Why Korean men are making these accusations, and context on the gamergate culture war that started in 2016

[Chaffee]

This was a comment I made on the other post https://steamcommunity.com/app/1973530/discussions/0/3808407347834519015 and I received requests to make it a separate post. Below I provide some rebuttals and additional context for what the OP of the post Champi failed to elaborate on regarding his accusations that the artist supporting a dangerous extremist feminist groups.

I also made small edits for added clarity, minor corrections, making it work better as a separate post, and fixing the overall text.

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In Champi's post, I noticed some comments about being aware of how Megalia and radical feminists interfered with Korean games like Closers and Girls Frontline. But after seeing Champi's pathetic accusations some of you may be suspecting there might be more to those controversies too.

You'd be right, and I can attest as a Korean. In every single case like that, it was someone saying or doing something vaguely resembling a protest about women's rights, incels throwing a tantrum with accusations of being a feminist and therefore a Megalian, demanding the employer to terminate the contract with the person, and the employer caving in IMMEDIATELY.

Most important context to realize about this matter is this. The "they're a feminist/Megalian!" controversy always starts first, and then comes the part where they scavenge the person's social media for anything they can relate to feminism.

Champi brought up "it all started with Closers" but couldn't provide a coherent explanation. I can. I was literally watching the mess in 2016 and I remember it to this day and feel how it STILL continues to affect the Korean game development industry, including this controversy.

It was when a VA who was newly cast in the game personally promoted a T-shirt that reads "Girls do not need a prince" (i.e. don't need to rely on a man to solve all her problems). And the important thing is, this is what triggered a tantrum about how a VA shouldn't be promoting feminist ideals and should be fired. And THEN they went digging into the T-shirt and apparently it was funded by some group of feminists that have ties to Megalia or operate on a website that's an offshoot of Megalia or something and the T-shirt was a fundraiser for victims of rape and domestic violence. A sensible person's response would be that while the fundraiser is well-intended they cannot support the group doing the fundraiser and would ask the VA to choose her promotions more carefully. IF even that. But DCInside immediately used this information to accuse the VA of supporting Megalia and all the horrific activities Megalia supposedly advocates. I repeat this because it's important: the ♥♥♥♥ storm wasn't because the VA seemed to be supporting Megalia. It started as soon as the VA promoted feminism, and everything that followed was an effort to demonize her. So DCInside took this information to Nexon, the developer and publisher of Closers and demanded them to terminate their contract with the VA. Nexon obliged immediately saying that they found the VA's beliefs to be unacceptable.

Keep in mind that this was DCInside. The 4chan equivalent of Korea, a website utterly crawling with hate speech and advocates of violence and bigotry. They don't get to call out someone else for subscribing to problematic and controversial beliefs. A website of mostly men that makes and uses tons of hate speech based on gender, nationality, age, disability, etc doesn't get to protest when "Korean men" is called out and used to make a slur.

This started two atrocious trends. One, the incel community would make demands to game devs and other companies in the media industry to always fire "Megalia users" or "Megals" in short. Two, most of those companies are happy to oblige because they feel the need to pander to incels and give them validation. Or rather, they're just run by older incels.

As Champi said, feminism in Korea is pretty different from the west. Because things are way WAY worse, especially with the convenient "Megalia" label that incels can slap on ANYTHING that's not extremist misogyny.
You think women deserve rights? You're a Megal.
You think women have the right to refuse a man's romantic advances? You're a Megal.
You think drugging a woman and using her unconsciousness to your advantage should be punished? You're a Megal.
You found a spycam in a women's lavatory and asked the authorities to remove it & apprehend whoever installed it? You're a Megal.
You refuse to declare that feminism is a mental illness and you will never agree to anything a feminist says? You're a Megal. Why is it so difficult to comply to the screening?
You see a news that a woman was assaulted and murdered, and think it's horrible and such things shouldn't happen? You're a Megal. You're supposed to find that cathartic because it shows who's really in power.
You think men have any power? You're a Megal. Men are the true oppressed people.
You think the previous two points contradict each other? You're a Megal. Otherwise you wouldn't try to find faults like that.
You believe accusing someone like this and demanding their employer to fire them is wrong? You're a Megal too since you're siding with one, and should be fired too.

If you think this is an exaggeration or blowing some really tiny radical group's stance out of proportion, my sibling in Christ I would KILL if doing so would make it so that that were the case. As I stressed before dozens of artists, VAs, musicians, writers, e-sport commentary providers, etc have lost their jobs to this madness over the past years. This is so rampant that I feel alienated in the Korean men category.

The Girls Frontline K7 controversy. To provide some underlying context, there's a novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982. I won't go into details about the book and you can look it up, what's relevant is that the incel community made it out to be some propaganda that demonizes men with instigations based on the most extreme cases of sexism and crimes (which it isn't, and the book is quite well-cited), and went on to cancel anyone reading it. How is this relevant to Girls Frontline? Well, it's a Chinese game and it was revealed or leaked that a Korean female artist is drawing up the new doll so naturally it drew quite a lot of attention in the Korean fandom. And the natural next step for DCInside was: go to her social media and try to dig up anything that would suggest she might be a Megal. And they found... that she's a fan of a K-Pop idol who got attacked for reading Kim Ji-Young and wanted to support her, plus a few retweets of seriously vaguely feminism-y tweets like protests against domestic violence on women and small complaints about how Korean men are acting nowadays. But this gave DCInside everything they needed to go to the publisher of Girls Frontline yelling that the K7 artist is a Megal, putting all sorts of words in her mouth (mostly grossly distorted editions of what the people in 2016 said in defense of the talents accused for being Megals), and demanding the game's contract with her to be terminated. As you probably know, this was also accepted immediately.

So... where was the radical feminists trying to destroy Girls Frontline? That's the point, there literally wasn't. It's the incel boys inflicting self-harm and blaming feminists. That, and all the sensible people trying to protect the artist's rights and condemning the company's decision looked like a horde of radical feminists putting their conspiracy to action to those incels with their heads in their little misogynistic worlds. Yeah, if you were a Girls Frontline fan who were bummed by the K7 cancellation, now you know who's actually responsible. All the horrible things that the "feminist artist" supposedly did and said? Not her. Pulling the "you're a Megal" card and randomly picking anything they think a Megal said before. I got into an argument with an incel once and tried asking him what he thought the artist said to get in trouble and he literally quoted a whole different webtoon artist from the 2016 controversy. I pointed this out and have been waiting for a reply for four years now.

Also, off-topic but I have a huge very personal grudge on this one because I was a big fan of the artist when she used to be active.

I think you can see the pattern by now, in light of the ongoing controversy. The "she supports a really dangerous feminist organization" argument is a truckload of bull that horrible incels have been weaponizing to get dozens of people expelled from the industry for years just because they weren't horrible incels like them. They like to say "if you subscribe to feminist ideals that can result in a social controversy it hurts the company" WELL HOW ABOUT YOU STOP BEING THE SOCIAL CONTROVERSY? Then they have the audacity to play the role of victimized heroes trying to protect the game industry from malicious radical feminists trying to take down their games.

Yeah, like most of you quickly realized, it's nothing but gamergate incel culture war. Do not buy that crap.

Also, Champi probably isn't deliberately hiding the context for propaganda purposes. Most likely he's never actually seen a controversy, or at least actually paid attention to the accused person when one is going on, and seriously doesn't know anything beyond "Feminism! Megalia! Bad! Closers! 2016! Men trauma! Controversies!". Even if his English were fluent you wouldn't get much more sensible and coherent arguments from him. The Megalia witch hunt is little more than mindless sport.

I hope this venting of frustration did a good enough job shedding light on previous controversies that you might have seen but couldn't fully understand due to language barrier, lack of context, misinformation and deliberate propaganda, etc and why so many Korean players (and non-players, like me) who've been watching the Limbus Company controversy are beyond pissed, more like utterly devastated, to witness a talent being unfairly dismissed AGAIN just because some incels wanted validation.

Of course, even though this is from my first-hand observations of what really happened, it's still a conjecture that needs to be taken with a grain of salt like everything else, and I don't personally keep or follow a good archive of the controversies. I know some people do keep archives (some of whom were canceled for supposedly being Megal and can't be found anymore), and there are plenty of articles about them though, like workers' right unions and the like condemning the companies for unfairly dismissing talents. I would strongly advice against gaming journalism websites though as they tend to take the "gamer opinions" as the sensible or at best try to make the controversy look like disputes on equal terms with no right or wrong.

Oh, and one last thing: DCInside finally realized that their misogyny isn't about to be validated for once and their propaganda is failing miserably on the global audience, so they're trying things like insulting the English articles for being written by woke "Southeast Asian banana-pickers" (yes this is an actual one of the many racial slurs they commonly use, why SEA is brought up I have no idea and don't want to know) and randomly accusing the artist for being a TERF (a term they probably barely understand beyond "feminists, but even the woke hate them") and such. I already see a few of those in the posts here. You know what to do when someone tries to shove one down your throat.

[P51mus]

The one thing I'll disagree with is that though I'm sure some of them are misguided, most of them are very very aware of how vile they are acting and how other people view their actions. That's why they go to such lengths to try and convince other people that they're somehow in the right.

[Yerc2]

I believe that to see the whole picture, one would also have to understand the social/political climate of Korea to understand why there is such dislike towards [discriminatory] feminism.

Different topics are just viewed and treated differently based on the past/present experiences of their people.
I personally wouldn't feel comfortable talking about politics or social issues to that extent on these forums, but it's quite a bit deeper than people disliking games being changed. IMO, it's worth looking into if you like going down rabbitholes of things like drama and corruption, or just learning about Korean culture and recent history.

People seldom do things that they think they aren't justified to do. Whether the justification be moral, or legal.
DCInside isn't really any worse than sites like Reddit. Take that as you will.

[David Bowie Sensei]

This whole issue has been maddening. All I get is extremist going on a witch hunt for extremists because they got annoyed. Its always been the loud minority having a fight with the other side of it. The words of loud can out weight facts, where you past words or actions can be twisted and used to destroy your life. Its like how a lot of people are getting fired for claims that they used a slur when they were a 15 year old, gets them fired 10 years later. But instead, in Korea it sounds like the actions of person you are slightly known of can get you fired, which is nuts.
I think we all know at this point the main reason Korea company have give in, is because these kind of people will send bomb threats and try destroy your company for the hell of it just because they get salty over the game and use a made up reason for it.

This whole chaos has almost stopped me wanting to post here, as I normally like to talk about the updates, with a neat little review, but my last one was buried by all the info hazard and invading by people who just want PM to burn. Really makes me miss the "before T4".

[PaleShakta]

Originally posted by Yerc2:

one would also have to understand the social/political climate of Korea to understand why there is such dislike towards [discriminatory] feminism.

yes actually let's delve into the recent history of the worst people in South Korea and their opinions on women, i think this would be quite informative

[Demonking]

I won't lie, with move by some global audiences to try to intentionally commission her art, I hope that at least this situation starts a rock slide effect to dismantle this practice. Sure, it 'worked', but there's now global outcry by much wealthier countries/players to re-instate her and support her. Not to mention a number of feminist groups that are suggest to boycott the game until we get a response from them. (Even if they need to chill, it'd been like 3 days, this company has barely had time to catch its breathe after the last group of angry people came busting down its door.)

That said, fixing these sorts of problems is always a messy process and difficult to get started, and I don't think a little sandwich shop with some cool video games is going to do it but... Maybe, I mean most of audience are people new to the gotcha dramas like this since it's pm that's giving us a reason to be here. So who knows maybe the pissing off real gamers is something the gotcha incels will start to regret.

[Ryo]

Originally posted by PaleShakta:

Originally posted by Yerc2:

one would also have to understand the social/political climate of Korea to understand why there is such dislike towards [discriminatory] feminism.

Yes actually let's delve into the recent history of the worst people in South Korea and their opinions on women, i think this would be quite informative

We're aware of the socio-political climate in S-Korea, people read news.
Here's my two cents;
First off, not saying all Koreans are like that, but a relatively loud minority of young men in South Korea are what I'm about to mention;
Some Koreans freaked out over Japan because they were salty they lost a football match, made monkey gestures toward a japanese player, and when japan insulted them in return felt highly offended and started a crusade against Japan trying to convince everybody that Japanese are extremists and hateful.

Later on, based on the same issue, they harassed a Vietnamese girl over a sun tattoo she made and showed on social media because it looked "like the Japanese imperial rising sun" and tried to cancel her because they found it not to their taste.

Skip a few years later, we got a whole gate-situation over a few feminists complaining in a biased way that enforcing the imprisonment of a woman taking pictures of nude men and sending them on the internet wasn't legitimate (it really is) but by doing so gaslight the fact that Korean men do those kind of things on an even more common basis without even batting an eye.

Then we have the wife of a belgian ambassador, slapping a cashier for insulting her, because she thought she stole clothes, and some koreans demanding a PUBLIC APOLOGY FROM THE ENTIRETY OF THE COUNTRY OF BELGIUM over, let me reiterate
THE ETHNICALLY CHINESE, KOREAN EDUCATED, WIFE of a belgian ambassador, and crying over it.

Then we have Lee Jae-yong, CEO of Samsung, (Company owning literally 80% of the gross domestic product of South Korea mind you, this doesn't get more dystopic when it sounds like a plot from Cyberpunk) getting a free-out-of-jail card despite proof of him bribing officials and corrupting cops, and that day, nobody batted an eye in South Korea.

And now we have this, a bunch of incels, triggered over the fact a female character they like isn't clothed as they wished.
(Don't deny it, here's visual proof if you wanna contest that claim https://www.reddit.com/r/TheOdysseyHadAPurpose/comments/159i5zh/count_the_degenerates_with_don_quixote/ )
trying to cancel its artist because they find the lack of revealing clothes "feminist" finding out the guy is a man, and thus can't be feminist (this makes no sense to anyone in the world but you South Koreans by the way, male feminists can and do exist), redirect their hate at his collegue who happens to be female, dig up a tweet where, from my understanding, she liked a post from someone who had interactions with the aforementioned feminist extremists, from 6 years ago, while she wasn't even working for the company, on a deleted twitter account, then physically go to her company to harass people until she gets fired.

Let me be straight; to any South Korean who doesn't feel triggered by my post, cheers and have a great day, but to anyone who is salty at any of what I just pointed out, grow, a, pair, you really need one. Because for people who believe men need empowerment and feel oppressed, you're really pitiful, and I only wish you will have the power to deal with actual, real life problems if they arise, and better than how you deal with minute ones, instead of focusing so much into your insecurities, lack of self-esteem and inability to empathise for anyone but your sorry asses.

tl;dr To me at least, a rather substantial portion of South Koreans sound like whiny, entitled manchildren who can't find anything better to do than complain about anything that doesn't line up with their worldviews, and should really learn to act like adults instead of spending their time in trivial matters such as this.

[FamaT]

With women like that no wonder South Korea's birthrate is so low

[Cyber Von Cyberus]

thanks for shedding light on the situation.

I'm still really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pissed about K7 in GFL, I'm going to be extremely disappointed if PM ditches the artist over this.

[Evarrice]

Does this apply to ALL Korean men? Just asking.

[Dying ArchDevil]

https://www.reddit.com/r/limbuscompany/comments/15b5f95/research_and_thoughts_of_the_recent_controversy/

This post summed up all the situation and investigation of the drama. TLDR: Korean incels bad. Ignore them.
Sad to see Limbus Company - one of the most culture deepen game - has a large amount of audience being uncultured and degenerated.

[Tobi]

Originally posted by Evarrice:

Does this apply to ALL Korean men? Just asking.

Of course not, whoever actually thinks that is an actual baboon.

[Ryo]

Originally posted by Evarrice:

Does this apply to ALL Korean men? Just asking.

It's in fact a very small portion, it was people on the korean equivalent of 4chan in a secluded part of the internet.
Although it would be wrong to say there isn't a misogyny problem in sk of course, we've had proof of it happening, and yes there is a societal objectification of women, name me another country that hires women based on appearance and "rewards" graduates with a plastic surgery so they look prettier and have a better chance at getting a job rather than looking at their skills.

But no, most koreans don't objectify automatically every woman they meet, that's a ridiculous thought, culture or not. Those people were a vocal internet minority.

[Chaffee]

Originally posted by Evarrice:

Does this apply to ALL Korean men? Just asking.

Not all. But too many, and enough to be a massive problem and make men like me feel alienated.

Originally posted by hogeyama-kun:

Angry radical misogynists in Korea might make the studio "Kyo-Ani".
But angry so-called radical feminists seems not.
Then small studios would inevitably rather enrage feminists than be Kyo-Ani.

Okay first of all, the danger of the visitors is grossly overestimated. Were they a threat? Yes, big enough for the employees to feel threatened. Were they such a huge threat like they had weapons and fire and bombs that it was inevitable for PM to cave in immediately rather than, you know, call the cops? Or would cops have been unable to handle it? Absolutely not. This is PM agreeing with the "feminists must be fired" demands and the reason that the Korean community is pissed.
Second, the fact that you brought up radical feminists in response to this thread shows how little of it you understood.
Third, that is a shockingly naive outlook if you think caving in to their demands was the smart way to end the situation and that incels will leave PM alone now that they got what they wanted. The Closers controversy has a second part I didn't mention: in a later update the incels thought the new character arts weren't sexy enough and threw another tantrum that Closers has been hiring feminist artists, and Nexon didn't have a scapegoat then. How do you think it would have gone from there? I'll give you a hint: as of now, DCInside'a perception of Closers is a game that went downhill because it sided with feminists. Now look back at the current controversy.
Also do you think other PM employees would feel secure after their boss just tossed the main artist like that just because some incels were angry? The news also spread to the whole country and employees all over are horrified to learn that a precedence of unfairly dismissing a regular employee on the spot just because some internet incels dug up her personal social media retweets years ago and made it out to be a radical feminist conspiracy has been set. Mind you, we're talking about people who are very anti-feminist and would otherwise be giddy about (what they think is) a feminist losing her job, yet this time they're horrified and are greatly protesting about such a dangerous precedence being set, especially because Korea is a country with very low job security.

[Cyber Von Cyberus]

Wait, they had already fired her ? ♥♥♥♥ I wasn't keeping up with the news. I'm really dissapointed that PM caved in just like that, someone lost their job over ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like this.

[Chaffee]

Originally posted by Cyber Von Cyberus:

Wait, they had already fired her ? ♥♥♥♥ I wasn't keeping up with the news. I'm really dissapointed that PM caved in just like that, someone lost their job over ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like this.

Yeah, Jihoon fired her mere hours after the DCInside brats went to the office. Notified her by a phone call at 11pm local time.