It’s amazing how much the whole cheating scandal and resulting finger pointing and chaos in the community has just like

Made me not care about following TOP stuff anymore

That sucks but all the fun is gone now

Just completely zapped

i will say that stupid academic part of me sees a sociological or anthropologic paper in all this mess somewhere

Definitely

Like that one time World of Warcraft accidentally created a plague model

I feel like once someone makes an inane comment like “discord is a third party app” I check out lest I want to inflict bodily harm

OKAY BUT THE WOW PLAGUE WAS COOL

The main thing I'd be interested in is the international context in which theories of the sociology of "deviant" behavior manifests here. Like it's one thing to say "we cheat because everybody does it," it's another thing to say "we cheat because we think all the non-Japanese do it"

I might be thinking about this because I was sitting in a session about why we shouldn't worry too much about ChatGPT in academia and the explanations for why students cheat popped up

Honestly, now that every phase has been shown now I've lost interest in watching too (though I get that way with every Ultimate released)

I'll stick around for a few memes, but that's about it