Context on Project Moon discourse
I did some digging and watched some internet slapfights between Korean users, and collected as much context as humanly possible, trying to avoid hearsay where I can:
Misogynistic dudes start complaining about how sexless and non-waifu-female-heavy the game is, feeling the skimpy Sinclair outfit with the thotty little collar VS the fully covered Ishmael outfit is pointed feminist jeering (a law Hawkeye Initiative). Korean anti-feminists are really sensitive to pointed feminist jeering. More on that in a bit
Upon learning the identity artist is male, they trawl the rest of the staff to prove their stupid-ass theory.
They latch onto the lead CG artist, who has tweeted about feminism before.
Project Moon receives countless threats and people marching on their office IRL demanding to speak to the CEO.
The resulting hate campaign leads to Project Moon firing the lead artist for violation of contract; it was specifically requested by the company that all users delete political statements and controversial topics before joining, and the tweets the incels are using seem to prove that the worst case scenario for not adhering to the request has come to pass.
The thing is, she did delete the tweets.
This user has screencapped incels scrambling to justify their belief the game is for man-haters, including a statement that he had dug up deleted tweets. These are old records.
These are the retweets, all made before joining the company (but again, the policy was that the tweets like this should be scrubbed). Most of them are just being catty. The most extreme statements are a scathing satire even a child could understand, and some general feminist sentiments which are not incendiary in any way. It seems they were screencapped to cement a pattern of passionate feelings on feminism.
In Korea, feminism is considered a wedge issue, which means basic activism becomes extremely politically charged. Think of it like how trans issues are being treated in America at the moment, or how "Critical Race Theory" was a wedge issue like 2 years ago. Nevertheless, the most hateful statements in these tweets are not "feminist", but rather annoyance at misogyny, and pretty obviously jokes.
The tweet that the incels are latching onto here states "if being a feminist makes me Megalia, I am Megalia. If being against patriarchy makes me anti-social, I am anti-social". Megalia was a scumbag leftist radfem group originating from Korea's 4chan (anonymous messageboards). It was bad enough that banning gay slurs created a splinter group. Megalia was well-known for mirroring misogynistic behaviours back onto men. They were reviled. An actress lost her job for wearing a T-shirt this group sold, even though the funds were going to supporting women seeking legal actions. Association with Megalia was reputation poison.
Notice I refer to them in the past tense, because Megalia shut down in 2017. The tweet was in 2018. You could not get any more obvious that the statement being made was "you can insult me by calling me Megalia, but I still believe in feminism". There is no association with this incendiary group.
Incels "supported" their argument with an image of Yi Sang holding a vial in basically one of the only 2 ways you can hold a vial, calling it a reference to 🤏, an emoji used as the Megalia logo interpreted to mean "men have small penises". This insane interpretation is being used to cement the whole company as misandrist.
Therefore: Project Moon fired their lead artist even though she didn't violate her contract because insane incels did a "how dare you say we piss on the poor" bad faith misinterpretation of deleted tweets in order to justify their belief that Project Moon is a man-hating company, and as a man-hating company deserves to be annihilated, leading to threats to staff.
The artist for Leviathan later stated that Project Moon pushed the comic forward with no buffer, and when the schedule became unbearable, they just cancelled it. They were told there was an issue with production (supported by the fact the company dropped the translation in favour of focusing on the game), but this news has made the artist pessimistic about the company's treatment of their art team.
Here's the artist Vellmori's twitter if you would like to support them through this period.
jbbartram-illu
gummygunk
baratheonpilled
blakekathryn
jacobvanloon
