Content warning: discussion of death threats and misogyny.

Additional warning: this is political and I’m not going to sugarcoat it.

The visible part of the iceberg

On July 25 2023, a coordinated effort was made to review-bomb Project Moon ongoing game, Limbus Company, on the different platforms it’s available on. Here is a screenshot from Steam I took at around 12:00PM GMT. (Overall reviews: mostly positive, recent reviews: average)

Later that day, Project Moon released an official statement on their twitter @LimbusCompany_B. The first part is basically apologies for gameplay problems. The second part, though, isn’t about in-game content. This is the machine-translated version of this post:

“Hello, this is Project Moon Director Kim Ji-hoon. As announced from the early days of the company, Project Moon has not conducted any ideological verification activities such as separate intervention, questioning, or tracking of individual employees having specific ideologies or engaging in social media activities. However, there was only one request that the company asked all the employees. It doesn’t matter what kind of opinions or activities an individual expresses through social media, but it was asked to eliminate the possibility that personal social media accounts, which could cause social controversy, were related to the company. As many people have their own thoughts about social controversies, expressions on personal SNS can be regarded as the thoughts of the entire company, and if a controversy arises due to this, it can harm other workers within the company and the company’s operation. And this caution has been communicated to the team members several times through the company messenger as a general notice, and verbally as well. The person in charge of the current controversial illustrator was posted as a nickname on his personal social media account in the game credits, and the company requested confirmation from the company and employees to ensure that the controversy did not cause damage. In this process, additional confirmation was not made because requesting further specific confirmation on whether there were any issues related to specific social controversies on the social media account was an act of ideological verification. Therefore, it was a situation where we had no choice but to deal with the controversy after it occurred, and the follow-up was delayed. In conclusion, starting from chapter 5, which is scheduled for future updates, the work of the person in charge will not be included in the game. Apart from this, the existing works of the person in charge were the company’s official works created by the CEO and the story team to express the worldview of Project Moon. We believe that the work in question does not contain elements that will cause social controversy, and that it is right to spend more time and effort on a new work in the future rather than proceeding with a complete replacement, considering the realistic work period for replacement. Works related to the previous story will remain, but the image of the worker in the main UI will be replaced over time. Since a violation of the company rules, which we have warned about again, has occurred, the contract with the employee in question will be terminated. Please refrain from any further verbal violence or threats to the person in charge both online and offline. As a result, we apologize for causing concern and disappointment to users who wanted to fully enjoy the contents of Project Moon, not problems outside of the game. Once again, the team members will not be involved in any social media activities at the company level, but we will ask you to be careful not to connect with the company.”

In short: Project Moon has a policy of asking their employees to avoid posting anything that could be deemed “controversial” on social medias if the account can in any way be linked back to the company. They got informed by an external source that one of their illustrators had made a controversial statement and could be linked to them. As it’s again the company rules, they fired said illustrator.

For context, this kind of clause is a common thing in South Korea (and other countries).

OK but that’s all the public information, so what actually happened?

We (sadly) have to go into a bit of cultural and political context. In South Korea, gender equality is very much not a commonly accepted idea. Simply saying that women should be able to work outside of home for an equal pay is a controversial statement. Around 2017-2018 there was a feminist push and, in answer to that, a harsh anti-feminist movement. At this point, a woman who would later join Project Moon (Vellmori) made a few feminist posts. She deleted them afterward, thus being in compliance with Project Moon policy of no controversial statement linkable to them. Here is a thread about these posts.

However, there is a solid movement of anti-feminism in South Korea, and people involved in it consider Project Moon a feminist company, which it very much is in this specific context. They targeted Limbus Company basically from the start, documenting every single thing they could think of as “proof” of the game being bad (bugs, balance issues, etc) and did their best to blow it out of proportion. It is, at it’s core, the classic dynamic of a small group being extremely vocal to try to get what they want even though most people disagree. So there was already constant pressure, and it came to a head with the Summer event.

In most gacha, a Summer event leads to characters in sexy swimsuits. However the new (female) character released for the event was Ishmael in a full-body diving suit. Anti-feminists saw this as an explicit feminist move and decided to up the pressure. They started review-bombing the game and cyber-stalking Project Moon employees. And then they stumbled upon the (deleted for years at this point) posts made by Vellmori, and decided to use this as a weapon.

Anti-feminists physically went to Project Moon’s offices and threatened the employees. I’ll repeat in case this didn’t read dramatic enough: people broke in the workplace of Project Moon employees with the goal of physically harming them. There are literal death threats, and alas this kind of situation has already devolved into actual deaths in the past in South Korea, so Project Moon knows to take this seriously. And given that they are under attack for a social/political reason, they also know that if they try to alert the authorities they’ll most likely get brushed off as being the ones starting the problem because authorities are generally not on the feminist side of this debate.

For those of you more familiar with USA events, this level of harassment and terrorism is akin to how Kiwifarm and the likes threaten LGBTQIA+ persons, or how anti-abortion terrorists target women’s clinics in the US, if this can help you get a better idea of the level of danger.

So to protect the life of their employees, Project Moon bows to the demand to fire Vellmori.

Here are several threads speaking of all that I just said: thread the first, thread the second (it’s in images in the post).

And now?

Now, anti-feminists are happy they won this round, but probably won’t stop here. The Korean fandom has a mix of people deciding to drop the game entirely (and I mean entirely, to the point of deleting their fan creations to avoid any association), people asking Project Moon to correct what they see as an injustice to Vellmori, and probably other groups I didn’t catch sight of. And meanwhile the English-speaking part of the fandom, who is having a hard time getting actual information with the language barrier, has lots of people who read the official statement, managed to gather it was a feminism issue, and are (understandably) angry at Project Moon for throwing one of their employees under the bus instead of sticking to the values they show in their creations. These people, though, are often lacking the additional context that lives were literally at stake and the decision was not made out of cowardice but in an attempt to save lives.

TL;DR

Anti-feminists hated that Project Moon was not openly anti-feminist, so they organized a hate campaign which culminated in people breaking in the studio with threats of killing the employees, and Project Moon bowed to their demand to fire an artist to make sure no one would be killed.

Hopefully this post helps spread awareness about the context surrounding these events.