A wave of false-flag reports has forced the removal of a video by YouTuber Hero Hei due to it containing mild criticisms of the pronoun selection options in the new creature-collection MMO Temtem.
On January 21st, Hero Hei uploaded a video to his YouTube channel titled “TemTem, “Pokemon Clone”, Launches with Absurdly Woke, Restricted Character Creation Gameplay Options,” featuring a thumbnail reading “Gender Not Allowed and Must Pick Pronouns.”
The video put forth Hero Hei’s personal speculation that the option to select one’s pronouns during Temtem’s character creation, rather than choosing from the male-female gender binary, was being done in an effort to appeal to “certain demographics.”
Shortly after the video was uploaded, anime YouTuber The Pedantic Romantic brought the video to the attention of their audience and depicted Hero Hei as calling for TemTem to be “swiftly cancelled” and mocking him for this assumed stance:
TemTem got to be a hero for the Gamers™ for two days as an example of how GameFreak are lazy hacks before being swiftly cancelled by them for *gasp* letting you pick your pronouns pic.twitter.com/7hhjqBG0yB
— ThePedanticRomantic @ AX (@PedanticRomantc) January 22, 2020
Now, how “being forced to choose your pronouns & your appearance” represents a loss of freedom as opposed to “being forced to choose whether you’re a boy or a girl, which only affects pronouns & appearance,” I’m not sure, but these folks clearly have much bigger brains than me pic.twitter.com/PWJleAZhNF
— ThePedanticRomantic @ AX (@PedanticRomantc) January 22, 2020
Hero Hei would later proceed to upload a video explaining the situation around the deletion of his original video, claiming that “within just an hour of releasing that video, a very vocal, very upset part of Twitter had found it, had screeched about it, disliked bombed it, and [presumably] false-flagged it.”
He did concede that he has no evidence of a coordinated false-flag campaign, but “if that’s not the case, it does seem a bit coincidental.”
In response to The Pedantic Romantic’s tweets, Hero Hei noted that he primarily took issue with their “strawmanning” of his argument and refuted this false depiction of his argument by explaining that he “wasn’t trying to get TemTem cancelled, and I don’t support Cancel Culture and all that shenanigans.”
Hero Hei would also take responsibility for his role in contributing to the incitement of the Twitter outrage, particularly for his use of unnecessarily inflammatory messaging in his the video’s thumbnail, title, and “presentation.”
“To be fair, I think I could have presented my arguments better in that last video. The title, the thumbnail, and my presentation, it all came off like I only had one argument, and I got into the rest of it later on in the video, but by that point, some people got the wrong idea, and that’s on me. I could’ve done better on that front.”