At two o'clock in the morning on November 26, the building of South Korea's NEXON Company was still brightly lit. What makes them so diligent? Is there a new game coming out? Sadly, not really. What kept NEXON employees awake at night was an error that should not have appeared in the game's CG.
On November 25, some Korean players discovered that insulting gestures appeared in the promotional PV for the character "Bolid Angel" in NEXON's game "MapleStory: Maple Legend".
Based on this, the CGs of other NEXON games have also been found to have relevant content.
The first ones that were found to have the same problem were "Dungeon and Fighter" and "Dungeon and Fighter Mobile". There are a lot of shots with this gesture in the CGs of these two games, and even the promotional animations linked to SNK are not immune.
Then, there is "Granblue Files", another major game under NEXON. Players discovered that even in the midst of a fierce gunfight with Bai Zhouzi, Dingqian Saori did not forget to take a moment to show this gesture.
Moreover, NEXON is not the only company with this problem. Under the discovery of Korean players, SmileGate, which was recently blocked by trucks in protest, NimbleNeuron, the developer of "Eternal Return", and Neowiz, which has just ushered in a career rise with "Pinocchio's Lies", all have more or less such problems in the CGs of their games.
From point to line, from line to surface, most of South Korea's well-known game companies have been affected by this incident.
After the incident, strong protests quickly broke out in player forums for games such as MapleStory and Dungeon Fighter. This time, the major game companies did not find a solution until the truck blocked the door, as was common in the past. Instead, they took quick action: In the early morning after the incident, Wonman Lee, the game director of "Dungeon and Fighter", immediately issued an apology statement on the official website.
Other companies are no less generous. Throughout the entire day on November 26, they set all YouTube videos related to this incident to "private" status, and successively issued apologies and statements modifying the content.
But the whole incident didn't end there. As mentioned at the beginning, because there is so much content affected, all companies have to work overtime to modify relevant content. Take "Eternal Return" as an example. Affected by this incident, many character skins have been removed from the shelves and redone.
As the incident continued to ferment, Korean players traced the source and found the outsourced animation company "PPURI Studio Animation" (주식회사스튜디오뿌리), which was inseparable from the incident. According to a survey by Korean players, all CGs related to the event were contracted and produced by this studio.
Although angry, most Korean players still maintained a considerable degree of sanity. After all, it does make sense for the character's hands to form similar gestures during movement. Therefore, they did not immediately define PPURI Studio Animation as a company that carries private goods and conveys extreme ideas.
However, with such a large number of suspected cases appearing in the works of one company at the same time, it is obviously difficult to explain the past with a "coincidence". A Korean player imitated one of the "Rock, Paper, Scissors" videos and said: "It is completely unreasonable to insert such a frame into a normal action."
In the end, Korean players unearthed a key piece of evidence: an ID of @nengneng339 (Korean username: 댓서) published a large number of extreme remarks on the social networking site X (formerly Twitter), and this @nengneng339 is the original artist who works at PPURI Studio Animation.
Now, everything makes sense: driven by extreme thoughts, @nengneng339 added insulting gestures to every work he worked on. They escaped the scrutiny of PPURI Studio Animation and major game companies, and were finally presented to players.
At present, a large number of players have begun to denounce @nengneng339’s behavior of carrying private goods on X. As for @nengneng339 herself, she has quietly closed her X account.
The whole thing was revealed. But at the same time, it’s hard not to ask: What kind of magic power does this gesture have that makes @nengneng339 insist on adding it to his work even if he takes such a big risk?
Readers who are familiar with this kind of thing must know one thing - this "holding" gesture is considered insulting because it implies that Korean men are not "strong" enough.
At this point, some people may think they are quite hypocritical. Because we have to dig out the so-called "evidence" in the animations of the game. Isn't it a bit of a fuss?
Actually, that's really not the case. If the unearthed problematic clips are like those in the original "MapleStory: Maple Story" character PV, where the character is facing the camera and showing this gesture to everyone in front of the screen, then it can indeed be said that this group of Korean men have "matched the numbers" and "broken the defense."
But this gesture also appears in the fight CG of "Granblue Files" above. At this time, Shaori's back was facing the camera, and she did not deliberately show the meaning of this gesture to others - this was not just a simple mockery of the "weakness" of Korean men. What makes Korean players angry is not the ridicule about "weakness", but the extremist attitude revealed in this move.
There are many similar cases
Ultimately, the answer to this question needs to be found in the rise of South Korea’s ultra-feminist website Megalia. This "holding"-like insulting gesture is the symbol of the Megalia website.
In 2015, when Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) was raging around the world, a piece of fake news spread on the Korean forum DCInside: two Korean women in Hong Kong caused the spread of the MERS epidemic because they refused to undergo quarantine. For Koreans who value "their identity is the same as their country", this move is undoubtedly a "disgrace to foreign countries". Therefore, they launched an outpouring of online violence against the two women on the forum, calling them "shameful pickle girls."
This move caused dissatisfaction among Korean feminists. After this fake news was debunked, they responded by calling the Korean men "Kimchi men" who abused innocent people online. As the "war" intensified, the DCInside forum had to ban the use of all related words.
As a result, the angry female users chose to leave the DCInside forum. They combined MERS, which caused the entire incident, with the feminist novel "Egalia's Daughters" (Egalia's Daughters) as their name, and founded the feminist website "Megalia". Members of Megalia declare that they will "promote women's rights and eliminate misogyny that is prevalent in Korean society."
But in practice, Megalia is a quite controversial organization. It helped victims of attacks at Chosun University Medical School and was instrumental in shutting down the illegal pornographic website SoraNet (the successor to the infamous Room N). But at the same time, Megalia also published a lot of hateful speeches, and some of them even took pleasure in spreading bloody pictures of "cutting away forever".
Moreover, as a stronghold of extremists, members of the Megalia website do not have any idea of "seeking common ground while reserving differences." Not only are they radical externally, they also have a lot of internal strife over LGBT issues internally. In the end, the radicals who could not tolerate LGBT people left Megalia and founded a new website "WOMAD" that was even more extreme.
Because of this, although the Megalia website was eventually shut down in 2017, WOMAD’s presence gradually grew. Members of WOMAD are no longer limited to verbal discussions like they did during the Megalia period. They begin to use their thoughts to intervene in real life more frequently - such as killing a male cat, publishing a crime notice of "kidnapping a little boy", saying that they will abandon an aborted baby boy, etc.
The words and deeds of WOMAD members are an example - fortunately, the knife was not really swung.
Because of this, this gesture no longer has a simple meaning of "ridiculing Korean men" in South Korea. Making this gesture deliberately means declaring "I am a supporter of the Megalia spirit and I believe that all male creatures should be eliminated." And this is the root cause of the outrage among Korean players and the intensification of the whole incident.
After the incident, under tremendous pressure from public opinion, PPURI Studio Animation issued a statement saying that it would correct the problematic scene as soon as possible and punish the employees involved.
But at the same time, perhaps to prevent the situation from deteriorating further, they mentioned in their apology statement that the incident "was an unintentional act."
Players were not satisfied with this statement, which also led to the entire incident not only not ending with PPURI Studio Animation's apology statement, but also becoming more and more intense.
In addition to the anger of players, PPURIStudioAnimation has more things to deal with-due to the real economic losses caused by this incident, PPURIStudioAnimation may face lawsuits from multiple Korean game companies in the future.
Of course, this matter has nothing to do with us as spectators.
PPURIStudio Animation has lost credibility in this crisis. Maybe it will go bankrupt because it can no longer receive contracts, but to be honest, even if PPURIStudio Animation does go bankrupt, this matter will not be solved.
Looking at the entire incident, we will find a ridiculous and deplorable fact: among the many "involved" animations, this insulting gesture appeared in basically only one frame. However, even if there is only one frame, the artist involved has to add private goods; even if there is only one frame, the added private goods will be discovered by Korean players.
We don’t know how many animation companies there are like PPURIStudioAnimation, nor how many original animators like @nengneng339 there are. After this, Korean players will scrutinize the CG of each game more strictly, but as long as the source is not cut off, similar things will continue to happen.
In a more subtle way.