The fall anime season is finally here and with it, much to the joy of fans, the premiere of Science SARU’s highly anticipated, animated adaptation of Yukinobu Tatsu’s Dandadan.
Unfortunately, one such fan, an anime YouTuber by the name of Chibi Reviews, has found himself the target of harassment for Western viewers due to his enjoyment of the series’ actual contents.
Originally published via Shueisha’s Shōnen Jump+ app, Dandadan follows high schoolers Ken Takakura and Momo Ayase, the former who believes in aliens but not ghosts, and the later ghosts but not aliens, as they attempt to prove their respective perspective to the other.
In service of this competition, the two begin visiting various locations where such supernatural activity is said to have taken place – and in a surprise twist, these visits eventually result in Momo being abducted by real aliens and Ken possessed by an actual spirit.
As a result, Momo develops psychic powers, and Ken enters into a psuedo-parternship with his possessive spirit and gains the ability to temporarily gain incredible physical abilities (but, as an unfortunate side effect, at he cost of his testicles, which he then proceeds to try and hunt down across all of Japan), which they proceed to use against the aliens in an order to stop them from taking over the Earth.
And it was this comedy-action shonen series that resulted in Chibi Reviews becoming an enemy of the terminally online.
Following Dandadan‘s October 3rd premiere, the YouTuber shared a clip from the episode wherein a member of the Serpo – an all-male alien race seeking to obtain human reproduction organs to repopulate their species – attempts to use their intentionally phallic reproductive tool to extract Momo’s “banana” and womb.
Alongside the clip, Chibi Reviews opined, “The animators didn’t need to go so hard for this scene.”
The Animators didn't need to go so hard for this scene pic.twitter.com/2WTIjCi4NQ
— Chibi Reviews (@ChibiReviews) October 3, 2024
From there, a number of social media users – all of whom are apparently unable to discern fiction from reality – took Chibi Reviews’ tweet as him endorsing sexual assault, which they in turn used as justification to begin harassing and threatening the YouTuber.
Sharing a screenshot of a tweet from @DUzetten in which they received thousands of likes for declaring “Petition to stone this guy”, Chibi Reviews asserted, “7K people threaten to unalive me over a anime post. I think I’m loved.”
However, despite his further clarifications that he was merely admiring the scene’s animation and that the series also features numerous such ‘uncomfortable’ scenes involving Momo, the harassment only continued to grow.
Sharing a collage of various tweets directed his way – which included such gems as “We need to bring back killing annoying people”, “Please god smite this man so he can finally get off my timeline”, “You are the most disgusting creature I have ever laid eyes on,” and “We need to stone this guy” – Chibi declared, “The ‘normal people’ everyone. I’m going to continue posting whatever the hell I want. Having 1000s of you seething over me breathing gives me unimaginable joy in life.”
A few hours later, Chibi Reviews announced that not only had the harassment not stopped, but also that his critics had crossed a very real line.
“And someone officially doxed my real information,” he wrote on October 5th. “Also they mocked my dead brother that committed suicide. You know who you are and I’m going to speak to my lawyer now.”
“Those that used me for clout that helped get all my personal info doxxed,” he said. “You know who you are. You ain’t good people. I got screenshots and will be using them as evidence. You wanna actually bring me harm. Better be ready to face the consequences in court.”
It was eventually discovered that though the original doxxers had undertaken their campaign on Twitter, others on their side later proceeded to move the campaign’s organizing efforts to the sojay.party forums, whereupon they proceeded to both openly document their exploits and up the ante by hacking into and uploading actual, genuine child sexual exploitation materials (CSEM) to Chibi Reviews’ personal DeviantArt account.
Per relevant posts, the information uncovered by the hackers related to his YouTube, Patreon, and personal social media accounts, as well as his social security number.
Interestingly enough, in regards to the topic of doxxing, soyjack.party’s official rules state, “While the act of doxxing is generally discouraged, in most cases it is deemed acceptable by the user base. However, the administration reserves the right to intervene if they feel that a dox is unwarranted or crosses a line.”
[Notably, while BIC normally links to sources, given the presence of Chibi’s information on the soyjack.party forums, we will not be linking to the thread directly.]
Screenshotting a number of the relevant soyjack.party posts himself, Chibi Reviews eventually took to Twitter to declare, in response to a critic who laughed off his concerns, “I hope you know I have evidence you all are on some bulls–t. Have fun with the FBI.”
“Also more proof,” he added, sharing a screenshot wherein a user can be seen admitting, “I hacked into his DeviantArt, nothing interesting though. I edited his bio as a gem [an online slang term for a ‘quality post’, as opposed to when one posts ‘coal’].
“And Deviantart even terminated the account because it was breaking its ToS,” he ultimately revealed. “Date and time at top right!”
“Not anyways kindly piss off,” he concluded.”
As of writing, Chibi Reviews has yet to publicly detail just what specific legal actions he is pursuing against his harassers.