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So tell me if I understand this correctly. The controversy is that a fan artist, in no way affiliated with the original game, made bad Doki Doki Literature fan art where they made the teenage girl characters look mannish?
This truly seems like a tempest in a teapot to me.
Like, whenever I learn about a controversy on any social media site that I'm not on (and that's basically all of them), I always feel like I'm getting news from a parallel world slightly worse than ours. Is this seriously a controversy? Was the fan artist particularly well known or influential before this? Why should literally anyone not involved in the flame war on Tik Tok care one iota about this?
That's why I called a mise en abyme.
The idea is that it reflects greater trends.
The artist in question has about 400,000 followers, so, more than BAP on X.
My limited understand is that Tik Tok followers are different from followers on older sites like Youtube or X/Twitter. I remember hearing some influencer on a podcast or radio show say that Tik Tok follower counts are so inflated that advertisers and brand deals had to adjust in response.
I suspect a lot of Tik Tok followers are bots or fakes, more so than on other sites.
But even so. I just feel like going after a random fan artist feels like such small potatoes for the culture war in general.
Like, what does this battle accomplish in the larger culture war one way or the other? There were always going to be bad artists who made cringey art, and tried to defend it in social justice terms. Why feed the toxoplasma and take up arms in this case? When it's not even the actual video game studio doing the culture war thing, I don't see what anyone is hoping to accomplish here.
I just thought it was funny how people are gas-lighting about the art looking like men. It says something about human nature and the culture war more broadly.
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