Introduction: An Abridged History of Webcomics

Webcomics are a fascinating medium to me. Like Web3, much of the modern landscape of webcomics is now dominated by rather sanitized mainstream romance and power fantasies on sites like Webtoon. However, if you know where to look, there is still a good portion out there that represents what the medium started out as: showcasing the best of what raw, unfiltered creativity can deliver. I’d argue that there are two waves of indie webcomic scenes: the old age, which started at the dawn of the internet and continued into the late 2000s and early 2010s, and the golden age, which ran from the early to mid 2010s into early 2020s. Let’s start with the old age first. Many, but not all, of the most popular and monetarily successful comics from this time were slice of life, comedy, absurdist, and/or autobiographical works (often fandom and or gaming related) that functioned more like newspaper comic strips in format and narrative continuity. Many of the creators from this era often ended up in the professional comics industry, like Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics fame. Stories like Ctrl + Alt + Delete, Cyanide and Happiness, SMBC, Penny Arcade, xkcd, Sluggy Freelance, Achewood, Hiimdaisy, and Hark! A Vagrant are some famous examples from this age of webcomics. You may notice if you read some of these comics that many of the characters in these comics are white men, and much of the humor involving race and sexuality could be rather…dated. This was indicative of the creators who were there at the time: (often white and male) computer nerds either really into fandom or gaming. Not to mention that this time period was famous for anti-gay and racist mentalities (ex. using gay as a slur).

Of course, there were exceptions. Many a successful long form comic was created at this time, and still continue int the present day. In addition, many of them were more likely to feature characters of color, queer people, and otherwise marginalized folks. Examples of these include Homestuck, Gunnerkrigg Court, Lackadaisy, The Less than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal (NSFW), Dresden Codak, and Bittersweet Candy Bowl. Other examples include comics from older collectives such as SpiderForest (the oldest one that's still around IIRC).

As the Internet grew with the rise of social media, more people gained access to it (and webcomics) than ever before. This influx of creators led to a golden age of webcomics, a time where webcomics were the ultimate form of expression without mainstream censorship. Many, but not all, of these creators were queer and/or racial/ethnic minorities, dissatisfied with the current state of mainstream media and representation, and decided to create their own stories that reflected their experiences. Comics that represent these include anything from Hiveworks (which along with several creators deserves its own separate write up*), as well as select comics from Smackjeeves and other smaller websites such as Todd Allison and the Petunia Violet (whose creator also deserves their own write up, lol).

>*I recommend checking out Chimera Comics Collective, which consists of several former Hiveworks artists that formed their own organization.

David Willis and his numerous webcomics are particularly interesting in the webcomics space, precisely because they span the entirety of the old and golden ages of webcomics, and often embody both.* Many of his older works, like Roomies, It's Walky!, and Shortpacked!, are all emblematic of the old guard styles of comics-often newspaper strip slice of life and wacky comedy/sci fi adventures. However, even early on, Willis was already writing complex narratives, character development, and marginalized representation into his works, and these all get better as his works move through the golden age of webcomics. One of the most important character of many of these works, Walky, is biracial and multifaceted, portrayed as a buffoon hiding a surprisingly competent and even heroic personality. But it’s Willis’ newest and arguably most popular comic, Dumbing of Age, that’s the subject of today’s write up.

>* Similar comics that straddle this line, or improve significantly in terms of representation include El Goonish Shive and Questionable Content.

A Brief Explanation of a Very Complex Comic

Dumbing of Age (DoA) is a semi-autobiographical coming of age story set in an alternate timeline Indiana University. The story centers around a dormitory hall of freshman attending their first semester of college, and all the wacky hijinks that result from it. Though the cast is absolutely massive, the main two characters at the center of it all are Joyce Brown and Dorothy Keener. Joyce, who is loosely based on a younger David Willis, is a white fundamentalist Christian girl who is ignorant but surprisingly kind and tolerant (even if she thinks you’ll burn in hell for your sins). Her conservative ideals and sheltered worldview are challenged when she begins college at the IU. Her best friend, Dorothy, is a white Type A pre-law student liberal atheist who is gunning to transfer to Yale (and dumps her boyfriend on the first day of college to do so) and become president of the United States. Though she is more “worldly” than Joyce, and is often the one to give her advice and support, her aspirations and worldviews are challenged just as much as Joyce’s are. Included in the mix are Sarah, Joyce’s grumpy heart-of-gold roommate, Walky, the perpetual slacker and man child that managed to capture Dorothy’s perfectionist heart, Becky, Joyce’s childhood bestie and fellow fundie who later comes out as a lesbian, Amber, basically female Walky with a literal superhero complex, and so many more.

DoA has got the classic hallmarks of a golden age webcomic: longer narratives and complex character development being the most notable. In particular, DoA tackles heavy topics such as religious indoctrination, homophobia and misogyny with a deft hand. This makes sense, as David Willis is writing the comic from their own experience as a formerly fundamentalist queer person. However, DoA still borrows heavily from the old age of webcomics aesthetic through its strict newspaper comic strip format, and decidedly mid 2000s to early 2010s fashion (see the cast page for copious Ugg, skinny jean, and flannel usage), politics (ex. White liberal feminism), and humor (the misogyny played for laughs is…painful at times). This contrast between the modern and sobering topics DoA portrays vs. the sometimes offensive or dated aesthetic it borrows from to make that point may be part of the reason it has generated so much controversy over the years. Particularly in its portrayal of relationships.

Relationships in Dumbing of Age

There is an entire volume of DoA that is called My Peer Group's Smoochy Chart is Basically Now an Ouroboros, and that pretty much describes the relationships in this comic.

For the sake of brevity, we’re going to be focusing on a handful of relationships that have occurred between the subjects of today’s controversy: Joyce and Dorothy.

Joyce's Relationships

For a sexually repressed Christian fundamentalist that considers pre-marital sex a sin, Joyce has had quite the dating repertoire.

Her first date was with Joe, a serial womanizer at the time who only agreed to the date to try and get in her pants. As you can imagine, this didn’t go well for either of them . She later goes on to date a closeted gay man Ethan, though to her credit, she breaks up with him after she realizes how messed up it is.

She remains single for the rest of the first semester (with one incident we’ll discuss later), but begins to build a genuine friendship with Joe when she needs support after her familial life begins to fall apart. By the beginning of the next semester, they are surprisingly solid friends, walking to class with their friends and attending figure drawing sessions together. As an artist, the figure drawing sessions are some of my favorite scenes of them.

They eventually become an official couple when Joe confessed that he liked her and they started dating up until the tear gas wedding incident. It was one of the most realistic portrayal of a sexually repressed former Christian dating that I’ve seen, and I really appreciated how respectful Joe was of Joyce’s boundaries. At the same time, they still had banter and riffed off each other well.

Dorothy's Relationships

Much more experienced than Joyce by pure number of partners, and continues to have some over the course of the comic. Her first relationship with her high school sweetheart, Danny, ends abruptly when she dumps him after the first day of college to focus on getting into Yale and disliking that he followed her to IU. Despite her focus on studies and transferring to Yale, she eventually ends up casually dating Walky, her opposite in every way-an immature jokester and slacker who coasts through college.

Their relationship, while sweet at times, has some pretty fundamental flaws: namely that Walky never feels good enough for Dorothy (as evidenced by the dialogue in the previous examples), and Dorothy, while well meaning, makes that clear by denigrating his interests * trying to fix his flaws in an almost motherly way, real and otherwise, and being wishy-washy about the status of their relationship, issues that continues in her later relationship with Joyce (we will get to their relationship a bit later). They end up breaking up and getting back together multiple times over the course of the first and second semester, with the “off” periods getting longer as Dorothy begins to crash out from multiple other events happening in her life (two kidnappings, rejecting a Yale acceptance, and having her dreams of being president crushed) but they finally get back together before the events of the titular tear gas wedding incident.

>* To be fair, Walky was acting like a dick earlier.

Dorothy and Joyce: Despite the copious amounts of M/F pairings Dorothy and Joyce had been a part of over the years (real time, not comic book time) there HAS been a metric fuck ton of simmering sapphic tension being slowly built up over the course of several years. While some of this can be attributed to Dorothy guiding Joyce through the world as a sort of mentor figure, the declarations of love for each other at different points in the comic (including some where it’s more than a bit inappropriate), overt jealousy of one another’s partners and willingness to forgo friends, partners, and even life goals to be with each other. For God’s sakes, they literally roleplay being a couple in their Gender Studies class at one point, with Joyce pushing aside Dorothy’s actual boyfriend to be Dorothy’s “wife.” It becomes so obvious that their latent gayness becomes a repeated inside joke in-comic.

However, this ship starts to get…stranger after the second semester of the comic. After Joyce and Joe become a couple, Dorothy, who had already not been doing well, becomes increasingly upset* over their relationship and possessive over Joyce. This begins to toe the line of cheating in a series of scenes, such as when she sends Joyce a titty pic and is later called out for it by Joe (scene starts here), after which Dorothy crashes out over not being able to have Joyce as a partner. There also this delightful scenes where Joyce and Dorothy go drinking and Joyce asks Dorothy if she can watch her have sex with Walky, as well as this scene where the two of them almost make out . But by far the most egregious example is when, in an attempt to prevent Joyce from having sex with Joe, Dorothy teaches her how to masturbate using the vibrations of a washing machine in the shared dorm laundry room…while they’re holding hands (scene starts here, NSFW warning).

>* For context: In this example, Dorothy views Joe taking Joyce on a date as Joyce being kidnapped in a previous arc. Extremely normal stuff!

The one thing I’d like to note about both Joyce and Dorothy’s approach to relationships is how much they try to justify or fix them based on their own definitions of morality and pure selfishness. In that regard, Joyce’s relationships are often morally fraught, whether it’s dating a closeted gay man because being homosexual is inherently sinful, or being okay with breaking up relationships (or being part and parcel to it) as long as it benefits herself, someone she cares about, or is morally correct in her eyes (aka validates the idea of “true love”). Dorothy is much less overt in this, but her repeated attempts to try and mold her partners to be more respectable and worldly , as well as her outright making moves on Walky when he’s going through a rough patch with his partner at the time, are good examples of this phenomenon. While these less-than ideal traits have been downplayed in the comic due to the sheer number of assholes running rampant in the comic (including but not limited to bigots, an actual rapist, a violently homophobic kidnapper, and ANOTHER violent kidnapper trying to dodge child support), they will become a major problem later.

The funny thing about all of this is that initially, many in the DoA fandom, including myself, did actually like Dorothy and Joyce together as a concept. They spent a lot of time together (around 790 strips so far!), helped each other grow as people, and had a camaraderie that as one commentor put it, was similar to Leslie Knope and Ann from Parks and Rec (whether that comparison holds up is up to you, as I’ve never watched the show). And man, they’re just cute sometimes idk. Even when they started to edge closer and closer to cheating territory* despite having semi-decent partners that liked them, many still wanted them to get together eventually, either just not under the aforementioned circumstances, or wanted to explore the messiness with the appropriate gravitas that it would require.

>* This just straight up ends up being confirmed cheating later and it's supposed to be cute. Lol.

And Willis is clearly capable of crafting such storylines-just look at one of the previous sapphic relationships in DoA, between Billie (a former cheerleader and alcoholic freshman) and Ruth (her also alcoholic RA). It literally started out with a bang, lol. While the ship generated lots of controversy due to the unlikability of both characters, its toxicity, and its power imbalance, it still had its cute moments. And this was, in my opinion, partially because the consequences of such a relationship were written so clearly within and outside their relationship. The repeat struggles against alcoholism affected every aspect of their relationship (NSFW example here). And when they were eventually caught, Ruth got placed into psychiatric care, and while she kept her job (after her grandfather chewed her out) Billie was moved to another dorm. They even eventually broke up later on pretty much due to the toxicity (scene starts here) . If Willis could pull off such an excellent depiction of a toxic relationship with side characters, he could definitely do it for the main characters.

Little did the fandom know how much that monkey’s paw would curl.

The Tear Gas Wedding Incident

We must now move to Volume 15, Chapter 4-The Only Exception. This chapter mainly revolves around an anti-genocide protest and encampment loosely based on the pro-Palestine protests at IU in 2024. Joyce’s sister, Jocelyne, who has come to participate in the protest, gets discovered on the news by their dad. Joyce decides to go find Jocelyne at the protest to warn her, and Dorothy comes with her so she won’t be alone. Once they arrive, they find out that the protest has been declared unlawful by the university, and their window of time to find Jocelyne quickly narrows. As they find Jocelyne and prepare to leave, Dorothy has an epiphany about how Institutions And Laws Can Be Bad Actually, and spurred on by how she feels she can never have Joyce, decides to join the protest and risk getting arrested so she has something to fight for. She is talked down from this by Joyce via…a kiss. And thus the two white girls that had partners already make out right in the middle of an anti-genocide protest for a brown country in the middle of a tear gas cloud.

Don’t worry, the optics get worse from here.

The Immediate Aftermath

Two things happen in quick succession from here, which I will list below:

1. Everybody starts acting unbelievably out of character.

When Dorothy and Joyce’s friend group learn about the cheating, barely anybody that has ties to their boyfriends is proportionally upset. Most people treat the pairing as obvious in hindsight and even call it sweet (Billie, one of the perpetual grumps of the comic, calling them adorkable feels wrong on so many levels). Most barely consider how their boyfriends feel at all, either being sarcastic or saying they will find someone else quickly enough. Not even their boyfriends are all that upset! While Walky is angry at Joyce at first, he quickly begins to gets over it once one of his former love interests gets pushed in front of him narratively. Joe, on the other hand…he goes from a reformed fuckboy with issues with cheating due to his dad’s cheating on his mom, to being totally okay with Joyce hooking up with Dorothy because he pushed for it to happen* and even suggests polyamory as a way to keep Joyce in his life. He is generally patient and kind to Joyce the entire time afterwards, even when she’s being especially cruel to him. It’s extremely jarring to see after the respectful conversations around consent and boundaries the both of them had.

>* I could be wrong, but I don’t consider this being a request for Dorothy to hook up with his girlfriend

On the other hand, the people who do have a problem with the cheating are portrayed as either being strawmen (the one instance of the bisexual cheaters trope being invoked with Joyce and Dorothy is done in a rather hamfisted way) or villainous in some way. Sarah, Joyce’s roommate, is a particularly egregious example of this. She is one of two people that immediately and directly calls out Joyce and Dorothy for their cheating, and even attempts to comfort Joe for being cheated on (despite them historically despising each other). While often abrasive and reclusive, she has repeatedly shown to be kind to the people she cares about and generally accepting of others for their sexuality and gender. So it is particularly interesting that after she calls them out, she is written as transphobic to Jocelyne upon their first encounter post her coming out , and then portrayed as overprotective and manipulative for being upset that Joyce cheated on Joe and Jocelyne is seemingly okay with it. Seeing such a drastic villianization of a Black character with traits she did not appear to hold before is…suspect at best.

Meanwhile, the people that are greatly affected by the cheating...have little to nothing to actually do with the affair. When Becky, Joyce’s childhood friend, finds out that the two of them got together, she gets extremely upset and depressed that her former crush had not in fact rejected her for being gay, but rejected her for being Becky. This, of all things, causes her to lose her faith (which she has held through being rejected by her entire fundie community for being gay, being kidnapped twice by her dad to bring her home and convert or kill her, and watching one of her friends and her own mother literally die in front of her) . It also causes her to lose her relationship with her long term girlfriend, Dina, as Dina finds out Becky's still not over Joyce and that she is essentially a rebound. And of course, this is what makes Joyce and Dorothy upset enough to apologize and try to make things right…by trying to get them to make up and get together again. Wonderful.

Not to mention that Dorothy and Joyce become very different after they become a couple as well. While both have displayed selfish tendencies before, this trait gets turned up to 11 after their coupling, to the point that Dorothy openly remarks that she’s worried she's bringing out the worst in Joyce. To her point, Dorothy's tendencies to criticize her partner's choices and try and fix her partners come out in full force, with her deciding what kind of jacket Joyce will wear, reminding Joyce to do daily tasks in a rather...motherly way, and trying to get her to take pills without soda by offering sex. This, combined with her previous trauma around protecting Joyce manifesting in increasingly concerning ways, has made some readers question if she is even attracted to Joyce or just trauma bonding to her. (I personally think both are possible at the same time.) However, Joyce is by far the worse of the two, acting rather childish and/or cruel in several strips and being suddenly very okay with talking about sex and having it frequently and publicly. It is rather jarring to see after we've witnessed so much character growth from her over the duration of this comic.

2. The sudden and poor introduction of a anti genocide protest arc

To be fair, DoA has had its share of controversial political arcs, but most of them have either been helmed by side characters or have little bearing on the actual plot. This storyline, however, is the first to reference a real life event that happened on IU's campus , and although the country affected by the genocide is named Bulmeria, the resemblances (Muslim students upset about the genocide, encampments, police tear gassing and beating the protestors, fencing the encampment) are uncanny. In the leftist communities that this arc revolves around (and the ones that Willis and much of DoA fandom are a part of), when you’re at a protest you generally want to give space to the issue at hand and the people who are affected by it. However, this is rather dramatically averted when Joyce and Dorothy’s kiss becomes the school newspaper headline about the protest rather than the, y’know, GENOCIDE that’s happening. For Christ’s sake, Dorothy’s teacher calls them a good example of leadership*. These two oblivious ass white girls become the face of a movement that neither of them actually cared about until they ended up at a protest for it. While Joyce doesn’t really care about the optics, pretty much saying so to a Muslim character’s face twice,** Dorothy does, and spends a good chunk of her time trying to either awkwardly absolve her white guilt or repeatedly insert herself into an activist movement, also out of guilt. It’s pretty gross, and while Willis has tried to make amends by elevating a Muslim side character, Asma, to main character status (never mind that her two defining traits as of now are being disciplined and gay…and I guess liking bowling), it will forever be a stain on the comic’s storyline…well, as long as Dorothy tries to make her activist era happen.

>* To be fair, Dorothy is uncomfortable with this realization, but her subsequent white guilt arc really do not endear me to her or the story's side.

>** According to the alt text in the strip "Shame", the narrative is siding with Raidah on this one, but considering that Raidah is a known villain in comic and the comments are turned off, I have my doubts about the seriousness of this claim. Also, she was the only Muslim character in the comic with more than a handful of speaking lines until Asma was introduced, so take that as you will.

The Fandom Reacts: Paladins Vs. Sickos

You may have noticed that I’ve been relatively quiet about the state of the fandom throughout this entire arc. And it’s because there is so much to unpack that I wanted to make sure I devoted an entire section to it after I explained the events of the comic in full. Buckle up, cause it’s gonna be an adventure.

The relationship between DoA’s fandom to DoA itself is like many other online indie comics communities-creative and diverse, but also deeply personal and sometimes parasocial. I've seen excellent character analyses, personal accounts giving context to storylines, and people genuinely building community with each other. Many of these fans have been following Willis‘s work since his previous webcomic, Shortpacked, with some having been around for even longer. And of course, they are quick to support Willis and DoA financially-the DoA print book Kickstarters are always fully funded, and Willis' Patreon currently makes about $5000 per month, with over 2,000 Patrons. At the same time, because the comic delves into intense issues at times, arguments are quick to break out. One such instance is with a storyline involving a dispute between two characters, Carla (a trans woman and prankster) and Mary (religious fanatic and general asshole-Joyce's evil twin essentially), which led to Mary misgendering Carla. Readers had intense debates about who was in the right to the point that the comments section was shut down. This sort of behavior is not uncommon in many webcomic circles, but in a fandom as big as DoA's, it is magnified and made visible to a wider degree. And this behavior would only increase during and after the tear gas wedding incident.

If you take a look at the page that Dorothy and Joyce first kissed on, you can see that there’s about 2000 comments below, far more than pretty much any other page has had before or since. This was probably bolstered by the fact that the day this page was released, Willis put up a poll on the website that asked people if they were sickos (people that like the ship because it is messy/don’t care about the mess), or paladins (people that disliked the cheating for any reason). I believe the poll was split relatively evenly but don’t quote me on it.

If you browse the comments, you can see this ratio reflected there, though most of the negative comments are at the bottom of the page.

Here is a sampling:

>[presses a button on my soundboard] “IT’S NOT CALLED SMARTING OF AGE NOW IS IT”

>I love how the pink tear gas creates sapphic shoujo bubbles. (Author’s note: Dear sweet Jesus)

>[the tear gas] also look like cherry blossoms blooming from the barren winter tree. its sending me insane let me tell you (Author’s note: never mind, this is worse)

>I feel bad for Joe and Walky. I feel like they’ve both been through enough, and they’re both trying so hard, and all that is just…not worth remembering. That gives me a shitty feeling. Like yeah I get the appeal and the chemistry here, but I just feel down right now.

>And then [Dorothy and Joyce] kiss again. So they realize what they are doing but they decide screw [it] and keep going anyway.

>I would say if anything this makes what they are doing even worse. This wasn’t just a momentary lapse of judgement, but they actually considered their actions, considered the people they are going to hurt, and decided to do it anyway. This is selfish behavior.

>Reply: God forbid women behave suboptimally

>as a muslim (relatively) this storyline has been balls but as a bisexual oh my god. sickos stay winning !!!

>Reply: I don’t care who tries to say ‘cheating sometimes happens, it’s exploratory, etc’ shut the fuck up. I’m a queer person (bi) and I’ve never cheated, nor felt compelled to cheat on my partners over the years.

>Cheating points to a character flaw in the cheater. Point blank.

>I’d be legitimately upset if everyone’s just kind of cool with this. What’s the point of over-the-top relationship drama if everyone’s a mature and understanding adult about it…I want every single relationship in the entire comic in flames

>this comic is so shit, i’m like a battered wife who keeps coming back even though it never gets any better. bye yall

>honestly as a queer person, i don’t agree with giving “special leeway” with what counts as cheating. I think some grace should be granted, especially for situations of “oh shit I just figured out what I’m feeling” but it IS still cheating. That said, I’m living for this development so I don’t even care. XD

And possibly my favorite comment of all:

>I think there can be a problem with writing flawed characters if you don’t have it presented as a flaw with real consequences.

>If you have a sexist character… that is a flaw. But if it isn’t critiqued then the story is just promoting sexism. And if that critique doesn’t have narrative consequences then it is just lampshading.

>Consider the Big Bang Theory. Frequently the main characters are very sexist. They often get called out for “being sexist” but without any narrative consequence.

>Will we see Joyce face repercussions for choosing to cheat? Probably to some extent but right now the visual framing of this seems to focus on the “romance” and “passion” rather than the dishonesty.

Oh my sweet summer child. You had no idea how right you were.

As time passed, and the demands of “paladins” for consequences in-comic were not addressed, the comments got more and more heated. To keep the criticism contained, a long time commentator called Dot created a “Hater Containment Thread” for people to vent their criticism in. These were often derided by “sickos” commenters for being too negative, and eventually these threads were discontinued when one night, it was the first comment that Willis saw on the newest page, and he publicly commented his displeasure at the sight.

This removal of the hater containment thread coincided nearly with commenters allegedly began to be shadowbanned or having their comments deleted. As a result, many moved to the r/dumbingofage subreddit to share their view points. The subreddit, which had been pretty quiet up until this arc, was now receiving thousands of visitors a week. Post range from deep analysis of the characters to revisions of comic pages affectionately called “Sickostrips” or “Paladinpanels”, to people trying to keep the positivity alive by making fanart and reminiscing about previous arcs that they liked. Occasionally, people from the comment section would butt in to criticize the behavior of the commenters on Reddit (though their comments were often downvoted so much that they would be hidden from view). This was not completely unjustified at times: DoA and Willis have become increasingly compared to another infamous webcomic, Sinfest, and its author, a literal Nazi and TERF, due to the latter’s comic jumping the shark after the first arc ended and the author reacting to criticism in a similar fashion to Willis (this will be explained more in the next section). Comparing somebody to a Nazi is a pretty bold statement and has some unfortunate implications, regardless of how you feel about Willis. And to be fair, the subreddit, while significantly less censorious than the comments section of the comic site, still has people actively correcting posters in the comments, warning against hyberbolic complaints or actively psychoanalyzing Willis. It's not a perfect system by any means, but it is a lot more open and honest than what has gone on in the DoA comments section so far.

(Continued in the comments, please read on below this post!)

EDIT 5/6/26: Fixed some of the introduction and bits of the DoA lore based on commenter's feedback. Thank you to u/milskidasith, u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS, u/michfreak, u/ElephantNo3139, and u/TupperwareLid for your feedback!

Picture this: you’re me on November 30th, 2025. Finals week is a bitch, and you have a project to present tomorrow. So, as usual, you click over to Youtube to find lofi music or some video essay to play in the background while you finish up the presentation’s visuals.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see a video thumbnail: “Tetro Danganronpa Blue Chapter 3 Full Audio”. It’s a long video. Huh!, you think. Chapter 3 has only just started releasing. Tetro is popular enough for fans to make fake clickbaity episodes? Wow. You ignore it and go about your day.

A day later, it’s December 1st. You’ve just finished your presentation, and you’re looking to wind down, so you scroll through Youtube again. Out of the corner of your eye, you spot a thumbnail: “Tetro Danganronpa Blue Chapter 4 Full Audio”. You sit up in your chair. The view count is oddly high, and it’s premiering right now. You click on it.

It’s real.

Oh no, you think. The curse must have struck again.

WHAT IS DANGANRONPA?

If you’re an edgy teenager or young adult, you’ve heard of Danganronpa. It’s a Japanese visual novel series, each game having the premise of 16 teenagers with extraordinary talents being stuck in a killing game in which they must kill another classmate and get away with it in order to escape. The first game, Trigger Happy Havoc, released in 2010, with a small English fanbase carried by a written fan translation on the forum Something Awful. The series gained more traction in the west after the official English translation of the first 2 games released in 2014. However, it REALLY took off in 2020, likely due to a combination of COVID and the third game’s recent release. It was especially popular among teenagers and young adults, who were drawn to its colorful characters and dark content. It especially dominated the cosplay community. So yeah. It was huge.

FAN PROJECTS

Danganronpa had the perfect formula for fanmade killing games. Its general format (16 students, each with a specific extraordinary talent, killing each other over the course of 6 chapters), was replicable, and the whole ‘talent’ system practically begged people to make their own killing games, often referred to as “fangans”, with their own casts of original characters. And they did!

There are countless fanfictions, fan roleplays, fan video series, and fan games. Well, started ones, at least. Because here lies the problem:

It’s actually really hard to make a full Danganronpa story.

Remember: you need at least 5 compelling mysteries, and you need to develop a cast of 16 characters. And these games are loooooong. So, thus began the fangan curse: the vast, vast majority of fangans never get completed. It’s become a meme in the community by this point. Hell, I even tried and failed to complete a fangan. The story goes like this: Someone wants to make a fangan, typically a fan game. They design their cast of 16 characters and excitedly search for voice actors on Casting Call Club. Voice actors audition and are selected, then the project goes nowhere. It’s a tale as old as time. And even when promising fangans do manage to release a chapter or two, most fizzle out due to internal issues.

So when a fangan actually does get completed, it’s a huge deal. Enter Tetro Danganronpa: PINK.

TETRO DANGANRONPA PINK

Tetro Danganronpa: PINK (which I’ll just refer to as Pink going forward) was done in a pretty untapped format for fangans: an audio drama. Here’s how it worked: installments of the series were released on Youtube in short episodes, each usually only a few minutes long. The episodes were fully voice acted, with minimal but stylish visuals that mostly just displayed captions and character portraits to indicate who was speaking. Each Friday, an in-game day was covered, with the release of 6 or so episodes scattered throughout the day.

This project succeeded for a variety of reasons:

1. Von Babbitt, the creator, did most of the work by herself. She was the sole writer and artist as well as the main editor. The only work that was mostly outsourced was the voice acting. Although this is a lot of work for one person, yes, managing a project team can be a nightmare. By doing the bulk of the work herself, she was able to keep a steady workflow.
2. The script was completed and all of the audio was recorded before the series started releasing. This was HUGE. Although visual and audio editing is obviously a huge undertaking, the audio’s completion massively cut down the work that needed to be done between episode releases.
3. The format was pretty minimal. Though there was a ton of voice acting, the visuals were pretty minimal; once the sprites and general graphic design format were laid out, Von didn’t really need to create many new assets during the series’ run. Once everything was set up, the project could just hit the ground running.
4. Weekly releases. You know how fanbases for TV shows tend to be more active when episodes release weekly rather than all at once? This is because weekly releases keep people engaged with a steady stream of new content, fostering discussion and the creation of fan theories. This steady release schedule worked wonderfully in Pink’s favor, especially in an ocean of fangans with yearly updates if fans were lucky enough to get any at all.

So yeah. This series was successful. The voice actors, many of whom were active in fan spaces, art, and weekly release schedule attracted a loyal fanbase that quickly brought Tetro massive popularity in fangan spaces. And that’s not all. You see, Pink started on July 26th, 2024 and ended on May 2nd, 2025. A fangan not only being completed, but finishing within one year? That was unheard of.

So when the sequel started releasing, people were hyped.

The Tetro series was always conceptualized as a trilogy: Pink, Blue, and White. Blue started releasing on August 1st, 2025, to massive popularity. However, on November 29th, 2025, shit hit the fan.

THE LEADUP

Let’s back up a bit. Although things exploded in late November, tensions had been brewing for a while before then. Now, something I want to mention right now for context is that Von had some (if not all) staff members (including VAs) for Blue and White sign NDAs. So, if you’re wondering why any of them stayed silent about any of this, that’s why. Okay, now onto the timeline.

On May 6th, 2025, Twitter user burnie468484 posted a lengthy Google Doc accusing Von of tracing and passing AI art off as her own. Later, on September 11th, an even more comprehensive AI art allegation Google Doc was created by Twitter user gonefishing235, as well. Now, the use of AI art at all is generally seen as a huge taboo in fan spaces like these, with Von herself even outwardly condemning it. However, the major grievance here was that Von had allegedly scammed people by using AI for art commissions through which she had made hundreds of dollars. Though these documents gained a bit of attention, it was generally dismissed, as many fans and VAs came to Von’s defense and refuted the claims.

During mid October, the AI art allegations began to gain a bit more traction on Twitter. One involved individual was Keluminary, who didn’t directly work on Tetro, but is roommates with one of the VAs and friends with a few others. Remember him; he’ll be important later. Though more AI art evidence was being circulated, the main grievance here was that Von ran Tetro as a volunteer-based fan project and thus didn’t pay any of the VAs (some of whom were underaged, more on that later) or other staff members (editors, moderators, etc) despite asking for and receiving thousands of dollars through Ko-fi from Tetro fans. These Twitter users urged fans to donate to the VAs instead of Von.

On October 29th, the entire character death order for Blue was leaked on Twitter by an anonymous account. Now, the prevailing theory is that this person is one of Von’s exes who had recently been cancelled in the fangan community for grooming minors. An “I’ll take you down with me” sort of situation. However, since this theory has not been proven, I won’t state their name here, as they’re otherwise irrelevant to the drama. This leak didn’t initially gain a lot of traction, as there was no real proof to back it up.

On November 29th, the entire White character list was leaked. The oldest source of the leak I can find is this tweet that seems to imply that Keluminary was the leaker. Keluminary clarified that he “knew people who knew people”, implying that one of the staff members violated their NDA to privately leak the cast list, and Keluminary was the one who spread it around. Many people believe that the initial leaker was the same anonymous person who leaked the Blue death order, but again, this hasn’t been confirmed. Regardless, this White leak gained a lot more traction than the Blue leak, as this one had actual art assets tied to it, giving it more credibility. The AI art allegations had been growing steadily by this point, so people opposed to Von used the chaos from the White leaks to blow the lid on this entire situation.

DISASTER

The Tetro fan community descended into chaos. The AI art allegations finally started to catch on, causing more people to go back and see if there was anything else shady that Von had allegedly done. And find they did. There’s a laundry list of allegations, so to keep things comprehensible, I’ll put them in a nice bulleted list.

• GROOMING A MINOR: Von, who is currently 23, had allegedly sent sexually suggestive messages to a then 17 year old when Von was 20, then waited until they were 18 to send a picture of her cleavage to them. (x) (x)
• TRACING + AI ART: The tracing and AI art allegations were strengthened by these screenshots, posted by Twitter user WallahiHumbugg, that heavily indicated that Von had used NovelAI for art requests in the past. Von has also outright mentioned using AI before. Again, the major grievance here was that Von had scammed people, earning hundreds of dollars through AI-generated art commissions.
• WRITING CRITICISMS: Around this time, some plot details for Blue were leaked. And they were. Uh. Something. You see, the series had always been pretty dark, with many of the murder motives including blatant torture, for example. However, the leaks were considered gratuitously torture-porny (and fetishistic, some argued) even by the fans’ standards. For reference, one of the leaked motives included fingernails being ripped out, shock therapy, cannibalism, and a lobotomy. Remember, all of this was fully voiced. Also keep in mind that some of the VAs were minors at the time of recording, and none of the VAs were warned beforehand about just how dark the story would get/the content they would be expected to record. Other criticisms of Von’s writing had been circulating for a while, especially regarding her mistreatment of female characters as well as ableism (some fans took issue with how almost (if not) every single disabled character had their disability used against them then died horribly).
• UNPAID LABOR: I already explained this above, but Von didn’t pay any staff members yet directly asked for and earned money through Ko-fi from Tetro fans. Von also briefly sold official Tetro merch (mentioned here and here), and allegedly earned upwards of 4 thousand dollars from Tetro in total, calculated here.
• STAFF MISTREATMENT: Once their NDAs were rendered obsolete (more on that later), many VAs came out to detail unprofessionalism on Von’s part. One particular accusation was favoritism towards the more popular/well-established VAs. More examples are given in a video by Youtuber Lechgang.
• NSFW WEIRDNESS: Von sent NSFW art of a Pink character to their VA, PancakeKING, unprompted. She also posted sexually suggestive audio content of a 17-year-old character she voiced in Pink on her Ko-fi. She generally has a bit of a history of being weird about her 17-year-old characters, detailed here and here.
• ALT ACCOUNTS: Since at least 2020, Von has allegedly run a ton of alt accounts which she has used to romantically pursue and/or harass people. She used many in the official Tetro Discord server, acting as mods, personal friends, and test audiences. She also previously ran a discord called New Bot City in which she claimed users could interact with advanced AI bots, all of whom were just alts of her. Beyond this, she ran a bunch of unaffiliated ones, as well.
• BULLYING: There are allegations of bullying dating back before Tetro, as well. (x) (x), (x) (x), (x)

There are more allegations, but these were the main ones I could find.

THE AFTERMATH

On November 30th, Von unceremoniously put the series on an indefinite hiatus in a now deleted post. She then deleted the staff Discord server and abandoned all of her public accounts.

Many of the VAs were pissed, as hours of their unsaved work (that some had wished to put in their voice reels) had suddenly been deleted without warning. Luckily, one of the Blue VAs, Felix Wiscan, managed to recover the audio for the entirety of Blue from Tetro’s test audiences, who had had the audio downloaded. Felix then uploaded all of it to their Youtube channel, giving the fans a bit of closure.

More art for Blue was leaked, and although a few details about White’s outlined plot* were given by the White VAs, we’ll likely never know the planned death order or major plot beats. Many of the White VAs were devastated by the cancellation in general, as many were new VAs who were overjoyed to be part of such a popular project with an active fanbase.

As for the fan community: Some fans are moving on, directing their attention to other fangans. Speaking of which, many fangans that had adopted the Tetro audio drama format were renamed to remove references to Tetro. As for the fans who stayed: Many fan artists have redrawn Blue’s sprites, allowing people to use those instead of the original AI-generated assets for Blue fan works.

*^(Some sources say that White had only been written or recorded up to halfway through the Chapter 1’s investigation, but one of the VAs mentioned recording 60+ hours of audio for their character, so we don’t really know exactly how far along in development White was before its cancellation.)

And that’s how things sat for a while. Until…

VON’S STATEMENT

On February 3rd, 2026, after two months of radio silence, Von posted one final statement on Twitter before deleting her account the next day.

In it, she thanks everyone for their support, apologizes for being impulsive and manipulative, and admits that she isn’t in a great mental state. She doesn’t address any specific allegations, but does say that she didn’t retain any earnings from Tetro, as all of the funds went back into supporting the project. She states that she’s going to try to move on, and that she may write again one day in the far-off future. She ends her statement by expressing that she’s sorry for how things ended and that she wishes everyone well.

It. Uh. Was not received well, to say the least.

People dragged her for not actually specifically addressing the allegations, and some doubted her claims that she really walked away with no money. It generally just left a bad taste in people’s mouths.

CONCLUSION

So there you have it. I mostly just feel sorry for the staff members and victims of all of this.

This goes without saying, but please don’t try to track Von down and send hate. I’m not endorsing any witch hunts. I instead urge any of that attention to instead be directed towards supporting the VAs. Twitter user pakutheta has compiled a list of their VAs’ socials if you wish to support them.

Thanks for reading.

For archival reasons, I’ve also created image galleries here and here of screenshots of every xcancel link provided above. Furthermore, Youtuber mahimeghan has also compiled a Google Drive folder of evidence, as well. Special thanks to u/ALiteralBucket for posting some of these allegations in a Scuffles thread a while back!

The Evil Dragon DILF Honeypot: The Hard Magnus Bans

The year is 2012, but barely. Korean MMO MapleStory has just released a major content update to its American server, and it is a big one. A new class, new items, and a new endgame dungeon. Players swarm into the new zone, eager to see the new land of space dragon knights. A hundred new dragon knights are made, and as most of the players engage with the new splashy warrior, the endgame raid players are looking towards the castle at the end of the zone, ready to try their hands at getting the newest, most powerful gear available.

They don’t know that they are walking right into a trap, and that the only way out is to lose. And they will. They will lose again and again, and as long as they lose, everything is fine.

This is the story of Hard Magnus, the impossible boss, and the players who were stupid enough to beat it.

Before we begin, however, I want to make a note about sourcing. Despite this event being only about fifteen years ago and during a fairly popular era of the game, primary sources have been surprisingly difficult to find after multiple forum purges and website refactors. I have endeavored to find as many primary sources as possible to help bulk out my memories on this event, but some details are simply lost to time. I would like to shout out the YouTuber Togain, whose detailed update timeline and MapleStory iceberg videos have become a major source for this write up.

What is MapleStory?

MapleStory is a Korean MMO currently produced by Nexon. It was officially released in Korea in 2003, with other servers opening across the world from 2005 (for the North American release, known as GMS) to 2007. MapleStory is best described as a 2D platform-based monster grinding game, and it plays very differently than most Western MMOs like World of Warcraft.

Particularly during this era, MapleStory was far more about leveling up and fighting monsters than the sort of dungeon- and instanced-based content of Western MMOs. While multiplayer and top end raid content did exist, for most players, the game was mostly played by killing enemies over and over again, training on whatever could be feasibly taken down in a few attacks. The level cap has always been extraordinarily high, and particularly during this era, very little content actually approached the cap. The goal was to always have something to grind towards, rather than the Western MMO “level to a cap and do expansion specific raids.” At its best, MapleStory is a game that focuses on simple loops and watching numbers increment in satisfactory ways. At its worst, MapleStory is a Skinner box in pretty sprite art.

Given its nature as a very repetitive game with simple movement and low PC requirements, MapleStory has always been plagued with bots. The game released with a focus on being lightweight and easy to install on even fairly mediocre hardware, and given that it was released in 2003, by 2012 nearly any computer could run the game. Combine the fact that it was easy to run with a few other “quirky” design choices that can create massive resource sinks for even basic equipment (looking at you, scrolling), and there was always a large bot presence across the game, from low level gold farming to high level boss hackers farming drops from endgame content.

The Tempest Approaches

Releasing in late 2012, the Tempest Update was a major release for the GMS server. Like most content, this update was largely a port of content originally developed in Korea over the previous months and years. The Tempest Update would introduce an entire mirror world to the main setting of MapleStory, and I will level with you, this is about when I checked out of even attempting to understand the lore of the game. I was just excited there were dragon people.

One of these really cool dragon people was our main NPC character, Magnus. Magnus is a commander in the army of the Black Mage, MapleStory’s myth arc villain for the majority of its lifespan, before defecting to another powerful evil character. His characterization isn’t exactly complex, and he serves as the villainous commander of the evil troops in the Heliseum region with a penchant for backstabbing so severe that even the other villains got annoyed. His design was striking, a human knight with black dragon horns and wings, and was certainly appreciated by certain segments of the community (and I, frankly, do not blame them).

Magnus served as the final challenge introduced in the newly released zones, and upon release, became the new hardest fight to clear in the game. And for a few short weeks, Magnus served another purpose: Magnus was there to kill bots.

Magnus, like other high-end content before him, can be challenged on multiple difficulty settings: Easy, Normal, and Hard. Each mode offers increasingly useful and powerful rewards, including best-in-slot gear (gear powerful enough that no other item can surpass it, like the best cloak or pendant). Higher difficulties would include more attacks, more aggressive AI, and a ballooning health total that mandated aggressive play to deal enough damage before the timer ticked to zero. While Easy and Normal could drop some interesting stuff, the real prizes were all locked to the Hard mode drop table. Endgame players would hop in, expecting a challenging fight that could give them the new best items in the game. There was, however, a problem: Hard Magnus was completely impossible to beat.

Hard Magnus was unkillable. But he was unkillable in some important and subtle ways. He did not have an arbitrary HP threshold he couldn’t go below, and the developers didn’t pull an Absolute Virtue from Final Fantasy and protect him at all costs. They had math on their side. No party could put out enough damage within the time limit to beat him, even if they were able to survive his onslaught. No player would be able to do it for months, in fact, as until the next patch upped the damage cap, there was no possible way that the players would be able to kill him.

Exactly as planned.

I Want to Smash Hard Magnus

As Tempest released to GMS, there were a lot of events, most of them tied to the new zone in one way or another. Endgame players had their eyes on the Magnus raids, and on that shiny, shiny new gear. And it seemed that Nexon was giving them the green light to attempt it. In fact, they had their own name for the early Magnus rewards: the Smashing Magnus Event. For the first month after release, the first team that could defeat Magnus on Hard Mode in each server would receive a unique and special title: The One Who Spearheaded Magnus [sic] Defeat, an extremely powerful stat boost that would be proudly shown to all players you happened to walk by. Eagerly, players rushed in to try and take him down, and one by one, every fair player was completely obliterated.

That isn’t to say that Magnus wasn’t killed. By using various cheats, several cheating players were able to kill him, only to receive a message that read “Congratulations for defeating Magnus! Your victory has been recorded.” as the boss rained down his drops for the party to pick up. Efficient cheaters were able to get his defeat down to about three minutes in relatively short order, and the drop rates for his rare gear were fairly generous. As the items trickled out into circulation, players awaited the announcement of which team had killed Hard Magnus first.

They received a very different communication from the developers.

The Trap Snaps Shut

On January 4th, a few weeks after the patch, an announcement was made through the official website:

“On January 3, 2013, we have permanently banned numerous players hacking the hard mode of the game boss, Magnus, as well as their party members. We will continue to crack down on abusers to ensure we maintain a fun and fair playing field for all [players].”

The ban wave had been pretty brutal. After waiting long enough that they’d catch more than just a few hackers, Nexon had banned a swathe of everyone that was connected to the account. This meant it was not only the actual attacking characters, but also all of the item mules (accounts dedicated to offloading the resources and trading them while the hacker farmed the boss before the exploit was patched) and even players who were not using illicit cheats themselves but were running the fight with people who were (as the exploits were obvious and there is no matchmaker, these people were probably paying for the chance to score drops if they weren’t in on the scheme).

While I can’t find any direct posts or discussions about this due to link rot and how fragmented the playerbase was, I do remember that the net was even broader than reported. Players who purchased the drops which had been trickling into the market had a good chance of being banned as well as part of the sting operation outright, instead of just getting the items removed. While many were buying the items with real world cash off-client (against ToS), this definitely caught people who were merely clueless and spending their in-game currency. Some commentators (notably, Togain, whose research has been immensely helpful), noted that this downstream damage was avoidable by just removing the drops from the impossible boss, but given that would likely have meant that the trap only worked on a fraction of the number of bots it caught as there would have been no reason to run at that particular brick wall, a more sensible solution is likely just having removed the items instead of banning for anyone removed from the raid by a certain number of steps. Either way, Nexon didn’t take it, but the actual number of innocent bans appears to be pretty low as most players who were high enough level to equip the gear were pretty suspicious of the sources already.

Consequences

The response from the playerbase tended to be pretty positive. Hacking bosses had gotten prevalent enough that it was satisfying to see them kicked down a peg. There were some downstream effects, like the banned players starting new accounts and making some of the farming spots unusable for like a week via bot floods that the tools did not stop well, but the event has largely gone down in fandom lore as a time the developers let people happily turn themselves in for the chance at a title that was never actually in the files to begin with.

Many high-level players clowned on the hackers pretty heavily. The fact that Hard Magnus was impossible to kill was subtle to the uneducated player, but to someone who, for instance, watched KMS content guides about content months in advance, the fact that this boss would be impossible for weeks was stone obvious. Any serious raid group was still working on Dark Empress Cygnus, the previous hardest boss, and would wait until the damage cap rework to even attempt Hard Magnus.

It was about this time that I drifted away from MapleStory. I had never gotten to the endgame content, and I was playing more and better games, now. But for a brief winter, I watched blatant cheaters feed themselves into a wood chipper. And truly, what more could you ask for?

Edit: fixed a link and corrected a typo.

This post is the final part of a series. See Part 1 here. See Part 2 here. See Part 3 here.

I hadn't intended to keep anyone waiting this long for the the 4th installment. As I've mentioned previously, I lost some of the data I intended to use for this post in a hard drive crash, I may yet be able to recover it, but that isn't a given, so I'll just proceed with what I have. This post is likely to be short and to the point.

One of the things John Tarnowski, AKA Juan Andres Tarnowski, RPGPundit, Swami Anand Nisarg, Kasimir Urbanski, etc. loves to brag about is the fact that he has gotten "rich" from sales of the RPGs he has written. As with his claims that he had a heavy hand in the design of D&D 5E, this is likely a lie. We know this because Tarnowski himself has said so.

In 2015, Tarnowski was asking the students of his "Mystery School" Swami grift to give him funds to buy a computer. Later that year, he was soliciting funds to pay for roof repairs, explaining in the comments that he didn't even have home insurance, as it was "beyond his means." But in 2016, he was bragging about being "rich and famous!"

In 2020, Tarno was having trouble with that damn roof - again, which begs the question, what did he do with the money he got the first time? Is this his version of the grandmother who keeps dying? A few months later, he would need donations to buy eyeglasses. Don't despair, though, by the following year, he'd be "crying all the way to the bank," because he was once again "making a very successful living." Man, this guy's life is a rollercoaster!

Tarnowski also hates to buy things. Here he is soliciting the members of his forum to provide free maps for a game he planned to publish and sell! He even busted out the old, "getting paid in exposure" chestnut, lol.

he spends a lot of time begging for free books, as well. See, he claims it's an honor to have him review your RPG book, but REFUSES to review a PDF copy, for... reasons. I have several more example of this, but it's relatively minor and boring compared to the rest of it.

The missing screenshots were further examples of Tarno crying broke, while alternately claiming to be ballin'. Nothing different than what I've posted above, but more of it. My favorite was one where he claimed that every month, he had to decide what to do without.

By his own admission, his home does not have central air conditioning or heating. And from the many photos he himself has posted on his publicly viewable blog and various social media sites, it also doesn't appear to have any internal doors. He has also claimed to have a rooftop patio, but pictures he has posted of his rooftop (not to mention Google Maps) prove that this is a lie.

My own opinion is that John is neither as poor or as rich as he alternately claims. He has had one game go "Platinum" on drivetherurpg, which means it sold 1000+ copies. But that took ten years. I'm too lazy to do the math on that or any of Tarno's other products, some of which have sold hundreds of copies, but the info is out there. Knowing what I know about drivethru's fees, and seeing that Tarno's products are mostly either very inexpensive or merely okay sellers, I feel very confident that he's not nearly as "rich and famous" as he claims. At least not from his games. It is likely that he makes as much, if not more, from his "Swami" grift. It also helps that the cost of living in Montevideo, Uruguay is pretty low.

I will conclude this series as I started it: by stating that John Tarnowski, the RPGPundit, is a liar and a fraud. And, let's face it, a bit of a prick besides.

And finally, thank you, dear reader, for your patience.