forgotten_aria

I mostly want to document this, because I think it is a complicated enough topic, that I want to try to remember the details.

I've been making a costume based on an Overwatch character who is wearing a Diablo character's costume. (Zarya wearing Sonya) I've been doing this for months, hours a day.

About a week ago someone playing in a Hearthstone competition made a political statement supporting Hong Kong on Activision/Blizzard's official stream. The player was stripped of his winnings and banded for a year. The two casters were also let go.

(Hearthstone, Overwatch and Diablo are all Activision/Blizzard IPs.)

Obviously this made many people upset, including myself. There is a very bad tweet from the Chinese segment of Hearthstone, though some people speculate that it might be edited by a third party. This came out about the same time that Apple and the NBA had also done things that seemed to be the Chinese government telling them to jump and them asking "how high."

This tainted the joy and accomplishment I had been receiving from making my costume. People were boycotting Blizzard and even Blizzard employees were protested with a walk out. But me not finishing nor wearing the costume doesn't to anything to help what's going on, and it does hurt me a great deal, because of the amount of hours I've put into this.

Blizzard has since walked back some of the punishment, they have returned the prize money and reduced the ban to 6 months. And in a lot of ways, this controversy has amplified the original statement, because if he had just made it and nothing had happened, I'm not sure anyone would have noticed, but now it's international news. Blizzard also pointed out that it's in their rules not to use these competitions for political advancement.

As I said, this is a complicated issue and my thoughts on this are still chaotic. I am a little tired of money over morals that all large companies seemingly have these days. I am also tired of how everything is so interconnected, that small things can taint so much.

When this was done, I was looking forward to writing up a complicated page detailing exactly what I did on my nobody-reads-it website. But now I'm not so sure.