So I went back and listened to the Rekieta stream with Shane, and it got me thinking about how Shane ended up involved in this in the first place. Looking at his twitter history, he wasn't a prolific tweeter before this year. In 2018, he only had 46 tweets for the entire year, 2 tweets in 2017, and 9 in 2016, and overwhelmingly he was tweeting about politics with some mild TDS. As far as anime/convention related tweets, there's one in 2016 that says, "Because they envy A-Kon?
" (no @s or replies to tie it to a specific thread). Given that any conversations he was tagged in would still show up in the search even if he deleted his tweets, it seems safe to say that he really wasn't involved in the social aspect of the Anime Convention scenes until this year.
So what got him involved? His earliest twitter conversation w/ Ron Toye was on Feb 20, earliest twitter conversation w/ MarzGurl was Feb 16 (now deleted), earliest twitter conversation w/ Jamie Marchi is Feb 10 (now deleted), earliest twitter conversation w/ Monica Rial was Feb 6, replying to Monica Rial’s allegation that Vic had harassed her. In reference, Nick’s first stream on the Vic Mignogna situation was Feb 15th. He was involved in some Discord group that helped him in the background during the livestream, so he was involved behind the scenes somehow with someone(s).
I have a theory. It may make me exceptional. It may mean I really ought to take a break from all of this for the good of my mental health, but...
On Nick's stream there were claims Shane made:
- He’s seen and even created contracts for people involved with conventions.
- He’s seen Funimation contracts.
- He’s been to court over issues involving contracts and won.
There's no reason, due to his lack of involvement with Funi for him ever to have seen one of those contracts. But... If his claim about winning in court over contract issues is true OR if he's claimed it was true loudly enough that people believed him, and if Monica, Jamie, and anyone else involved wanted to check on the legality of their scheme to pressure Vic out of his job and his convention contracts, it's possible that they would have gone to someone they believed knew how to do it legally, or at least in a way that appeared legal enough for them to win in court.
What if Shane was giving them legal advice on how to execute their attack on Vic without having it come back to bite them? It's really interesting to see what Shane does in the Nick stream. First, he's fishing for information. The cabal needs to know if Vic is really suing - thus ruining their schemes - or if this guy on the internet is just a blow-hard trying to stir up trouble. When Nick admits that he's just speculating about everything, that gives the cabal confidence that their plan isn't totally ruined yet, so when Shane starts going off the rails debating points of law that he doesn't know anything about, they rein him back in and start trying to get Nick to buy into the plan they've been trying to get Vic to accept in secret - he needs to take certain steps they lay out to be allowed back, piece by piece, into the industry. Of course, they're going to control everything for him on that front, so if he ever steps out of line, they'll ruin him again. Listening to Shane talk about his own, personal re-invitation to Nomakai, it sounds exactly like what that group was trying to get Vic to agree to - there's going to be a set of rules above and beyond the rules for everyone on the convention scene, and if he agrees to that, they'll start tossing him some bread crumbs.
Does anyone know when people started archiving Shane's tweets? He was really off the radar before Nick's stream, so it seems like all the things he deleted that night are probably gone for good, but I would really like to know what he thought was bad enough that he didn't want the opposition to see it.
archive.fo
