Kiwi Farms

Like any good war story, it needs to begin with the proper tone setting....

So there I was, no shit, drunk off my ass, bored, and then I stumbled across a fascinating bit of internet drama...

I came to the farms, like most people do, to talk about a particular crazy situation that interested them. In my case, it was the Alex Mauer drama. While not a lawyer, I have a great fascination with the law and in particular how it is applied to social issues. If anything, my time since then has taught me I did not know as much about it as I thought I did. One of the defining features of this place is dumb opinions of yourself rarely survive. But it is that same feature of autistic back and forth that sets the farms apart from other discussion forums like Reddit, and even 4chan. This led me to stick around and make several, bad, and failed, attempts at legitimate OP's to add to the index of Kiwi threads. None really stuck, and if I was being honest were not that interesting. Not even to myself. Which makes the Weeb Wars OP a bit bizarre all things considered. Even now I am a very surprised at the impact it had.

My first indication that something was happening in the weeb space came from my Youtube recommendations that helpfully offered "Animegate has begun" titles. It was all click baity and I ignored it. I have a fond experience with Anime, but I never really considered myself a fanatic of it. I've never been to a convention and I never really paid attention to who voiced what. I did prefer dubs over subs though. I cannot recall the exact moment I tuned into the drama around Vic Mignogna, but I honestly think it might have been Clownfish TV mentioning it in passing, which led me to the Rekeita Stream with yellow flash. "Now this" I thought, this was interesting. An internet slap fight with legal overtones and a new front on the culture war? Lets see what we got here!

So I began to collect info and start sketching an essay to form the core of an OP. My actual field of study is history, not law, so developing archives and going back to "the beginning" was my focus. What I found started to make me mad. When I mentioned that I had a fondness for Anime and the Anime community I do mean this literally. When I was in Iraq, a major escape for me and many of the guys in my Company were Anime fan dubs. Basically pirated stuff put on the net by Anime devotees. Iraqi Christians would burn it onto CD's and then sell them to the troops on the FOBs. During my few hours of free time between work, guard duty and sleep, I would watch dubbed anime courtesy of luminary translators like "Desupixie553". These were not professional stuff by any stretch of the imagination. They were purely fan produced translations, put out for other fans to watch, and then downloaded by Iraqis to sell to American soldiers with no internet connections. honestly? They helped keep me sane. And many other soldiers too. Now there is some deep lore about the war on terror for you all to chew on.

As I read into what was happening to the Anime fandom, my "essay" began to read more like a screed. Once I saw what people like Samantha Harte had said about Vic and why they were doing what they were doing, I really did become possessed. I wanted to make a statement as much as introduce an internet drama. Encapsulated in this one man I saw everything I hated about the encroachment of far left politics into pop culture, abuses of gender relations, and a credulous media happy to goad along the baying mob. Worse though, I saw this as an attack on a largely good hearted fan community that in my mind I owed something too. So I wrote my essay the way one would write a harsh political statement. Unlike my prior failed OP's, I was determined for this one to succeed. Over two days and about 12 hours I researched and wrote, and then posted my first draft to proving grounds. It immediately flopped. Knowledgeable kiwis such as @damian and @Jaimas pointed me towards other areas of research, like Jaime Marchi, and more importantly, showed me how to properly archive all the information. This became very important.

You see, because of a credulous media, this particular drama was harshly sequestered. Even 4chan moderators moved swiftly to delete any threads bringing it up. So when my thread was finally posted and @Null allowed it to be front paged on "happenings", it was for all intents and purposes, the only pro Vic Mignogna article of media put to words and published. And it dropped like a bomb. I don't say this to toot my own horn either. People started taking screen shots of it and posting it to twitter. Entire twitter threads were devoted to posting the original weeb wars OP in its entirety. Within a week the thread started moving ridiculously fast and after a month an entire subforum of the Farms was created. The damn thing has even been cited in legal documents in the ongoing court case.

As of this moment, it has 9 million views. Without that intense quality control at the start I doubt it would have stood the test of time the way it did. There has since been a ton of screeching about the Weeb Wars OP, but no effort to actually refute its contents.

After a year, and all the legal activity, I am confident to stand by it as a true and accurate, if slightly biased, record of what happened in January of 2019. I have since stepped back quite a bit from following the ins and outs of weeb wars as I found myself becoming too invested. Probably the one good thing to come out of the Chupp rulings was he put the brakes on things. Even so, being confident in the veracity of the OP means I am also confident that Vic will be vindicated in the end. The movie "Schindler's List" has a very good misquoting of the Talmud. "He who saves the life of one man, saves the world". While this is inaccurate of the original text, I like the sentiment conveyed. Its origins in judaism are also apt as well. The Moral Panic that was weaponized by Vics envious rivals to destroy him is no different from the same moral panic that was weaponized against Jewish communities in Europe. People wanted what they had, and they used the patina of virtue to take it. So I hope that I did my part, in some way, to save the life of a man I believe is innocent. And by doing so, I hope this in some small way, makes those who caused this situation to reflect on their sins. Barring that, I hope they be punished for those sins as an example to those who will come after, and seeing their fate, not travel down the same path.