Regardless of Mangs’s vile actions and any personal opinions of FEU, here’s what I think about this open letter:
- You cite a long bullet-point list of projects, and use their presence on Mangs’ channel as justification for this request. Judging from the signatures that were present at the time of posting this thread, it’s clear the FEU staff didn’t ask a number of the creators of these hacks if they were okay with this letter before seemingly speaking in their names.
- I obviously don’t know everyone who signed this, but I don’t believe all the signatures come from mod creators, let alone people involved in projects featured on Mangs’s channel. Non-creators may obviously agree with the purpose of the letter, but I don’t think their signatures have a place on a letter specifically written from the perspective of mod creators whose works are featured on Mangs’s channel.
His FE5 LP uses Lil’ Manster, not Project Exile.
This, regardless of moral considerations, makes this entire letter look like a massive gaslighting operation, bringing projects up as evidence without consulting their authors, and pushing an uncurated list of signatures. Guys, you’re better than this. At least organize the signatures a bit, ffs.
This is my first gripe with this initiative.
My other gripe was that it was treading dangerously close to rejecting the concept of fair use, something I find incredibly ironic coming from a community of modders. The new wording does a better job at not expressing that, but there’s still this lingering idea that modders have every right to demand things of a LPer because they hold “rights” to their content. That’s not how fair use works.
If anything, I think asking for demonetization would have been a better idea to avoid tainting this letter’s message. You want to do good, and hope that victims get reparations. I get that. I hope you can achieve that goal, but I sincerely doubt this is the way to do it.