as of 8/3, the most recently updated version of this post is here (it's a reblog of this exact post with more info added)
as a lot of you know, limbus company recently fired its CG illustrator for being a feminist, at 11 pm, via phone call, after a bunch of misogynists walked into the office earlier that day and demanded she be fired. on top of this, as per korean fans, her firing went against labor laws---in korea, you must have your dismissal in writing.
the korean fandom on twitter is, understandably, going scorched earth on project moon due to this. there's a lot currently going on to protest the decision, so i'm posting a list here of what's going on for those who want to limit their time on elon musk's $44 billion midlife crisis impulse purchase website (if you are on twitter, domuk is a good person to follow, as they translate important updates to english). a lot of the links are in korean, but generally they play nicely with machine translators. this should be current as of 8/2.
Statements condemning the decision have been issued by The Gyeonggi Youth Union and IT Union.
A press conference at the Gyeonggido Assembly will occur on 8/3, with lawmakers of the Gyeonggi province (where Project Moon is based) in attendance. This appears driven by the leader of the Gyeonggi Youth Union.
The vice chairman of the IT union--who has a good amount of experience with labor negotiations like these--has expressed strong support for the artist and is working to get media coverage due to the ongoing feminist witch hunts in the gaming industry. Project Moon isn't union to my knowledge, but he's noted that he's taken on nonunion companies such as Netmarble (largest mobile game dev in South Korea) by getting the issue in front of the National Assembly (Korea's congress).
Articles on the incident published in The Daily Labor News, Korean Daily, multiple articles on Hankyoreh (one of which made it to the print edition), and other news outlets.
Segments about the termination on the MBN 7 o' clock news and MBC's morning news
Comments by Youth Union leaders about looking into a loan made to Project Moon via Devsisters Ventures, a venture capital firm. Tax money from Gyeonggi province was invested in Devsisters in 2017, and in 2021, Devsisters gave money to Project Moon. The Gyeonggi Youth Union is asking why hard-earned tax money was indirectly given to a company who violates ESG (environmental, social and governance) principles.
Almost nonstop signage truck protests outside Project Moon's physical office during business hours until 8/22 or the company makes a statement. This occurs alongside a coordinated hashtag campaign to get the issue trending on Twitter in Korea. The signage campaign was crowd-funded in about 3 hours.
A full boycott of the Limbus Company app, on both mobile and PC (steam) platforms. Overseas fans are highly encouraged to participate, regardless if whether they're F2P or not. Not opening the app at all is arguably the biggest thing any one person can do to protest the decision, as the app logs the number of accounts that log on daily. For a new gacha such as Limbus, a high number of F2P daily active users, but a small number of paying users is often preferable to having a smaller userbase but more paying users. If the company sees the number of daily users remain stable, they will likely decide to wait out any backlash rather than apologize.
Digging up verified reviews from previous employees regarding the company's poor management practices
Due to the firing, the Leviathan artist has posted about poor working conditions when making the story. As per a bilingual speaker, they were working on a storyboard revision, and thought 'if I ran into the street right now and got hit by a car and died, I wouldn't have to keep working.' They contacted Project Moon because they didn't want their work to be like that, and proposed changes to serialization/reduction in amount of work per picture/to build up a buffer of finished images (they did not have any buffer while working on Leviathan to my knowledge). They were shut out, and had to suck it up and accept the situation.
Hamhampangpang has a 'shrine' section of the restaurant for fans to leave fan-created merch and other items. They also allow the fans to take this merch back if they can prove it's theirs. Fans are now doing just that.
To boost all of the above, a large number of Korean fanartists with thousands of followers have deleted their works and/or converted their accounts from fanart accounts to accounts supporting the protests. Many of them are bilingual, and they're where I got the majority of this information.
[note 1: there's a targeted english-language disinformation campaign by the website that started the hate mob. i have read the artist's tweets with machine translation, and they're talked about in the second hankyoreh article linked above: nowhere does she express any transphobic or similarly awful beliefs. likewise, be wary of any claims that she supported anything whose description makes you raise eyebrows--those claims are likely in reference to megalia, a korean feminist movement. for information on that, i'd recommend the NPR/BBC articles below and this google drive link of english-language scholarly papers on them. for the love of god don't get your information about a feminist movement from guys going on witch hunts for feminists.]
[note 2: i've seen a couple people argue that the firing was for the physical safety of the employees, citing the kyoani incident in japan. as per this korean fan, most fans there strongly do not believe this was the case. we have english-translated transcripts of the meeting between the mob and project moon; the threats the mob was making were to......brand project moon as a feminist company online. yes, really. male korean gamers aren't normal about feminism, and there's been an ongoing witch hunt for feminists in the industry since about 2016, something you see noted in both the labor union statements. both NPR and the BBC this phenomenon to gamergate, and i'd say it's a pretty apt comparison.]
let me know if anything needs correction or if anything should be added.
4K notes
·
View notes
atsushi seeing dazai as a good guy, actually (underneath all the annoying/bizarre antics) is always interesting to me because i think it can come across as naive, sometimes, because we know that dazai is generally a pretty terrible human being with a broken moral compass and a body count in the hundreds so we’re like damn, really atsushi? this guy?
but atsushi doesn’t have the perspective of the audience, and he hasn’t personally seen that side of dazai. he hasn’t seen how dazai acted to akutagawa how akutagawa acted to kyouka (ah. the cycle of abuse). atsushi knows that dazai is ex-mafia, that he’s capable and willing to do terrible things, but he doesn’t know the specifics or the extent, nor has he seen any of it personally.
atsushi has never been an altruistic hero. he’s never been determined to save everyone. kunikida told atsushi that the ada weren’t heroes and that they can’t be heroes when he was trying to save kyouka, but atsushi wasn’t really trying to be a hero. he wasn’t driven by some moral need to save people, or even by simple compassion. there was compassion, but part of why atsushi needed to save kyouka was because he saw himself in her. he could not see his own worth in himself, could not see if he had a “right” to live, to exist, to take up space. he saw himself mirrored in kyouka, and he was compelled to rescue her largely because of his own sense of self depended on proving that people like them could get second chances.
atsushi does not want people to die, but he’s willing to overlook things that people have done in the past if there is a personal connection, if he can relate to them. he sees akutagawa initially simply as violent, as a danger to himself, and responds defensively to akutagawa’s hatred of him, but he only starts to truly dislike him once he realizes his connection with kyouka and sees him as kyouka’s abuser. he didn’t like akutagawa, because he’s obviously not going to like someone who is hacking off his limbs and trying to kill him, but his initial reaction is more fear than hatred. he doesn’t want to fight back, he wants to stay the hell away from this weirdo. after meeting kyouka though, atsushi’s perception shifts. he begins to actively dislike him, and when akutagawa pushes, atsushi has to push back.
it’s only in season 3 when atsushi starts to realize that akutagawa is not too dissimilar from him and that perception shifts. akutagawa is as haunted by dazai as atsushi is by the headmaster. they’ve been able to work together before that, but the way they work together shifts after that revelation from “we’re beating up the same guy and are kind of weirdly in sync accidentally” to actually melding their abilities in an act of trust and intentional cooperation. he tells akutagawa to stop killing people. he might not be able to accept someone who is actively and currently a murderer, but he is able to overlook it if it’s in the past. he did it with kyouka, he did it with akutagawa and he did it with dazai.
this post took something of a detour, but the point is that atsushi sees things through the lens of his own abuse. dazai is a representation of escape from that life of abuse, giving him a place to live and a people to belong to. atsushi’s entire life changed when he pulled dazai from that river. and sure, maybe he’s frequently getting stabbed or having a limb chopped off these days, but he’s also been able to learn how to be more confident, and has started to accept himself and his past and move forward with it. he’s started to accept the tiger and to believe that he does have a right to live, that he does have worth.
not only that, but dazai tries to be there for atsushi. dazai is not necessarily an empathetic or even sympathetic person, but he’s trying to be good and to be on the side that saves people. he’s the one who finds atsushi when the headmaster is killed, and while he’s not comforting, what he says makes atsushi feel that he has permission to grieve this man who hurt him the way that he needs to. atsushi sees dazai as a decent guy, actually, because dazai is decent to him. it doesn’t matter to him that dazai has killed before, because that’s in the past and it’s disconnected from him. in the here and now, in what atsushi can see, dazai is someone who has helped him. dazai is someone who is on his side, in a way that no adult had ever been in his life.
589 notes
·
View notes