Gossip Girl: the Yakirisu Saga

– Mary’s an animal, sick as they come. Taste of a cannibal, on top of her tongue

– She’ll fill with loving and drink out your blood. She’s trying to kill me but I just want your…

(This is more of a historical record than a ‘news’ article.)

On May 31, in the year of Sonic Frontiers, a Google Doc was posted by a DeputyAruuu on Twitter Dot Com. I did not know her but the person she spoke of in it, I at least heard of. “Yakirisu” Mary the Garchompist. I had seen her in two Alpharad videos weeks before this. If you don’t know, Alpharad is this gamer who does sick challenges because he’s so good/lucky at gaming that he needs to add some twist to his videos. Over last year, he’s done a bunch of invites with other Creators but I don’t always pay attention to them if I don’t think they are pretty/funny. So I did not really know Yaki but I was shocked of the contents on the doc because holy shit Alpharad’s name is in it!

Wait, he didn’t do anything. Jacob is not implicated. That’d be like blaming Shanks for Luffy’s piracy. The doc shortly addressed Yaki’s verbal abuse of her roommate UltimaShadowX while she had him live at her house to ease the cost of rent. It was mostly telling him to shut up when she was streaming. Then the doc moved to Aruuu’s own history with Yaki which made her out to be a master manipulator, mean gossip girl, and totally bad friend. It also painted Aruuu as a loner as according to her, Yaki forced the dissolving of her friendship with other creators leaving her nearly isolated.

The response from Chat (the mass of the internet) was disgust. Yaki had to log off and even her own twitter replies were acting coldly toward her. Then like six more people came out with bad news about Yaki. The reaction was off the charts. At this point, there was no form of a Faction Event, they just constructed a diamond class bandwagon to hate on Yaki. NOBODY wanted to defend Yaki. Otherwise Chat also wanted to console Ultima for getting abused and treated him as an unfortunate victim of a terribly evil person. The news never really spread outside of Twitter.

The next day Yaki came out with her own doc which was only to respond to Aruuu, her ex Hazel, and this miniature streamer Fadel. But no one was trying to hear her shit. Chat read her response to be a big ‘nuh uh’ maybe because that term is a little trendy right now. They didn’t find anything that actually justified Yaki’s actions and instead it seemed she was avoiding blame and putting it on Fadel (this is a misreading, clearly a bunch of it was supposed to blame Aruuu for their falling out). She does very shortly and even forgetfully apologize to Ultima as she was unaware of how truly harsh she was to him. I don’t think anyone got to this part because even Aruuu criticizes her for apologizing to no one in the doc. She doesn’t apologize to anyone else which I don’t know if she can in her perspective.

And that’s the thing. There was something very interesting in her doc that the casual chatter ignored. While they memed about her long list of crimes (and you could’ve left Twitter that day thinking Yaki was Hitler), I was interested in the very chronological retelling of her history with Aruuu, Fadel, and Ultima. Chronological not only because she actually specified when something happened but also had much more screenshots than Aruuu did. That doesn’t give her too much credit, some screenshots were wholesome fodder but I was happy to be able to gage her perspective. And because of her 111 screenshots with Aruuu text convos, I found that Aruuu’s perspective has some lowkey plotholes. Then I read the other 7 docs people posted which was like so enlightening.

I hardly paid this much attention to any creator drama but reading each doc was like a fun little puzzle of figuring out the ugly picture behind Yaki. Every angle, 360 degrees could be established by these docs. As I journeyed through each, I found disappoint that she was only like a kinda sucky person. These (social) crimes they are accusing her seem true but also like, all of this fanfare? She’s not an angel but I was expecting a demon. I decided to start piling the information together to have a clear picture and here is that timeline; Yakigate.

Now hey, -gate is being used appropriately. Ever since the Watergate Scandel, people liked to use -gate to refer to almost any political controversy but -gate was apart of the place’s name. It’s only appropriate to use it for actually investi-gate-tions as the original controversy was this intensive investigation of ex President Nixon.

So I was nearing the end of reading everything hoping there would be some big reveal to truly hate her like I do pedophiles. But even the most evil thing she did seemed to be under talked about and it was just a really bratty thing to do. She does not seem to commit any actual crimes which I guess is why they don’t go to court over this stuff. It’s just bad social behavior so you gotta make sure everyone hates her instead. In the end, I realized I also don’t mind if she’s unjustified, she is a regular person. Oooh and I haven’t done a villain story on this site so…

This record will be psychoanalyzing the Garchomp fan and if you want to hate her afterwards, I do not mind. It’s just the reactionary nature of Chat that my brain is suspicious of. Also, despite these many stories, I feel bad no one had that much good to say about her. So either we did not get all 360 degrees of her or maybe she really really sucks. You might see arguments for both sides but that isn’t being unbias, I’m an optimist who tries to see the best on either side. Anyways, that timeline I linked up there will be nice to read along to since I will write like you already read it.

Glossary (there are some terms I’ll just casually use)

Alliance: two parties in favor of each other

Coalition: multiple parties in disfavor against a common enemy

Diplomatic Reputation aka rep: whether people have a positive or negative view of you

Power Projection aka clout: the actual following count of a person.

Rival: one party disfavoring another even if its not a mutual competition

Extrasocial: describing people with one connection to Yaki’s general friend groups between Fadel and Jacob. Basically they are outside of it.

Chat: my label for the general internet userbase. There is no consistent form to them, just opinions spawned at nauseum. They will argue amongst themselves. They do not have specific names because if they were notable, they would not be in chat. To relate it to real life, imagine a mass of peasentry.

Peace Treaty: formal agreement to prevent escalation of aggression

Faction Event: whenever there is controversy between two or more creators, Chat will divide itself into two or more groups that will fight in favor of their favorite creator. The event will feature contests of arguments and memes until eventually one side has been labeled the bad guy or toxic and the other person as wholesome. The discussion will end there (unless the creators restarted it) as a toxic person is indefensible since you look like you’re simping.