So Justin Wong has always been a dick. I knew this, I don't like them, but I keep my distance for the most part because it doesn't have anything to do with me and doesn't affect me. My friends and I are part of a group called the Fraud Krew where we put on tournaments and try to grow scenes for lesser known games, as well as me doing youtube content and tweeting about these games to raise awareness. One of those games is Street Fighter The Movie Arcade Edition.
It is a fascinating game that despite it's jank has a lot going on under the hood, and we have spent literal years breaking it down, understanding it, and fostering a community for it. It's our champion game. For years we have been lugging an arcade machine on our own dime to Magfest, bringing setups to Xanadu, Beast in the East, and anywhere else we could. Dealing with explaining to people that AE is different from the console version, and sitting down and teaching people the game.
When corona hit we started doing online events, and have been building a following. A lot of the online things like streaming and how to even use twitter and whatnot I have self-taught in service of the goal of bringing light to these games. We have members in our community from other countries who have been learning English to be able to share tech and stuff with the SFTM community. We have people who say it's now their favorite game. We have had a person or two even say that their enjoyment with this game is what helped them start understanding fighting games as a whole and gave them the desire to explore other games. It's been doing a lot of good for a lot of people.
During coronavirus when Wong couldn't travel to events or whatever, he pivoted to this angle where he enters and wins 100 online tournaments. Somebody foolishly invited Wong to one of our bi-weekly events where we were playing Avengers in Galactic Storm and SFTM, where he did not care. He entered, asked who the easiest character to win with was, ignored the rest of it, and competed. He was restreaming his matches, talking shit the entire time about the game he didn't understand or care about, and then later cut that up into a youtube video that made us all look very bad.
We were all upset but we just continued to mind our own business for the most part. This past weekend IdolismJ made a video about big creators farming smaller games and their communities for free social media clicks, and how it's damaging to these small communities. We were used as an example, specifically with screencaps and footage of my twitter and youtube channel. Nobody in the Fraud Krew, especially me, was asked if this was ok, and we didn't know until the video dropped. It was a nice sentiment and I thought it was ok so I said thanks and left it. The video is very good and we are only a small part of it’s bigger message.
Justin Wong either didn't watch the video or didn't understand it, or chose to purposely ignore the message, and started complaining on twitter about it, as if he wasn't allowed to have an opinion on games. I had to make a statement saying "I'm too tired to fight with Justin Wong, but he's misunderstanding the video and that's part of the problem" basically. I said that it's not about his opinion of the game, but the fact that he doesn't know shit about the game, will never dig into it deeper to understand it, and is just being an asshole at face value for clicks, and that's damaging because his large audience and loud voice paints a powerful stigma. I then spent the rest of my weekend arguing with him and his fans.
Every time something stupid was said, I debunked it. Wong began pivoting to attack it from other angles, and I kept having to set the record straight. The person who edited that Justin Wong youtube video, who is the editor for him and Panda (Justin's sponsor) began picking fights with me and anyone else who got involved, trying to start trouble. I called him a bitch and told him to fuck off, and he blocked me so he could keep causing trouble elsewhere.
Then Wong pivoted into saying he always tried to uplift small communities and he's sorry if that doesn't come across. I had to debunk that AGAIN by saying he never did a damn thing for the couple of events I've been involved with that he entered, except give a raid over to one of the streams on the fundraiser, where everyone promptly clicked off the window after Wong left because raids don't fucking matter.
They attempted to drag a fundraiser into this. A fundraiser where Wong entered, didn't donate a penny, re-streamed his matches to his own twitch, made a youtube video, won the tourney, and left. Somebody found a piece of a twitch clip where we didn't know the mics were hot and I said "I hope Wong donates. That would be cool." and another person jokingly said "oh he BETTER DONATE!" They tried to make it an issue. I had to debunk that by explaining "yes, I WOULD hope that a big name FGC celebrity would donate or at least spread the word about the fundraiser he's competing in, unless it's just another notch on his belt. The other person was being hyperbolic. Nobody is saying donation is mandatory." One of the people in the clip instantly tried to throw me under the bus like "nah I didn't say that. Jeux did!" and I had to explain "no, I said THIS. The person that said THAT was somebody else. regardless that's not the issue here and it's out of context."
During all of this I had his fans attacking me, sending me death threats in my DMs and starting trouble in my replies. Every name in our FGC circles felt the need to make a statement about this thing they had nothing to do with. All vague like "I feel the need to weigh in on this current situation without naming names." As all of this started happening, the narrative twisted back to "bro people are getting mad about SFTM? game sucks bro!" which I constantly had to remind people that this wasn't about the quality of the game, but the damage a big name can do to a small scene if they don't take the responsibility of being a big name seriously. When things were finally dying down Wong started @ing other big name players who had nothing to do with this, like Nerdjosh and Punk, who began making tweets making fun of SFTM and acting like this entire situation was just a bunch of people being mad that Justin didn't like their game, which as I've been saying, is NOT the issue here. It's the exact problem the original IdolismJ video was bringing attention to. I try to go back to debunking, and a friend of mine pops in to be like "ok now you need to chill. let them make fun of you. it'll all die down because they'll get busy with the new KOF game." So I shut up, log out of twitter for a day.
6am today the tweet where I called the video editor a bitch for harassing me gets reported as violent and hateful conduct and my twitter account is permanently suspended. I attempted to appeal it twice and the automated system grabbed it both times and said "nope, you threatened somebody with physical violence (I didn't) and your account is now gone forever. The Fraud Krew twitter account was also mass flagged but we got to keep that one. Wong made a halfassed "guyyyysss noooo pls don't attack them
" tweet, and now the new narrative is that we are apparently just trying to ride Wong's fame to get people to subscribe to our Fraud Krew youtube channel that we never use. I can't do or say anything to set that straight now.
It took me two years of my life to ALMOST hit 500 on twitter. It's a third of my entire operation. It funnels people towards my youtube videos, it tells people when I'm streaming, it helps me promote the variety of fundraisers and things that I am involved in. Without it I am severely crippled. I also used it to show off my budding graphic design work and get commission work so I could pay my bills since I'm not working while I try to build this online presence. I make $12 a month on patreon, so I needed that work. Without it I might as well just pack it in and go back to the office. It was also going to be how I launch and promote a business endeavor I have been cooking up. I can't do that now.
If I start up a new twitter account, I won't survive another two years like this trying to build it back up to where it was. Maybe if enough people in our circles came together to help and tell their friends to spread the word or whatever, I don't think it'll hit 500 again. It's really funny, because I've reported tweets of people telling me to go off myself, and admitting to making burner accounts to continue harassing me after I blocked them, and people calling me slurs based on my sexuality and shit, and the automated message said "we didn't find anything wrong with that" and lets it go through.
Even if twitter magically unlocks my account (which they won't), how am I supposed to feel good about working so hard to do all of this, knowing it will just be farmed to make another person rich and I have no control over that, where I can just lose it all in the blink of an eye whenever somebody wants to start a problem? How can I feel good about this?
So I don't know what to do now. All I know is "fuck Justin Wong, fuck his fans, fuck his video editor, and fuck his sponsor who allows this to happen", and I've lost a lot of faith in this whole FGC community. My brand is in shambles and the credibility of my entire community has been tarnished because the message of "be careful not to harm smaller communities that work hard with your big voice" fell on deaf ears.
" takes or endless "HARDEST COMBO TRIALS EVER?!?!?!?" clickbait.
