Recently, an artist JLemongrass has been ‘de-platformed’ on Twitter. They were notable for working with Minecraft Championship event (known as MCC), where they drew icons for the players, and for the conflict that arose because of that.
As the time went out, new details were uncovered that would put an end to their carrier and any relationship to MCC event. The artist was discovered to be racist, transphobic, homophobic and many other things. But are they really are? Let’s take a look into the details and see what we’re missing.
My goal with this article is not to defend JLemongrass and their behaviour, nor I am trying to make their problematic behaviour less severe than it really is. Here I just want to point out a few issues when people overlook certain details and clearly not being objective. In some cases, I’m also going to be speculative of the reasoning.
<aside> ⛔ Content warning: the article below contains mentions of homophobia, transphobia, racism, incest, fetishising of MLM, fat-shaming, J.K. Rowling and mostly censored slurs. It should be suitable for audiences of 16 years and older. Proceed at your own discretion.
Russia: This content is not suitable for audiences below the age of 18.
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<aside> ℹ️ Editor note: please be aware that I’m not a native English speaker and might have mistakes in the text and even translations. If you find any, be sure to contact me through social media. I’m @Brawaru on Twitter.
More, I was raised in Russia, with a different culture and social issues compared to other western countries, so I might be not aware of certain ‘outside’ issues, and if my speculations or views are incorrect or even offensive, I very welcome you to tell me why that is the case, I am open to learning, and do not intend to hurt anyone. Thanks!
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<aside> 📝 The post has been updated to include comments from JLemongrass. Thanks to @egg_io_ on Twitter for providing screenshots.
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<aside> ✏️ Last edited — 21 December 2021. Reason: clarifications and missed a/the articles.
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Back when MCC introduced season two and started presenting the teams, users noticed that a few members were ‘incorrectly’ painted, more precisely, their skin colours ‘weren’t right’.
‘Announcing team Green Guardians’, a since-deleted tweet said. Users noticed that George's colour is much darker than he is in life, while Quackity is much paler for a Mexican.
People bashed into each other, few defended the artist reminding that Mexicans can be paler and that colours probably come from their in-game skins. As we learned in the future from the organiser, Scott Smajor, each team member would confirm their icon and be able to request changes, but none did, so we might assume they were fine with how they were depicted.
Users were not. But more discoveries were made back then when people researched the artists followed accounts and all past tweets. Artist seemed to support a fictional ship of two brothers, which then seemed to be debunked and artists in their defence said they were following the accounts only for their drawing style and weren’t aware that they’re brothers (which I read they’re not, at least not in our ‘family’ sense, but rather clan sense [citation needed]).
The conflict really divided everyone who paid attention and probably was not forgotten within the community, but it calmed down and the event went as intended. During the MCC Pride, though, all players had no icons, their avatars or photos were used, but most probably due to lack of time for an artist to draw all the players.
<aside> 🔗 *Based on source material by @itsmisssmakayla on Twitter. (web archive).*
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Some people went out of their way to find all misdoing that the artist JLemongrass did and discovered their VK account.
In case you are not aware of what VK is, basically, it’s Russian Facebook. It has user profiles with real names (as real as they can be), groups of various visibilities, public pages and much more to it. Just as Facebook, VK has a very conservative community: because the company is co-owned by the Russian oligarch, it is working with the state agencies and has a history of censoring ‘anti-state’ content, including LGBTQ+ communities and protest channels, and helping jailing people over ‘re-posts’ and memes, what in turn causes progressive auditory to leave. The site also has an issue with Russian bots.
VK allows communities to provide links to any other pages related to that community, through which we find about her ‘shitposting’ group, where she makes various personal relaxed takes. Since the previous conflict during MCC teams introduction, it seems that she has taken measures to limit the visibility of her page contents, as well as make some of the communities private.