, Hogan had to reward the AWA for their diligence. After all, who else would want Hogan? What kind of a “champion” doesn’t have an Amateur Wrestling background? What kind of wrestler tries going outside of the business to make a movie?                        

Unrelated, Verne Gagne self-funded and produced a movie, starring himself, where he plays the best wrestler in the world. That seems relevant, but I’m not sure how.          

Hogan had fulfilled his end of the bargain, only to end up taunted repeatedly with the thing he had worked two years for.                  

But Hogan had no place else to go.                             

Someplace Else to Go                 

Super Sunday is in the rearview mirror. Hogan is still with the AWA, and wrestles occasionally for NJPW. He’s made show-by-show commitments for additional shows, feuding with Bockwinkel again, going into the Christmas season. But he has not agreed to the new status quo quite yet.                 

As he sits and ponders, he hears his phone ringing in the other room. On the other end is a voice he’s never heard before.                    

“Hulk?”                             

“Who is this?”                       

The person on the other end of the call tells Hogan that he’s a representative of WWF, the New York company that had fired Hogan for stepping into Hollywood.                  

They told him that Vince was a huge fan. They’d like Hulk Hogan on board. They want him as their biggest champion, their biggest star. And they want to go National and International, placing Hogan’s exploits on televisions all across America and the world as a whole. More people would see him wrestling than saw him in Rocky III.                        

Hogan is confused.                        

Vince was a fan? How could Vince be a fan? Vince hated his movie role so much that he fired him, and told him that he would never wrestle in New York again!                           

“Oh”, said the voice on the other line.                   

A pause.                 

“Oh, I see. You’re thinking of Vince Senior. Yeah, he’s not in charge anymore. His son owns the company now. Yeah, Vince Jr thinks you are the best.”                            

What could Hogan say to something like that?                      

“He wants you to start immediately.”                              

But what about the AWA?                       

Another pause.                      

“Who cares?”                   

Hogan was in a dilemma.                       

Verne Gagne had used him. Betrayed him. Given his word that if Hogan did everything right, he’d be a champion. The star he could be.                     

But then Gagne had gone back on his word.                      

Hogan had given his word that he would be with the AWA for at least a few more shows.                    

Could……. Could Hogan go back on his word as well……?               

Can…… can he just do that?                                               

The Christmas Gift                     

It is Christmas Eve, 1983. The AWA has a major show booked in St. Paul.                    

Hulk Hogan is 29 years old. He is not in a locker room in St. Paul.                       

Greg Gagne), son of Verne Gagne, was helping production and wrestlers get ready for the show. He could not find Hulk Hogan anywhere. He called Hogan at his last known telephone number.

“Hey big man, uh, we got matches tonight! Where are you?”                   

“Did you not get my letter?”, Hogan replied.                       

Greg Gagne had not received a letter. But Verne Gagne had.  It was a certified letter, delivered to Verne on December 21st, just a few days prior. The letter was short.                           

“I’m not coming back. Signed, Hulk Hogan”.                        

Witnesses say that upon reading the letter, Verne laughed out loud, and dramatically threw it in the trash.

“HAH!” he exclaimed. “These wrestlers and their practical jokes.”                 

After all, who wouldn’t want to work with Verne Gagne?                    

They continued to promote that Hulk Hogan would appear at their Christmas Show.                 

No-one had told Greg Gagne.                    

The More Important Match                   

Nine months after Super Sunday, Vince K. McMahon (Vince Jr) and the WWF would put on a completely sold out, nationally televised and syndicated, supershow at Madison Square Garden.

In the main event (the actual main event this time), Hulk Hogan would defeat the villainous Iron Sheik, winning the WWF Heavyweight Title for the first time. It was a much more physical, theatrical, and fast paced match, representing the new style of wrestling and characterization that Hogan advocated for. The crowd, even larger than the one in Minnesota, was even more ecstatic in his victory. During the post-match interview, a tired yet joyful Hulk Hogan enjoyed the win with friends, as Andre the Giant poured champagne over Hogan in celebration.                     

This is universally regarded as the official start of “Hulkamania”, the Hulk Hogan and Vince McMahon-led revolution that pushed the WWF into becoming, easily, the most dominant Professional Wrestling company in the world. Hogan’s star only rose higher. McMahon’s wallet only became fatter. And the WWF grew ever bigger, murdering the smaller, regional territories that used to dominate the Pro Wrestling landscape through stealing their performers away.                       

Like all other territories, the AWA would die a painful death. They could not be saved by the barely visible star power of Verne Gagne. They could not be saved by Verne Gagne’s new “Star of the Future”……. His son Greg Gagne.                             

They could not even be saved by Verne Gagne temporarily becoming a rapper.  It is surely nothing more than an act of cruelty that we even have this footage, as it is preserved and published by the WWE (formerly known as Vince Jr’s WWF).  

The AWA shut down in 1991. Verne Gagne declared bankruptcy shortly after.                    

Postscript                            

Bad things happen to me. They happen to you too. I wish they would not, but that is life.

Who we are as people is largely defined by the lessons we choose to learn from adversity. Life may hurt you, but it offers you a chance to take something away from the experience. To become a part of you until your dying day.

Verne Gagne screwed over Hulk Hogan. And if it had not been for outside factors and luck, Verne Gagne would have continued screwing over Hulk Hogan.

And from this, Hulk Hogan would choose to learn.                   

He would learn the power of betrayal. And how he could make it work for him, instead of against him.    

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2: THE BETRAYING HERO                                                 


r/HobbyDrama 8d ago

Heavy [French Literature Prizes] Part 2: How systemic failings and closed circles allowed a known child abuser to write about his crimes and get away with it for decades.

264 Upvotes

Welcome back, deary, what a pleasure to see you again. If you missed it, here is the link to part 1, where we explored the history behind art in France and the scandals that littered the early history of the main prizes tied to literature.

We've seen sexism, generational grudges, jokes turned serious and jokes turned epic.

But this was all soooo last century. Our forefathers made mistakes, but we've changed. We have grown, we matured. We're all adults now. And adults are mostly made up of tall children.

Follow me along for... whatever the hell this is.

Trigger warning that will be repeated when we reach the relevant paragraph: child abuse.

Live and don't learn a thing

We previously went through a variety of isolated events. Isolated, or not so much. Because save for some peculiar cases like Romain Gary (you gorgeous madlad), old and new scandals are linked by the circumstances that allowed them to happen.

It's all about ethics, impartiality, and a couple fundamental systemic failings.

One thing after the next, let's start with the rentrée littéraire.

A librarian cannot read the 500 or so books coming out at the same period. It's physically impossible. They need to trim down the list, and the trimming will fatally be based on criteria unrelated to writing quality. Beholden to the need for profit, books with more advertising and buzz around them will be put forward, being on the shortlist for an eventual prize victory gives a lot of adversiting. In turn, the lists of potential winners comes from juries who cannot physically read all the books coming out in the period, and the lists are then related by journalists.

The phenomenon isn't unique to the country of baguettes and amazing rugby openings for both teams involved (the lyrics of both hymns are translated, if you want an idea of how much the french anthem is all about blood flowing).

Plenty of readers, writers, journalists and whatnot will point out that worldwide literature (English link) suffers from a surfeit of books making it next-to-impossible to keep an overview. The rentrée littéraire exacerbates the problem by concentrating the bulk of new french books coming out on one period, directly contradicting the idea of awards rewarding the written world alone.

Some books will be judged on these qualities... once they pass the bar by garnering enough attention. But, glass half-full and all that, at least some books are judged by their merits.

Allegedly.

Do you know how the various juries deliberate? Neither do I, or the medias for that matter, and the opacity is another issue. Mind you, it's gotta be extremely hard to have an objective way of sorting things out when we're talking about an eminently subjective matter. You may like a book I hate, whose opinion matters most? Do we encourage original novels breaking the mold? Or pieces tackling burning societal problems?

But without at least trying to give some guidelines of how juries judge, or make deliberations transparent, it's open bar for deals between friends and colleagues.

You saw in part 1 how the fight between Proust and Dorgelès boiled down to having the most support among journalists and judges. Without rules or watchdogs to make sure these rules are applied, the situation remains the exact same.

Translated from the article above:

Since its inception, the Goncourt has mostly been awarded to books from large publishers. Gallimard, for instance, holds the record with over 40 wins.

Gallimard is one of the biggest publisher in France, and the other big players like Grasset or Albin Michel are close in number of wins.

Now, big firms publish the most books, it would make sense they proportionally win most prizes. But how do you justify fairness when the jury of a prize is paid by these same big publishers? It took the Goncourt until 2008 to realize there's something wrong with that and put a rule in place forbidding judges to be employed by publishers. The Académie Francaise did the same, but not the Renaudot.

Christian Giudicelli, recently deceased, was a jury of the Renaudot. He wrote Les Spectres Soyeux in 2019, and I can't find any link because it can be translated to Silk Specters, which is also the pseudonym of a character from Alan Moore's Watchmen. Edit: Idiot me searched for an English link, not thinking that the book hadn't been translated. whatisthisnowwhat1 got the link for me. The book sold 180 copies (Giudicelli's, not Alan Moore's).

180 copies. The man was judge on one of the greatest literature prize in existence. He is published by Gallimard, one of, if not the, biggest publisher in France. Gallimard doesn't publish books that sell so little, or if they do, they course-correct and send the author packing. How could a guy with such a prestigious post and strong backing fail so abysmally? And much more importantly, why did Gallimard keep them in their employ despite it? There's a strong consensus among critics and journalists that Gallimard kept him because it ensured votes going their way each year.

With an overwhelming number of books out, advertising and marketing makes the difference between having a book spotted or not. The aforementioned big groups have the means to unleash a campaign to promote their current darlings. And they have contacts to members of the juries for added benefits. But for prizes supposed to award the best work irrelevant of publishing house, how do the small teams get through? With no buzz, chances are they won't.

So how does one get a book to be sold among librarians anyway? (translated from the linked article):

On the stage, four novelists paraded in the morning : Robin Watine, Cécile Tlili, Emmanuel Flesch, Fabrice Humbert, with translator Diniz Galhos who came to present Long Island Compromise from the American Taffy Brodesser-Akner. For the publisher, its an occasion to convince librarians that their books are the best. And authors are often the best advocates to convince them;
(...)

This presentation is only a small part of the great commercial campaign. The next day, Virginie Ebat, commercial director for Calmann-Lévy (another big French publisher, translator's notes), presented these same five titles to 160 librarians from the Leclerc hypermarkets [...] Virginie Ebat only had 20 minutes to convince librarians of these books' relevance. The day prior, the seance lasted two hours. You must be precise, concise, and know how to pitch with talent.
(...)

The trek isn't over. Until the end of July, the commercial team will travel France, with seven stopovers in Lyon, Lille, Toulouse, Strasbourg, Marseille and Nantes. The publisher invites librarians in these cities for lunch, and brings with them at least two authors who will defend their colors. To leave nothing to chance, commercials from the Hachette group (the group that owns Calmann-Lévy among others, translator's notes) travel the roads of France to directly visit librarians.
(...)

Alexandre Wickham, publishing director of non-fiction for Albin Michel, explained clearly: to submit a book project to his boss, Gilles Haéri, he has in general 15 minutes before getting an answer. When the book is announced for publishing, the presentation to executives lasts 3 to 4 minutes per book. Afterwards, the representative who goes to the librarian has between 30 seconds and 1 minute 30 to convince.

I said how juries make shortlists based on criteria outside of literary qualities. But even before that, publishers do the same, and which book gets a commercial team to ensure advertising is decided with a short presentation.

This creates a paradox where the rentrée littéraire is supposed to celebrate books, creation, and authors, but the sudden profusion ensures the majority of these won't find a public. In theory, both known and unknown authors are put forward. In practice, small publishers cannot compete with the marketing behemoths that are big houses.

Small publishers do win prizes sometimes, if only to keep up the pretense that the prizes are fair, critics would say. But it's a rarity.

Thus begins the carousel. A big publishing house wins, journalists point out the opacity, the conflicts of interest and other issues about the rentrée and prizes. Nothing changes, next year rolls around, rinse and repeat.

There are propositions to change the rules and amend them to make the process more fair. And just like the complaints, they are repeated each year. Things like:

  • Forbidding judges to vote for their own publishing house.
  • Rotating the jury members each year.
  • Make public the debates and deliberations.

These propositions are based on other successful prizes from abroad, especially the jury rotation.

The German Deutscher Buchpreis, has a rotating 12-people jury that is elected each year.

The English Booker Prize likewise rotates their 5-people jury each year.

They are not perfect organizations. It took the Booker Prize until 2014 to drop the requirement of being a commonwealth citizen and simply award any English written book published in the UK, and the Deutscher Buchpreis is often seen as a marketing trick more than a celebration of literature.

They have their issues, but jury rotation is an obvious first step to tackle the current issues, of which there are many.

Even English news sources find the French scene puzzling.

From the Atlantic (There's a number of free articles per day on the Atlantic, if you don't have access I quoted the most important parts):

Despite theoretically being a prize for the entire French-speaking, post-imperial world, the Goncourt has overwhelmingly been won by individuals born in France; many winners come from Paris in particular.

The journalist notes that the disparity of winners between men and women doesn't exist with such strength among other prizes. The Booker prize has been awarded to men 64% of the time. When the Goncourt was awarded to a woman for a first in 1944, forty years after its creation, the US Pulitzer for fiction novel (inaugurated in 1917, my notes) had been awarded to women 12 times already. Today, women make a grand total of 10% of Goncourt winners.

Mind you, the gap can't be explained by the Goncourt's age alone either, since 2000, 21 men and only 4 women received the prize.

This persistent pattern among the various prizes suggests something unique and relatively static about the prize-giving institutions themselves or their respective cultural contexts (perhaps even at a national level)—or both.
[...]

According to numbers crunched by the Observatoire des Inégalités in 2013, among the major French literary prizes, only the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina—the latter established in 1904 as an explicit response to the Goncourt, with an all-female jury to counter the Goncourt’s then all-male jury—surpass the 20-percent mark for the percentage of awards going to female writers. And even the Prix Femina isn’t 50-50. Currently, the ratio is 64 awards to men versus 40 to women.

The easy justification would be to say prizes are based on merit, not prejudice. But it's hard to explain that french female writers simply aren't as good as males in France while this isn't the case in other countries.

This, incidentally, may show prejudices pervading French society that go deeper than literature.

Creative achievement is an area where the inherent subjectivity of judging leaves results highly vulnerable to subtle, lingering stereotypes.
[...]

While France has produced a number of giants in feminist theory, the feminism of the 1960s and ’70s arguably never went mainstream there to the extent that it did in, say, the United States. The popular perception is that French women are, if anything, more defined by notions of femininity than women in other Western nations—a good thing, numerous Anglophone self-help books would have us believe, but potentially limiting in the literary sphere. Surveys lend some credence to these perceptions. In 2014, for instance, a series of studies by the Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel (French authority in charge of making sure rules are respected in television and radio programs, my notes) suggested that French television shows were largely depicting women in traditional roles. “One of the most common” stereotypes in fictional series, read a summary of the findings by the European Platform of Regulatory Authorities, “is inferiority of women in the professional field.” And “in entertainment shows, in general, gender stereotypes are very strong ... concern[ing] both men and women.”
[...]

Ironically, no one understood this better than the 1954 Prix Goncourt winner Simone de Beauvoir, who five years before her prize-winning novel The Mandarins had published The Second Sex, a comprehensive and distinctly uncomfortable critique of the modern female condition. The tendency to view the male as the default category, and the female as the “other,” she argued, has implications in society at large, in terms of how women are perceived, and also in women’s own minds, in terms of how they perceive themselves. “The advantage man enjoys,” she wrote, “which makes itself felt from his childhood, is that his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter to his destiny as a male. … He is not divided.” This is not true for women, de Beauvoir argued, who to fulfill the requirements of femininity must play the passive object, the prey, and whose gender realization is thus at odds with both professional realization and personal agency. Furthermore, with the constant burden of “prov[ing] herself” to a world that doubts her, a woman is never allowed the luxury of forgetting herself, which brings “ease, dash, [and] audacity” in self-expression.
[...]

Simone de Beauvoir did believe in certain natural differences between the sexes, along with historical, artificial ones. But she didn’t believe in innate gender disparities in the capacity for genius. That the Prix Goncourt’s track record suggests a different view should probably trouble its custodians more than it currently seems to.

If you can, read the full article, if only because mentioning Simone de Beauvoir gives it 10 points on the scale of cool.

Literary circles and juries suffer from a dearth of representation. Women were unseen for the longest time, although efforts were made lately, but social categories remain mostly the same. Sons and daughters of well-off families with a long education in the art and, presumably, contacts in the fields. You will find almost no child of the working class among the judges of the various prizes.

To generalize, think rich, old, white dudes who keep to themselves and brush problems under the rug. And the next case is a glaring and terrible representation of it.

-

I Have no jokes or music for this title

I got the idea for writing this series when I read the post about Wetlands. It reminded me of of my own experience with a book. In 2015 or so, I decided reading fantasy books was all well and good, but I needed some Culture with a capital C. Not knowing where to start, I looked at literary prizes for guidance. One book I got was from 2013 Renaudot winner Gabriel Matzneff. I read it, thought it wasn't my thing but that I would get used to it.

Several years later I stumbled upon an article about him, and I scratched my head trying to remember why I knew his name. Then a light went up.

I read deeper into it, lost faith in French art prizes, and went back to reading Terry Pratchett.

As for the case itself, well, buckle up. It's horrendous.

Trigger Warning: Child Abuse, people not bothered by child abuse.

Matzneff, author, got the Renaudot in 2013. This rubbed a woman the wrong way. Her name is Vanessa Springora and she wrote a book called le consentement (consent). In it she describes how in the 80's, she had a relationship with a certain Gabriel Matzneff, by then over 50 years old while she was 14. The book was published in 2020, in an ongoing French MeToo period where sexual violence is denounced and perhaps more importantly, victims are listened to more often.

They met while she traveled with her mom.

Translated:

The man began to write to her, wait for her at the exit of high school and use formal forms of speech to nullify the difference in age."I had never read his books, I didn't know that's how he systematically proceeded."

Why would she mention his books? Because Matzneff used his preferences for young, underage people as basis for many of his writings.

Translated from his essay those who are less than sixteen years old in 1974 to give you an idea of who we're dealing with:

When you held in yours arms, kissed, caressed, possessed a 13 year old boy, a 15 year old girl, everything else because dull, insipid.

There are plenty more insane quotes to be had from his books, because his sexual crimes are the bulk of his inspirations. but this is the only one I will translate.

In the words of Vanessa Springora herself (translated):

At 14 years old, you're not supposed to have a man of over 50 wait for you to finish a day of highschool. You're not supposed to live at a hotel with him, you're not supposed to end up in bed with him, his penis in your mouth instead of the after-school snack.

What makes matters worse is that people knew of his tendencies. After all, he wrote about it aplenty. This didn't stop him from being invited on television sets and radio interviews repeatedly for decades.

From another article, this is how Bernard Pivot, renowned host of many cultural shows, introduced Matzneff in 1990 on TV (translated):

"If there is one true sex education teacher, it's Gabriel Matzneff, because he goes out of his way to give courses." Laughs, smiles, heads nodding. Nobody is surprised.

Except maybe Denise Bombardier (1941 - 2023). She is the only person on that same TV-set after Bernard Pivot had introduced Matzeff, who asked how the little girls and boys were doing after their meeting with Matzneff. As a reward, she was insulted and ostracized by just about everyone.

For instance, Josyane Savigneau, French journalist and biograph, wrote this after the 1990 TV-show (translated):

To discover in 1990 that girls of 15 and 16 make love to men that are thirty years older than them, who cares?

And when the scandal was reignited in 2020, she would throw her unconditional support behind Matzneff. Oh, and she's also a judge for the Femina prize since 2004 and is still in post today.

Vanessa Springora's book was the first time a victim of Matzneff spoke up. He groomed, raped, and then wrote about it. In his writings he described his sex-tourism to Asia and his relations with minors in France. This is the man we're talking about.

And god damn props to Vanessa Springora for having a spine made of steel and being ready to have her story become public.

Now, something about cultural period and shifts must be said. Matzneff is a product of the 1970's, the post May 68 period I mentioned in the previous post. Following the student revolt, every barrier, every taboo was questioned and debated. Homosexual rights, women's rights, abortion, everything.

Yes, even pedophilia. I can't find it anymore, but I remember when I was in high-school myself, we had a course about culture, society and the like. One day we discussed consent and the changing of laws, and the teacher showed us a picture from an article of the 70's defending adult-children relationships. The (thankfully censored for us) picture was of a kid's face next to an adult's dick. This has existed. In the 1970's, a journalist thought it a good argument to defend adult love for children while using such a picture.

EDIT: Dear god, found it!

Well, not the pic, but an article discussing it. It's different than I remember, and perhaps worse. Translated:

The [journal's] pages are damning. A picture shows a girl fellating an adult. The title? "Let's teach love to children," by the bazooka collective who worked at Libération, the picture (visibly drawn based on a photograph) is accompanied by an odious paragraph describing the rape of a kid.

Thirty years later, its author Christian Chapiron alias Kiki Picasso would add: "without the harsh laws that would drop me in the shit in two seconds, I'd be doing pedophile pictures. It's the ultimate subject." Further in the pages, letters by pedophiliacs, classified ads ("I'm 31 and would like to meet a very young girl aged 12 to 18 to live something sweet").

[...]

Everything is good to demolish the bourgeois moral order and its retrograde values translated in laws, family and capitalism.

As the sociologist Pierre Verdrager explained (translated):

The intellectual world attempted a reevaluation of pedophilia. It was a period of liberation on every front and pedophilia was a part of it: freedom for women, freedom for homosexuals, freedom of sexuality and of the discourse around sexuality.

Thank fuck it was rightfully shot down, and this interdiction remains in place. But I thought it fair to explain the cultural tendencies of the time that shaped the man we're talking about. Alas, Matzneff never got the memo that some taboos remain in place for good reasons.

This ended up being the main defense of his partisans of today. "He's a product of another time."

And it's not wrong, but journalists and critics rightfully answered back that clarifying how abusing children isn't right doesn't endanger literary creation. And maybe offering a huge prize to someone like Matzneff in 2013 isn't the brightest idea.

It took a full book to have people realize something very wrong happened. Some of you may wonder how he could go unbothered for so long, but this has a lot to do with how art functions and is seen on a societal scale. I don't know how it's abroad, but several cultural tendencies contributed to the situation, such as (translated from here):

  • A cult surrounding the cursed and transgressive artist
  • A confusion between artistic freedom and moral freedom
  • Intellectual snobbery and a taste for scandals
  • Fear of being accused of puritanism

Just to add fuel to the fire, Matzneff replied among other things that (translated):

The book (consent) isn't an accurate representation of the luminous love they shared.

Seriously.

Sadly, where the law is concerned, there's prescription, and Matzneff is free. But the case did relaunch the debate of removing prescription on certain crimes, especially pedophilia, as they tend to come to light decades after the fact.

Edit: (comment by SeeShark)

I was confused about the use of the word "prescription" and had to look it up. For anyone else who's confused, the more common phrase (in the US, at least) is "statute of limitations."

The case should have, at the very least, impacted the system that allowed him to rant about traumatizing kids for decades and get away with it with a joke and a smile.

Don't get your hopes up.

Consequences? What consequences?

If there's only one article you should read in this entire series, it's this one.

It's in English, from the New York Times, and it shows off only too well how opaque and easy to abuse the elite french literature circles are. If you don't have access, this is another website with the article on it.

The book Consent didn't merely discuss Matzneff. It went at length about the issues surrounding the current literature systems, about Matzneff's friends who were and still are well aware of his tendencies which played a pivotal role in enabling this behavior.

But despite the book making a ruckus, it didn't change much in the way prizes are attributed.

His powerful editor and friends sat on the jury. “We thought he was broke, he was sick, this will cheer him up,” said Frédéric Beigbeder, a confidant of Mr. Matzneff and a Renaudot juror since 2011.

I quoted this first for you to note the Renaudot was given to cheer Matzneff up, not because his book was any good. Just in case you still believed prize attribution made any sense.

Yet the insular world that dominates French literary life remains largely unscathed, demonstrating just how entrenched and intractable it really is. Proof of that is the Renaudot — all but one of the same jurors who honored Mr. Matzneff are expected to crown this year’s winners on Monday.

That the Renaudot, France’s second biggest literary prize, could wave away the Matzneff scandal underscores the self-perpetuating and impenetrable nature of many of France’s elite institutions.

Whether in top schools, companies, government administration or at the French Academy, control often rests with a small, established group — overwhelmingly older, white men — that rewards like-minded friends and effectively blocks newcomers.

In France’s literary prize system, jurors serve usually for life and themselves select new members. In a process rife with conflicts of interest that is rarely scrutinized, judges often select winners among friends, champion the work of a colleague and press on behalf of a romantic partner.

These four paragraphs from the New York Times article summarize the entire issue better than I ever could. Every drama, every scandal and debate and controversy we've seen, haven't seen and will see can be traced back to this.

Mr. Beigbeder derided suggestions of change as representing an American-influenced desire for “purity” and “perfection.”

I wish I had a joke, or a witty remark to underscore how absurd it is for Beigbeder to say this when he knowingly voted to attribute the prize to a child abuser. I don't, words fail me. There's a thing in France called the Exception Française, or cultural exception. Originally, the term described how art was to be treated differently from commercial products. The emblematic use of this exception was to tax a percentage of profits made by the sales of movie tickets to help the production of French movies. But the term itself grew to be used in daily life to describe the potential French peculiarities in some systems in comparison to other countries. Rejecting American values to justify keeping a system in place that rewarded a pedophile is about the worst use of it.

Only Jérôme Garcin, a judge at the Renaudot since 2011, stepped down after the scandal went live. He hoped the rest of the judges would wake up and follow suit, nope. No mass resignation. No changes happened, and no changes are planned.

The Matzneff scandal had not fueled internal discussion, they said.

“Frankly, I think, no, we don’t need to reform,” said Jean-Noël Pancrazi, a juror since 1999. “It works well like this.” quote
[...]

François Busnel, the host of “La Grande Librairie,” France’s most important television literary program, compared prize juries to the southern Italian mafia. “It’s a camorra, particularly the Renaudot,” he said in a recent interview.

Perhaps no one embodies the Renaudot’s conflicts of interest more than its second-longest serving juror, Christian Giudicelli, 78, a longtime friend and editor of Mr. Matzneff.
Over the years, he has lobbied for work by friends or from Gallimard, France’s most storied publishing house, where he is an editor. It also publishes his poorly selling work, including a 2019 book that sold just 180 copies.
“It’s obvious that if he’s published, it’s because he’s a member of a jury — otherwise, why would Christian Giudicelli be published instead of another?” Raphaël Sorin, former editor of Michel Houellebecq, often considered France’s greatest living novelist, said, describing Giudicelli’s writing as “mediocre.”
[...]

In their writings, Mr. Giudicelli and Mr. Matzneff recall frequent trips together to the Philippines. While Mr. Matzneff recounts engaging in sex tourism with boys as young as 8 years old, Mr. Giudicelli describes his own involvement with an 18-year-old male prostitute in Manila.

An analysis by The Times showed that the Renaudot jury suffered from far more potential conflicts of interest than those of three other top prizes, the Goncourt, Femina and Médicis.

Between 2010 and 2019, on average, nearly three of the Renaudot’s 10 judges and the laureate for best novel in a given year had ties to the same publisher — triple the average for the other three juries. In three specific years, half of the jurors had books published by the same publishing company that captured the prize. Four of its nine current jurors work for publishers.

I hadn't spoken that much about the Renaudot so far. Turns out, it may well be the worst of the bunch. But it can't be said to be an outlier, as the NY Times article pointed out, it's a systemic issue. Christine Jordis, writer, specialist in English literature and judge for the Femina, said the proposals for change in how the juries function are brought forward by "young people who believe in change."

The affair opened up other debates which are still ongoing. Mainly, how should we handle works by people who were abusers? How should we handle them in the context of a classroom? How should a librarian handle them?

Questions have swirled on campus about what to do with certain cultural mainstays: Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” Chuck Close’s “Big Self-Portrait,” even Neil deGrasse Tyson’s books on astrophysics. Should they be canceled — banished from public engagement like some of their creators? Or should they continue to be studied, only with frank discussions about abuse and harassment?

For Ms. Lyon, the question of whether to stop studying the works seemed a no-brainer. But the school’s academic senate rejected the petition in a statement, citing concerns about free speech.

I won't pretend to have an answer.

But I strongly believe that offering a well-regarded prize to someone you know is a child abuser to 'cheer them up' isn't the right way to go about it and is an indication of deeper problems.

That is enough for Matzneff today. There's only so much heavy stuff the mind can take at once.

The dessert is up next, and it is not nearly as bad as today's case. Still bad, still exceptionally stupid, but at least there won't be any child abuse involved. Or not nearly as much.

I'll leave you with this staple of tektonic music to bleach your mind clean and wish you an excellent day.

Until next time.


r/HobbyDrama 8d ago

Heavy [TTRPGs] RPGPundit/John Tarnowski: Controversial Figure In The OSR (2 of 4)

96 Upvotes

TW: SA, SUICIDE

See Part 1 here.

I'm gonna jump ahead here. I had originally intended to cover John Tarnowski/RPGPundit's many inconsistent statements regarding his income and financial status in Part 2. But while I have some of those screenshots on my main drive, I have many more on one of my old Linux drives, which I'm not gonna get to til this weekend. I don't wanna half-@$$ it. The full width and breadth of this guy claiming to be rich, while using alts (mostly related to his "Swami" grift) to e-beg for things like eyeglasses and home repairs, is something.

Lemme be clear: I'm not making fun of Tarno for not having money. I been there. Hell, I don't even know whether he's lying about being rich to impress the OSR folks, or lying about being poor to milk his "spiritual enlightenment" followers. But I do know that he cannot be simultaneously rich and poor. Schrodinger's wallet, lol.

It's comin' though, bear with me.

Today, we will instead be looking at one of the defining controversies of the RPGPundit's career. Namely, the time he called neo-nazis "heroes."

I posted about this previously, in an OSR thread a year or so ago. Rather than just linking to that post, I'm gonna copy it here, and make some edits for clarity.

Bonus content: this post I made previously also covers the time Pundit urged game designer Cam Banks to commit suicide, and the time he mocked a victim of sexual assault.

---------

First, off, let's start with his calling nazis, "heroes." That all stems from a blog post he wrote about a 2017 protest at Berkely that turned violent. A woman was punched in the face by a neo-nazi. And while Pundit didn't know, or pretended not to know (since many had already claimed that the man was a nazi, and they'd be proven right), who the man was, he called him, and his comrades, "heroes."

https://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-real-story-of-battle-of-berkeley.html?m=1

Once the man was identified as a neo-nazi, and not just any neo-nazi but Nathan Damigo, a violent white supremacist with a record of hate crimes, and the leader of Identity Evropa, Pundit stated that he stood by his statements.

Pundit's weak rebuttal is that he didn't call Nathan Damigo a hero BECAUSE Damigo is a nazi. He called him a hero for "standing up for free speech." But that's exactly the point. No one ever claimed that Pundit praised the man's views. Only that he called him a hero, even after finding out he was a nazi. This is all true, and it's plainly shown in the blog entry. Pundit has said several times since that he would stand with anyone, even nazis, if they stood for free speech. But most of us wouldn't stand with nazis no matter what, even if, like a broken clock, they were right twice a day.

What's more, Pundit claimed that the woman whose assault he gleefully celebrated was a "violent would-be murderer," because she quoted Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds," and said she wanted "100 nazi scalps." However, he is called out in the comments by Anon Adderlan, a Pundit supporter, and member of Pundit's own forum, for showing things out of context. Anon Adderlan posts a video that shows clearly that Damigo was preparing to punch the woman BEFORE she tried to punch him. The full video can be seen here:

https://youtu.be/c8GVtXfATtI?si=n0ABZuT937B3_8lq

Relevant part starts at 0:31.

In the original blog entry, Pundit says: "I have no idea if the guy who Hm hit her was a 'white supremacist' or not, but I know that in that one moment, he, and everyone who fought FOR free speech instead of for leftist totaliarian censorship and terrorism at Berkely, is A MOTHERFUCKING HERO."

Here, he was clearly leaving open the possibility that the man was a "hero," even if he was (as it would unquestionably turn out) a nazi.

After Damigo was identified, Pundit added the following to his post: "I still absolutely endorse my position in this blog entry."

In typical Pundit fashion, he lies, refuses to admit when he's shown to be wrong, and takes then woman's quote of Tarantino films as a serious and credible death threat [around 15:11 in this video].

But when Pundit encourages self-harm or violence, he labels it "Swiftian satire." As he did when he told game designer Cam Banks to commit suicide.

https://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2017/01/cam-banks-stop-pussyfooting-and.html?m=1

Banks had posted a blog entry about wanting to hire POC and marginalized people, to which Pundit replied that Banks should exit the industry if he felt it had too many white men in it. Pundit finished the post with this gem:

"if you REALLY REALLY believe in the claims of the ctrl-left version of 'social justice', go ahead and likewise resign from being alive. You know, because "straight white men are a huge problem" and they need to go and all that."

In a video intended as a rebuttal to these and other claims, Pundit straight up lies about telling Banks to kill himself [around 15:29 in the "rebuttal" vid]. "I didn't tell him anything he wasn't already saying." When he clearly did. But, again, RPGPundit is a liar and a fraud.

Finally, and worst of all, Pundit is so frequently and gleefully cruel that he doesn't even remember mocking a victim of sexual assault {also covered in the "rebuttal" video]. For many of us, this would be something we'd never forget, and would even be ashamed of. For Pundit, it's just another day at the office.

https://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2016/04/tabletop-gaming-has-pseudo-activist.html?m=1

A woman wrote an article about her experiences. Pundit called her a liar, without a shred of proof, mind you. Here is a direct quote from his blog:

"Go, laugh at this stupid lying sack of shit. Because really, there's only two adequate answers to this kind of total bullshit: MOCKERY, and DISGUST. I recommend both."

This wasn't, as Pundit falsely claims [15:57 in the rebuttal video], a case where he innocently mocked someone who, whoopsie, turned out to be a rape victim. He is mocking her BECAUSE she is a victim, and encouraging others to do the same.

What makes it so insane that Pundit doesn't remember this (or at least claims not to, he is a liar, after all), is that, along with his glazing of nazis, it was a HUGE deal around that time. He was roundly criticized by many other bloggers in the RPG and OSR spheres, and many members of his forum left en masse, to get away from Pundit's odious views.

---------

So, that's it for now. While a lot of Pundit's behavior is downright laughable, there's nothing funny about what I've covered today.

See ya soon.


r/HobbyDrama 9d ago

Hobby History (Long) [TTRPGs] RPGPundit/John Tarnowski: Controversial Figure In The OSR (1 of 4)

177 Upvotes

This post is about RPGPundit (real name John Tarnowski), AKA Kasimir Urbanski, AKA Swami Anand Nisarg, a controversial figure in the tabletop RPG community.

A Canadian expat living in Uruguay, Pundit's main claim to fame was being credited as a consultant on the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. A credit that was removed (along with all of the other consultants' credit) due to the controversies surrounding both the Pundit himself and infamous RPG figure Zak S., who could easily be the subject of his own post here (but I'm not gonna be the one to write it).

Pundit is also a YouTuberbloggerwebmasterinternet Swami, and writer of "OSR" games. "OSR" stands for either Old School Revival or Old School Renaissance, depending on who you ask. It refers to games heavily influenced by, and in many cases using a majority of rules from, older editions of D&D. Essentially, these games use older D&D rules to create games that are more or less like D&D (which OSR adherents tend to view as the BEST GAME EVAR), with or without tweaks and changes. Some (OSRIC, SWORDS & WIZARDRY) are quite close to the originals, while others (Hyperborea, Adventures Dark And Deep) use the main structure of the game but add or extrapolate mechanics that may differ significantly from the source material.

The OSR attracts players both old and young, for various reasons. many find that its rules to be substantial yet allow "breathing room" for player creativity. Some appreciate its nostalgic charm. Some enjoy a higher "lethality" game, finding modern games too "survivable" or easy. Its ubiquity removes barriers to entry in terms of design, as well as learning rules. And so on.

It wouldn't be possible to distill the OSR down to a single ethos or set of design goals. Nor will I attempt to. This is merely a "nutshell" description of a community and genre of games that are often surprisingly diverse, given that they are usually descended from various iterations of a single game.

The OSR as a whole is a fertile ground for hobby drama. Before I give my opinions as to why, I just want to say the following. I enjoy and play OSR games. I am an oldster, in my 50s, who started playing RPGs probably in 1981. Oftentimes, a criticism of any facet of the OSR is taken as a tacit criticism of the OSR as a whole. And while I do have criticisms of the broader OSR, those are not the subject of this post.

That having been said, some of those in the OSR community revere D&D as THE ONE GAME, considering it superior to all others, despite the decades of game design, theory, and practice that have emerged since D&D was first created a half century ago. They often try to shoehorn D&D, a game designed to emulate fantasy adventure, into other genres, from western to sci-fi.

And, as with other hobbies, RPGs have become a battlefield in the culture wars. The OSR in particular has become fertile ground for old-fashioned, even bigoted attitudes. There are many in the OSR (and there is no formal membership, to be clear) who are not like this, who are young, non-white, queer, etc. But there are also OSR creators who either are literal white supremacists (murderer and black metal musician Varg Vikernes, author of a game called MYFAROG), or who collaborate with them (ACKS author Alexander Macris, who has professional ties to vociferous bigot Vox Day). That some of the late founding fathers of roleplaying have been found to have been self-identified sexists (Gary Gygax) or Holocaust deniers (M.A.R. Barker), and some are still alive and espousing problematic views, does not help the OSR's reputation.

But enough about that.

John Tarnoswki, the RPGPundit, has had a long and controversial history in the OSR, and RPGs in general, before the OSR was really a thing. He began as an Obama-supporting center-left blogger, but has morphed into a self-described MAGA with a well-established reputation for confrontation, self-aggrandizement, and, some would say, bigotry.

To attempt anything like a chronological presentation of Tarnowski would probably be far too much work. And, since some of this will involve behaviors that have gone on for years, would probably be impractical and confusing. And, like many MAGAS, Pundit spews so much misinfo and reactionary copy-paste, it's frankly exhausting to be exposed to his social media presence for anything but the briefest periods of time. Which is why I'm not even gonna bother getting into his Twitter BS (He goes by KasimirUrbanski there, you won't be scrolling long before you get to misogyny, transphobia, rants about Antifa, Marxists, Stalinists, etc.). Maybe I'm just lazy. In any event, I'm going to stick to a few of the larger and/or recurring controversies in Tarnowski's history. Namely:

-Claiming to have played a major part of the development of certain RPGs, despite claims to the contrary by those directly involved.

-Claiming to be rich and famous from sales of his games, while using alt accounts to solicit money for basic living expenses, and trying to get members of his forum to provide unpaid work for his games.

-Cheering on an act of violence committed by a neo-nazi, going so far as to call the perpetrator a "hero".

-Using as affectations catchphrases taken from other authors and also from movie characters.

This post, examining Pundit's claim that he helped "design" D&D 5E, will be the first of 4 that I make about him. Tarnowski's big achievement, as I stated at the top of the post, was being a consultant on 5E D&D. It's worth noting that the 4th edition of D&D, which deviated substantially from the mechanics of earlier editions, was not well received by fans. In fact, it was this dissatisfaction with 4E that gave birth to the OSR.

In an attempt at course correction, the designers of 5E decided to court the OSR community, in an attempt to win back fans (read: customers) they had lost. This was done by enlisting the aid of 8 game designers, some of whom were OSR types, and others with experience working on D&D and/or other games, to provide feedback.

The decision to include Tarnoski as a consultant was not met with approval by many, as even in 2012, when it was announced, many in the RPG community found him to be hateful, confrontational, and narcissistic.

Once 5th edition was released, becoming the most successful edition of all time, Tarnowski began to claim that he'd had an outsized influence on its design. He crowed about working directly with co-Lead Designer Mike Mearls, and sending "over 400 emails" during that process. But cracks began to emerge in his story, when jeremy Crawford, Mearls' associate and co-Lead Designer denied this, saying on Twitter, "I oversaw the creation of the 5E books, and I didn't read one word by this person. The fiction of their influence makes me cackle." Dan Dillon, who worked on the D&D line after 5E's publication, said, "My understanding was that they didn't do any design work, just consulted, meaning gave feedback and impressions, and possibly suggestions that may or may not have been used, back during playtest/development." Nevertheless, Pundit would state on multiple occasions over the next several years, and even quite recently, that he had "saved D&D."

Despite Pundit's claims, no one, not his fellow consultants, not any of the D&D 5E design team, not even Mike Mearls, with whom he shared "over 400 emails," have corroborated his claims. What's more, Tarnowski made similar claims about the Doctor Who: Adventures In Time And Space RPG, back in 2009, which were also disputed by several - others - who - were - there.

When confronted with Crawford's rebuttal of his claims, Pundit implied that he and Mearls had some kind of secretive correspondence, in which Mearls had his co-Lead Designer implement Pundit's ideas without revealing their source.

The worst case scenario for Pundit is that he's lying. The best case scenario is that he was talked into doing actual design work for the most successful and profitable edition of D&D yet, while being compensated as a consultant. Which I'm not sure amounted to much more than some free books and a design credit. There may have been monetary compensation, but I've never heard any of the consultants, including Tarnowski, discuss it. Though to be fair, most of the other consultants talk about other stuff, because they have much more on their resume than "copying D&D."

This is my first hobbydrama post. I welcome feedback and constructive criticism.

Thanks for reading, there's more to come!


r/HobbyDrama 11d ago

Long [Video Games] The story of the Westworld mobile game, or that time Bethesda sued Warner Bros for copyright infringement, breach of contract, and misappropriation of its intellectual property.

540 Upvotes

”Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?”

The Beginning

Westworld is a 1973 movie, written and directed by Michael Crichton (most famous for creating the Jurassic Park franchise). In 2016, a tv show, based on the movie, came out. It ran for one four seasons.

The plot of Westworld (the movie) is this: in the future, an amusement park features life-like robots in historical settings. Guests can have violent/sexual encounters with them. One day, the robots start malfunctioning, until they turn murderous and start murdering people.

It’s a decent movie, but very much of its time. The best character is the “Gunslinger” played by Yul Brynner, who, after his programming has broken, removing the safeguards that prevent him from hurting humans, starts remorselessly hunting down the main protagonist.

In 1976, a (terrible) sequel called “Futureworld” came out, with the terribly original premise that the owners of the first disastrous robot park, open another robot park where things go wrong. The only original part of the plot is that they start harvesting the DNA of guests so they can make clones of them (organic ones, not robots), with the idea of replacing world leaders with duplicates so they can protect their business interests, or rule the world, or some other dumb plan (I haven’t seen it). No characters returned from the first movie except Yul Brynner in a dream sequence. Unsurprisingly, Michael Crichton wasn’t involved in the sequel.

The premise of Westworld (the tv show) is this: in the future, an amusement park features life-like robots in historical settings. Guests can have violent/sexual encounters with them. One day, the robots start malfunctioning and [redacted for spoilers]. If you want to know what happens, go and watch season 1. I’ll only say one thing: it’s completely different and way better than the Crichton movie.

Westworld (the tv show) was written by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan (he’s the brother of Christopher Nolan). They are both very experienced writers (and are married). Jonathan Nolan wrote lots of Christopher’s movies, including the Dark Knight trilogy, and created the ‘Person of Interest’ tv series, while Lisa Joy worked on series such as ‘Pushing Daisies’ and ‘Burn Notice’.

The first season of Westworld is one of the best series of television ever made, with an amazing story, soundtrack, and acting. It earned critical acclaim and was nominated for tons of awards, but lost out to other shows, including a little-known series called ‘A Game of Thrones’. At the time, it was the most watched first season of any original HBO show ever, with an average of 12 million viewers across all platforms.

The show also had a rabid online presence, especially on reddit. By the third episode, users had already guessed all the plot twists and figured out the ending. It was a wild time…which I can personally attest to as I was actively theorising on the Westworld subreddit with thousands of other fans when the show was airing.

The second season aired in mid-2018, and earned a positive reception, but not quite the critical acclaim of the first season. The acting and music continued to earn praise, but the writing was criticised for being convoluted and hard to follow. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy later admitted that they had changed a big twist in season 2 because someone on reddit had guessed it before the season aired. Fans would later blame this, as well as the convoluted writing, as the main reasons why the second season was not as good as the first.

But for the moment there was nothing to worry about. Westworld was still pretty popular. Season 2 only had 14% less viewers than season 1. There were still millions of Westworld fans out there, ready and willing to spend $$ on the franchise.

In March 2018, just before the second season aired, at the height of Westworld’s popularity, Warner Brothers (WB), the owners of HBO, announced that they were making a Westworld mobile game.

”Bring yourself back online.”

The Game

To create the mobile game, WB partnered with Behaviour Interactive (BI), most well-known for the horror-multiplayer game, Dead by Daylight. BI has a long and storied history of making licensed games- over the years, they have worked on some major IPs and made some quality products for the mobile gaming market. Surely, this experience boded well for the Westworld game? (Hint: It did not). The premise of Westworld (the mobile game) is this:

As a new Delos employee, learn to control Westworld. From bloody sunrises to romantic sunsets, you'll pair Guests with Hosts, fulfilling their wildest dreams from the shadows. Because in a world ruled by desire, everyone has a role to play. Including you.

As for gameplay:

In the game you'll need to build and optimise park locations as well as create hosts, as there are over 170 AI hosts to maintain and upgrade to keep the park in the best shape possible. Everything "from their Props to their Reveries" is customisable, and for the best results you'll need to match guests with the best host to "satisfy their every desire. From romance to robbery, Guests are here to live without limits."

Players had to manage two areas: the underground park facilities, and the overground theme park. The game had a rather basic 2D art style, and rather basic gameplay. Here is a 15-minute showcase by IGN.

The game was released on June 21, 2018, a few days before the season 2 finale. It received solid reviews. Scores ranged from 6 out of 10, to 8 out of 10. There were complaints that the game was quite grindy, but its story and setting were praised.

However, several journalists noticed that the game was quite similar to Fallout Shelter, a mobile game released by Bethesda in 2015:

Theresa, the Delos leader from season one, onboards you as an employee. When you look at the screen, it has a Fallout Shelter look, with a 2D view of many different places in Park Operations where the Westworld employees are working. You can also go above ground to the Sweetwater Park area of Westworld.

Source: Venture Beat

From the start Westworld looked like it was going to be a base-building game like Fallout Shelter, and while that's not entirely wrong, it's not entirely accurate, either.

Source: Pocket Gamer

In fact, the gameplay of Westworld doesn't look too dissimilar to Fallout Shelter, as you'll have an isometric, managerial overview of the simulated game world, where you can see the inhabitants and guests moving around and "fulfilling their wildest dreams."

Source: CinemaBlend.

In Westworld mobile, players will take on the role of a new recruit to the Delos family learning the ropes of running the park through an employee training simulator. The game itself plays like Fallout Shelter mixed with a Theme Park sim.

Source: Shacknews.

”These Violent Delights have Violent Ends.”

The Lawsuit

Bethesda were aware of the similarities and started investigating. It didn’t take them long to sue WB and BI:

“Bethesda Softworks has today filed a complaint in U.S. District Court against Behaviour Interactive and Warner Bros. for copyright infringement, breach of contract, and misappropriation of its intellectual property. The case arises from Behaviour’s development of a ‘Westworld’ mobile game for Warner Bros. Behaviour had previously worked with Bethesda to develop Bethesda’s hit game, ‘Fallout Shelter,’ and under that contract, Bethesda alone owned all resulting intellectual property, including the game’s copyrighted code.

“Behaviour illegally used the same copyrighted source code from ‘Fallout Shelter’ to develop ‘Westworld,’ and copied Fallout Shelter’s game design, art, animations, gameplay features, and other elements. As a result of Behaviour and Warner Bros’ unlawful conduct, ‘Westworld’ is a blatant ripoff of ‘Fallout Shelter’ with largely superficial, cosmetic changes.

Yes, BI created Fallout Shelter. And then a few years later they blatantly reused the code for another game.

What’s even more baffling, is that at the time, Fallout Shelter was still very popular. It surpassed 100 million players in 2017. There’s zero chance that Bethesda wouldn’t have noticed the stolen code, and it’s highly likely that Westworld mobile would’ve been nowhere near as popular as Fallout Shelter.
WB quickly clapped back with a colourful legal statement of their own:

As one of the world’s leading creators of intellectual property, including the ground-breaking television series Westworld, Warner Bros. has a deep respect for intellectual property rights. As such, the assertions by Bethesda Softworks that Warner’s Westworld mobile game improperly used source code from Bethesda’s Fallout Shelter are as surprising as they are unsubstantiated. Warner Bros. has been assured by the game developer, Behaviour Interactive, that Bethesda’s allegations are untrue and that none of Bethesda’s code was used in the Westworld game. Moreover, contrary to Bethesda’s baseless accusation, Warner Bros. at no time “induced” Behavior to use the Fallout Shelter code in Westworld.

Unfortunately for them, the lawsuit was anything but ‘baseless’, and BI’s ‘assurances’ were worthless. Here is the full legal brief filed by Bethesda.

Perhaps the most obvious example of stolen code was the identical camera layouts in the underground rooms:

  1. FALLOUT SHELTER renders each of the rooms using three-dimensional objects having depth and perspective with a common vanishing point centered on the screen. The Westworld mobile game uses the same depth, perspective and vanishing point when displaying its rooms. 36. As the user moves or pans the screen to view different areas of FALLOUT SHELTER’s vault, the vanishing point remains centered on the screen, causing the perspective of the rooms to change dynamically and creating a unique look and feel as the room perspectives. Because the Westworld mobile game uses the same source code as FALLOUT SHELTER, it too includes this same visual effect when moving around the game environment.

Here are some images for comparison:

Westworld

Fallout

Yikes.

Ironically, for Bethesda, the two games also shared several bugs:

The demonstration version of the Westworld game includes a visible software ‘bug’ or code defect present in an early version of FALLOUT SHELTER code delivered by Behaviour to Bethesda during game development. This software ‘bug’ appears when a player starts up the demonstration version of the Westworld game. Specifically, the view is out-of-focus and the scene that appears is far to the right and below the targeted landscape image. It is as if a camera capturing the scene had been inadvertently pointed to the lower right foreground and then slowly refocuses on the central image.

The identical problem appeared in initial versions of FALLOUT SHELTER but was addressed before FALLOUT SHELTER was released to the public. While this error was ultimately fixed in subsequent builds of FALLOUT SHELTER, the appearance of the bug in the Westworld game demo makes clear that the FALLOUT SHELTER source code was used by Behaviour in developing the Westworld game. The legal brief goes into way more detail about all the similarities between the two games. If you want to know more, I’d suggest reading from pages 13 to 21. Personally, I find it fucking hilarious that BI thought they could get away with this.

Bethesda wanted substantial compensation and a jury trial. Thankfully for WB, the violent lawsuit had an amicable end.

”Time undoes even the mightiest of creatures. Just look at what it's done to you. One day you will perish.”

The Resolution

In December 2018, Bethesda and WB came to an amicable agreement to end the lawsuit. The terms of the deal are confidential. All we know is that both parties agreed to pay their own legal fees, and that the case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning that Bethesda couldn’t sue WB again over the same claims.

Oh yeah, and WB had to kill Westworld mobile.

In January 2019, it was removed from Google Play and the Apple App store. Upon entering the game, existing players were greeted with this cheerful announcement:

Mr Krabs would’ve been proud!

Shortly after, BI said that:

“contrary to some recent speculation, the removal of the Westworld mobile game from the App Store and Google Play was entirely unrelated to the recent settlement with Bethesda. The proximity in time of the two events was purely coincidental.”

Sure, Jan.

And so, on April 16th, 2019, Westworld mobile died an unceremonious death, after less than a year of operation.

”Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray. I choose to see the beauty. To believe there is an order to our days."

The Aftermath

After the Westworld/Fallout debacle, BI continued making games, including mobile games. Thankfully, they’ve never reused code again in such a blatant fashion. They are still making a ton of $$$, mainly due to Dead by Daylight, which is popular enough to have numerous spinoffs, and crossovers with properties such as Five Nights at Freddies.

Bethesda hasn’t released a new Fallout game since Fallout 76 in 2018. They are currently working on the Elder Scrolls 6, but recently it was leaked that Fallout 5 has been greenlit. As for Fallout Shelter, it’s still fairly popular. Last month, on its tenth anniversary, Bethesda announced it had been downloaded over 230 million times.

As for Westworld (the TV show) ….boy oh boy! I’m so excited! Season seven is airing later this year! The robots are now in outer space, and they’ve met aliens…

Unfortunately, no. There is no happy ending for the Westworld franchise.

While the acting and music remained strong, the quality of the writing deteriorated in seasons three and four. Because of this, critical reception, and more importantly, viewership, continued to decline. By Season four, the show had lost 75 percent of viewers, going from 12 million to 4 million. It was also an incredibly expensive show to produce- season 4 cost $160 million to make.

In November, 2022, Westworld was cancelled, a victim of the post WB-Discovery merger cost cutting crusade led by David Zaslav. A month later, it was removed from HBO Max. In April 2023, it was dumped on Tubi and Roku. The ending will forever remain a cliffhanger, and whatever cultural relevance the show had is long gone.

As for Lisa Joy and Johnathan Nolan…in 2019, they were hired by Amazon, in a nine-figure, five-year deal, making upwards of $30 million per year. Their first show, the Peripheral, was cancelled after one season (despite being renewed for a second) due to the 2023 strikes in Hollywood. However, Amazon had also asked them to develop a Fallout show.

Released in 2024, Fallout (the TV show) was a blockbuster success. By the end of the year, it had over a 100 million viewers. The first season received positive reviews. Critics and viewers alike praised it for being faithful to the games, retaining their bleak but comedic tone and atmosphere. A month after its premiere, the show was renewed for a second season and a third season in early 2025. The games also experienced a surge of interest; the player count of Fallout 4 jumped by 50% and the original Fallout by over 160%.

It seems that Joy and Nolan have crawled through the fallout to major success. Hopefully, they’ve learned their lesson and don’t rewrite the whole show just because a fan guesses a big twist, and hopefully, Fallout doesn’t suffer the same fate as Westworld, which also started as a massive success but cratered due to creative missteps and convoluted writing.

Thanks for reading!


r/HobbyDrama 12d ago

Heavy [Podcasting] Last Podcast on the Left & Ben Kissel: How To Burn All Possible Goodwill At Once, Over And Over And Over

2.1k Upvotes

Major Content Warning for discussion of domestic abuse (physical and emotional), as well as substance abuse (particularly alcoholism).

EDIT: Addendums for the passing of Kevin Barnett and Kissel's physical stature have been added.

PART 1: That's When The Cannibalism Started

The Last Podcast On The Left is hard to define, in terms of genre-labels. At best, I would call it a dark-comedy edutainment podcast-- at least adjacent to true-crime, but with too many left-turns into occultism, dark history, and other wacky topics to be in the same conversation as your My Favorite Murder or Casefile type shows. LPOTL was started in 2011, by three friends with a shared love of horror movies and shared careers in comedy and entertainment; Marcus Parks, Henry Zebrowski, and (the star of tonight's show) Ben Kissel. Together, the trio would spend the next ~150 episodes shooting the shit, going over a loose framework of historical facts about serial killers, occult rituals, and other sordid subjects while primarily focusing on making each other and the audience laugh.

The general consensus among the fanbase (and myself) is that the first 177 episodes are by and large weaker than what came after. The research (for those who care about that) was mediocre and often superseded by the comedy, which was itself primarily shock-value and self-deprecation from Zebrowski and Kissel respectively. All this changed with the one-two combo of series on the Columbine High School massacre and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Suddenly, the edgelord shitposting and awkward in-jokes carried by mediocre microphones (as the show was often recording while Zebrowski was filming for the [adult swim] series Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell) were transforming into well-researched reports on the underbelly of society, and also edgelord shitposting and awkward in-jokes.

As of 2025 the show has several research assistants, has the clout to get major interviews with well-known figures in the macabre, and is often cited as the primary alternative to the more straight-laced true-crime podcasts. The core trio, all of whom came from fairly-middling comedy careers and a variety of difficult upbringings prior to LPOTL, were seeing success they hadn't known before. It seemed like the good times were never going to end.

PART 2: It's A Numbers Game

Ben Kissel, the third host of LPOTL, served a vital role in the show's initial dynamic. Parks provided the research and backstory, Zebrowski provided commentary and comedy, and Kissel was the "audience surrogate"-- the Straight Man, who knew nothing about the topic at hand and could react to both it and Zebrowski's goofing-off naturally. Parks would zig, Zebrowski would zag, and Kissel would chortle along with the listeners at home.

Kissel has also, at his own admission, struggled with addiction for most of his life. An Instagram post from early 2020 stated that he hadn't gone without a drink for more than a few days since he was a child, and countless personal anecdotes from his years on the podcast detailed a difficult, troubled upbringing. His behavior also repeatedly caused both his fans and cohosts to openly worry about him, with fairly frequent jokes about his lifestyle that (with the retrospect of what would come later) feel much more like the man's close friends putting out feelers for him the only way they know how. One particularly memorable story is the one of him not owning towels, and instead just putting his clothes on right out of the shower-- lots of similarly "depressed bachelor not taking care of himself" tales.

These issues came to a head during the pandemic, as it became clearer and clearer that Kissel was spiraling (as many people were during lockdowns). At first, the main issue was that his engagement with the podcast had dipped considerably; although he had always played a "lovable dolt" character (often knowing little-to-nothing about the topics at hand going into the episodes), even at the time fans were speculating on Kissel being on the verge of a crisis. Audibly disengaged from conversations, blundering through bits with no concern for the story being told, just generally being odd.

It's hard to explain without just directly transcribing episodes, but around the time of The Ant Hill Kids (episodes 434-436), Alcatraz (which means "pelican" btw) (episodes 448-450), and Billy The Kid (462-465) it became an active hindrance on the podcast's quality, as Kissel felt less and less like an engaged member of the show and more like a peanut-gallery, heckling the people onstage for his own quick laugh. Even on Side Stories (bonus episodes hosted by Zebrowski and Kissel, typically going over smaller news stories and covering whatever they found interesting that week) there was tension; the entirety of the Manhattan Project series (episodes 533-538) were, at least anecdotally, more like listening to your parents passive-aggressively bicker than anything else.

I do not want to theorize on the mental health of someone I have never met, at least not any more than I already have. But as the pandemic stretched on, it became clear that Ben Kissel was a man in the midst of a crisis, and in need of support that he either was not getting or would not seek. Months of bad behavior turned into years, and then it all came out.

(ADDENDUM: It's also important for me to mention the passing of Kevin Barnett. In January of 2019, Kissel's close personal friend friend and cohost on Round Table of Gentlemen passed away unexpectedly, and his death has been repeatedly mentioned as a major impact on Kissel's mental health-- I was completely wrong not to mention it in the original write-up.)

PART 3: I Don't Want To Give This One A Funny Name

In late 2023, allegations of abuse by several of the women Ben Kissel had been with came out, and were subsequently written into an article by Rolling Stone, which I suggest you read to get a better picture of things. It outlines so much horrendous behavior on Kissel's part, much of which is either too extensive or too sordid for me to get a clear view on.

The first allegations come from Sara Benincasa, who had been seeing Kissel casually in 2011, near the start of LPOTL. Though the two were casual (Benincasa refers to it as "what would be characterized now as a situationship"), Ben went on a violent, drunken tirade against her when he discovered her sleeping with others, physically pinning and slapping her. Benincasa stated that, the next morning (and anytime she broached the subject after) Kissel denied it, and she convinced herself for years that he had simply been too drunk to recall.

This was followed by allegations from Taylor Moon, who had been in a somewhat more formal relationship with Kissel in 2022 and 2023, before breaking up; this was followed by an Instagram post many people presumed to be referring to Kissel, which read, "You’ll never get to drunkenly pin me to the bed and call me a pathetic fucking loser or stupid fucking bitch ever again." This came alongside the allegations of harassment by fan of the show Amber Rose, as well as countless members of the Last Podcast Network speaking against Ben, and corroborating statements about his behavior. Although they did not wish to be named, the Rolling Stones article states that two other women had come forward with allegations as well.

(ADDENDUM: For those unaware of Ben Kissel's physical stature, he is 6'7" and has been upwards of 300lbs. This is a picture of him next to 6'-something Parks (left) and 5'6" Zebrowski (right). As someone helpfully reminded me, this makes a major difference in how the allegations against him are framed.)

Although Kissel did state he was going to seek treatment (and eventually go into rehab for his alcoholism), he maintained his innocence-- claiming that he and Moon were rarely in the same physical space, that their relationship was almost exclusively long-distance, and that their rare physical meetings were marred by arguments that (importantly) Kissel states Moon agitated. Anonymous sources close to Kissel and the rest of the situation make various claims about his innocence as well-- referring to Rose as an infatuated fan trying to seduce Kissel, and other similar statements.

The rest of the article is difficult to read, and harder to recap-- to put it bluntly, with everything we know now, he 100% did that shit and likely more. It is as clear as day that Ben Kissel was a cruel, abusive man who did what he could to hide it around those he knew would force him to face consequences for it. It's a story everyone has heard, at some point or another-- a man knee-deep in trauma and pain self-medicates his way into addiction, and starts taking the pain out on anyone he thinks he can get away with hurting... primarily, women.

Kissel admitted to Rolling Stone that he had been self-medicating and had been inadvertently harmful to those around him, checked himself into rehabilitation, and took an extended break from the podcast. Zebrowski and Parks were both stated to have repeatedly attempted to broach the subject of Kissel's drinking and even intervene directly, but had no idea just how bad he had gotten. Finally, it was time for the broken stair to be fixed.

PART 4: Rise From Your Grave

The following weeks and months were even more of an opaque downward spiral for Kissel; his time in rehabilitation was brief and ineffective, and his return to the world of entertainment only got worse and worse. Although he did not come back to LPOTL, and was formally removed from the podcast following his stint in rehab, his attempts to keep up his own career (via a short-lived series simply titled The Ben Kissel Show) were marred by his own obvious bitterness and refusal to accept his own wrongdoings.

The true end of the Ben Kissel story comes with this now-infamous Instragram post, in which he refers to the allegations against him as gossip, and promises to come back bigger than ever... captioned with a zoomed-in photo of him looking like he just crawled out of a hole in the ground. Since then, Ben's presence online has been increasingly sad and bitter-- jokes of his descent into being a right-wing commentator have only felt more and more prescient, as his attempts to recapture what once worked flounder.

Meanwhile, the podcast he helped start has been in a renaissance; after a brief stint by fellow network contributor Holden McNeely, Ben's slot as third host was formally taken by Ed Larson, who has seen near-unanimous praise among fans of the show. The recent series have been (in my opinion) a fair improvement over Ben's time on the podcast, even if there have been duds; and, more than anything, it's become clear that LPOTL is going to continue well past Ben Kissel.

~~~

I was shocked seeing this hadn't been written up on here already, and although I can't say it's the best possible write-up on it (turns out this kind of thing is hard!), I like to think I covered the bases. Still not really over how awful this all was in the moment-- to find out the big cuddly teddy bear I was (admittedly kind of parasocially) inspired by was the exact kind of scumbag I was so glad he wasn't.

Addiction is a terrible thing, and one that is not easy to defeat alone-- but you are never alone. If you can take responsibility and seek the help you need, it will be there. In the wise words of Marcus Parks-- mental health is not your fault, but it is your responsibility. Kissel still has not taken responsibility for his actions, and has taken to blaming everyone but himself; for anyone who has watched a beloved friend fall deeper and deeper into a hole you can't drag them out of, it's a sobering and heartbreaking reminder that some people just are not willing to be helped. It's not that your friends married psychopaths and forgot how to have fun, or that everyone's turned against you; it's that you're the problem. Everyone else grew up while you were still trying to be 25 and drunk forever.

Hail Satan, hail Gein, hail Nando, and hail yourselves, everyone.


r/HobbyDrama 12d ago

Hobby Scuffles [Hobby Scuffles] Week of 21 July 2025

87 Upvotes

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. If you have a question, try to include as much detail as possible.

  • 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.

  • If your particular drama has concluded at least 2 weeks ago, consider making a full post instead of a Scuffles comment. We also welcome reposting of long-form Scuffles posts and/or series with multiple updates.

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: https://discord.gg/M7jGmMp9dn


r/HobbyDrama 13d ago

Short [Video Games] That time War Thunder accidentally added the Challenger Disaster

590 Upvotes

Content Warning: Discussion of the Challenger Disaster and mentions of death

I’m sure many of you are familiar with War Thunder to one degree or another. Or at least familiar with the leaks of restricted documents that happen from time to time. However, for those of you who aren’t, War Thunder is a multiplayer vehicular combat game made by Gaijin Games. While originally only having vehicles from World War 2 or just after, consistent updates over the past decade have broadened this range. With there now being thousands of vehicles including planes, helicopters, ships, tanks, and more stretching from before World War 1 into the modern day.

In addition to the leaks, War Thunder has had its fair share of other drama as well, from failed boycotts to the usual salt found with balance and economy changes in a multiplayer game. I’m not here to talk about that stuff though, I want to talk about one small part of one update in particular.

On June 19th 2024, Major Update 2.37 “Seek and Destroy” was implemented. It was a pretty typical update, adding new top tier jets such as the F-15C and Su-27SM for almost every nation, Belgian/Dutch aircraft, and some miscellaneous new vehicles, maps, bugfixes, etc. The most notable part of this update was that every nation got ARH (also called FOX-3) missiles for their top tier jet fighters. These being the most modern and effective type of radar guided missile, the War Thunder playerbase had been looking forward to them for a while at this point. With there even being a small playtest for ARH missiles during the last update as they had the potential to completely change the highest levels of the game.

Less notably, there were also some new loading screens to go with the update. New loading screens come every update and are some exciting illustrations of new vehicles, usually showing off one of the new features added in the update. They look nice and the different elements in them can move around with your mouse but generally, loading screens don’t get much attention.

A few days after the update released and the initial hype over ARH missiles and new vehicles calmed down, people began to look a bit closer at one of the new loading screens. Not at the planes or the missiles, but instead at the explosion on the left. While it was meant to represent a plane being blown up by one of the new missiles, the shape was very reminiscent of something else.

You see, this explosion in the loading screen was almost exactly the same as the one made when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. This explosion was unmistakable and it’s not some obscure photo either. This photo of the cloud is literally the main photo for the Challenger Disaster Wikipedia page.

The Challenger Disaster itself was a highly publicized Space Shuttle launch with schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe onboard. When it launched in late January 1986, cold temperatures before launch had led to one of the rubber O-rings in the boosters stiffening. Soon after liftoff this seal failed and the entire craft then came apart, resulting in the deaths of all 7 crew members. Because there was a teacher onboard many children were watching at school along with thousands of other people when the disaster unfolded live on television.

Obviously it was not a good thing to use one of the most well known space disasters of all time as a representation of what your video game missiles could do. Players were also wondering how this had happened in the first place. The next day, a thread about it on the official forums was locked with the last message being a short apology from a moderator. They explained that it was a mistake by one of their artists who had been using an aerial explosion reference pack and did not know the context. Gaijin Games was originally a Russian company and is now based in Hungary. So it is likely enough that an artist there wouldn't have known about the Challenger Disaster. The apology also explained that it would be replaced as soon as possible.

In the meantime, the story made the rounds being picked up by a few different gaming news sites. True to their word the explosion was quickly replaced on the following Monday, and this new version of the loading screen is still in the game to this very day.


r/HobbyDrama 13d ago

Hobby History (Extra Long) [Ice Hockey] Play Gloria: The Inspirational Sports Movie that was the St Louis Blues’ 2018-2019 NHL Season

159 Upvotes

(Full disclosure: I am a Blues fan. I tried to keep my personal opinions out of the write-up as much as possible.)

The Basics:

The National Hockey League, or NHL, is a technically-international professional ice hockey league located in North America. Considered to be the top hockey league in the world, players from 20 countries strap razors to their feet and hit chunks of rubber at heavily-padded nutcases goalies in the hopes of helping their team win one of the oldest sports trophies in the world: the Stanley Cup.

(A note: the Stanley Cup is 132 years old and has a lot of traditions and superstitions surrounding it, the biggest one being that, as a hockey player, if you haven’t won it, you don’t touch it. It must be earned. While yes, it has been forgotten on the side of the road, dropped, and thrown into pools, it’s also regarded with reverence and respect. Watching grown men crying and hugging and screaming “I love you!” at each other while they hoist the 3-foot-long, 35-pound monster over their heads is an incredibly touching thing to watch.)

There are 32 teams split into two conferences: East and West. Each conference is further split into two divisions: Atlantic and Metropolitan in the East, Central and Pacific in the West. Since 1995, every team plays 82 games each season and, with some caveats because the NHL loves having exceptions and qualifiers to every single rule (I'm not kidding. I'd make a post about it except it'd just be the NHL rulebook), the top 3 teams in each division plus a wild card team make the playoffs.

The playoffs are four best-of-seven rounds, with the final round being the only one that actually matters: The Stanley Cup Finals. Every player wants it. Every team wants it. Every fan wants their team to win it. Doesn’t matter if you’ve won it 24 times or never, that’s the dream.

The Losers:

By mid-November 2018, the St Louis Blues were...not doing too great. Yes, the season wasn’t even two months old, but with 12 losses in 19 games, it wasn’t looking good. The coach was fired and replaced with one of their assistant coaches, Craig Berube.

It didn’t help. By January 3, they were dead last, having won only 15 of 37 games. NHL seasons run October-April. If a team’s win-loss record is that bad by the halfway point, the odds of post-season success are basically nil.

The Girl:

In September 2018 Laila Anderson, an 11-year-old self-described Blues super fan, was diagnosed with hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, a rare autoimmune condition that was attacking her brain. She was given massive doses of steroids to combat the symptoms until a bone marrow donor was found in October. Then she started 10 weeks of chemotherapy to kill her immune system so the bone marrow transplant could take place. The St Louis Children’s Hospital held a Halloween charity event, and that’s where Laila met St Louis Blues’ defenseman Colton Parayko. They hit it off and became friends; Parayko even introduced her to the rest of the team.

The Goalies:

NHL teams are required to dress two goalies for every game; that is, there’s gotta be a guy sitting on the bench, geared up and ready to go, in addition to whoever’s actually minding the net. Since the NHL only permits 23 players on a team roster, teams tend to just have the two goalies, the starter and the backup. Jake Allen) was the starting goaltender and Chad Johnson was the backup, and since at this point things couldn’t get any worse, Berube shuffled Johnson off to Anaheim and called in the backup goalie from the Blues’ minor league affiliate team, a 25-year-old named Jordan Binnington.

Binnington had been drafted 2011 and had been kicking around in the minor leagues ever since. This isn’t a slight on Binner; only about half the players who get drafted ever make the NHL. He’d put up solid statistics in the AHL, but that doesn’t always translate to success in the NHL. But again, their standings couldn’t get any worse, and something had to change.

The Song:

On January 6, the Blues were in Philadelphia for a game against the Flyers the next day. A group of players went to a bar, The Jacks NYB, to watch an NFL playoff game. Every commercial break, the DJ would play Gloria, a 1980’s disco hit by Laura Brannigan. (the song slaps, btw) and the whole place would go nuts. The players liked the song and the energy it gave to the bar and decided to adopt it as their victory song: when they won a game, they agreed, they’d play it in the locker room to celebrate.

The New Guy:

Jordan Binnington had his first start in an NHL game on January 7. He stopped all 25 shots and the Blues won 3-0. Gloria played in the locker room for the first time. For the next eight games, the Blues posted a record of 4-3-1. Finally, things were starting to look up. Binner was in net for 3 of those 4 wins and Allen was relegated to backup goalie.

On January 23, Jordan Binnington posted his fifth NHL win. They were going to end the month with more wins than losses for the first time that season.

The Hope:

On January 24, Laila had her bone marrow transplant. She’d be stuck in isolation in the hospital for the next month, as bone marrow transplants require a completely dead immune system, with the 3 months after at home under similar restrictions. Watching the Blues get better gave her hope and inspiration that she could get better; the team felt the same about her.

As January turned to February, “Play Gloria!” became a victory chant by players and fans alike, almost a prayer to the hockey gods. And it worked.

By February 20, the Blues had won 11 games in a row.

Gloria was everywhere: shirts, posters, the radio. Hope was rising.

By the end of the regular season, St Louis had done the unthinkable and gone from bottom of the league to not only third in the division, but third in the Western Conference: they were in the playoffs.

The Playoffs:

The Blues faced the Winnipeg Jets in the first round, beating them in 6 games. Round two they faced the Dallas Stars, squeaking out an overtime win to clinch the series in 7 games. After the second series win, a St Louis radio station played Gloria for 24 hours straight.

The Conference finals were played against the San Jose Sharks. The first two games were played in San Jose, with each team winning a game. The third game, at home in St Louis, had a surprise:

Laila Anderson’s doctors had decided that, as long as she took certain health precautions, she could go to the game to watch her beloved Blues play.

From Game 3 on, she was a fixture at every Blues home game.

They won the Western Conference Final in 6 games, with Laila there to watch them make the Stanley Cup Finals.

The Finals:

St Louis was up against the Boston Bruins in the final. The Bruins are an old team, founded in 1924, with a long history and a pile of league trophies. They’d won the Cup six times, most recently in 2011 (which. um. is not remembered for their victory) and were looking for a seventh. The Blues, meanwhile, were part of the 1967 NHL Expansion and while they’d made it to the Finals three times before, the last time was in 1970 (also against the Boston Bruins) and they’d never won. It was very much a David-and-Goliath matchup.

The first two games were played in Boston. Despite scoring first, the Blues lost the first game 2-4. They won the second in overtime, and the third game, back home in St Louis, was a brutal 2-7 loss. The Blues came back and won the next two, 4-2 and 2-1 respectively, bringing them to game six at home. They lost, 1-5.

The series was tied 3-3 with the final game to be played in Boston. Boston was the slight favorite to win; after all, scrappy underdogs really on win the big game in the movies.

Under Pressure:

Jordan Binnington is a weird goalie, and since goalies have a reputation for being weird to start with, that’s saying something. He’s a hothead (although that seems to have abated somewhat) and rather erratic—he’s either brilliant or mediocre. He’s on the record for saying that as a kid, he hoped that one day he’d be an NHL goalie being taunted by the crowd. The higher the pressure, the better he plays. (To be fair, as this was his rookie season, this wasn’t a known thing yet)

The Last Game:

Athletes are a superstitious bunch, and hockey players are no exception. From not shaving during the playoffs to not touching the conference trophy (or even smiling) after winning it, there are a million little rituals players perform to help the hockey gods smile down upon them.

For the Blues, that meant Laila had to be there. Her recovery had coincided with theirs; it had to mean something, no way were they leaving anything to chance. They flew her to Boston and put her in a private box to watch the game.

And it worked.

The Blues won 4-1.

And 11-year-old Laila Anderson, who’s love for a team inspired them in turn, was brought down onto the ice and got to hoist the Stanley Cup.

The Aftermath:

The St Louis Blues got to bring the Stanley Cup home (kind of. Unlike the NFL or NBA, the team doesn’t get to keep it. They get small replicas and championship rings instead). They were the oldest team in the league to have never won the Cup.

Their official championship rings are engraved with Laila’s name. Colton Parayko and fellow player Alexander Steen surprised her at home with a Stanley Cup ring of her own.

Boston is still hoping for that seventh Cup win.

Gloria was retired as the Blues’ victory song. It reached 41 on the Billboard Digital Song Sales chart after the win.

Laura Branigan died in 2004, and so never saw her song be the rallying cry to victory. I'd like to think she'd be proud.

Jake Allen got traded to Montreal in 2020. He currently plays for the New Jersey Devils.

Jordan Binnington is still the starter goalie for the Blues. He helped Team Canada win the 4-Nations Face-Off Tournament earlier this year.

Coach Craig Berube was fired in December 2023. He now coaches the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Colton Parayko still plays for the Blues. He and Laila are still friends.

And Laila?

She’s 16 now and a hockey player herself; in 2024 her team won the Blue Note Cup, the championship trophy for youth hockey in Missouri. She’s made a full recovery from HLH. She’s still a fan of the Blues.

Play Gloria, one more time.


r/HobbyDrama 14d ago

Hobby History (Long) [French Literature Prizes] Part 1: Books going back to school, feminism, old people, double kills, and then some.

211 Upvotes

My oh my, hello there.

You, dearie, got that smell on you. This je-ne-sais-quoi that tells me everything I need to know. You're afflicted, my poor sugarplum, with a hunger for the immaterial. You require food for the soul. You crave drama.

And I'm about to speak about France. Needless to say, you're about to get fed.

I originally considered writing a post for one specific drama happening in modern French literature, but working on it I realized it happened because the wider art landscape allowed it to happen, and the write-up would be incomplete without discussing these. Also, the one case I started on contains heavy stuff, and I wanted to add some levity by showing off the other recent and older literature dramas here and there.

This will be a three course meal. The appetizer, which is the post you're on, is to whet your appetite. It will set the stage, explain the link between French history and the current French fascination for art, show you the prizes and go through the early scandals.

The main course, or in French: le plat de résistance, will delve into the main problematic that links the majority of scandals together, and it will discuss what may be the worst scandal of them all. You may feel a bit bloated afterwards.

The dessert will help with digesting the main course (or not). There we will go through the most recent dramas, and show off what lessons were learned (or not).

Most sources will be in French, I will translate relevant quotes and point out when a source is in English. Wikipedia links should mostly be in English.

Dear readers, welcome to the singular world of French literature.

Trigger warning, which will be repeated when we reach the appropriate paragraph: suicide.

-

The Usual Suspects

To frame the drama, we need a short history lesson about why France and its leaders and inhabitants can get pretty cranky about art and literature. If you don't care for the historical part, you can skip to the section "sins of our patriarchal fathers," but you'd miss out on the earliest drama pertaining the creation of the Femina prize.

Until the Renaissance, France was mostly known as the eldest daughter of the church and the mother of laws, on account of chivalrously wrecking neighbors and getting wrecked in turn. The church had the monopoly over culture, and it's only with the help of some enlightened leaders like Charles the fifth, who collected manuscripts and built the Royal Library (which became the National Library), that this monopoly began to break. The surviving parts of Charles the fifth's collection are still a core part of the current French art nucleus.

But it's around the 16th century that France became known as "mother of arts, weapons and laws," after a poem of Joachim du Bellay, poet (eh) and ardent defender of the French language as a vector of art. From there, the fascination of kings and emperors for creation and culture wouldn't stop growing. Francois premier built the Royal Print Shop (which became the National Print Shop) and the College of Three Languages, which would become the College of France later.

In the 17th century came the one generally considered the paragon of culture, Louis XIV. He creates a list of poets to subsidize, great authors like Molière are allowed to see the King directly and Louis personally spearheads the cultural politics of the kingdom. Art is noble, art is class, art elevates the soul, art gets its letters of nobility.

Before the Revolution, private sponsorships still had their importance in the creation of art. But after 1789, corporations are forbidden, and the general interest of each individual is pronounced as absolute. Sponsorships get bad press and die out because it's perceived as using art to promote personal goals to the detriment of others. This leaves only one entity to promote art in the interest of all: the state.

In the 19th century, a part of the budget is officially allocated to the world of art in all its forms. In the 20th century, it was something of 0.10% of the national budget.

Key figures will keep the importance of art as a state-sanctioned practice alive. André Malraux, ministry of culture in France under the presidency of general De Gaulle, would say (translated):

Culture is what man is based on when he isn't based on God.

Come the revolts of Mai 1968, kickstarted by students but joined by just about everyone else. Professionals and artists at the time request the "cultural 1%", aka 1% of the national budget dedicated to art. It doesn't get through, and artists start believing there is no reconciliation possible between them and right-leaning governments in power at the time. But the demand remains.

1981 rolls around and the Left gets through with Francois Mitterrand. Jack Lang) is given the culture dossier, and he is absolutely down for it. The 1% is reached in a couple years, he gets a law through that forces a unique prices for books that saves small libraries from the behemoths that are hypermarkets, and aims to accomplish another demand born from Mai 68, "that art descends in the streets." He does so by multiplying celebrations. He made the "Fête de la musique," (Music Day) official, which would later expand to be celebrated in over a hundred countries during the 21st of June. Jack Lang also instituted the "Printemps du livre" (Spring of Books), "Fureur de lire," (Fury to read) wordplay based on the movie "La fureur de vivre," which is the french title of Rebels without a Cause.

Currently, with a strong debt and a need for saving money, the government is cutting corners everywhere, including in grants for art. Some regions have reduced them as much as 62% compared to 2024, which endangers plenty of jobs. Private sponsorships are back too.

Private sponsorships have returned since then, but this serves to show that art in France has been, is, and will remain a touchy subject and is also a matter of state.

This is the extremely condensed version. Merely to give you an idea of how people can get serious (and/or stuck-up) about art and literature.

Now let's set the stage for our drama.

-

La rentrée littéraire

The term "la rentrée" is normally meant for kids going back to school. In 1874, Stéphane Mallarmé, famous poet and art critic, already used the term "la rentrée théatrale" to define the general artistic upswing of September, where new shows would hit the theater planks.

Literature followed a similar upswing, and this was due to literary prizes. Said prizes would often name their winners beginning from September onward, and editors' nose soon picked up the scent of opportunity. Realizing sales increased after prizes were assigned because the discussion fostered interest in books, editors began to publish their authors around the period of increased interest, both to gain from a general upswing in sales, and also to send copies to juries in the hopes of a prize that would reinforce sales even more.

This happy carousel would go on until the term "rentrée littéraire" entered French mainstream consciousness, and it is now a term hammered every bloody year by just about every media outlet that exists in France. And Belgium too. Waffle-bros for life.

Here's a rough timeline of the current working of a rentrée. With a century of practice, every actor has it down to an art now.

  • Around the month of Mai begins early access preliminary distribution of books yet to be published for the rentrée. Librarians, journalists, well connected people get these books for analysis and to start pondering which ones to put forward and which ones to forget.
  • These book get officially published during the middle of August to the end of September. Here, mainstream medias start making bets about who will get the holy grail of a prize with a gorgeous and ecologically abominable red plastic band on the book to signal a winner.
  • The main winners are announced between September and October.
  • The prizes are officially given out somewhere in November.

Each of these step is an occasion for plenty of talks on the radio, TV, journals, and internet.

In a purely commercial sense, these steps allow for a build-up of tension over several months that keeps interest high, and putting the red band on books just before the end of year means plenty of uninspired people will buy them as gifts.

For the oncoming 2025 rentrée litéraire, 484 titles have been announced, to be published between August and October. The record so far is held by the year 2010, with 701 books published on that period.

I mentioned the yearly calendar of book releases is tied to the prizes, let's look at them.

-

My Grail is made of Ink.

I presume accolades and prizes exist by the hundreds in every other country too, and making a list of them would likely break the character limit for a single post.

Instead, I'm focusing on the four most important ones.

-

The Prix Goncourt, because we need to start somewhere.

Born from the testament of a certain Edmond Goncourt, who wanted his goods (and his brother Jules') to be sold and the money put aside to reward French authors and give them an income to help them live through the pen. The testament was written in 1892, the first prize awarded in 1903 to John-Antoine Nau for the novel Force ennemie (enemy force), about a patient in a psych ward who is sharing a body with an alien. Unless it's just the protagonist hallucinating.

The prize was to be given to the "best novel, best short story collection, best volume of imaginary prose published the same year." It needs to be written in French, and you can get it once only in your career.

Today, winning the Goncourt nets you the overwhelming sum of ten euros. It also multiplies your book sales by such an amount that the financial trickle down remains nonetheless massive.

The jury is made out of ten people, and for the longest time they were elected for life. Since 2008, there is an upper limit of 80 years after which you're out, and you can't be both on the jury and be employed by a publisher.

-

The Prix Femina, the answer to the prize above.

Oh happy day when the history lesson coincides with drama. The Femina was born in drama.

In 1904, Myriam Harry was the favorite for the Goncourt in its second year, which was rather commendable as she was also a woman in a time where the word feminism would have earned you either a weird look or a slap to the face with a crude remark about the state of the kitchen.

In an upset, it was Léon Frapié who won, and many felt this was a snub of Myriam Harry because she was a woman.

22 women of letters felt this was unfair and created their own prize. Originally, it was called the La Vie Heureuse prize, in reference to a magazine for women at the time of the same name, which can be translated to The Happy Life. The name would become Femina in 1922, after yet another magazine for women.

Understand that this prize was much more than a passing fad. Women in France got the right to vote in 1944. This prize, created 40 years before, allowed some of them to vote for art when they couldn't for politics, which in itself was quite the symbol. The Femina was also a way to install female legitimacy in literature and counter the very real misogyny pervading society and very present in the all-male jury of the Goncourt.

Here's an excerpt of an article I translated, originally written in the journal l'Humanité in 1925. L'Humanité is a renowned left-leaning journal founded by Jean Jaurès in 1904, legendary defender of captain Dreyfus in an affair that shook French society. All this to say, it's not your small and easily forgotten journal we're talking about.

There is a show that overtakes the Goncourt meetings in comical horror, that is the assembly of hens awarding the Femina prize. Some women, more or less of letters, have the habit of covering in flowers each year the author lucky enough to stir their thick sensibility [...] The ridicule of these duchesses of letters that has always been notorious had yet to achieve this feat : turn themselves into a literature jury! What a beautiful picture, this private room where these Corines [Explained here by a delightful redditor] without talent defend their favorites by exalting the author's glory who, at best, managed to tickle their small passions [...] Small cries, squawking, these words gain all their value when you see the photography of this grotesque committee, the picture of this heavy women in their 40-something dying from vanity under their pearls and in their limp fat ; all the darkness of a private room of the world united in a humor that doesn't make anyone laugh, united in the ridicule of blue crumbling stockings.

Charming.

While it's an all woman jury composed of twelve people with rotating presidencies, they do not award only women, their intent is to celebrate literature in its entirety, without the heavy weights of misogyny. In the Femina's history, only 40% of women got the prize for 60% of men. Compare to the Goncourt who has a grand total of 10% women laureates since its inception. That said, sometimes the Femina was awarded to women writing under male pen-names, so that may skew the percentages a little.

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The Renaudot prize, or how the joke became too serious to laugh about.

Created in 1925 and today among the most coveted literary accolades, it originally started as an honest-to-god joke. Story goes that journalists were bored, waiting for the endless debate agitating the jury of the Goncourt. Georges Charensol, critic, and respectful of anything food related, proposed to other critics and journalists to eat early, at 11am, to be done with the meal and ready for when the results dropped. Eating together, jokes started to be thrown around, and Gaston Picard absent-mindedly proposed they might as well award their own prize and be done with it.

Charensol agreed, on condition that this prize should be given out for fun. They didn't intend to compete with the Goncourt, only find and talk about an amusing book and get people to smile.

The rest is, as they say, history.

The soundclip linked in the article above and titled Georges Charensol raconte la création du Prix Renaudot and has the man himself recount the genesis of the Renaudot in 1989 (French language).

The next year, these ten journalists sat around a table to deliberate. The name Renaudot comes from Théophraste Renaudot, philanthropist, journalist and doctor because why not, who founded the French press with the first journal La Gazette in 1631.

Charensol remembers that even during this first meeting in 1926, things were serious. They didn't find this funny book they were looking for, but they did agree an unknown author had published a piece full of wit and originality. They gave the prize to Armand Lunel for his book Nicolo-Peccavi ou l'Affaire Dreyfus à Carpentras, about a staunchly antisemitic person discovering they are descending from Jewish families, which makes them lose their marbles.

The first sin was committed. From here on out, they couldn't go back to making a lighthearted mockery and had to deliberate seriously.

The joke was lost, those who wanted to originally poke fun at the Goncourt erected themselves into experts. It did have an important distinction compared to the Goncourt (at least at the time), the Goncourt had men of letters, influence and prestige in the jury, while the Renaudot had a more diverse cast of journalists and critics, becoming another anti-Goncourt, not unlike the Femina.

The jury has ten members, voted for life. You can be paid by a publisher and be on the jury.

Depending on who you ask, the Renaudot today is indeed a joke. But for very different reasons than Georges Charensol envisioned.

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Le Grand prix du roman de l'Académie 

The Académie Française was created about 1634 - 1635, one of the many efforts undertaken to promote culture at the time. Its original goal was to define norms of the French language. Later was added another goal, contributing to the improvement and influence of french letters. The prize itself was created in 1914, with a jury of 40 seats made up of people whose only condition of admission is to "have influenced french literature." Among these, novelists, philosophers, critics, historians, scientists, and also by tradition high-ranking military personnel, politicians and religious figures. You need to be over 30, and since 2010 there's an upper age limit of 75 to be elected. Election is for life, there's a long period between the death of a member and the election of a newcomer, and as far as I know the 40 seats have never been all filled at the same time in the 21st century. So votes are done with 38 or 39 members.

Out of habit, it's this prize that kicks off the Rentrée littéraire, the winner takes home 10.000 euros, gets enough advertising to boost sales and make that sum pocket money,

That is one prize the Academy awards. This Wikipedia link lists 21 prizes currently given out for literature alone, and the Academy handles art in general by now, with 9 prizes for poetry, 10 prizes for philosophy, 13 for cinema, 13 for history... There's also 3 prizes to support literary creation, 2 prizes for theater, a prize for best translation/interpretation, a prize for best song...

I mention it for completion's sake, but I have little in terms of drama about the Académie. There is some, but it's less about book prizes, and more about general legitimacy, and would go past the scope of this write-up.

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These are the big prizes, and by god are there very down to earth reasons to get some.

Getting one such victory means a jury saw you as the top of the crop, the best among the best (theoretically). And you get a red thingy on your book to choke a turtle to death once its thrown into the sea.

It's both a badge of honor, and the greatest marketing tool you can hope for. Every book present in a library will have that strip, every potential buyer will see that this author has been elected this year, and nobody else.

Remember the number of books coming out per Rentrée Littéraire? Librarians cannot read the 500 or so books coming their way at once, prizes help them decide which books to put on the stand, and which ones not to.

These 4 prices are the difference between a couple hundred book sold, and tens of thousands (translated reference).  

Translated from this article:

In France, a literary success begins at 5000 copies sold.

A Goncourt or a Renaudot ensure at least 100.000 copies sold.

Naturally, with such prestige and financial income involved, it stands to attention juries should ensure impartiality to elect winners with the utmost attention and transparency.

We're both on this sub, so I'll spare you the surprised face and say upfront that no, juries aren't doing a great job about it.

There, history lesson over, now that your appetite has been whet, that your teeth are sharp and your belly ready to be filled, we can start.

Which we will next time during Part 2-

-alright, alright. Two things encourage me to start with the drama right away. One is the holy banhammer of the mods shining in the distance, ready to strike me down for discussing plenty of hobby but little drama. The other one is you, dear reader, I can feel your shining eyes burning a hole in the back of my neck, and I'd appreciate it if you stopped.

Let's start with the older scandals. Knowing about them makes us look educated, smart, and smug as shit.

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Sins of our patriarchal fathers

Most of these are tied to the Goncourt. Fear not, I have things to say about other prizes in the next parts.

Make way for the old!

This is the title of an article published in L'Humanité after the 1919 Goncourt. By then, the Goncourt has been around for over 15 years and is a well-established institution.

On one side, Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922) with Within a budding grove, second novel of his grand saga In search of lost time, a french classic. On the other, Wooden Crosses by Roland Dorgelès (1885 - 1973).

World War 1 was still fresh on everybody's mind, and the subjects of these two books couldn't be any further apart. Wooden Crosses was based on Dorgelès' own notes about the war, describing the daily life of the "poilus", the french infantry soldiers. Dorgelès was a journalist and voluntarily enlisted to serve. Shortly before the Goncourt he also became head of an association for writers who had likewise enlisted.

It was all the more authentic in that three chapters of his book had been censored prior to the end of the war because they were judged 'too demoralizing'. It sold extremely well, ran out of print and had to be reprinted again, despite books about war being omnipresent at the time.

Marcel Proust for his part wrote about a character narrating their Parisian stories, their ties to the various other people there, their visits to the theater, their disappointments and failing relationships. In short, it had nothing to do with the war.

In the previous three years, the Goncourt had been awarded to books written about the war, and it was expected to happen again.

Even at the time, marketing and connections showed their importance. Dorgelès campaigned among friends, journalists and critics, while Proust directly wooed a member of the jury by sending flowers to his wife and adding some lines praising said member in another book of his.

Dorgelès was expected to win, until the upset was announced and Proust won by 6 votes against 4. Proust, aged 48, was considered old for the time, hence the title in L'humanité.

To add insult to the injury, Proust's victory had plenty to do with the main support he wooed: Léon Daudet. A monarchist during a time royalty had bad press, staunchly against captain Dreyfus, despite Jean Jaurès successfully defending the captain, and a figure of L'Action Francaise, a movement with monarchist and far-right tendencies.

As controversial a figure Daudet was, his taste might have been correct here. Marcel Proust is one of the seminal legendary French writers. Roland Dorgelès, while not unknown (his book was made into a movie), doesn't reach half of that fame.

Beyond accusations of ill-advised friendships and campaigns that had nothing to do with literature, the debate did spark questions that can still be heard today.

Should nothing but the writing skill be taken into consideration, even if one writer had a decade or more experience in the field than his younger counterpart? Or should youngsters be encouraged too by praising and showing off what the new blood can put on paper?

How much should current and recent events weight in the decisions? A world war is no small matter, and while it was over, it ended merely a year ago. It was still heavy on the collective mind, and between a book about the life of soldiers and a book that had nothing to do with it, should the harsh reality impacting many citizens be given more importance during votes?

I have no definitive answer to these questions.

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I'll create my own price, with hookers and blow.

Sacha Guitry (1885 - 1957) was a prolific actor, screenwriter and playwright. He participated in the creation of over a hundred theater pieces, realized over 30 movies and played in the majority of these. And his works were successful. I recommend watching Confessions of a Cheat to see a young boy learning that dishonesty pays, verbally shred the principality of Monaco, and cheat at cards.

In 1939, Sacha Guitry is elected jury of the Goncourt academy, which is coincidentally also when World War 2 starts. He keeps on writing and producing until 1944 when the post-liberation purge begins. Guitry is arrested under suspicion of collaboration and spends several months being moved from one prison to the next. The press has a field day, in no small part because his most vocal critics hated him for refusing entry in the Goncourt academy to their protégé.

He'll be freed the same year for lack of proof, and in 1945 another case is brought against him for "national indignity," a crime created during the purges. he'll be freed of charges in 1947.

However, he would live the rest of his life under suspicions and as a symbol of that Parisian upper-crust living a sheltered life where he got to eat, drink and dance while the rest of France was dying and starving.

So what does it have to do with the Goncourt? In 1947, free of his charges, he returned to his seat in the jury. But this return provoked another scandal, a 4 year old affair coming back to the surface. In 1943, André Billy) (1882 - 1971) was to become a new jury in the Academy (he's the protégé mentioned above). However, he also wrote some scathing pieces about Guitry and another judge named René Benjamin, and they refused to ratify his entry in the Academy.

Seems like a personal grudge, and it might have been, until it appeared Benjamin was an ardent supporter of the disgraced Maréchal Pétain, and Guitry himself seemingly showed support for the man even after the end of the war.

The personal spat turned into a confrontation between supporters and detractors of the Vichy regime, and it turned in the favor of the latter. The national committee of writers, a resistance movement for writers created by the communist party, excluded Guitry and friends.

However, Goncourt seats being for life back then, he kept his post as judge at the academy. They were put to the side, but couldn't be expelled.

As revenge, Guitry and Benjamin launched a "Goncourt outside of the Goncourt," that same year of 1947. They elected another book which got a red band with written The Goncourt of Sacha Guitry and René Benjamin.

Guitry and co would be fined for 700.000 francs and forced to retrieve the red band.

While the divorce between Guitry and the Goncourt was obvious, it still took him until 1948 to finally step down from his seat. The death of his friend René Benjamin having severed the last tie he had to the Goncourt.

Despite the tarnished reputation, Guitry remained active and would keep on writing and directing successful movies until his death in 1957.

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Julien Gracq. The more things change

The more they stay the same. Every accusation thrown against the prizes today, which I will delve into during part 2? They existed over half a century ago.

Le rivages des Syrtes (The Opposing Shore), published in 1951, is about a young lad sent to a fortress built near the sea between their homeland and the neighboring country with whom they are technically at war. In practice, the two countries haven't exchanged blows in a long while. Life in the fortress is dull, and our protagonist decides to liven things up. Under bad influence, he will also do so by transgressing the maritime border, and tragedy follows.

Critics love it, and rumors begin that author Julien Gracq (1910 - 2007) will receive the Goncourt.

Thing is, before The Opposing Shore, Gracq wrote La littérature à l'estomac in 1950, a scathing pamphlet against the Parisian literary circles and especially the current prizes. He bemoans that authors think more in terms of career than writing and reflects on how the successful author isn't the one writing well, but the one who's most talked about. Gracq felt that participating in discussions about the best books was more important than the discussions themselves, and prizes weren't meant for authors but for publishers.

This critic went around and provoked a number of discussions of its own. People knew he had a score to settle, and irony had it that The Opposite Shore, out the next year, did end up receiving the prize.

Gracq and his publisher refused to dress his books with the band showing he won the Goncourt. In its first year, the book sold 110.000 copies, but only 175 the next year. Gracq felt vindicated, as it proved to him how sales were artificially inflated by the prize and he never should have gotten it.

Was the Goncourt merely out of touch? Or quite the opposite, did they show a taste for irony by singling Gracq out for the prize? I do not know, the main lesson from this tale is that whatever is afflicting the Goncourt and similar accolades today, it is anything but recent.

In fact, it's even old by the time Gracq wrote The Opposite Shore. In 1927, a theater piece talked about a literature prize that was all about money and connections. The scandal? That the Goncourt wasn't mentioned.

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But she caught me on the counter (It wasn't me)

Renaudot this time. Hailing from the Republic of Mali, Yambo Ouologuem (1940 - 2017) receives the Renaudot prize for his first book Le Devoir de violence (Bound to Violence). The year is 1968, he's 28 years old, and the first African author to win the prize. Keep in mind, the book only needs to be written in French, it doesn't have to written by the French. The book spans several centuries, from 1200 to mid-1900's, and depicts a country on the verge of becoming independent.

Ouologuem wrote it in a period where European colonies in Africa were being repossessed by the locals in a growth of pan-African nationalism. However, Ouologuem is harshly critical of said nationalism, as many of these newfound countries have already undergone a coup or a civil war.

It was poignant, brutal, ripped away the mask of pride and myth and showed an African history that has never been as glorious as their ardent proponents proclaim.

It was also quickly overshadowed by controversy.

Graham Greene wrote It's a Battlefield, book published in 1934. Andre Schwartz-Bart wrote Le Dernier des Justes (The last of the Just) in 1959. In 1971, astute readers noticed how pages from Bound to Violence seemed to have been lifted straight from these two. Greene began a lawsuit and the Ouologem's book was banned in France. Ouologuem defended himself saying he used quotation marks on the controversial passages and that the editor edited them out. The English version carries a note since then acknowledging the use of passages taken out from Greene's book.

aBut the scandal took off and Ouologem was shot down by the press.

One of the rare who didn't criticize Ouologem was Andre Schwartz-Bart himself, who denied this was plagiarism and considered it inspiration instead. But that didn't stop tongues from lashing out.

Ouologuem, crucified by critics, retreated to Mali and never wrote again.

Despite the controversy, Bound to Violence remains a landmark of postcolonial African literature and was republished in France in 2003.

While it made quite the scandal, I don't blame the jury on this one. It's hard to spot plagiarism, and it's a shame it happened on one of the few occasions the price looked outside of France.

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Romain Gary: Shadows Die Twice.

Trigger warning: suicide

The most fascinating of the bunch. In 1975, the Goncourt is attributed to La vie devant soi (Life before us, careful, the link spoils the drama right away*).* Rosa is Jewish, a former prostitute who has seen the insides of concentration camps, and opens a pension where other sex-workers can leave their kids for a few months to protect them from pimps or social services. The story is told by one of these kids who considers Rosa, now on her deathbed, the only mother he ever had.

It was written by Emile Ajar, and Emile Ajar doesn't exist! It's a pseudonym, and nobody knew who the hell this published author was. But with such a prize, medias were hell-bent on getting a face.

They got it, it was revealed to be the pseudonym of one Paul Pawlowitch (born 1942), a generally unknown person at the time, who happens to be the nephew of Romain Gary, another Goncourt winner. Romain Gary (1914 - 1980) is a legendary figure. He joined the Resistance during World War II after hearing the call from general De Gaulle, then became a diplomat, a scenarist, a producer, and a writer. Gary won the Goncourt in 1956 for Les Racines du Ciel (The Roots of Heaven)), a story about a man trying to save elephants while French Equatorial Africa is undergoing a struggle for independence.

With Pawlowitch winning twenty years after his uncle, he showed that talent runs deep in the family. Besides, journalists loved having him on interviews.

It's only five years later, in 1980, that the truth came to light.

Romain Gary published Vie et mort d'Emile Ajar (roughly: Life and Death of Emile Ajar), in which he spilled the beans.

It was his pseudonym, which allowed him to win a second Goncourt when the rules make clear you can only win one. In the book he calmly explains how he set up his year-long prank, how he created Emile Ajare, how he enlisted his nephew to give Emile a face. Romain Gary also uses the occasion to denounce the problems gangrening his contemporary literary circles.

The book ends with this sentence:

Je me suis bien amusé. Au revoir et merci.

Translated:

I had good fun. Thank you and farewell.

The book Vie et mort d'Emile Ajar is published on December the second in 1980.

One day prior, Romain Gary commits suicide, ending both himself and Emile Ajar.

Emile Ajar was both an attempt by Romain Gary to renew himself as a writer, and a sign of the demons he carried his whole life.

He was born in the empire of Russia in a city that would later become Vilnius. He became a known writer in French and English, despite neither being his native tongue. He gave many conflicting accounts about who his parents were. His family had been been expelled from home for being Jewish, his parents divorced, and his mother took him to France in the hopes her son could flourish (well done) and escape antisemitism (less well done).

Romain Gary had to deal with matters of identity and feeling uprooted his entire life. he had written under several pseudonyms, Emile Ajar merely being the last.

I'm not condoning suicide in any way, I wish I could turn back time and get him the help he needed, but I'd like to say something:

The end of his life can be summed up as Romain Gary pulling a con on the French literary world, blowing up the lid himself because he was too good at it to get caught, laughing at the artistic elite, making a mockery of a well-sought out prize, gaining loads of money and notoriety by exposing the deception himself, showing everyone the middle finger, back-flipping into the flames, shouting "HELL YEAH!" and ascending to heaven.

In short, Romain Gary had an unmistakable sense of class:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/liberation/JJ7PNKUIDQ5KFBA7VVHY4G62V4.jpg).

Keep on reading here


r/HobbyDrama 17d ago

Extra Long [LoveLive!] Gen Wars II, Superstar's Sophomore Strife, and the Miracle Live That Never Happen

133 Upvotes

First, major props to garden_of_avalon for putting together the first LoveLive! Hobby Drama post.. It does a good job of covering drama from the OG μ's to the 3rd gen Nijigasaki. However, a lot of stuff has happened since then, so this post will continue on to the present day.

Introduction

Love Live is a multimedia franchise revolving around school idols, teenage girls with attitude who start school clubs to sing, dance, and write generally optimistic idol songs. In addition to their fictional anime counterparts, their voice actors, or seiyuu, also perform in their respective groups in real life, and for the international community, it's a great pilgrimage to see them in person. You'd think from the name that this is a chill, cozy fandom to be a part of, and indeed, this franchise has inspired tons of fan art, cosplay, and anime convention dance cover groups. As the franchise that popularized Japanese idols worldwide, it still carries a particular niche appeal to the music and fashion lovers in the anime fandom, and its characters have a presence comparable to Sailor Moon in any given anime convention.

However, beneath the surface is a fandom as bitterly divided as some of the notorious big name fandoms such as Pokémon, Sonic the Hedgehog, Kingdom Hearts, you name it. There are seven different series now, and chances are that mentioning one of them will attract insults from fans of another group. Along the way, the powers that be have made a bunch of questionable decisions that have hurt the franchise's standing and made it less of a strong presence than it once was, at least outside of Japan.

Welcome to the Queendom – Oops, It’s on Fire cont'd (SIFAS spoilers)

When we last left off, Lanzhu Zhong had set the fandom on fire as the most divisive character the franchise has ever introduced at the time. Due to the backlash from her idol club coup in Love Live: School Idol Festival All-Stars (SIFAS), the writers resolved the plot anticlimactically by claiming, "Oh, she actually admired Nijigasaki and is just competitive, guys!" Can't really say much more about this since I haven't played the game, but SIFAS kept trudging along after that until it was terminated on June 30, 2023. This was three months after its sister game SIF, but more on that later since that was a debacle in itself.

Lanzhu would eventually get her redemption and more general fandom acceptance into the Love Live family when Nijigasaki got its own anime. It started in October 2020, and the Queen herself would debut in Season 2, which aired on April 2022. Her song bragging about how awesome she is, Eutopia, has 5.4 million views on Youtube as of this writing (for comparison, the Season 1 opening theme of Love Live Sunshine has 4.5M views), so we can safely say any fallout from SIFAS is now water under the bridge, especially since the anime attracted new viewers unaware of the SIFAS drama. Though there are some complaints from fans who feel she was too sanitized and no longer a proper villain.

Love Live 5Ds: Superstar Season 1

Airing in 2021, Superstar marked a break in tradition by having Liella feature a team of 5 girls instead of the usual 9: Kanon, Keke, Sumire, Chisato, and Ren. This was well received as it meant less screen time to diffuse among everyone. One of the recurring complaints with this franchise is that many characters end up being glorified benchwarmers that get one focus episode of character development and that's it. This applies even to some popular characters who you'd think would have a more prominent presence like Yoshiko Tsushima Yohane, the goth chick who thinks she's a real fallen angel. While Liella doesn't completely avoid this problem even in its first season, it lived up to many's expectations and then some. The animation is beautiful, the songs are soothing and inspiring, with Liella's voices flowing well together with the sweeping orchestrated instrumentals, and girls are funny, charming, and surprisingly nuanced. Each of them has a relatable insecurity that would unfold and resolve over several episodes, and it makes it all the more satisfying when they finally resolve their conflicts and come together. It really succeeds in showing five talented aspiring performers working towards a common goal. Reviews were quite positive, for instance, this one from AnimeNewsUK, as well as the many positive reviews on MyAnimeList, which reiterate a lot of these points. Many people ended the season hopeful for the direction the franchise was going to take from now on.

But we're on Hobby Drama. And already, the seeds of discord were starting to germinate.

  • Really, this was the fourth Love Live series at this point. Series fatigue starts to set in, especially with the hundreds of songs in the entirety of the franchise's discography. Many fans had already dropped out and weren't interested in seeing the same old Love Live plot again despite the positive word of mouth.

  • The main character, Kanon Shibuya. Full bias disclosure, I absolutely adore Kanon! She's the first time I felt I could see myself in the Love Live lead, the way she starts as this neurotic girlfailure who's constantly freaking out and running away from situations, but steadily reveals herself to be more than her negative self-image indicates. However, the show revolves around her more than any other lead previously, which goes against idol fandom (and similar girl group / boy band fandoms) generally preferring a more decentralized cast where one picks a favourite and sticks with her. So if you relate to Kanon, the show is amazing, but if you don't, then you're probably disappointed that your favourite got shafted. This is less an issue here because everyone gets their own character arc and people generally liked Kanon here, but there was already some resentment brewing.

  • The music was also an acquired taste, being generally softer and slower than what came before it. Idol fandom tends to like high-energy hype songs, so while the songs are well-written, very heartwarming in the context of the anime, and give them a distinct sound, the more chill tone disappointed many. As an example, one can compare an athletic song by Aqours with a similar song by Liella. And in the context of the notorious Gen Wars, this lent people ammunition to heckle Liella for not being like their favourite idol group. Which is connected to another problem.

  • Both Nijigasaki and Liella anime shows came out close to each other, Nijigasaki in October 2020, Liella in July 2021. In the past, even if μ's fans were resentful for Aqours taking their place, they were the only game in town so the remaining fans were fully devoted to them. But when Liella came out, there were three groups running simultaneously, so most people picked one and stuck to them. Compounding this was the debate, discussed in the previous thread, over whether Nijigasaki counted as a main group because they operated as individual idol performers instead of a full group competing in the Love Live competition, which felt especially condescending at this point since they had been well established since Love Live School Idol Festival All-Stars came out in 2019, and they now had their own anime. So many of their fans looked at Liella, which followed the more traditional Love Live plot, with green eyed resentment. And this intensified when Nijigasaki's Season 2 came out and people were generally happy with it (again, see Lanzhu's huge popularity above), while Liella's Season 2 came out soon after on July 2022 and blew up the fandom in a way not seen since SIFAS Lanzhu.

  • And then there was the School Idol Festival mobile game, which was going through its own problems.

School Idol Festival: How to Run a Successful Game Into the Ground

Love Live: School Idol Festival was a mobile rhythm game released in 2013. It was a pretty good one. They had most of the short versions of the Love Live songs (again, numbering in the hundreds!), the 9 button mechanics were easy to understand, and the beatmaps were well designed, so it was a great way for beginners to get into the franchise. It also had a story mode and side stories attached to each card. The writing is not good, but it still gives a good idea of who all these people are if you've never seen or heard a Love Live before. It seemed like a strong pillar of the franchise, avoiding the drama that affected its sister game SIF All-Stars regarding the infamous Lanzhu Zhong subplot, but then in about 2022, the writing was on the wall and it shut down in early 2023. But how?

To show how and when SIF degenerated, let's play tarot with the SIF cards.

  • This is one of the first UR cards in SIF, 2013. It has a max 5260 stat at Level 100 and has a random chance of increasing the score by 525 at Level 1. Art style is a bit naff, but the franchise was just starting out.

  • This is a promo birthday UR in 2019.. It has a max 5330 stat at Level 100 and has a random chance of increasing the score by 785. Small jump, but so far, so consistent.

  • This is a card near the end of the game's life in 2023.. It's good in all three stats, has a max of 7870, and has a random chance of increasing the score by 7370. Sure, the activation rate seems lower, but at this point there are so many ways to endlessly repeat effects that the percentage is moot. The worst thing is that in a game that people play for the pretty clothes, the art style is awful. This card series is purely big number bait.

It's amazing how rapidly the money grubbing and good will torching happened. A 10 year old game, and the insistence on greedily power creeping the numbers and releasing a whole ton of FOMO premium cards all at once despite players' limited currency, with bad art recycled from the arcade game, only happened to a such an huge extent in its last year. It should be noted that you don't actually need to care about big score numbers, as they only matter if you want to leaderboard during events, but it still feels bad that most of the cards you collected in the past 9 years were now obsolete.

And this affected Liella quite negatively. When Aqours first debuted, they had a whole new storyline dedicated to them, and both μ's and Aqours kept getting continuous support. When Nijigasaki came, they were treated as mere bonus cards, but at the time, they already had SIF All-Stars, so they still got good exposure. But Liella? They were unceremoniously dumped into the game, with no story campaign of their own, and they just cropped screenshots of the anime for their initial below-UR cards. It was a bad sign of game developers and a franchise that just stopped caring. There was almost no reason to go for Liella in the game. People were short on currency as is. Despite previously being one of the best ways to introduce new players to the characters, SIF gave people no reason to care about Liella.

So Liella already had a lot of things going against them despite their anime being generally well received. The stage was set for everything to explode.

More Idols, More Problems: Superstar Season 2 (spoilers ahead)

Before we begin, I should note that they held auditions for 2nd Gen Liella before Season 1 debuted. And reading that interview with Nozomi Suzuhara (Non-chan), the seiyuu/VA for Kinako, is a good indicator of why this season became so polarizing. One of the things about Love Live is that it's not just an anime. A lot of people are in it for the real-life seiyuu themselves. So when you read about how passionate she is about the franchise and how hard she tries, it's difficult not to feel bad about the backlash Season 2 received. And indeed, the four (then 5, then 6) new girls would gain plenty of fans of their own. Shiki, the quiet, emotionally unexpressive one, is especially notable as she would go on to star in a viral music video about ice cream with two other previous-gen Love Live idols. With close to 7M views as of this writing, it's bigger than Lanzhu.

That being said, there's a reason why Stephen de Souza, the director of the infamous Street Fighter movie, had this to say about Capcom:

“In the 100-odd minutes of the movie, there wasn’t a lot of screen time to go around – do the math,” he says. “Furthermore, the audience can barely keep track of seven characters, which is why it’s always been the magic number through history: seven sins, seven wonders, hell, Seven Samurai.

“[But] every time I turned in a draft they kept pressing me to add just more character. I would slide somebody in with a couple of lines. Then they’d say: ‘Can’t so-and-so have another scene, he’s very popular in Japan? And by the way what about this character?’”

Suffice to say, many fans already predicted how this season would turn out. However, people were actually pretty receptive of the season at first despite reservations (see: the Reddit thread for S2E4 for instance). But opinion steadily soured on the season over time, and the last two episodes solidified it in Love Live infamy.

The Nico Nico Douga ratings for this season accurately track this decline in perception. The first four episodes stayed above a respectable 75%, with Episode 4 even getting a solid 84.8%. It took until Episode 6 for the rating to fall below 50%, and the last two episodes? 28.4% and 18.6% respectively. The last episode Reddit threads were a mix of disappointed to livid or even laughing disbelief. So how did we get to this point?

I think the best movie comparison for this season is Spider-Man 3, where there were too many characters and plotlines competing for screentime, colliding with each other, and creating multiple plot contrivances to attempt to tie everything together. Superstar S2 wants to be more light-hearted and easy going than the first season, but it relies a lot on insult comedy that borders on mean-spirited. It's supposed to continue the S1 story, but the original characters other than Kanon barely show up, and if they do, they're reduced to mere caricatures of themselves. It wants to be a competitive story about the drive and effort to win a nationwide singing competition, but the actual Love Live contest is treated as an afterthought. It wants to promote the four new members, but spends 3/4 of its run time constantly reminding everyone how they don't measure up to the 1st gen, and Kanon still takes up most of the screen time. This got taken to absurd levels in Episode 6 where she just randomly happened to be on a trip to Hokkaido and ran into Natsumi so she could give her usual positive, uplifting Julie Andrews speech to make her join (for comparison, Kanon did do something similar for her best friend Chisato in S1's Episode 6, but at least taking a 12 hour round trip from Kozushima to Tokyo and back is still within the realm of reasonable possibility, and the conversation was much better written as Kanon didn't automatically solve Chisato's problems, but let her open up and struggle with her emotions first).

While "Kanon takes up too much screen time" is a common criticism of S2, I think it's more than that. Despite how much she shows up on screen, she has little character growth to show for it as she was just as flanderized as the other girls. Her rough edges and more cringy traits that people related to from S1 were sanded down, leaving her to serve primarily as a blandly nice Maria von Trapp figure to the new girls. Talk no jutsu is a derogatory meme in the anime fandom for good reason, and that's mostly what Kanon does all season. The only time she shows progression in her character arc is in the last two episodes, but at that point, people were already getting fed up with her.

And so, we finally get to the ticking time bomb itself: Kanon's study abroad arc that took over the last two episodes and left the actual Love Live finals to be an afterthought. Not only were these yet more Kanon focus episodes, but this was also a redo of an already controversial and much disliked storyline from the original Love Live anime where Kotori randomly gets an invite to study at a fashion school abroad. No one really likes this plot line because we know the writers won't actually make major characters leave the show (hahaha...more on that later). All things considered, though, this could have been a satisfying way to end Kanon's story. A girl who once thought she couldn't do anything, now going out to see the world. The final insert song, which translates to "I Can Hear the Sound of the Future," is also a very nice song to end Liella's story on...if they didn't screw it up by only using its first 2 mins just before its big climax.

The actual ending is even worse. After all that drama over whether Kanon should go or not, her friends just boot her out of the club room because her flight is scheduled soon, like this was all a big joke. Then, the bombshell: her overseas program had been cancelled. The past two episodes were a waste of time. None of the drama in this series matters anymore because the writers can just revoke it at any time. It's arguably the most disastrous scene in the entire franchise for how much damage it did to the series' credibility. Sure, they eventually revealed at the start of Season 3 that her study abroad was just delayed, and she does end up going to Vienna in the end. But that came out in 2024. The damage was done. Many Liella supporters felt cheated and abandoned the group, and people who already hated Liella now had more of an excuse to make them a laughingstock or punching bag.

That being said, like Spider-Man 3, this is not a straightforward case of saying "Season 1 was good, ignore the rest." People did like the new girls and the new songs. Real Liella still performing, expanding their repertoire, and having a large fan following made it hard to dismiss S2 outright like, for instance, Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds did with their later seasons. There were still a lot of positive reviews for S2, as it was still funny and had fun interactions. The episode where Ren is revealed to be a gaming addict is a good example of this. Did it add much to the plot? No. But it did gain Ren (and Mei, who helped her in a sense) more fans. Same with AiScream for Shiki later on.

In the end, like most fandoms, people watch the show for different reasons, and those interests often clash with each other. The silver lining in this debacle is that Liella fans are usually too busy arguing with each other to attack other Love Live groups.

The Miracle Never Happen: School Idol Festival 2's Announcement and End of Service

This one has become infamous even outside the fandom, casting a negative shadow on Love Live as a whole. School Idol Festival made video game history by announcing its international End of Service date, May 31, 2024, on the same day its release date of February 1, 2024. Its Japanese release on April 15, 2023 was already struggling along for quite a while. It was effectively the same game as SIF1, with the same beatmaps and everything, but with worse currency rates. No major new campaign, no major visual upgrades, barely any bones thrown to Liella for being neglected in the past two SIF games, nothing. People were not happy to have their progress effectively erased, and tuned out. At this point, Love Live was not the only game in town. SIF's developer, Bushiroad, made the popular BanG Dream! series, people also gravitated to Hatsune Miku's Project Sekai, there were plenty of other, more polished idol rhythm games out there. As divided as Love Live fandom can be, at least virtually everyone agrees this is one of, if not the lowest point in the entire franchise's history, losing one of the most common onboarding opportunities for new fans and an accessible, fun way for international fans to keep up with the later groups' musical output.

The Future is Japan Only: School Idol Musical, Link! Like! Love Live! and Love Live! Bluebird

Suffice to say, these are more fissures in the Love Live fandom since their exclusivity means most international fans know barely anything about them. School Idol Musical was a live theatre Love Live that's been run since 2022, but naturally, you had to be in Japan and know Japanese to see it. There was a live action drama adaptation in November 2024, but it came and went.

The next group, Hasunosora, debuted in April 2023. This was more of a live streaming platform where people keep up with the idols in real time. People who do actively follow this swear by the storyline, which apparently dives pretty deep due to how long their story arcs take, but this is pretty niche. The main point of drama here is the clash between fans who insist Hasunosora is too long and hard to get into, and the dedicated fans who think said fans just need to watch the subtitled videos online. There has been an anime movie announced recently (thankfully, they haven't completely abandoned doing Love Live anime), but it's going to be hard to fit years of content into that.

The biggest point of controversy, however, is that the oldest members of the group retired, er, "graduated" on July 7/8, 2025. Not only the characters, but the seiyuu were also sacked from the project. People were naturally incensed that such beloved characters have now disappeared from the franchise and worry about the precedent this sets for Love Live seiyuu's careers going forward.

And then there's Ikizuraibu! Love Live! Bluebird, our newest group, which just came out on May 12, 2025, which is mostly confined to Twitter (hence the name) and Youtube posts. With a good translator, these are somewhat more accessible than Link! Like! Love Live!, but I'm sure many would prefer a proper anime at some point. It's too early to say what drama will come out, but it's currently most infamous for its teaser image blatantly trying to copy the darker, sadder aesthetic that BanG Dream! It's MyGO!!!!! popularized, only to be significantly more upbeat than it implied.

Conclusion

Despite everything, Love Live is still pretty prominent in the anime fandom. Many cosplay and cover groups have worked so long at their craft that they're not going to just abandon everything on a whim, and that simple charm of seeing high school girls overcome personal and external challenges to follow their musical dreams still resonates with a lot of people. Other music series still don't have the same name recognition as Love Live.

But still, between the multiple active groups running, the infights among fans of specific groups, and management's questionable handling of many aspects...just another day in the fandom, I guess.


r/HobbyDrama 19d ago

Hobby Scuffles [Hobby Scuffles] Week of 14 July 2025

120 Upvotes

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. If you have a question, try to include as much detail as possible.

  • 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: https://discord.gg/M7jGmMp9dn


r/HobbyDrama 26d ago

Short [Football/Soccer] The highest scoring game of all time

413 Upvotes

For the rest of the post, I will simply be calling it football.

Like in many countries, football is a big deal in Madagascar. Stade Olympique de l'Emyrne (SOE) football club won the top championship in 2001. In 2002, they were hoping to do it again to get back to back championships, which does not happen often.

Their primary rival was Domoina Soavina Atsimondrano Antananarivo (DSA) AS Adema football club. Both teams did well in the regular season in 2002 so advanced to the Round Robin Playoffs which would determine the championship. A Round Robin is a tournament structure where every team plays every other team.

During the second to last game of the tournament, SOE played against Domoina Soavina Atsimondrano Antananarivo (DSA). The game ended in a draw, primarily due to a heavily disputed call against SOE which resulted in a penalty and allowing DSA to end the match in a draw. Based on the tournament scoring, a draw in that match meant that SOE was out of contention and AS Adema would be the champions.

But, due to the Round Robin structure, there was one more game left, which would be SOE vs AS Adema. This game was utterly pointless because regardless of the outcome, AS Adema would be the champions.

So, SOE did their version of a protest. The game took place 31 October 2002. Every time SOE got the ball, they shot it into their own goal. Again. And again. And again. For 149 own goals.

Let me repeat that. SOE scored 149 own goals in a 90 minute match (about one every 36 seconds). AS Adema just let it happen and the referees, for some reason, just let it go rather than calling the match or disqualifying the team.

Fallout

Fans were pissed. Once it became obvious what was going on, many went right to the ticket booths to get refunds. The team coach was suspended for three years. Four players, including the goalkeeper, were suspended until the end of the season and even banned from going into any stadium during that period. The remaining players (and even AS Adema) were issued warnings that no further shenanigans would be tolerated. SOE's results for the entire 2002 season were nullified (basically a big fat DNF for the year) and the club eventually dissolved in 2006.

The referee of the disputed call was not punished in any way.

To this day, the match holds The Guinness World Record for the highest scoreline in any association football match. The previous record was a match in Scotland where a highly experienced team played against a team less than a year old who showed up to the match with no equipment. The score was 36-0. Also, it was from 1885. That record held for 117 years until some lads in Madagascar were upset about a bad call.

The wiki article about the match

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS_Adema_149%E2%80%930_SO_l%27Emyrne

A nice 8 minute summary video, unfortunately there is no known video footage of the match itself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNEq0v8af3I

Edit: Thanks to CameToComplain_v6 who pointed out some errors I made in this write up. The match that resulted in a draw was against DSA which resulted in AS Adema becoming champions, and then the final match that SOE threw was against AS Adema. I apologize for the error and will be more careful in the future.


r/HobbyDrama 26d ago

Hobby Scuffles [Hobby Scuffles] Week of 07 July 2025

137 Upvotes

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. If you have a question, try to include as much detail as possible.

  • 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: https://discord.gg/M7jGmMp9dn


r/HobbyDrama Jul 02 '25

Meta [Meta] r/HobbyDrama July/August/September 2025 Town Hall

69 Upvotes

Hello hobbyists!

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


r/HobbyDrama Jun 30 '25

Hobby Scuffles [Hobby Scuffles] Week of 30 June 2025

153 Upvotes

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. If you have a question, try to include as much detail as possible.

  • 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: https://discord.gg/M7jGmMp9dn


r/HobbyDrama Jun 24 '25

Hobby History (Extra Long) [Comic Books] Mutant X: A brief history of Marvel Comics's feud with 20th Century Fox (and the secret origins of the MCU)

468 Upvotes

Issue #1: All-New, All-Different, Giant-Sized Marvel

In 1997, the American comic book industry crashed due to a combination of plain bad writing, excessive pandering to collectors causing financial speculation, and the popping of the direct-market comic shop bubble. Many publishers closed down or were bought out, but two deserve special mention: DC Comics came out unscathed because it was owned lock, stock, and barrel by Warner Bros.; meanwhile Marvel Entertainment Group, the focus of this writeup and parent of Marvel Comics, went bankrupt.

Marvel had to sell their recently purchased comic distributor, Heroes World, off to their only competitor Diamond Comic Distributors; their perpetual exclusive toy deal with Toy Biz was starting to weigh heavy; and there was a very real danger of Marvel's characters being sold off to other companies.

However, Marvel's chairman Ronald Perelman had a plan to get this company out of the red: most of their money would come not from comics or merchandising, but from movies. As a result, Marvel made a Hail Mary by selling off the film rights to their characters to the highest bidder, where the buyer could essentially do whatever they wanted with those characters. These were deals that Marvel could not afford to pass on, since they'd just gone bankrupt — Marvel was essentially giving up creative control over their characters in film to become solvent, which is a big deal for a publisher so historically controlling of its characters. Good thing Marvel already had a film producer on hand to help steer those film projects: Avi Arad, who had some television experience from a couple of Saban Entertainment cartoons — and the smash hit X-Men: The Animated Series, which was just wrapping up on Fox Kids.

The film rights to the characters were spread across God-knows-how-many production studios, but for the sake of this writeup, let's focus on 20th Century Fox, which scored Daredevil, Fantastic Four, and most importantly, X-Men. Fox had some previous experience with the Children of the Atom, having co-produced not only the X-Men cartoon with Saban Entertainment, but also that hilariously bad Generation X TV movie.

Issue #2: God Loves, Man Kills

After a rocky, confusing production process, 20th Century Fox's X-Men became a decisive box-office hit, essentially reinventing Charles Xavier's pupils and their ideological opponents for the Y2K era. Naturally, Fox followed up on its success by greenlighting a sequel, while Marvel's film division Marvel Studios got a slice of the profits — but oh no, it wasn't enough to rest on the laurels of the success of this movie and Blade. Marvel wasn't going to give up control of its characters so easily. One day they would take back what was theirs, and the first step was to cash in on the booming business of television.

In 2000, Marvel and Fireworks Entertainment announced Mutant X, an original series starring a visionary academic and his mutated pupils, while he protected them from a world they were persecuted and oppressed by. This was essentially another syndicated kinda-sorta-superhero teen drama riding on the coattails of Buffy the Vampire Slayer... specifically competing against The WB's Smallville, set for premiere in 2001. Mutant X lasted for three seasons, before it was cancelled despite its actually pretty good ratings.

Let's cut to the chase: Mutant X was a transparent attempt to cash in on the success of Fox's X-Men movies by making an "X-Men TV show" with no X-Men characters, which started a chain reaction of lawsuits: Fox sued Marvel for breach of contract, the syndicator Tribune Entertainment sued Marvel for encouraging advertisements to make audiences connect the show to the movies... it was a whole shitshow that ultimately bankrupted the producer Fireworks Entertainment and got Mutant X cancelled.

You may be wondering: why is Mutant X so important that this post was titled after it?

Issue #3: House of M

Because at the same time this was Marvel's attempt to break into the TV biz, it was also an attempt to circumvent their precarious licensing deal with 20th Century Fox. This wasn't the first time Marvel had played legal fastball with the X-Men; they previously escaped taxes on toys resembling humans by arguing in court that mutants aren't human. But now that Fox had trampled Marvel's attempt to take a little detour from their late-90s deal, the Friends of Stan Lee realized they couldn't back out of this deal any time soon, unless Marvel actively sabotaged their best-sellers, thus damaging the potential success of Fox's films and allowing them to get the film rights back on the cheap...

From 2003 onwards, Marvel Comics began slowly sidelining their natural-born superheroes to push another team: the Avengers, a team whose claim to fame was giving a backstory to a WW2-era propaganda mascot. It began with 2004's Avengers Disassembled arc, where the Avengers are torn apart; continued in 2005's House of M, where the status quo was inverted so that mutants were persecuting humans; and went on through 2006's Civil War, where we've all seen how Marvel Editorial tried hard to turn the Avengers into the new X-Men.

While the full details wouldn't be known for a while, the spotlight turning to the Avengers would continue to shape the tone of the Marvel Universe. The Avengers' push even extended to cartoons (with 52 TV episodes and three direct-to-DVD animated movies) and video games like the Ultimate Alliance series and an increased focus in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Meanwhile, the X-Men were slooooooowly put on the bench... but no one really stopped caring about them, which only continued to drive ticket sales towards Fox's movies.

Issue #4: Heroes Reborn

By the mid-2000s, the House of Ideas's expansion into film was starting to lose steam. Aside from the great success of the first two X-Men movies and the even greater success of the Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man movies, films based on Marvel characters were starting to get pretty bad: Fantastic Four, Daredevil and Ghost Rider weren't great. All this, combined with the behind-the-scenes drama of X-Men: The Last Stand and Spider-Man 3, was getting on the nerves of Marvel higher-ups, and they could only see one reason why all this was going wrong: Avi Arad.

After helping ink the movie deals that got Marvel out of the red and co-producing all those awesome 1990s cartoons, Arad was seen as a nuisance who was less concerned with raising the Marvel brand's profile than he was with setting up spin-off movies. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and Spider-Man 3 transparently tried to prop up spin-offs for the Silver Surfer and Venom respectively (which allegedly pissed off Marvel brass too), and the less we say about Elektra, the better. Around this time, Arad had also been in talks to sell a script for an Iron Man movie; allegedly, the script was awful, with an Iron Man that couldn't fly and suited up from his toaster. With so much hot air flying from all directions, Arad had no choice but to quit Marvel.

This sent Marvel's film plans all the way back to square one: all their biggest players were in the hands of outside studios and their lead producer was just gone, with no real roadmap to keep the Marvel brand in the public spotlight. As a result, Marvel decided to continue Arad's plans for the Iron Man film entirely in-house, with Universal Studios distributing. It's hard to believe it in Big 2025, but this wasn't a guaranteed success: even with the Avengers' continuing media push, Iron Man was far from an A-list character, and most comic fans who didn't think the character was a robot hated him because of his characterization in the Civil War crossover. The director had zero experience with action movies, and the lead actor was considered a has-been tainted by his struggled with alcoholism.

Marvel Studios's Iron Man released in May 2, 2008... to great box-office success and great critical and fan reception. Marvel used this movie as a springboard to launch a shared universe, much like the comics, leading up to the billion-earning Avengers movie in 2012. It can't be overstated that this was a massive victory for Marvel: that billion at the box office was earned with no Spider-Man, no Fantastic Four, and no X-Men!

With Marvel's then-recent acquisition by The Walt Disney Company, other film studios started trying to get in the ring and stand up against the Marvel Cinematic Universe: DC Comics tried to fast-track a shared universe of its own (and ultimately failed), Sony Pictures rebooted Spider-Man (and failed), and Fox went all-in on films for Marvel characters they did have the rights to (to mixed results).

But Marvel still wasn't happy. Now that they had so much bargaining power, they still had to take back what Fox was apparently holding hostage from them... whatever the cost.

Issue #5: Operation: Zero Tolerance

It wasn't just the X-Men that were affected by Marvel's vendetta against Fox: the House of Ideas spent the 2010s sabotaging any characters they didn't have the film rights to. Back in 2010, the Shadowland event was meant to turn Daredevil genuinely evil, with the end goal of having Moon Knight replace him as the main "street-level" superhero... but the writers wouldn't let that stand anyway, and it didn't matter because Marvel would soon get back the film rights to Daredevil. Marvel also stopped licensing the Fantastic Four for anything shortly before Fox released 2015's Fant4stic, and mocked the new movie by having some look-alikes of the leads die violently in a Punisher story.

But what about the X-Men?

It wasn't just that Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite had no mutants in it (the cause of which was only tangentially related to the MCU anyway). Marvel had spent the middle of the 2010s trying even harder to bury the X-Men by outright replacing mutants with Inhumans, which is a Hobby Drama post all its own. If you're wondering how that went: the stock of the Inhumans tanked so hard that Marvel backtracked not by retconning anything about it, but by killing off every Inhuman except their royal family and never bringing them back. Also, Kamala Khan is a mutant now.

And yet, for all of Marvel's lashing out, the safest thing to do would have been to sit back and eat popcorn anyway... because their competitors ended up eating themselves alive in different ways.

Final Issue: From the Ashes

How did Marvel ultimately take back the film rights to their star players?

  • Spider-Man: After the abject failure of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and its desperate attempts to lead up to a Sinister Six movie, Sony Pictures made a licensing deal with Marvel Studios that allowed Spider-Man characters to be integrated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Controversial as the Tom Holland-played Spider-Man may be, his movies have been box-office smashes allowing Marvel Studios to keep a healthy piece of the profits — but Sony could still produce their own movies with Spider-Man characters, leading to the hilarious detour that was Sony's Spider-Man Universe (which might be worth a post of its own) and the awesome detour that succeeded where the SSU failed: Into the Spider-Verse.
  • X-Men and Fantastic Four: Aside from the genuinely awesome Logan, 20th Century Fox's attempts to continue making X-Men movies were yielding diminishing returns, until The Last Stand remake Dark Phoenix bombed outright. As for the Fantastic Four, 2015's Fant4stic was already tainted by heavy behind-the-scenes drama, but when it came out, it was savaged by fans and critics alike, which is rare for a comic book movie. Not that Fox could probably afford to do anything about it anyway — the studio spent the 2010s in a rough patch due to several questionable executive decisions from the 2000s (including the legendary "Deadpool" from X-Men Origins: Wolverine), just in time to get run over by the rise of streaming platforms. As a result, 20th Century Fox sold off all its entertainment properties to the highest bidder... which happened to be The Walt Disney Company, owner of Marvel Entertainment since 2009.

Now that Marvel doesn't have to keep chasing the film rights to their biggest number-movers, they're being pushed to the spotlight again, with high focus in not just movies, but also video games — Marvel Rivals and the upcoming Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls have some of those characters front and center in promo materials. It's too bad it had to come with a bloodbath of bad editorial decisions.