As unfortunate as it is and how it reflects on my primary hobby, I think this needs to be talked about here.
Christine Sprankle is a very popular cosplayer in the Magic the Gathering community. She is popular enough to have been subject of a mini-documentary sponsored by Wizards of the Coast (who make MtG, in case you didn’t know). Last friday she announced that she would be leaving the community citing extensive harassment, particularly naming Magic YouTuber Jeremy Hambly as the prime instigator of such.
Hambly runs a YouTube channel called Unsleeved Media (previously known as MTGHeadquarters) which was a couple of years ago the biggest YT channel for Magic the Gathering, mostly on the back of easy-to-make box opening videos and little to no actually informative or meaningful content. He has since been overtaken in popularity by other channels with better content. At the same time he was told “not cool” when making an inappropriate joke about women, and blames such events for not having been invited to the Magic Community Cup (a yearly event where popular members of the community battle the employees of WotC) and no longer receiving preview cards for new sets. He pretty quickly went down the rabbit hole of becoming a full blown alt-right troglodyte, the type that uses “beta cuck loser” on a regular basis.
Hambly has started using his channel to also stir all sorts of drama with misleading thumbnail images and complete misrepresentations. The official story is of course “it’s all a joke, bro” but the implication for his followers is of course to shun the people he features in such videos, which of course leads to substantial harassment for those victims. I am not going to directly link to this vile behavior, but instead going to feature a video which has been made by another much better MtG YouTuber who refers to himself just as “The Professor” on his channel Tolarian Community College, who has himself been a target of Hambly on multiple occasions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nslCeqwKuCk
In the wake of all of this a lot of talk has started about what the community at large and WotC in particular can do in these situations. WotC released a statement on the weekend and says it is looking into the situation. However since MTGHQ is not actively participating in tournaments there is not much they can do. A large selection of Magic Pro Players have also released an open letter condemning such behavior with a call to do better and step in when people see it happen (The letter has been published on several websites simultaneously).
At the same time a bunch of fans of Hambly have come out with the typical assortment of counter-measures such as accusing others of forming a hate mob against him and the charge that nobody is presenting Hambly’s position fairly. The largest subreddit for MtG has also had to clean up a ton of vile spewed by Hambly’s followers to the point where most threads that deal with the issue are almost immediately locked as it has also been targeted by raids from the usual suspects.
Edit: Update from WotC which was released a couple hours after I made that post.