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innuendostudios · 3 years

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I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

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dramaruni · 3 years

Text

@bpdaf so this answer opened a can of worms (that I can call procrastination) and I wanted to address it, but with the limited characters in the reply function, I decided to answer it with a new post. Also sorry if this come as an attack, I promise it's not. I just became really curious if I had the wrong idea about the live-shooting system as I was ready to refute your points, but realized I didn't have enough knowledge to do so.

*also tagging @jahe, @yasmini24, @le-amarant as they also replied to my post and I figured maybe you were also interested in this (although it's really long and rambly, so I don't blame you for ignoring the post entirely). So yeah warning, this post is really long.

So I'm well aware of kdrama's live shoot system. But I did wonder if it was normal to start shooting 6 months before the first airing episode, as I was under the impression 6 months of shooting exceeded the standard duration of filming. But I couldn't actually refute it without some data to back that up. So I went to find data.

According to Wikipedia's page on Korean Dramas, they write: “As producing a series involves high expenses, production companies seek to shoot the episodes in the shortest time possible. In contrast to practices elsewhere, the first four episodes of Korean series are usually shot in advance, but the rest are shot continuously as the series is being aired.”

This fits in line with what I believed about Korean dramas live shooting system. They film a couple of episode ahead of time and then rest comes while it's still airing to fit with the audience response to it. Even preproduced dramas are sometimes reshot and re-edited while it's airing. But it didn't really say anything about the average filming duration for a drama or what shortest time possible was defined as. Probably because all dramas will aim for different things and given the content it can vary a lot how long it takes to film.

But I highly doubt it took Vincenzo 6 months to shoot something around 4 episodes and then crammed the rest into the 2 remaining months, as they knew from the start they had 20 episodes to fill.

So let's go through some other drama's shooting schedule to compare with Vincenzo.

I chose to limit the list to 2020 dramas (as they were likely affected by the pandemic) and tvN dramas, so it's the same broadcasting company as these dramas will likely share the same practices. Obviously with the amount I have included, I can't make any definite conclusions, but it does show a pattern.

*disclaimer I tried my best to accurately determine the shooting duration from when filming started to when it ended, but not all of these dramas had that information readily available, so I made do with the information I had at hand. This means some of these are just estimations.

So without further ado, here's the list:

Vincenzo:

May 2020, Director Kim Hee Won and writer Park Jae Bum teamed up.

July 2020, Song Joong Ki and Jeon Yeo Bin were considering the drama, while Ok Taecyeon had confirmed

September 2020, filming started

February 20th, 2021 first episode aired

No episodes April 17thand18th

April 17th, last episode script delivered

April 23rd, filming wrapped

May 2nd, 2021 last episode aired

Shooting time: 8 months

Shooting duration before first aired episode: 6 months

Filming wrapped before last airing episode: 8 days

1. Crash Landing on You

*not affected by the COVID-19 Pandemic * includes overseas filming

July 31st, 2019 – first script reading

End of august 2019, filming overseas begin

December 14th, first episode airs

January 12th, filming wrapped

February 16th, 2020 last episode airs

Shooting time: 5 months

Shooting duration before first aired episode: 4 months

Filming wrapped before last airing episode: 1 month + 4 days

2. It’s okay not to be okay

I couldn’t find the exact time shooting started, so these numbers are based between March and May, as I assume they didn’t shoot without Oh Jung Se being casted and while the table read photos were released in May, it could very well be they had started shooting before this.

February 2020 Kim Soo Hyun and Seo Ye Ji casted

March 2020 Oh Jung Se casted

May 8th 2020, first script reading photos released

June 20th 2020, first episode aired

July 31st 2020, filming wrapped

August 9th 2020, last episode aired

Shooting time: 3-5 months

Shooting duration before first aired episode: 1-3 months

Filming wrapped before last airing episode: 9 days

3. Start-up

August 4th, all the leads are confirmed for casting

September 2020, promotional starts to come out

October 17th 2020, First episode aired

November 21st 2020, Bae Suzy wraps up filming (assuming filming wraps up around the same time as her as she is the lead)

December 6th, last episode aired

Shooting time: 2-4 months

Shooting duration before first aired episode: 1-2 months

Filming wrapped before last airing episode: around 15 days

4. Hospital playlist season 1

*only aired 1 episode pr. week

October 2019, principal photography took place

March 12th, first episode aired

Late April 2020, filming wrapped

May 28th 2020, last episode aired

Shooting time: 7 months (couldn’t find when they actually started shooting, so let’s just pretend they also filmed around October)

Shooting duration before first aired episode: 6 months

Filming wrapped before last airing episode: 1 month

5. A piece of your mind

February 7th 2020, article of the first script reading

February 13th, first photos from drama unveiled

March 23rd, first episode aired

April 8th 2020, tvN announces that 4 episodes are cut due to low ratings

April 28th, last episode aired

Shooting time: 2-4 months

Shooting duration before first aired episode: 1-2 months

Filming wrapped before last airing episode: N/A (couldn’t find the exact time but they also axed four episodes and I don't know how much that affected filming)

6. Psychopath diary

*not affected by the COVID-19 pandemic

August 2019, first script reading

November 20th, first episode aired

January 9th 2020, last episode aired

Shooting time: n/a

Shooting duration before first aired episode: 3-4 months (assuming they started shooting shortly after the first table read)

Filming wrapped before last airing episode: n/a

7. Stranger /Secret Forest season 2

* preproduced based on the information I found

January 2020, first script reading

June 20th, 2020 lead actors wrapped filming (But I only found this article that says this)

August 15th 2020, first episode aired

October 4th 2020, last episode aired

Shooting time: 6 months

Shooting duration before first episode aired: 6 months

Filming wrapped before last airing episode: 4-5 months

What does this mean?

So the drama that comes closest to Vincenzo's filming duration is Hospital Playlist, but they also did things a bit differently. According to their Wikipedia, they only aired 1 episode a week to comply with 52-hour week system and to avoid overnight filming for the cast's and crews' health. So that would extend their shooting time. They also had the same amount of shooting time as Vincenzo before the first episode aired, i.e. 6 months, but Hospital playlist was only 12 episode drama so they also had less content to fill.

The rest of these dramas has a shooting time with 6 months or less. I will say though a lot of these dramas are not action-packed (also I haven't checked the budget for any of these), so comparatively they probably have different needs when filming. The drama that comes closest in terms of action is Stranger/Secret Forest, and it's also pretty close in shooting time with only 2 month different (that's counting from the first table read though). This was however pre-produced so they wrapped up filming before the first episode even aired (if my information is correct). Also this was a season two so they were operating under a little different circumstances.

But with the exception of Stranger/Secret Forest (preproduced) and Hospital Playlist(tried to work with humane working hours), none of this drama has a 6-month filming duration before the first episode aired. In fact some of these dramas don't even exceed 6 months of filming. Meaning they had less time to shoot before the first episode aired. Their production was probably also lower and none them did CGI (although I haven't watched all of them so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) as that should also be accounted for.

So 8 months of filming is a lot to allocate to a drama, at least it's not the norm. There are other dramas that exceed that filming time that didn't make the list (Mr. Sunshine sorry too much research for at this point), but obviously that is not the standard.

Obviously I don't know how the filming was divided, how many of the episodes they had filmed before the first one aired. I don't know how many of the episode scripts were written before it aired. But I can see that even with the live-shooting, Vincenzo has some very uneven scheduling that doesn't align with how the rest of these dramas did their scheduling and airing. None of the mentioned dramas had any delays (in airing, I can't be sure about filming as some of them are probably affected by the pandemic), and yet Vincenzo did, even though they had spent more time filming before the first episode aired.

Also, most of these dramas wrapped up filming with more than a week to spare before the final airing, with It's Okay Not To Be Okay coming the closest to the airing date (with the ones where I know the date when they finished shooting), but they also only had 1-3 months of filming before the drama actually started airing so much less time than Vincenzo. And although they didn't have CGI, they did have the animations for each of the fairytales which I don't know how long it took but I can imagine it took some time.

So then I looked up another drama not by tvN but by Park Jae Bum:

Good Manager/Chief Kim

December 15, 2016 first script reading

January 25, 2017 First episode aired

March 30, 2017 Last episode aired

I couldn't find the date they finished filming, but given they only started a month before airing (honestly I felt super sorry for the cast and crew when I saw these dates), I am assuming the hit the last airing date pretty closely with filming, and that would give them 3 months of filming roughly. And they also had 20 episodes like Vincenzo.

I haven't seen this drama myself, so I can't say anything about the writing quality, but here Park Jae Bum was working under even more time pressure and was able to deliver the ending on time and as I hear, it was pretty a pretty good ending (but I haven't seen it, so feel free to refute me). And yet he couldn't do it for Vincenzo. So I do think something happened with ending, whether it was Park Jae Bum just took a long time writing it for whatever reasons, or someone/thing (be it something personal, writer's block, execs not liking the ending etc.) actually interfered and that prolonged the writing or entirely changed the ending.

Anyway this became too long, so let me just end it here.

I wish I had time to make a more comprehensive list so I could be more definite in the conclusion because obviously I can't base everything of the schedule of 8 dramas that also vastly different in production quality, genre and content.

So yeah I might have just wasted the last three-four hours making something that doesn't even make sense. But hey, at least I'm less prepared for the exams now, good use of time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#Vincenzo #so much procrastination #I don't know if this was just an excuse to not look at unity #probably #also I think this mostly also to satisfy my curiosity about the live-shooting broadcasting system in general #although there is still a lot to be learned #sometimes I have this idea that bad dramas are live-shoot and the good dramas are preproduced #but then I think of descendents of the suns and remember not all preproduced dramas are good #and if chief kim/good manager is as good as everyone says #they did a pretty good job considering the circumstances they had to work under #I have put it on my watch list #so once I'm done with exams I can watch it #and then I can tell you if I think PJB can write a good drama under immense time pressure #anyway this was probably pointless #but here it is anyway

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moved-builtintripping · 4 years

Text

Setleth AU: Weathering With You

CONTAINS SPOILERS, MENTIONED MATURE THEMES, AND A LONG READ!!

(While I’ll be assigning both Byleths in my preferred roles for them here, feel free to switch Beleth and Beles if it’s your cup of tea!!)

F!Byleth as Hodaka. 15 yrs. A highschool runaway from a rain-kissed island town who desperately seeks the shy sunlight in the city. Her life will forever change when she realizes that somebody dear to her is worth so much more than the hiding blue sky.

Seteth as Hina. ‘19’/16 yrs. His strict expression doesn’t best describe his identity as a sunshine boy. Values Flayn above all else until a certain somebody enters into (and saves) his life. Used to only clear the sky whenever his little sister excitedly asks for it.

Flayn as Nagi. 10 yrs. Lives alone with only her big brother. She seems to gain a sort of situation where most boys in her school would swoon over her charm, which she is unaware of (yet Seteth knows nothing about this). Becomes instant best friends with Byleth.

Jeralt as Suga-san/Keisuke. ?? yrs. Head of the J&A ‘news’ site (that will eventually grow into its own company). Compares Byleth (whom he hired) to his own child, who’s taken away from him by his mother-in-law. Still loves his dead wife dearly.

Leonie as Natsumi. 25 yrs. (post-timeskip design) Jeralt’s trusted and loyal apprentice and (surprisingly) niece. She’s currently job hunting, but her impatience is one factor why luck hadn’t been so kind to her. Would probably make an excellent speed cop.

M!Byleth as Moka. Jeralt’s son, who shares the same name and almost the exact same look as the girl his father hired. Despite the many phone calls they’ve shared, he still misses his father very much and wishes to see him everyday.

Cyril as Ame/Rain. A stray brown kitten who stares with his red eyes and bears a scar by the left side of his forehead. Adopted and cared by Byleth and eventually spoiled rotten by Jeralt.

Solon as Yasui. (Tomas looks) An aged and experienced police officer, who’s tasked to look for the missing highschooler and wielder of a lost gun around the flooding Tokyo.

Thales as Takai. A younger police officer who’s assigned to assist Yasui on their shared mission. Manages to get ahold of Byleth, but his grip on her had slipped more times than he hoped.

Kronya as the Dude who’s offering Hina the strip club job. (idk his name, rip) Harasses Seteth into offering him a job, a naughty one. Is stopped by Byleth and the warning shot she was threatened by her face.

Detail Changes!!

Not everything in the movie will be covered as I haven’t thought up some changes yet, especially the part when Keisuke’s child, Moka, was shown the first time and they all were just bonding. This should still be a lot already! Hopefully I can add some more and fix this eventually~

Byleth’s Yahoo!Answer username was ‘TheAshenDemon’

During her first days in Tokyo, she was silent the whole time, not even uttering a single word since she could just nod, shake her head, and bow, not even when Jeralt saved her from the crashing rainfall nearly slipping her away from the boat.

Jeralt thought he saw his own son in grave danger, so he jumped to action. He didn’t realized how panicked he must have looked until a blue-haired quiet girl (almost) blankly stared up at him. He tried to brush it off with a shrug, but he swore his heart was beating fast.

She pointed to Jeralt the beer vending machine, which she plans to give him one as an exchange for sparing her from death. Jeralt politely declines, yet she insists only to realize the price to be much higher than her budget. She bought one anyway. “I told you you didn’t have to, kid...” “*bows and sweat drops*”

During her stay around the city, Byleth had been hearing news about a killer who leaves their bloodied victims lying in alleyways, always sprouting knife wounds around different part of their body, plus they’re dismembered. Byleth didn’t know she would eventually encounter the said-killer herself.

The lost kitten Byleth found by the alleyway stared up at her, but not meowing. He hissed when she offered him some candies, but eventually he ate it gratefully. This was the first time a smile bloomed on Byleth’s face since arriving.

When she woke up from her unintentional slumber, Kronya (plus two more grinning men lingering by her side) were staring down at her. “What’re ya doing here, girlie? This is no place for a street rat like you, so I suggest ya scram… Unless you want to join the fun with me and the boys. *winks and licks lips*” “*fuCKIN SCRAMBLES UP AND RUN*”

When Seteth laid down the burger, Byleth was so shocked she stared with large eyes up at the strange kind worker above her for a long time. “… Stop staring at me. It’s going to get cold if you don’t eat that soon, and my money would go to waste.” “… *blinks*” “… Just… Eat it.*walks out*”

Byleth still hadn’t said anything, but she cried for the first time for not only satisfying her empty tummy after so long, but for also kindness to miraculously come her way in this cruel city.

During the bus ride to Jeralt’s place, she silently pitied Flayn several seats behind who’s obviously oblivious from the two young boys’ mission to capture her heart.

The moment Leonie wakes up, she thought Byleth to be a theif. As she shouted threats at the intruder (and shrieked at her for staring at her chest), Byleth nervously held up the business card Jeralt gave her.

When Leonie confirmed that Jeralt indeed invited the kid over, she quickly welcomed her with open arms as if she never shouted exactly a moment before. She introduced their home as the ‘holy sanctuary of the proud journalists’.

Leonie was clearly passionate as a J&A journalist, possibly much more than the head himself, to the point that she would insist on Byleth to read every single article they had ever written. “Alright, kiddo! What article was written on June 15, 2021??” “*shakes head in resignation with a tired look*” “SILLLY! It’s the first one you helped me out with!! The title is ‘The Magical Wonder of a Sunshine Girl’, which discusses about the blablabla--” “*cries inwardly*”

The second time Byleth sees Seteth, he was gripping his umbrella hard as he tried to quickly walk away from Kronya, who was following, cat-calling, and basically harassing him. Eventually she slyly offers him to ‘work’ with her with a promised high pay, which made Seteth abruptly halt on his tracks.

Byleth rescues Seteth from Kronya by pretending to be his girlfriend (Funnily enough, “HONEY~!” was her first ever word on Tokyo and also a foreshadowing of their future relationship). She then attempted to drag a spluttering Seteth away as she cooed, “Come on, sweetie~ We can’t miss the big day!” “B-b-b-but- I thought you’re mute-” “I said *grips Seteth’s arm too tight* Come. On.”

Infuriated for taking away her potential partner, Kronya whipped out a knife and charged at the two. Seteth instinctively grabbed Byleth’s hand and together, they ran.

They eventually reach a dead end, which Kronya took advantage of by literally jumping over the two, then pinning Byleth down. “Move a muscle and I’m going to cut your girlfriends’ throat.” “SH-SHE’S NOT MY GIRLFRIEND! AND LET GO OF HER!”

Byleth struggled to reverse their position and had been successful. She pointed the gun on Kronya and, as the rain poured, blasted a warning shot by her left ear.

When Seteth snapped out of reality, he grabbed Byleth up who was about to shoot Kronya’s forehead (whose left ear was slowly bleeding). “GET UP! GET UP! LET’S GET OUT OF HERE! WE HAVE A DATE, REMEMBER!?”

Once they retreated to the abandoned building, they argued. “Did you really think you should just- just interfere just like that!? You have a gun, for god’s sake! We’ll get in serious trouble for that, or worse go to jail!” “You ungrateful- I just saved your damn life like you saved mine-” “Plus sh-she’s a woman! We shouldn’t have been too harsh with her-”“Look, you can be a prostitute for all I care, but that woman was harassing you and that’s just wrong!” “You listen here very well: I am a grown man, and I make my own decisions!” “Yeah!? Decisions to get yourself killed by that murderer! Can’t you see she’s the recently wanted person who had been killing off men in the alleyways!?” “I…! You…! *growls and shoves towel at Byleth* *stomps away*”

Believing it to be useful, Byleth was about to pick up the gun she previously threw out of frustration, but Seteth’s voice interrupted her. “I thought about what you said, and you’re right. I’m sorry. What can I give you in return?” “Er… Your… Apology, I guess?” “That’s already given! I meant something else, more than that!” “... Hmm…”

Byleth spaced out. She couldn’t really think of anything she wanted other than... “I’d like for the sun to stick around, but *chuckles dryly* I know you can’t just magically clear the sky…” “… Actually…”

Byleth silently (and comically) screamed when Seteth prayed to draw the curtains of the clouds and make way for the blue sky and the sun to smile down on them.

This is the first time Seteth clears the sky for somebody else other than for his little sister, so he smiled. There, they shared each other’s names and age.

While trying to appear mature, Seteth awkwardly rambles about how he was old enough to make his own decisions and do adult things, basically justifying his consideration on Kronya’s offer.

“Seteth, that’s... That’s nothing to be ashamed of. There must somebody you want to protect. That’s why you’d go to lengths to commit acts like that.” “… How did you know??” “*shrugs*”

Ever since meeting Seteth, Byleth began to speak much more frequently than before, but was still overall silent. She only says more whenever she’s around her new friend.

Seteth cooked a seafood dish for his guest when Byleth visited to discuss about their new business. As Byleth observed around the house, she saw lots of cute objects such as the colored fish-shaped glass curtain. She assumed Seteth’s little sister had wanted it.

When Flayn arrived home, she beamed that finally, her big brother had made a friend! Meanwhile Byleth recognized her as the oblivious girl who had a lot of boys to answer to, so she awkwardly greeted Flayn back, who was shaking her hand too rapidly.

Flayn had been more than willing to wear the teru teru bozu mascot. Although Seteth secretly thought it looked adorable, he simply didn’t approve of it.

After their first successful job, Flayn in her mascot told Seteth, “Onii-sama, won’t you lighten up?? You’ve finally cleared the sky for all the people! Isn’t that amazing???” “F-Finally? Flayn, how could you just forget the joy of just the two of us sharing our secret…” “Stupid brother! You’re the sunshine boy here, and sunshine boys should smile just like the sun! Look at Byleth-nee! She would make the perfect sunshine girl had she got your magic instead!!”

“Byleth?” Seteth wondered out loud and looked at the said-girl a few strides ahead of them, who was grinning ear-to-ear as she admired the sun. He tried to observe her enthusiasm like Flayn suggested. He ended up mindlessly gazing at the girl even when Flayn was already demanding for his attention.

When Byleth found out that Seteth enjoys writing, she suggested him to try working for J&A to earn extra cash. “Hm… I suppose I can give it a chance... Yes, this will make a great opportunity indeed.”

When Seteth visited Byleth’s place and found out that their intention and business were all a fraud, he backed out. “This is scam! I cannot feature my literary works in a shady manner such as this!” “WHAT THE FUCK!? YOU’LL CONSIDER PROSTITUTION, BUT YOU WON’T DO THIS!?!?!?” “…Uh. Language...”

During the firework festival, while Byleth hadn’t bother to fix her hair, Seteth smoothed his as well as tied a tiny pony. He almost frowned at her messy hair the first time he saw her, but held back when he saw the businessman standing beside her (i mean can u just imagine the beauty of him wearing a kimono while byleth in a formal suit omg im crying kjasdhjkhas--)

“Mr. Jeralt.” “Yeah, kid?” “If I am to give you a present, what will you ask for?” “Hmm.... Let’s be perfectly honestly: a good ‘ol beer is all I needed to remedy my past sins... Unless you can bring my wife from the dead, then *smiles sadly* I’d appreciate that.”

When someone on Yahoo!Answer suggested (jokingly) to gift Seteth a ring for his birthday, Byleth turned to Flayn for advice instead as they began walking home together while the love-strucked boys waved her good-bye. “Well, Mother told me that you shouldn’t limit your choices of gift just because your friend was born with the body they have. For example, even when society isn’t entirely ready to accept it, there are men who enjoy wearing dresses!” “.... OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH, SENPAIIIIII”

The next day, Byleth spent the entire day checking on every corner of the nearest mall to find the perfect ring, only to return empty-handed, exhausted, and bummed out. When an oblivious and excited Leonie shoved one of their old magazine copies (back when they could still afford printing their issues) on Byleth, she retreated to her room for the older girl to leave her alone.

Still tired, she flipped one of the pages and saw an article about a ring that can boost the wearer’s creativity and motivation to write many promising stories with the help of jewel’s powers. (aka, the ring in canon) Amused but resigned, Byleth shrugged and decided.

Byleth spent a much longer time looking for the tiny shop, which only had one branch, than looking for ring in the said-shop itself.

Meanwhile, police officers Solon and Thales had captured Kronya. Both are interrogating the criminal for what exactly happened when the missing girl, the one both officials were looking for, threatened to shoot Kronya.

Leonie nearly punched Byleth for accidentally staring at her chest again as the she struggled to sink in the information that Jeralt and Leonie are related and absolutely not 'lovers’.

Byleth lend her jacket (aka, her cloak in canon) to Seteth when he was nearly whisked away by the wind.

When the police were questioning the runaway kids, Seteth tried to ward them off with a slight glare all the while remaining polite. “Our family will continue to worry if we remain longer in the rain, so if you will please let us carry on...”

“Happy Birthday, Seteth!” “*inwardly: OH MY GOD IT’S A RING IT’S A RING HOLY SHIT DOES SHE ACTUALLY WANNA-- NO NON ON THAT CANNOT BE IT, THIS IS TOO SOON-*” “This ring is supposed to help you write good, boosts your creativity and all. Not that I believe it, nor care, but I hope you like it~” “.........................................................Oh.”

“I... *clears throat* Th-thank you. I-I appreciate it.” “What’s with that stupid look though? Did you really think it was a proposal? Seriously, no way. I doubt it... *lies down, stares at ceiling, blushes* Unless you wanna...” “W-W-WHAT!? NONSENSE!! AND EVEN IF IT IS, YOU AND I BOTH KNOW VERY WELL THAT WE ARE TOO YOUNG FOR- FOR THAT!!” “You don’t say, you old geezer ;)”

“But Byleth... What are you doing? Oh no. No, this cannot be. I was even fully prepared... But if you were to part me with a gift, I’m going to leave with regrets...” “Regrets? Leave? What’re you talking about?” “Don’t you understand!? Back when we were walking our way home and you saw my skin? Don’t you see- *shuffles for robe*” “OH MY GOD, WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU PERVERT!?” “*reveals chest, skin magically distorted* I’M DYING!” “...Huh?”

Like her first days in Tokyo, Byleth didn’t speak the entire time when she and Flayn were caught and escorted to the police car. When Thales mentioned Seteth’s real age to Byleth (16), Byleth shouted, “SIXTEEN!?” much to the police’s shock since they thought the girl was mute or refused to ever speak.

“*inwardly: ... Seteth, you damn liar.*”

Flayn’s borrowed disguise from her male friends was a cap, hoodie and baggy pants. “Flayn, I thought he was your ex! What’s he doing here stealing you away from me?” “Ex? Stealing? Whatever do you mean; I thought you two are wonderful friends! And please hurry up!”

“I’D MAKE AN EXCELLENT SPEED COP!!” “... No, you won’t.” “I HEARD THAT!!”

Jeralt always compared Byleth to his own son due to how dangerously similar they looked and acted. He tried not to see her as a sort of child to him since the girl was not his son at all. However, Jeralt does end up acting like a father-figure to her, especially when he saw Thales pin her down as she repeatedly and desperately shouted her loved one’s name. Who knew that quiet kid had it in her to fall in love, just like Jeralt himself?

As Flayn ran towards Solon to pin him down, her cap flew away and her hood fell to reveal her long green hair. “It’s not your fault, Byleth-nee... Neither of us has foreseen this... But I will always trust you no matter what... SO PLEASE! BRING MY DEAR BROTHER BACK!!”

While Seteth did jump to reach for Byleth out of instinct (and love, coughcough), he tried to pry away from her as they fell no matter how much she desperately confesses her love for him. “The people would no longer have sunshine! Isn’t that what everybody wants, you included!? It’s why we even made that business! It’s best I leave this world for all of your sake!!”

In her fury, Byleth reached out to Seteth with more effort than ever all the while muttering, “Come here- Come here you stupid old geezer--” When they finally held hands, she slapped him hard.

“DON’T YOU GET IT, YOU DUMB IDIOT!? FLAYN AND I DID NOT GOT ARRESTED, NARROWLY ESCAPED, HAD TO BE RESCUED BY LEONIE, RAN ALL THE WAY TO THAT BLASTED BUILDING, ALMOST STOPPED BY JERALT, AND NEARLY GOT SHOT BY FOUR DAMN PEOPLE TO RESCUE YOU FOR NOTHING! SETETH, I LOVE YOU!”

“*giggles* You look gross when you cry.” “Shut it, Byleth. Seriously, at a time like this... Let’s... Let’s just go home.” “Yeah...”

When Byleth returned to Tokyo, she had her hair dyed into light green since she felt like it (and reminded her of someone dear to her).

Jeralt happily showed Byleth the photo of Flayn (who barely grew an inch), his son Byleth (who’s almost reaching Flayn’s height), and Leonie, (wearing a cop’s uniform imean they should have seriously made natsumi a speed cop too, jeezus).

When she and Seteth reunited, his first words to her (other than, “Byleth!”) were, “Your hair...” “*grins* I know what you’re thinking, it doesn’t suit me.” “No, not at all. *touches Byleth’s hair with the hand wearing the ring* You look beautiful.” “*tries to pout, but melts into a winder grin* Not before?” “You always have been.”

Yay, it’s done!! I’ve had this AU for a long time now actually, but only got to post it now that the movie’s out on the west!! Now watch me ignore this shit for the next years, rip

Again, every detail in the movie isn’t covered here since I haven’t seen their potential setleth au differences yet, but the overall plot remains the same! Note that I haven’t actually finished the other routes yet other than the beagle one, so there might be a lotta ooc stuff here. Maybe when I’m done with them all, ima get back to this and fix it and add some more.

As you can see, I made their dynamic more on the teasing side unlike hodaka&hina’s, mainly because i interpret byleth to be playfully sly and ofc seteth’s distrust on her on the start of the game. I personally enjoyed them to be a bickering old couple, so they’re like that xD

Honestly, i’m torn in between assigning rhea as either the two green peas’ mother or jeralt’s mother-in-law. the former for obvious reasons, the latter since rhea sorts of ‘hides’ away the little kid from jeralt like in canon, but for another reason.

As for the taki and mitsuha cameo, I feel like that would be a completely different thing, so I didn’t include them here. But for sometime now, I’ve been imagining them as ferdinand & dorothea, manuela being their okudera. but this au isn’t house biased (leonie’s there cause of jeralt), so i didn’t include them.

Huge thanks to my sister for helping me shape this au!! Actually half of these ideas belongs to her, even more perhaps. Hope I can link ya’ll to her accounts once she’s done fixing ‘em so ya’ll get see how much of a genius she is!! <3

I wanna make a manga/fanfic outta this one day, but for now, here’s the idea compilation of my setleth au nobody asked for!! Thank you for reading!! :D

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amtushinfosolutionspage · 6 years

Text

DeMar DeRozan’s Loyalty to the Toronto Raptors Was Admirable

“Don’t worry, I got us…”

For the last eight years, the immortal tweet from DeMar DeRozan in response to Chris Bosh leaving for the Miami Heat has been a comfort for Toronto Raptors fans. In the moment, it seemed too bold a claim. DeRozan, coming off a shaky rookie season and then only 21 years old, did not yet look the part of franchise player. The confidence was appreciated; the degree to which it would ring true was unexpected.

The Raptors have traversed a great distance in the time since. There were some painful years in the immediate aftermath, and as they ran their course, DeRozan’s slow ascension was one of the lone bright spots. There was Andrea Bargnani, Rudy Gay, a number of ill-fated or short-sighted trades, a coaching change, and a five-year stretch without a playoff berth. DeRozan offered reprieve with Slam Dunk Contest theatrics, improved shooting and ball-handling, and glimpses of an All-Star future, the hint of a spark that if nothing else, the Raptors had a piece to keep building with and around.

When Masai Ujiri came aboard and flipped Bargnani and Gay, then had a Kyle Lowry deal fall apart, DeRozan had his best opportunity yet to deliver on his promise. What has come since is something maybe only DeRozan believed possible back in 2010: He truly did have the franchise and the city covered. First, there was an All-Star berth in 2014, his first. Later that year, the Raptors would make the playoffs for the first time since 2008, helping an expanding Toronto basketball culture reach what to that point was a crescendo, DeRozan’s promise and unlikely ascent standing as the perfect avatar for the team’s We The North marketing campaign built on collective doubt and being the other. If DeRozan wasn’t Toronto before, he became it at that moment, embodying the growing rabidity of the city’s appetite for the sport.

The years that have followed have been the best in franchise history. DeRozan has made three more All-Star teams, two All-NBA teams (including Second Team this past season), earned down-ballot MVP votes, and helped lead the Raptors to five consecutive playoff appearances for the first time ever. There was an Eastern Conference Finals trip, a franchise-record 52-point game, countless posters, beautiful moments with Lowry in one of the league’s best friendships, and a downright assault on the Raptors’ all-time record books. DeRozan ranks first in Raptors history in games, minutes, points, and Player of the Week and Player of the Month honors, second in steals, third in assists, third in Win Shares, fifth in rebounds, first in playoff games and points, and has played more seasons with the Raptors than anyone else at nine.

There have been times where that impact became somewhat divisive. Advanced stats and specifically on-off numbers haven’t always been as kind to DeRozan as counting stats, and the fan base has occasionally tried to cut off its nose to spite its face debating DeRozan and Lowry, while Stats Twitter, until recently, held DeRozan up as a relic. His game is imperfect and a bit outdated, and his defense has always proved a problem come playoff time. He has not been the “best” Raptor during this stretch, nor does his remarkable peak match that of Vince Carter.

At the same time, he’s pretty safely had the “best” Raptors career, and he has been their most important player during this run in a larger sense, given his commitment to the team and how that helped secure other commitments, his commitment to improving and his role in culture-setting, and his status as the face of the franchise and the fan base. He has become a spokesperson for mental health advocacy and a community leader, and he played while dealing with heavy off-court burdens this year. He’s never not been there. All of that stuff matters.

When he became an unrestricted free agent, DeRozan took no meetings, quickly re-signing and claiming “I am Toronto” at the press conference that followed. When recently yelled at on the street to join his hometown Los Angeles Lakers, he replied “hell naw.” At every turn, DeRozan has been steadfast that Toronto is home and that he hoped to be the rare player to spend an entire career with one organization. He was not promised that—he was ineligible for a no-trade clause when his contract came up—but it at least seemed likely he could be the first career Raptor, the franchise’s first home-grown and long-term star, perhaps even the first jersey to be honored in the rafters of Scotiabank Arena (assuming Carter, who left on far more acrimonious terms, does not beat him to it).

https://sports.vice.com/en_ca/embed/article/8qy834/vince-carter-should-be-the-first-raptor-to-have-his-number-retired?utm_source=stylizedembed_sports.vice.com&utm_campaign=8xbgpb&site=sports

Because through everything, there has been DeRozan. He’s been the biggest constant for a franchise that until recently was identified by its consistent tumult; he’s been the one player to stay for a franchise that was always a place people wanted to leave; he’s been the most or second-most important player as the Raptors redefined themselves from perennial afterthought to legitimate high-end organization. The growth in Toronto is not singularly credited to DeRozan, but it’s also inextricable from his own individual growth.

That’s all in the past now, as DeRozan’s career will continue in San Antonio after Toronto completed a blockbuster trade with the Spurs on Wednesday.

The Raptors shipped DeRozan, Jakob Poeltl, and a 2019 first-round pick for Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green. In strictly basketball terms, it is a good, if risky deal. Leonard at his best is a top-five player and was in the discussion as the league’s second-most important player behind LeBron James. He is an all-world defender, one of the best perimeter defenders of the modern NBA, and he is an efficient scorer on or off the ball. It is an upgrade, and that the Raptors made the deal without having to include OG Anunoby, Pascal Siakam, or a valuable 2021 pick is somewhat shocking.

This is not playing out strictly in basketball terms, though. Leave aside questions about whether Leonard will report, whether he’s healthy, and whether he’ll walk at the end of 2018-19. The Raptors surely weighed those risks, and the trade is structured such that Toronto didn’t sacrifice too much of its long-term future to roll the dice. It’s messy on the Toronto side alone.

DeRozan is reportedly quite upset, as the Instagram story of him and his brother would both suggest. Multiple reporters have indicated that DeRozan was told as recently as Las Vegas Summer League that he would not be traded, and him feeling slighted and lied to is entirely understandable. Players know well at this point that the idea of loyalty in sports is an illusion. Teams will trade players on their whims, and players have little recourse. Similarly, players should never be questioned for leaving or exploring options in free agency. The loyalty DeRozan has shown the Raptors is admirable, and it is the exception rather than the norm. The Raptors trading him is understandable, but if it’s true that he was misled, that’s a terrible look for an organization that has built up its reputation and cache around the league in large part because of a run that was made possible by DeRozan. It’s always difficult to navigate the trade of a player who committed to a franchise; it’s more clear-cut if the player was done wrong by.

If that’s the case, DeRozan unquestionably deserved better. He’d earned honesty, at least. The franchise can’t be beholden to his commitment if a trade is for the good of the team now and down the line, but for a player who as vociferously put on for the city and the organization like DeRozan did, grace was warranted.

In addressing the idea of a difficult DeRozan trade earlier in the offseason, I’d more or less come to terms with the idea, on the condition that a deal does somewhat right by him and offers a return commensurate with letting a player of his off-court importance go. The latter is satisfied here, and San Antonio under Gregg Popovich could be a good fit for the next stage of his career. Considering what he’s given to the team, it sounds like it could have been handled better. There’s an organizational risk at the player or agent level to handling a star player poorly, and more importantly, DeRozan has earned that kind of respect.

From a personal perspective, DeRozan will be missed. To pull back the curtain a bit: I’ve been writing at least casually since 2008, and my first ever post at Raptors Republic was an analysis of DeRozan immediately after the Raptors drafted him (after which I purchased his Compton High jersey). Watching him turn from a raw player and immensely shy teenager into a legitimate All-Star, an outspoken player, and an advocate for mental health has been remarkable. Getting to speak with him about designing his own Kobe AD Compton player exclusive was one of my favorite stories I’ve written. He’s always been a consummate professional, and his consistent desire to improve himself is a great example inside and outside of sport. There is an entire generation of new Raptors fans who look at DeRozan as a favorite player and as an extension of the city’s basketball identity.

That DeRozan is no longer a Raptor will feel weird for some time. His first visit back to Toronto as a member of the Spurs will be awkward, and a cause to celebrate what he meant to the franchise. It’s a little strange, I guess, to be eulogizing the career of a 28-year-old still in the middle of his prime, but DeRozan’s impact on the Raptors warrants it. Ironically, the opportunity to make an all-in push for a player like Leonard, the ability to offer a compelling package, and a situation where it all made sense is only possible if DeRozan becomes the player he’s become and gets the Raptors as far as he has. That the Raptors might take the next step without him will take some getting used to, because DeRozan has been Toronto for so long.

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports CA.

DeMar DeRozan’s Loyalty to the Toronto Raptors Was Admirable syndicated from https://australiahoverboards.wordpress.com

0 notes

flauntpage · 6 years

Text

DeMar DeRozan's Loyalty to the Toronto Raptors Was Admirable

"Don’t worry, I got us…"

The Raptors have traversed a great distance in the time since. There were some painful years in the immediate aftermath, and as they ran their course, DeRozan's slow ascension was one of the lone bright spots. There was Andrea Bargnani, Rudy Gay, a number of ill-fated or short-sighted trades, a coaching change, and a five-year stretch without a playoff berth. DeRozan offered reprieve with Slam Dunk Contest theatrics, improved shooting and ball-handling, and glimpses of an All-Star future, the hint of a spark that if nothing else, the Raptors had a piece to keep building with and around.

When Masai Ujiri came aboard and flipped Bargnani and Gay, then had a Kyle Lowry deal fall apart, DeRozan had his best opportunity yet to deliver on his promise. What has come since is something maybe only DeRozan believed possible back in 2010: He truly did have the franchise and the city covered. First, there was an All-Star berth in 2014, his first. Later that year, the Raptors would make the playoffs for the first time since 2008, helping an expanding Toronto basketball culture reach what to that point was a crescendo, DeRozan's promise and unlikely ascent standing as the perfect avatar for the team's We The North marketing campaign built on collective doubt and being the other. If DeRozan wasn't Toronto before, he became it at that moment, embodying the growing rabidity of the city's appetite for the sport.

The years that have followed have been the best in franchise history. DeRozan has made three more All-Star teams, two All-NBA teams (including Second Team this past season), earned down-ballot MVP votes, and helped lead the Raptors to five consecutive playoff appearances for the first time ever. There was an Eastern Conference Finals trip, a franchise-record 52-point game, countless posters, beautiful moments with Lowry in one of the league's best friendships, and a downright assault on the Raptors' all-time record books. DeRozan ranks first in Raptors history in games, minutes, points, and Player of the Week and Player of the Month honors, second in steals, third in assists, third in Win Shares, fifth in rebounds, first in playoff games and points, and has played more seasons with the Raptors than anyone else at nine.

There have been times where that impact became somewhat divisive. Advanced stats and specifically on-off numbers haven't always been as kind to DeRozan as counting stats, and the fan base has occasionally tried to cut off its nose to spite its face debating DeRozan and Lowry, while Stats Twitter, until recently, held DeRozan up as a relic. His game is imperfect and a bit outdated, and his defense has always proved a problem come playoff time. He has not been the "best" Raptor during this stretch, nor does his remarkable peak match that of Vince Carter.

At the same time, he's pretty safely had the "best" Raptors career, and he has been their most important player during this run in a larger sense, given his commitment to the team and how that helped secure other commitments, his commitment to improving and his role in culture-setting, and his status as the face of the franchise and the fan base. He has become a spokesperson for mental health advocacy and a community leader, and he played while dealing with heavy off-court burdens this year. He's never not been there. All of that stuff matters.

When he became an unrestricted free agent, DeRozan took no meetings, quickly re-signing and claiming "I am Toronto" at the press conference that followed. When recently yelled at on the street to join his hometown Los Angeles Lakers, he replied "hell naw." At every turn, DeRozan has been steadfast that Toronto is home and that he hoped to be the rare player to spend an entire career with one organization. He was not promised that—he was ineligible for a no-trade clause when his contract came up—but it at least seemed likely he could be the first career Raptor, the franchise's first home-grown and long-term star, perhaps even the first jersey to be honored in the rafters of Scotiabank Arena (assuming Carter, who left on far more acrimonious terms, does not beat him to it).

Because through everything, there has been DeRozan. He's been the biggest constant for a franchise that until recently was identified by its consistent tumult; he's been the one player to stay for a franchise that was always a place people wanted to leave; he's been the most or second-most important player as the Raptors redefined themselves from perennial afterthought to legitimate high-end organization. The growth in Toronto is not singularly credited to DeRozan, but it's also inextricable from his own individual growth.

That's all in the past now, as DeRozan's career will continue in San Antonio after Toronto completed a blockbuster trade with the Spurs on Wednesday.

The Raptors shipped DeRozan, Jakob Poeltl, and a 2019 first-round pick for Kawhi Leonard and Danny Green. In strictly basketball terms, it is a good, if risky deal. Leonard at his best is a top-five player and was in the discussion as the league's second-most important player behind LeBron James. He is an all-world defender, one of the best perimeter defenders of the modern NBA, and he is an efficient scorer on or off the ball. It is an upgrade, and that the Raptors made the deal without having to include OG Anunoby, Pascal Siakam, or a valuable 2021 pick is somewhat shocking.

This is not playing out strictly in basketball terms, though. Leave aside questions about whether Leonard will report, whether he's healthy, and whether he'll walk at the end of 2018-19. The Raptors surely weighed those risks, and the trade is structured such that Toronto didn't sacrifice too much of its long-term future to roll the dice. It's messy on the Toronto side alone.

DeRozan is reportedly quite upset, as the Instagram story of him and his brother would both suggest. Multiple reporters have indicated that DeRozan was told as recently as Las Vegas Summer League that he would not be traded, and him feeling slighted and lied to is entirely understandable. Players know well at this point that the idea of loyalty in sports is an illusion. Teams will trade players on their whims, and players have little recourse. Similarly, players should never be questioned for leaving or exploring options in free agency. The loyalty DeRozan has shown the Raptors is admirable, and it is the exception rather than the norm. The Raptors trading him is understandable, but if it's true that he was misled, that's a terrible look for an organization that has built up its reputation and cache around the league in large part because of a run that was made possible by DeRozan. It's always difficult to navigate the trade of a player who committed to a franchise; it's more clear-cut if the player was done wrong by.

If that's the case, DeRozan unquestionably deserved better. He'd earned honesty, at least. The franchise can't be beholden to his commitment if a trade is for the good of the team now and down the line, but for a player who as vociferously put on for the city and the organization like DeRozan did, grace was warranted.

In addressing the idea of a difficult DeRozan trade earlier in the offseason, I'd more or less come to terms with the idea, on the condition that a deal does somewhat right by him and offers a return commensurate with letting a player of his off-court importance go. The latter is satisfied here, and San Antonio under Gregg Popovich could be a good fit for the next stage of his career. Considering what he's given to the team, it sounds like it could have been handled better. There's an organizational risk at the player or agent level to handling a star player poorly, and more importantly, DeRozan has earned that kind of respect.

From a personal perspective, DeRozan will be missed. To pull back the curtain a bit: I've been writing at least casually since 2008, and my first ever post at Raptors Republic was an analysis of DeRozan immediately after the Raptors drafted him (after which I purchased his Compton High jersey). Watching him turn from a raw player and immensely shy teenager into a legitimate All-Star, an outspoken player, and an advocate for mental health has been remarkable. Getting to speak with him about designing his own Kobe AD Compton player exclusive was one of my favorite stories I've written. He's always been a consummate professional, and his consistent desire to improve himself is a great example inside and outside of sport. There is an entire generation of new Raptors fans who look at DeRozan as a favorite player and as an extension of the city's basketball identity.

That DeRozan is no longer a Raptor will feel weird for some time. His first visit back to Toronto as a member of the Spurs will be awkward, and a cause to celebrate what he meant to the franchise. It's a little strange, I guess, to be eulogizing the career of a 28-year-old still in the middle of his prime, but DeRozan's impact on the Raptors warrants it. Ironically, the opportunity to make an all-in push for a player like Leonard, the ability to offer a compelling package, and a situation where it all made sense is only possible if DeRozan becomes the player he's become and gets the Raptors as far as he has. That the Raptors might take the next step without him will take some getting used to, because DeRozan has been Toronto for so long.

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports CA.

DeMar DeRozan's Loyalty to the Toronto Raptors Was Admirable published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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