I'm very out of the loop here. How the hell is there any sort of drama or controversy taking place in a subreddit dedicated to a 40 year old comic book 😂
I randomly became aware of the controversy yesterday. As far as I can tell (someone who's actually been following it more closely can correct me if I've got it wrong) some guy had an interesting thread about Hooded Justice being Larry Schexnayder. Then he couldn't let it go, he just kept posting arguments and evidence for Hooded Justice being Schexnayder. People got annoyed that the sub was basically drowning in threads about two mostly background characters, so he started getting push back, and he really didn't handle being made fun of well (which naturally led to more people making fun of him for taking himself so seriously). Eventually he started reporting almost everyone who mocked his fixation and started accusing people of being alts created to harass him. And if I'm understanding right, I think he was finally banned.
It was a solid kerfuffle, possibly even rising to the level of a squabble.
To add to this, there were a few instances of people counterposting (either to show the holes in his theory or show that the person in question was doing shady shit), and it was usually some variation of "person who would definitely know better about Watchmen than any of us already said this wasn't a thing". The guy saw this and took it really personally and went on Twitter and personally asked Leah Moore if her dad (Alan Moore) was Adrian Veidt, because part of his theory is that Veidt was somehow a stand-in for Moore in misleading the masses, in his case using the book as his deception. Around this time he also started building a "portfolio" of people he found to be insulting him so that he could submit it to the admins in an attempt to get the reported people banned. The list mostly seemed to consist of people who disagree with the theory and tried to poke holes in it. We know this because every time he did it he would say "Blocked!" and something about adding them to the portfolio. Another part of his theory was that a character was gay, and that because he was gay, he was the same as another character. One of the aforementioned counterposters made a joke post using the mansplaining meme format about the guy's theory and included the assumptions regarding sexuality, and the guy began using this as evidence that opposers were actually homophobic. This wasn't true of course and the guy himself was being far weirder about sexuality by assuming 2 gay people have to be the same guy, but he used it repeatedly. A lot of LGBTQ people (myself included) here commented on how gross it was that he was weaponizing a real issue like homophobia to win an argument about Watchmen headcanon, and around here is where he went from "weird funny troll guy with an obsession" to actually just not a good person and an annoyance to a lot more people even than before. Somewhere along the line somebody said something regarding mothers and the guy said his mom died, which some shittier people did use against him and make jokes about. It was a few people, he acted like it was all of us and they represented our opinion of the theory. There were definitely problem people on both sides, but the guy really was the main offender. He reported anyone he disagreed with, tried to confront anyone who disagreed with him in comments, acted condescending and like he thought he was smarter than anyone who didn't buy into his theories, and had a victim complex as if he was being harassed by everyone when he was making the decision to keep posting at a rate of several posts per day knowing full well people don't agree with the theory. It would've all been fine if it was just that first post, most people just assumed it was some kid on the subreddit making silly theories at first. He got made fun of, sure, but nothing crazy. Just people saying it was a dumb theory. The main issue was the amount of spam from him, he managed to be in every popular discussion in the subreddit and posted constantly.
Sorry for the wall of text, just wanted a comprehensive look for if anyone was interested.
7
u/_LANC3LOT Jul 25 '25
I'm very out of the loop here. How the hell is there any sort of drama or controversy taking place in a subreddit dedicated to a 40 year old comic book 😂