Sxxxshow that was Limbus Company rn and attempts at making right information.

In understanding where the controversy comes from, the subject of gender conflict and internet culture war in South Korea must be discussed. While I understand that I myself is also biased in this judgment as a first-hand observer, I hope that some of this paste can bring some resemblance of coherence. The reason that I have written this paste was largely due to the fact that there has been a tremendous amounts of misinformation on both sides of the argument and I would like to point some of the misinformation currently spreading in Western community.

What I myself recall with the beginning of the controversy is the Stealth Patch of Nfaust and her ego (emitter) and the mislabeling the effects of the certain egos, particularly with Heathcliff's bodysack.

This was from the DCinside, predominantly male internet community as opposed to twitter. While Twitter is more visible to the Western viewers and as many of my apprentices have found their sources in twitter, it should be noted that the twitter community (at least from what I know of in their current state) is predominantly a female internet environment at least in the subject of illustration, anime, and related subject.

I should also note that at the moment the Lobotomy Corporation Gallery of DCinside is full of trolls and manipulative actors at the moment as it is currently trending number 1 in post generation in comparison to their usual 40th or less. There are lots of misinformation in the air and unfortuantely, internet is not very friendly with my endeavor.

So where did all this began?

https://gall.dcinside.com/mgallery/board/view/?id=lobotomycorporation&no=1430886
This was, I believe was the original post to the beginning of the controversy. According to the rough translation, the original complaints from the users were:
"
1.) Unreasonable nerfs to Faust
2.) Inefficient effects of the Uptie 4 despite the resource consumption
3.) Stealth Patch on power range that was unreasonable
4.) Weird character rotation - Imbalance of id allocation to Sinclair and Ishmael while Faust and Outis got less
5.) No Swimsuit id
6.) No communications regarding that stealth patches or lack of communications"

https://gall.dcinside.com/mgallery/board/view/?id=lobotomycorporation&no=1419987
This post also points out on the technical criticism on the  game itself, examples including the ineffective patches with the tremor mechanic in Rosespanner ids.

While myself can agree on the 1-4 as a legitimate criticism, it should be noted that reason 5 is a very questionable justification for the rage. Keep in mind that ish swimsuit, as cultured individuals can agree, can allude to more feminine body figure through the lack of space between the apparell and the body. This part is especially questionable considering the fact that all the frenzy with the swimsuit has not became a problem when the id was announced. This I believe is both the matter of anti-feminist fervor and trolling from the third party, as DCinside is known to have trolls similar to 4Chan in the West.

This particular aspect should be criticized in the community as the swimsuit controversy, though being part of the whole controversy, became elevated towards the entirety of controversy and thus loses its main point of 1-4 which were reasonable criticism.

However, during this sxxxshow, small details about the story illustrator (Vellmori or her username, @Shd_Eod) being a "feminist" was revealed.

Before I talk about the her issue with the male community, I should mention that word feminism in South Korean community is not a scholastic reference towards the Western mainstream feminist movement and the subsequent progressivism. During the 2015-2016, a particular site called Megalia was introduced in the mainstream media. This website was a amalgamation of users from the infamous MERS gallery in dcinside, which had a history of radical feminist problems. addendum - the reason for MERS gallery's rise is also partially due to the other feminine website community called woman's age (여성시대) imploding due to controversy but I do not know much about this subject so we'll move on.

Some of the events in the Megalia included circulating illegal photos of male, both adult and minor, derogatory terms towards Korean males (Han-nam-chung, which translates to Korean male insects), and homophobia. A lot of these controversy can be found in this website: https://namu.wiki/w/메갈리아/사건%20사고#s-24 Although it is undoubtly a downgrade version of wikipedia, it has considerable sources (the green texts) that soldifies its argument and will be used in further discussion or at least I hope so.

If not, the following pastebin contains a link for an academic graudation thesis on the politics and social discourse of Megalia in Harvard. the following dissertation, although limiting itself as a dissertation, contains quite enriched insight on the topic of Megalia.

(https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/37366046/WonyunLEE_graduationthesis.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y)

Although Megalia as a website has been closed for quite sometimes since their birth in 2015, its child website, WOMAD, became a lot worse than its predecessor with its users known to be arrested in child molestation, filming nude without consent, and generally being an asshole.

So why are they part of the problem here?

The term feminism since the 2015, and particularly in 2016 during the Closers voice actor controversy, has been hijacked by TERF similar to the elements of Megalia and even WOMAD. During the Closers voice actor controversy, when Kim Ja-yun, the voice actor for a new character, defended Megalia as a legitimate source of feminism on twitter. While the playerbase, mostly male, were fuming at Kim for defending Megalia, the situation took a weird turn when progressive political parties, such as the Justice Party, Labor Party, and Green Party, defended Kim as a "...act that does not discrepent from the public good, despite it being controversial." (https://archive.is/wd2Zj - Political briefing of the Justice party at the time. The actual website is now deleted its post) While this political intervention did show an understanding of the situation as controversial, given the history of Megalia as a radical feminist website, it also legitimized Megalia and its TERF/radical feminist voices as a just political actor in Korean society.

However, this isn't just a problem with the women. As we noted earlier the male users in DCinside has been highly criticized by the Western community, and my peers, as incels and losers. This is unfortunately a valid observation due to the reactionary movement arose from the legitimization of Megalia was a highly dysfunctional, 4chan-esque incels that would create incel dystopian controversys such as the Dishes (설거지) theory. https://namu.wiki/w/설거지론.

This theory is just braindead 4chan incel horsesxxt that many of you might be familiar with. It's that men with less sexual interactions would marry girls with promiscuous sexual history as if they are cleaning a dirty dishes. The theory objectifies women as a source of sexual interaction and deviates from the general marital strife between wife and husband to a level of degeneracy. Using unacademic terms like Alpha males and beta males to justify a marital strife in sex only is peak incel behavior that should not be justified in any level.

In many cases, both sides are, for lack of a better term, utterly fxxxing retxxxed to create horsesxxt like this. Problem is that they are not even a real, majority sociopolitical force. This section will talk about these supposed figure of "Korean males in their 20s" or Yi-Dae-Nam (이대남) that was supposedly born out in partial to this reactionary movement, represented by conservative political figures like Yi Jun-seok. Be aware of the political bias of my own writing as I myself consider myself as a progressive liberal. The birth of the term Yi-Dae-Nam was supposedly after the 2022 presidential election with the flip of 20s male voter from liberal to conservative.

According to conservative outlook, this may be due to the disappointment of the previous incumbent, the liberal party, and its policies, and the rightness of conservative party to carry its agenda, I'd like to point out that at the actual voter turnout of the election, the male voters actually fall less than its femal counterparts as 20-24 years old males had 67% voter turnout while female counterpart had 71.1%. The 25-29 years old male had 69.5% while female counterpart had 74.2% (Source - https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiO8NXBpauAAxX1kIkEHSehBA4QFnoECBEQAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nec.go.kr%2Fcommon%2Fboard%2FDownload.do%3FbcIdx%3D188992%26cbIdx%3D1090%26streFileNm%3Dbb0e3620-dbcc-45b0-939f-0cd16c4b6201.hwp&usg=AOvVaw1drIZ3yxyMCfeYswIl-IQG&opi=89978449 - National Election Committee)

And keep in mind that the presidential election of 2022 was barely won by the conservative in about 0.47%, the incel president of South Korea doesn't seem to represent the fact that Korea is filled with incel, but rather a troubling society with genuine struggle for which direction that the country should be leading to with rising socioeconomic problems and staggering decline of birthrate and suffering youths with toxic work enviornment and struggling lifestyle. This section alone deserves a whole another essay but I will not get to them. But it is to be mentioned that the anti-feminist elements in South Korea are a social minority simply being inflated by the political forces which for many years, has done just fueling hatred in this "gender war" than actually fixing the socioeconomic problems of Korea. But even at their inflated state, such effect of feminism and anti-feminism is definitive in the internet enviornment where many people are just exposed to the sxxtshow without any filtering, which is a consequence of self-indulgent nature of the internet.

Returning back to the Limbus Company, let us keep in mind that the whole feminist controversy also began in the gaming industry in Korea, particularly, the sub-genre (anime, gacha, etc.) industry in Korea. As Closers also had a sub-genre anime aspect in its game as well. As many illustrators and voice actors were participating in the industry. This is where our illustrator, Vellmori, comes in. During the fervant years of feminism, which is around 2015-2018, Vellmori has retweeted "feminist" tweets that is now deleted today.

https://gall.dcinside.com/mgallery/board/view/?id=lobotomycorporation&no=1495864
https://gall.dcinside.com/mgallery/board/view/?id=lobotomycorporation&no=1462193

People have dug up these old tweets as part of the evidence. While some elements in twitter has pointed out on the somewhat justified tweets about preventing illegal photo taking and opposing patriarchy. Some of the retweets also used derogatory term towards male such as Han-nam-chung (한남충) or “We are Megalia” (우리는 메갈이다). This should be noted that the illustrator did have apologetic behavior towards the arising TERF during this time and many people did find that upsetting with the behavior.

However, I should also be of note that it was more than 5 years ago when the tweet has been made. Although the illustrator can be of criticism due to the things that she have done in the past, it shouldn’t be a permanent stigma that outright paralyzes her entire life and career. In acting in good faith, this digging up old tweet that was more than 5 years ago, which is enough for someone to change their mind about a subject, is nothing more than a witch hunt to a shadow of her past.

In addition, the Limbus Company community in twitter should be of blame of twisting this controversy as nothing more than incel vs. feminism in South Korea. As I perceive that many foreigners are not aware of this volatile history of contemporary feminism in Korea, simply using the term “feminism” does not connotates a same meaning that is perceived in the West. This is a problem that both feminist users and anti-feminist users perpetrates; they use the eyes of the foreign countries to push their own agenda. Utterly fxxxing disgusting.

What’s more ironic is that in terms of progressivism and controversial political correctness, Project Moon and its product has always been very progressive in their portrayal of characters. The male figures aren’t necessarily masculine or the feminine figures aren’t overtly feminine. There was a fine line of gender creativity that enriched the art and the beauty of the worldbuilding that the company has done. It’s what attracted many players, like myself, to be invested into the game. And this playerbase was also a very of universal one, as in Korea, there was a 50/50 split of male and female players in Limbus Company.

However, because of such diverse and fervent community that existed within Limbus Company, the current controversy exploded, thereby spreading confusion and misinformation towards the third-party, foreigners who have no idea what the hell is going on. And many of them may feel anger towards the incels as incels, in comparison to feminism, are a unsavory bunch in many cases. But this shouldn’t be constructed in the superficial, binary conflict between the right and wrong. Both sides are utterly fxxxing retxxxed and they should be taken with absolute scrutiny.

This utter sxxxshow of the Limbus Company fandom has ultimately led to the Project Moon announcing the following tweet.

https://twitter.com/LimbusCompany_B/status/1683853422351765505
https://twitter.com/LimbusCompany_B/status/1683854709046808576

The first tweet discusses the aforementioned List of complaints by the users quite well. It said to fix the attack-defense power range, correctly labeled Heathcliff’s ego, buffed emitter, promised to fix id rotation and id allocation imbalance, and addressed macro in the game.

The second tweet was from the director, Kim Ji-hoon, who briefly explain the controversy behind the illustrator and the reason on why they fired her. The following excerpt is directly translated by me in my own volition and is subjected to revision:

“Hello, this is director of Project Moon, Kim Ji-hoon.

Project Moon, as announced from the beginning of the company, does not discuss individual employee’s particular ideology, SNS activity or special question or investigation as an act of ideological verification.
However, the company has continuously insisted to all employees with one detail: that while it does not matter for individual to express any opinion or activity in SNS despite its controversy, such personal accounts shouldn’t be linked with the company to possibly connect the company with said ideology  As a controversial persons can be linked towards the company itself (and other employees), it can hurt the company and other employees should the controversy arises. And such warnings were issued in multiple times through messenger apps and in person in multiple occasions.
The current controversial illustrator has put her personal SNS account to the Game’s credit, and the company has asked for favor and verification to not cause any problems with the SNS account and its relations to the company. In this process, we have not asked for further investigation of particular subject of controversy as such action may be perceived as a ideological verification. Thus, when the controversy happened, we were unable to respond immediately and delayed our responses late.

From now on the Update 5 will not contain the aforementioned illustrator.

Aside from this, the previous works of the aforementioned illustrator was an official company product that was made by myself and story team to illustrate the Project Moon Worldbuilding. As her works are determined to be not containing socially controversial aspect, the considerable time that would be need to change the art, we are considering that we should work on more newer products. We will keep the arts of previous stories, we will switch the aforementioned illustrator’s work starting from the main UI and overtime.

As this was a violation of the company policy that was continuously warned, the controversial employee and its contract will be terminated. However, please refrain from committing verbal violence or threat towards the illustrator in both online and offline.

And we are deeply sorry for the concern and disappointment of users that does not want to see the issues outside of the game but rather just enjoy the Project Moon contents. We will, again, not care whatever individual does in their personal SNS activity, but will stress that it shouldn’t be connected to the company.”

In my opinion, Director Kim’s response brings a different light into the picture. As Project Moon was aware of the sxxxshow noted from above, they tried to avoid such conflict by staying neutral to the subject. However, with a somewhat reckless behavior from the illustrator, they are both blamed as both misogynistic and misandric at the same time. It should be noted that Project Moon, according to their own account, were very careful in their internet environment, but hoped to stay out of it through individual’s acting in good faith. And while they are in the controversy, they still hope to act in good faith as enforcing certain side would cause losing their playerbase.

This event is still an ongoing subject, so this Pastebin may be subjected to revision, but I hope that through providing a bigger picture of gender conflict in South Korea, there are bigger understanding of foreigners that can see the controversy in a larger picture, rather than viewing a small incel community rambling about Ishmael’s tits.