Extra info for the lore masters! * Nyanners wasn't a part of the campaign with Momo (one of the girls who spoke out), but her experience is simply another ray of light on Arcadum as a whole. * Arcadum's 'wife' is only a wife by his nickname due to how long they've been dating. * Neckberdia's situation involves them sending a picture of their silver UA-cam play button, which had a reflection of a d*ck on the mirrored segment, into their discord server. The server at the time knowingly had underage members. This is also in conjunction with allegations that their discord staff would solicit sexual pics from these same minors, with their entire discord being nuked some time after.
@@mentallychallenging Apparently he barely looked into the Neckbeardia thing and posted this while not knowing all the facts, his words in another comment.
Well, someone is doing something wrong, and in this case it's definitely the DM. I guess staying in a game run by a toxic DM could be considered doing something wrong, though that feels a bit to "victim blaming" to me. Especially considering this is probably the first time these players have probably played a TTRPG. I wouldn't blame them if it is also the last time.
@@tekbox7909 Try having social anxiety and being the DM, and I don't even stream. I needed a couple before starting. Been sober two years and coincidentally haven't DMed since (fixing that). But yeah, with THIS particular case it was not good.
His interview with Dr. K was wild in retrospect. You could tell Dr. K knew he was leading him on but didn’t know why. Every time he asked a question Arcadum would spin a tale and Dr. K would think for a minute and say: “Well it’s clear you are a very good storyteller”
@@TheSaphireKatanahe's been active on Twitter. He himself has said that he's starting to feel safer altho there is still lingering fear. He's nevertheless thankful for the support of everyone in the community
The controversy he got for his silly video is still so crazy to me. One of the dumbest "cancellations"(?) I've ever seen, especially since most of thr hate was coming from people who didnt know who Jocat actually was.
It’s because they weren’t physically abused as children. The leather belt is a good cure for being a predatory asshole. Now that I think about it if I ever do have kids, I want to name my spanking belt empathy that way when I’m at parent teacher conferences and they’re not behaving. I’ll just say do I need to show you empathy? The teacher will be really confused.
@@queenannsrevenge100 Power doesn't corrupt, it attracts the corrupted and corruptible. I wrote a full reply, but I knew Arcadum before Twitch. He was always like this, long before the fame.
I think it’s just that the spotlight tends to land on these sort of people. It’s not that there’s a lot of them, it’s that media focuses on them so they have an overwhelming presence in our say to day
I think some of the Vtubers involved did take part in another campaign shortly after arcadum got outed. But from what I saw, said campaign was fairly short lived. Dunno why. The DM was FAR more normal and nicer compared to arcadum. Maybe the girls just got burned out? Or maybe i'm misremembering.
The most impressive part is that he made the whole vtubing community feel bad for Nyanners. It's an anomaly for that kinda shit to happen, but he found a way
@@avandorhu-3389 From what I know they had fun with it, but burnout and other complicated feelings stemming from that disaster aside, D&D campaigns fall through all the time due to a myriad different reasons, so, who knows?
I watched this thinking "With such big names, why don't I remember this guy?" And then the Discord call monologue about his friendship statistics over Death Note came up and it all came flooding back like "Ohhhh right. This guy."
17.8% isnt even a bad rate! If you run games for a total of 50 people, you end up with 8 friends, which is a good, manageable amount. If you add friends from work, school, and everywhere else, you end up with more friends than you can realistically maintain.
This is something I see from people who view relationships as transactional. Was also in that mindset due to be a loner growing up. It took time and experience to relearn that people are social creatures, and you can't just quantify relations like it's a math problem or a high score. It'll just make you feel mad and inadequate in the end.
It doesn't sound that bad, but that might be using your definition of "friend". :P Now, if we just shift "friend" to mean someone who you can call on for favors or control, and still speaks with you, it begins to take on a new tone...
Being romantically together for years in the same place would still qualify as "common law marriage" in court, so that's still a "wife" in any sense of the word, minus the ceremony. While there are a few factors that need to he taken into consideration to say for sure, living together and sharing assets are major ones, so it's pretty unlikely there's any valid argument if he were to claim "she's not my wife" as a defense.
> *sees title* > _"oh no, it's about HIM isn't it"_ > *it's about the person, the very reason, I burned out on watching D&D shows* > [psionically pings out a pulse of theta-radiation of sheer cortisol-induced stress] *_{A U G H sound}_*
Yeah, similar experience here The thumbnail doesn't look much like Arcadum, but I strongly suspected from the video title which person was about to be discussed.
after the allegations and proof came out, he went into his discord's voice chat on a new account and pretended to be his own female relative, not even using a voice changer, telling weird stories about how nice he was easily the strangest, funniest attempt at damage control i've ever seen
These streams were how I got into D&D I'm only thankful I got new friends into the hobby and we gave D&D our own meaning He may have introduced me to why I love the hobby, but I'm so so glad we made our own memories and weren't defined by originally being fans.
The movie Megamind is an interesting exploration of this. The presentation of "nice" doesn't always mean someone is of good morale character. When people are given power over others is when you find out who they truly are.
I honestly don't really see what you're talking about, unless you mean the literal Redditor archetype "nice guy" the camera guy was? Which wasn't even that nice
I was an avid fanartist, along with many fanartists for his games, and among all of the rest of the community that he built, I could say that on behalf of them, I am genuinely sick to the core on how he shattered the trust of each and everyone that believed in him. The wounds are old but they still linger. It was upsetting, it was exhausting, and man, I fcking hate it, even now
The fan art community of his was so amazing. I still remember fondly joining it a couple months before it all blew up, and the support I got when asking for advice with art there was what motivated me to some of the most productive months in terms of art of my life! And it was so much fun to watch the streams, find a cool idea for something to draw live and then see yours and other people’s art live on stream a few hours later. Good times. Cant ever forgive that twat for ruining that with his selfishness.
I probably saw your fan art at the end of those streams. Regardless of how things turned out, I just want you to know that your efforts were not wasted and are still appreciated.
Man, I was in a hurricane with my power knocked out when all the drama broke out, so I was pretty distraught when I came back and saw that the entire community he had spent years building essentially crumbled to pieces over the course of like 3 days. Painful to learn everything after that. Dude was the biggest vibe killer of all time. I still feel bad for everyone he soured for the game for.
Here is something many people may not know; this happened before. This was not the first time Jeremy ditched a community after his actions and attitude destroyed it (primarily gaslighting and taking advantage of people), and his method of coming back is the exact same. This was just the largest time. I was one of his original Verum players, before he became a Twitch streamer and back when he was pay to play GM. He had a habit of picking players who were his favorites, more often women but also some guys he liked hanging out with, and in game they would always receive more dialogue with NPCs, better items, and their rolls always garnished better results. It was still a difficult campaign, but they were more likely to see success for their risks. The ones he didn't like got one sentence responses, nothing they tried ever worked, their items were always lack luster, and anything besides pure, mechanical numbers were always harder for them. It got to the point one guy literally started keeping notes on what all the DCs, AC, etc, were, and showing us that the game was always easier for some people and harder for others. Well, I called Jeremy out on it, because THIS was empirical. Previously I was one of the people he liked, and I noticed the immediate drop treatment afterwards. He couldn't get rid of me, and I had trouble leaving, because I was the financial backer for most of the players in the game we were in; if I left, a lot of my friends were out of the game, and if he got rid of me, he was out a lot of money. He would convince the people he treated better that he treated everyone that way, because he was such a great guy of course,, and lie to them and say that we were just being sore losers because our builds were worse, our characters weren't as interesting, or we didn't like him. It wasn't that they were treated better, we were just assholes. Then it wasn't just him actively gaslighting you and treating you like shit, your mutual friends would be passively gaslighting you on his behalf, and the people who liked him and didn't like you all tried to make you out to be the bad guy. These were not stupid people either. He was just particularly good at getting rid of people who would scrutinize him. Well, what happened is eventually he decided to move to Twitch and the people who stayed with him when he transitioned to Twitch were the ones that he had successfully gaslit. The ones who didn't go to his Twitch were the ones who saw through his bullshit. So he started his Twitch community built up with people who were deeply entrenched, manipulated, and gaslit, and he knew what had worked to keep so many of them on board. He knew what to say to get them to dismiss evidence presented to them. Because those '52%' of people who wouldn't talk to him after the games were done? We were the ones he wanted to get rid of. This was the early 2010s. He was *always* this person. He just got away with it for so long because he can spot people who can see through his shit, and made sure to chase them away. As he gained money and influence, he did worse things and did them more brazenly, but he had always been that way.
Wow, thank you for that narrative. Just know.. someone here appreciated your effort when writing this text. Damn you played even before The Seven were a thing?
I remember he was like "I'm gonna stream later and explain everything" except he got kicked out of the house, seemingly had no internet access and never did said stream obviously it's impossible to give a good enough explanation anyways, at that point he was already done for no matter what
@@letsplaysvonaja1714 He returned after 2-3 months and his return stream was playing Far Cry 5 in emote only mode with everyone spamming the universal "No" emote and he basically said "We're not gonna talk about what happened"
0:45 this joke single-handedly made me subscribe to your channel, i tend to forget to subscribe to people that i like after watching their videos, but this stupid gag actually made me pause mid-way through just to hit the subscribe button lmao
The SA allegations make him irredeemable so I don’t even know why people feel comfortable defending him, even debating the whole “these tubers are grown woman” argument
@@BlaineSimple the people justifying SA cause they're adults-- i don't believe they have the IQ to consent like SA should be illegal no matter what age a person is. tf. Dx
@@BlaineSimple He is good at figuring out who will and will not scrutinize him, separating the two, and getting people to ignore those who call him out. He was doing it before Twitch.
I’d like to say I am utterly baffled by the concept of “Sexual favors in exchange for D&D favors”, but as the last 10 years have taught me, I should be surprised by nothing ever again.
A lot of the most creative DMs always seem to have these controlling personalities, where they get so caught up in their own ideas and the things they want to show players or viewers, that they always end up crossing lines. I had only learned about Arcadum a few months before this all happened, thought his work was super cool and was binge watching it to try and catch up, since he had this ambitious living world thing planned that I wanted to be part of. Was terrible to hear all this news and my interest dried up overnight. I remember looking at one of his campaigns he tried starting up after all this drama, but that just made it very clear that while he makes good worlds, his players were critical to his success.
Thanks for getting into this, Callous Row (now Neon Divide) was one of his projects. Following him getting exposed his own staff team cut him off. Though the scars Arcadum left are visible if you know where to look. Seeing him try and crawl out is fucking deplorable, if anyone sees him poke his head out you push him back into his hole.
I did not know that Callous Row rebranded and shifted tracks. That's good to know. You're right about him not needing to make a comeback. Everybody has a right to make a living, but not everybody deserves to make that living in show business. Arcadum is welcome to get a normie job like me.
@@lordzaboem Yeah they weren’t very receptive as Arcadum sexually harassed some cast members. They also needed to rebrand a lot, corps go by different names as Arcadum was trying to take legal action.
I was one of the staff for Arcadums living world, the part for this situation that don’t get mentioned very often. Artists were ran in on a super tight deadline from what I recall, even forced to do concept art for free. Summer tried to get all the artist on a separate server but he eventually worked his way in there. As for staff meetings, we were pretty much at the mercy of him sleeping properly. If he stayed up to late, usually in vrchat… we would be directionless for a week. As for his big bad events, the Violet Events, I eventually detested doing them for him. They weren’t fun, they were everything wrong with his story telling. Just things designed to make the game unfun for the living world. One example of this was him comatosing half the player base and CANCELING everything until the issue was resolved. Another thing I tried to do to help the living world was gather everyone’s unresolved research and people frozen waiting for him, and bring it to him. He essentially got pissy and kind of tantrumed when I revealed like, 3 or 4 pages of stuff he needed to resolve. He also later decided to corrupt research too. As for the aftermath of the fallout for Verum, he told Nurp, a trusted DM in the community and eventually establishing Syrik, he had planned to give him the server, to step back. Not even a day went by and he deleted all admin roles and basically removed all safeguards, resulting in people spamming unsavory gifs in the general chat. Rather than just give Nurp the server he literally tried to screw the living world again. As for the VrChat community Callous Row, which I’m not familiar what happened behind the scenes or what is happening with that anymore, they essentially had to rebrand because he was trying to take it back from them, even after he said he was stepping back. I’ve also had the misfortune of dealing with his new admin, Princeoverkill, who’s only defense for arcadum is he has evidence to disprove everything, but he can’t show it. He’s essentially trying to rebuild the Cult of Personality he had with Verum but in a more controlling manner.
And it sucks so much that he was bringing in a bunch of NEW people into DnD, and that was the experience he gave them. Wish someone like Jesse Jerdak or Seth Skorkowsky could give them an experience with GOOD RPG vibes instead.
Just to fixate on his number crunching for a moment, I have 3 hands. On one hand, 17% of people he ran games for becoming friends (or "friends" depending on how he's interpreting that term) might initially sound like a low number but it's actually pretty good, especially when given just how many people he was working with; It's almost 1/5 which frankly sounds pretty normal if not favourable. There's also a limit to how many relationships you can maintain at one time so I don't see why it's a problem for that number to be as "low" as it is, and while he complained that 48% won't ever talk to him again, 1) that means 52% do stay in touch at least a little, and 2) Sometimes paths cross only briefly and that's fine, not to mention imagine having to stay in even remotely regular contact with that many different people that's a nightmare. On the second hand, if nearly 50% of the people you play/ work with go completely no-contact once your working relationship is no longer tethered to an active project and 2/3rds of the remaining half keep a certain amount of distance, maybe that says more about yourself? But idk because I'm not that sociable myself which skews my perception, and to me those numbers still don't really sound like red flag levels of avoidance; If they do for him though, which the fact he's bothered by them suggests they do, then as the common denominator self reflection seems appropriate. On the third, and imo most importantly, to be _that_ invested in the matter that they've calculated how many friends they make from running DnD sessions is a red flag in itself. I can see it being excusable from a hyper fixation curiosity standpoint where it's not that they strongly care about what the result is like a shareholder looking at company profits, where they just want to know for the sake of knowing/ they like the maths. But to calc the numbers, and care about them enough to be annoyed that they aren't higher to a point that he can't fully hide it, you can hear it in his voice when he talked about it, is a red flag. Like he feels entitled to lasting friendships with these people because he ran a game for them, and them going their separate ways by the end of it is a personal insult.
no youre espot on. its crazy to me that hes "run the numbers" but he never even raises the idea that the problem, being the only constant in all his statistics, is himself. stories like this have really turned me off from ever running a ttrpg with people i dont already know.
This is what many people miss about evil. They think of evil as the terrorist leader, the evil dictator, the deranged criminal, or the like. People that are obviously evil and outwardly so, surviving only by being stronger than everyone else. But most evil is like this, it is insidious, it hides among us, it seems normal enough and we invite it into our life knowing no better. It is easy for evil to pass undiscovered, at least for a time.
Ruh roh, man's has powdered humans into statistics. I'm a logical person myself and even villanous but gawd dayum this dude is like... Absurdly manipulative sounding and also weirdly nerdy. Edit: AIN'T NO WAY JOCAT IS INVOLVED IN THE STORY 🤣 Even beyond the Internet grave, this man is still a lawful good person Edit²: 12:09 This gremlin is defending another member of his kind, oh mah lord this story is simultaneously disturbing, disgusting and hilarious to learn about
I only learned about this guy because a Let's Play series I watch has a cast member who used to be in a game Arcadum ran, and had a horrible experience. The other cast were REALLY gentle but REALLY strict about informing the community that they would not allow anyone to bring up or talk about the player's old character in that game. The way they spoke was extremely supportive and defensive and evoked genuine concern in me, so I was curious and looked into it. When I found the twitter posts about the guy and what he did, and seeing how protective everyone became of them about it, and how much it resembled PTSD, my heart sunk. I've encountered a very manipulative and awful person before, once. They were cold, calculating, and always networking. My skin crawls any time I remember them. The biggest red flags I learned from the experience are 1: they only ever gave the time of day to people they were actively benefiting from, 2: they only EVER interacted with ANYONE in a situation where they held some kind of control or authority, and 3: they felt like a completely different person in private than they were in groups. If you ever meet someone like that, and you get a weird gut feeling about them, trust that instinct and get away! SAFELY SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH OTHERS! Once I started speaking privately to people who knew him, it turned out the vast majority of their "friends" had problems with him and said things like they "wished they could get away from him". They used the networks they built to leverage friendships with others he was connected to against them, creating the illusion that he was part of the bargain for being friends with everyone else. Really gross stuff and it reminds me of what I've heard about this Arcadum guy. The capstone to it all is that they never felt to blame for hurting others, and had zero empathy or respect for anyone else.
Don't give him the satisfaction of being considered some kind of legendary villain. He's a pathetic creep who did depraved things to feel powerful. Nothing more.
Arcadum hurt me deeply. Not because I was in his games but because he had a special place my heart. He rekindled my joy for worldbuilding and dungeon mastering. He was everything I wanted to be: A nerd who could make a profit being nerdy. He was an inspiration to me because he was, like me, just some guy from the Midwest. A true Everyman. But then he had to go and throw it all away because he wanted a harem of anime girls…what a waste. I’ve had a lack of good role models in my life…and before all of that stuff came to light…Arcadum was someone I thought I could call a role model…
This is why i always have a dm whos been a good friend for ages. My first dm helped me play and gave me roleplaying skills for my next games. Glad my bestie is our dm whos letting us have a safewords, a story that connects our charaters and is very aware of our triggers.
Oh, iirc, there was going to be a show featuring his setting on one of the now defunct sites like RoosterTeeth. I forget which one exactly. That or they were in talks or something? Point is, yea. He actually was going places, and then he blew up his whole empire.
Monsters like this guy get to keep going, Jocat has to leave the internet because psychos threaten his family over a music video which if anything was about body positivity (actual body positivity, not just glorification of obesity like what you see nowadays under that banner). There is no justice in this world.
That's the thing. Justice never even existed. If there was justice, life wouldn't feel as bad. In fact, I personally believe justice is a lie made up by those who can't defend themselves to give themselves a reason to keep going when in reality, there will only be suffering in the end.
@@alheimianservant1499 There is justice, there's just more injustice. Or injustice is at least more noticeable than justice, like news headlines being more popular if it's about people getting hurt than people getting help.
„Social“ media amplify toxicity. Without Xitter, none of the shitstorm would ever have happened. We love Jo in this house. Sooo many evergreen videos. „Races“ is amazing.
@@alheimianservant1499 Justice is a human construct, true, but it was created to define with a more grandiose name what each defines to be good and evil, not whatever you said. In that sense, justice does exist, only each of us has their own sense of what justice is, the reality of justice would be to call it a moral lense by which we judge the world and the actions of ourselves and our peers. When someone says "there is no justice in this world" what they mean is this world does not fit their moral opinion of what would be just.
Former member of THAT GUY'S music team. Just wanted to say that with everything that happened, the musicians, artists, and even some of the players still chat and talk to each other or just hangout. A lot of us have become lifelong friends, not because of That Guy, but because we all just were having fun, and still do to this day. Some of us run games, do commissions, or just are just doing whatever. A lot of us still support eachother, and build eachother up, it's good to do good for one another! An easy place to find a lot of us is through Siren Feather Studios if people are still interested in the people who were making a lot of assets for That Guy.
The statistics thing is such a Ulillia move to make, but unlike Ulilillia, where this quirk can be seen as an endearing way someone particularly views the world, Arcadum comes off as the evil general who spreadsheets wars as "inches gained per death"
I started watching Arcadum during his first Vtuber D&D campaign. That first one went fairly well because theirs was a side campaign that didn't have much relevance to his overarching multi campaign storyline so he pretty much let them do what they wanted for the most part, but there were still some weird and uncomfortable moments in it. The second Vtuber D&D campaign was so bad because most of the players were brand new to D&D and it was one of the main campaigns of that story arc so he was putting an extreme amount of pressure in them to play good and be entertaining. When everything came out about what he was doing, I dropped him like many in the community at the time due to how terrible all the thing he did was.
Yeah I was watching during both Vtuber Campaigns but the second one was fishy from the get go, That fight where Haruka died was full stop bad DMing, sure the girls where inexperienced but he had a monster there way outside of their challenge rating with home brewed mechanics that he was purposefully hiding from the players even though at multiple points the girls had sufficiently succeeded enough intuition checks for those mechanics to be revealed to them. Even experienced players would have called bullshit on that fight. Then on top that we later learned the girls playing the home brew races weren't even given information on what their racial abilities actually did.
So to add on to what you have put in here, Arcadum has done a few other things as well. * With one of his all male groups he chose to essentially ignore any of the issues they had. He even forced that party into a TPK because one player's character was dead and was meant to be introduced the next session when the party actually would've needed them. * He chased off the person that made his new server by verbally chastising them in front of the group and allowing one of his current players to push him into this decision. * He is incredibly hands-off with moderating his server and allowing cliques to form that caused a lot of backlash and favoritism amongst the mod team. * He allows rampant racism to take place and makes crude racist remarks in VCs with others and in staff channels. * When a player was making a hard boundary about scat being used in the game and as a "prank" by one of the players, he essentially told that player to get over it and that * it was all a joke. And one of the other players there proceeded to back up Arcadum and support the joke and say that the victimized player is too sensitive. * He scammed a lot of money from his fans for a new Living World that fell apart due to lack of GMs and the verbal abuse he gave them every time. * He also makes most of his money on Patreon as opposed to Twitch Subs/Ads because he charges his players over $40 on Patreon per session. * All of his players know what he did. Some of them believed he would do the right thing and he has chosen not to while others are focused on finally being able to play in Verum. * Currently he has secret moderators and admins that help him stay as "squeaky clean as possible" and these individuals are almost purely in his Edge of Twilight game. He still bullies, manipulates, and deceives anyone he runs for and plays with and still heavily prefers female players. And not to mention that he was presented a document by his admin and one of his moderators that had every victim in it and everything he did to those victims. He was pushed by those two to make him make an unmonetized video of him apologizing to each person for every action he did and that he was not to seek forgiveness, but to accept responsibility. He shook that off and said that his official statement was, "tailored by his legal team" and that if he did what was asked of him it wouldn't look good. At this point he truly doesn't care about how many viewers he gets, or subs, or anything really. He is happy he can run D&D and make money from it on Patreon. He had a lot of help when he was coming back and he was on the fast track to actually own up to his shit and make a difference. But he decided to throw that away the moment he said in a staff channel that he wanted to pursue legal action against Folkona and he was trying to get his staff to find out what state she lived in so he could do it.
Leaving aside the SA stuff for a moment. It is a weird flex as a GM to basically boast that after running a game with friends, that most of those friends will not want anything do with you. It is a game, it is meant to be fun, something you do to relax and enjoy yourself. I've been GMing for over 35 years, and I don't think I can remember a point where I have stressed my players to the point that they needed a support group to cope! As for the SA stuff, well, the bloke is scum.
At the top of his popularity the guy had 7 games a week, 3 long term campaigns and 4 short ones, needless to say the quality of those campaigns was less than ideal but the objective was to take advantage of his rotating "cast" of twitch heavy hitters, basically trying to change players asp, and maximize the exposure of his content to their massive communities, he was using the players for his own benefit treating them as nothing but popularity boosters and then cried that no one was his "real friend"
I knew him in the Air Force. We were both stationed on Tinker AFK in Oklahoma. It''s so surreal seeing him recommended on my feed. My experience with him as my DM was so bad it was why I avoided the hobby until little over a year ago.
Do you know if he was dishonorably discharged? That was the rumor going around for a while. A childhood friend of his implied that it was for dereliction of duty due to not showing up on time, but it was never confirmed.
@@skyn3817 So the answer to this question is somewhat complicated and I'm going to give most informed answer that I can. In the Air Force, a dishonorable discharge is very rare, despite how it's portrayed in the media. A dishonorable discharge is the civilian equivalent of a felony conviction, and thus it's only done for the most severe of crimes or if an incident in the military was made public, and an example needs to be made of them. I do not believe he was dishonorably discharged. However, I do know for a fact that he was in a world of trouble. Most likely he had either a Bad Conduct or an Other than Honorable discharge (the characterization of someone's discharge is on their DD-214). I realize this may dox myself, but I don't have anything to hide. He and I very casually dated about a year before he was kicked out. The other thing I do know for a fact (because I got in trouble as a result of it) is that he was not allowed to be alone with women for any reason, and he was moved from his job in logistics to the Wing Headquarters building (which was directly across the street from where I worked). One morning on my way to work, shortly before he was kicked out, he asked if I could give him a ride to work. He didn't have a car and I did. It was about a three mile drive from the barracks to the operations side of the base, so I agreed. After I dropped him off at the Wing HQ building, someone suddenly shouted my name and began yelling at me. It was an officer (Major of Lt. Colonel if I remember correctly. I was an E-3/E-4 at the time) and he started tearing me a new one. I was told that he had been ordered to not be alone with a woman, in any capacity, for as long as he remained in the Air Force. I had no idea, and was very confused. I was ordered to never speak to him again. Happily, I obeyed and was furious at him for putting me in that situation. By that point rumors had begun to run rampant about him. A co-worker of mine warned me (another woman) about him when we first began dating. We dated very casually, and I broke up with him after about a month. The friend you talked do is right in that he was always late to work. He didn't have a car, and was too lazy to wake up early so he could catch the shuttle. He had a very cushy job. I don't think he even went on to the flight line, much less deploy. He was a paper-pusher through and through. Something else to know is that in the Air Force (or at least on Tinker), the more serious trouble someone is in, the less the general public knows about it. So the fact that no one seems to know exactly what he did speaks volumes. The other big red flag is being ordered to stay away from women. Moreover, he didn't inform me of this when he asked for a ride to work. He was very manipulative, and I was immediately reminded of why I broke up with him. In any case, that's your answer. The long and short of it is that he did something really really bad. No one, and I mean, NO ONE, outside of Wing Headquarters and Jeremy himself knew exactly what it was. If he was telling people that he was kicked out of the Air Force for being late, that is yet another lie.
I got into D&D by watching his streams, hours, and hours spent. And like many others, felt disgusted and betrayed by his actions when he was outed. I regret that during those hours of watching back then, and not being in a great state of mind, I did not see the red flags sooner before Arcadum got exposed. I was aware that he was still active on Twitch and frankly was appalled that he still ran games, and it makes me angry that he hasn't apologized or even acknowledged his actions (which isn't surprising). I hope victims who were severely hurt recover and that Arcadum leaves the internet for good before more people get hurt by being a part of his current games.
He also ran games for big UA-camrs like Moistcritikal. I remember watching the Vtuber campaign, and from what I remember, it was BAD, lol. The girls were all over the place and the story wasn't that good to be honest. The only one I watched completely was the DM campaign because he had MontyGlu from the Unexpectables and JoCat, but it also wasn't that good
As a dm if you are making people your friends with no longer be friends with you thats a clear sign that miscommunication or bad dming. And as a dm buddy just don't do stupid shit dont play victim when your harassing people. I didn't know about this guy til now thanks for letting us know Blaine.
Because you already didn't like them. Apparently James got drunk and posted something publicly in a place where there wasn't supposed to be minors, but ofc there were.
@@borderlands10 Yup. And Blaine knew too, evidenced by his comment explaining the situation. Just decided to put it on video in the worst way possible. Some other guy in that thread mentioned that Neckbeardia had also posted in the thread. A comment later same guy said Neckbeardia's post had disappeared.
I remember how hurt I was when the stuff about him came out. I was always interested in DND but he really helped propelled that interest, even inspiring me to become a writer (a dream I'm still following today). I bought his merch, I watched all of his streams, and I even modeled the way I ran campaigns and homebrewed worlds after him. I was young at the time and didn't have many people to look up to so you can imagine how devastated I was when someone who I thought was genuine turned out to be the opposite.
Hearing some of these names made my jaw drop. I've casually watched a handful of the victims mentioned here, usually through other streamers and some UA-cam clips here and there. I never would have imagined that any of these people would have been put through such atrocities. I wish them all nothing but the best after what this monster put them through.
It took me literal half a minute of this video to realized it was about him... My heart dropped because i geniuenly thought he was a fever dream after those two long years LMAO
I haven't even heard of this guy before, and I've been pretty all in on Dnd content for basically all of 5th edition's lifespan. Thank you for bringing this to more people's attention.
As soon as the news broke that was probably the worst i've ever felt before. I still will never understand why it did what it did. From nonstop fanart of something that happened not even 2 hours ago (GOD The fanart was so god damn good), to the dozens & dozens of Animators & musicians creating masterpiece after masterpiece, to the incredibly wonderful community, it had it all. & just like that it threw it all away I remember there was 1 piece of fanart of a player's (G-Mart) character who was a monk who's arms were made of elements : Light & Darkness (A Custom Race) & he was solo facing off against some Yokai in a dark forest. Had that as my High School Laptop's Wallpaper. Ever since then i've been trying to find that piece again to no avail & of course as soon as everything came to light not only did the Discord Server get vanished, but so did it's entire living world as well. That world had sooooo much potential & the lore & world building & just everything about it was immaculate to me. & now it's all gone. I wish it would have at least handed off the world to someone else who wasn't, y'know, sub-human so that they could continue it on without its influences, but I can get the numerous reasons as to why that wouldn't have been a good idea. I still remember exactly how its server reacted when it sent out announcements to go & support BrettUltima's World of IO: With reactions spelling out "F U C K U D I E 💩" Shit still hurts to remember & hear about to this day, but at least I found my forever D&D group later on & continued to love the game ever since
I think I'm mortified, but I'm also impressed. It takes a skillful manipulator to keep this type of stuff up. I can only imagine how things would have continued if the Momo lady didn't get the snowball rolling..
He wasn't a skillful manipulator, he was just good at spotting people who started to scrutinize him. He had been doing stuff like this for years, but when the numbers were smaller, it was easier to scrub out the people who called him out.
damn, some months ago I saw one of the recently shorter campaigns on his channel and thought "oh this is some newer niche DM channel that posts a big number of different campaigns", I saw that he was kinda uncompromising, tryna speed up things always, kinda trying to manipulate the players into doing things and blaming them afterwards, passive aggressively insulting them, and saying stuff out of context that felt quite out of place. BUT NOW, watching this video and seeing what he did prior, DAAAAAYUM, he really sucks.
Got to be an ethical struggle to post things like this. I never heard of the guy, and I'm sure many others hadn't either. But now we have. This might send more traffic his way despite how much of a jerk he is. Just hope enough of his current viewers see this and leave to make up for it
Man, I was hoping that it was him using a new account in order to deceive those who didn’t know better, but at least his arrogance will lead to people pulling up the beef when they try to look him up LOL
Oh yeah. While it was a smaller creator than this guy, my first foray into DnD was at the hands of a streamer who was awful and treated me terribly as well. And he foster a attitude in his other players that made me feel crazy for having a problem with how I was being treated
I still can’t believe how this guy is still around and because it’s been long enough new people are starting to show up for him not knowing what had happened
Just last week, Burn DMd for Nyan, vei, silvervale and lillipichu, all were part of mr. 17.8% campaigns at some point, for nyan it was her first game since back then and several times praised burn for how actually fun and "comfy" his game was in comparison with her last experience.
On the real though, Start Playing Games is rad. I jumped into a Fabula Ultima game, and my party is full of voice actors and other professional dms. It's been a blast. And f*** Arcadem, the dude is a piece of festering trash.
Thanks for this, Blaine. Never knew the details of why 'Acradum is a piece of shit', just that that was the consensus. Never had any crossover with his channel, so it wasn't high priority for me to look into it yet. Glad to have watched this video though, so I understand a bit better what happened.
If the internet had the power to take down "Dr. Disrrspect" and Ava Kris, then sure we could takedown the asshole that made D&D a bad thing for some people
I was very active in his community for years, and it was impressive to see how fast he fell off, even the usual reactionaries like the Quartering and Destiny saw the receipts and immediately clowned on him. A fun thing that happened immediately after were his childhood friends that he dragged into his streams did a stream talking about it. They said that they had previously cut him out of their lives for doing similar things and that they weren't surprised. His mods also aired out a lot of dirty laundry before the whole discord got nuked. He's unfortunately making $7600 a month on Patreon, the people in his stream games pay to be there.
Extra info for the lore masters!
* Nyanners wasn't a part of the campaign with Momo (one of the girls who spoke out), but her experience is simply another ray of light on Arcadum as a whole.
* Arcadum's 'wife' is only a wife by his nickname due to how long they've been dating.
* Neckberdia's situation involves them sending a picture of their silver UA-cam play button, which had a reflection of a d*ck on the mirrored segment, into their discord server. The server at the time knowingly had underage members. This is also in conjunction with allegations that their discord staff would solicit sexual pics from these same minors, with their entire discord being nuked some time after.
Neckberdia has always rubbed me the wrong way.
When did this stuff with Neckbeardia happen, are there receipts, and why hasn't anyone talked about this?
WHAT. DA FUCK!?
maybe clear that up IN the video bud... looks sus on your part otherwise. take a lesson from in praise of shadows
@@mentallychallenging Apparently he barely looked into the Neckbeardia thing and posted this while not knowing all the facts, his words in another comment.
If DnD gets so stressful that you need to get drunk then you’re doing something incredibly wrong
I mean, a drink or two isn't bad for loosening up, especially with friends. Actually hammered D&D is a bad time.
Well, someone is doing something wrong, and in this case it's definitely the DM. I guess staying in a game run by a toxic DM could be considered doing something wrong, though that feels a bit to "victim blaming" to me. Especially considering this is probably the first time these players have probably played a TTRPG. I wouldn't blame them if it is also the last time.
@@DetectiveLance there is a difference between loosening up and needing to drink to be able to play
Agreed, though drunk DnD is a good time, as long as the drinking part is for fun rather than to deal with the game
@@tekbox7909 Try having social anxiety and being the DM, and I don't even stream. I needed a couple before starting. Been sober two years and coincidentally haven't DMed since (fixing that). But yeah, with THIS particular case it was not good.
His interview with Dr. K was wild in retrospect. You could tell Dr. K knew he was leading him on but didn’t know why. Every time he asked a question Arcadum would spin a tale and Dr. K would think for a minute and say:
“Well it’s clear you are a very good storyteller”
That's crazy I'm watching this
The fact jocat is no longer on the Internet and this parasite is, hurts me
jo is coming back, so there's that i suppose
@@virtual_newvegas hopefully, just don't know if it's confirmed or not yet
I know they posted something recently
@@TheSaphireKatana i hope they are coming back, even if they barely post
@@TheSaphireKatanahe's been active on Twitter. He himself has said that he's starting to feel safer altho there is still lingering fear. He's nevertheless thankful for the support of everyone in the community
The controversy he got for his silly video is still so crazy to me. One of the dumbest "cancellations"(?) I've ever seen, especially since most of thr hate was coming from people who didnt know who Jocat actually was.
I DO NOT GET HOW SO MANY FUCKING PEOPLE FIND IT SO GODDAMN HARD TO NOT BE PREDATORS
It’s because they weren’t physically abused as children. The leather belt is a good cure for being a predatory asshole. Now that I think about it if I ever do have kids, I want to name my spanking belt empathy that way when I’m at parent teacher conferences and they’re not behaving. I’ll just say do I need to show you empathy? The teacher will be really confused.
What’s the old phrase, “power corrupts“? Even if it’s the “big fish/small pond” power of being a middling UA-cam creator…
@@queenannsrevenge100 Power doesn't corrupt, it attracts the corrupted and corruptible. I wrote a full reply, but I knew Arcadum before Twitch. He was always like this, long before the fame.
I think it’s just that the spotlight tends to land on these sort of people. It’s not that there’s a lot of them, it’s that media focuses on them so they have an overwhelming presence in our say to day
@@jordansandoval7097 So the algorithm is good at finding questionable people, but can't find a wiki article, even when I'm searching for it by name?
all those people will never want to touch d&d again and have been horribly traumatized, what a disgusting person arcadum is
I think some of the Vtubers involved did take part in another campaign shortly after arcadum got outed.
But from what I saw, said campaign was fairly short lived.
Dunno why. The DM was FAR more normal and nicer compared to arcadum. Maybe the girls just got burned out? Or maybe i'm misremembering.
The most impressive part is that he made the whole vtubing community feel bad for Nyanners. It's an anomaly for that kinda shit to happen, but he found a way
@@avandorhu-3389 probably just burnout trying to play d&d soon after the arcadum experience seems like burnout waiting to happen
@@avandorhu-3389 From what I know they had fun with it, but burnout and other complicated feelings stemming from that disaster aside, D&D campaigns fall through all the time due to a myriad different reasons, so, who knows?
Momo still plays d&d frequently (pretty sure she already played before that campaign), and many of the others have played since as well.
I watched this thinking "With such big names, why don't I remember this guy?" And then the Discord call monologue about his friendship statistics over Death Note came up and it all came flooding back like "Ohhhh right. This guy."
17.8% isnt even a bad rate! If you run games for a total of 50 people, you end up with 8 friends, which is a good, manageable amount.
If you add friends from work, school, and everywhere else, you end up with more friends than you can realistically maintain.
This is something I see from people who view relationships as transactional. Was also in that mindset due to be a loner growing up. It took time and experience to relearn that people are social creatures, and you can't just quantify relations like it's a math problem or a high score. It'll just make you feel mad and inadequate in the end.
It sounded more to me like he was trying to sound smart while also putting people down. But that's just my opinion.
@CritCrab Love your videos CritCrab, can't wait for your next one even though it takes a while for you to upload a video which is understandable.
It doesn't sound that bad, but that might be using your definition of "friend". :P Now, if we just shift "friend" to mean someone who you can call on for favors or control, and still speaks with you, it begins to take on a new tone...
@@RaethFennecyea the perspective of it changes drastically
Slight caveat he only called Tiffany his wife because they lived together and dated for years but they were never married.
ooh neat tidbit. Still sorry for her either way lol
This makes the whole information control part involving his wife even heccin' WORSE.
Not really.
Controlling someone against their will is always bad, there's no worse or better.
@@gratuitouslurking8610
@@BlaineSimple i actually knew them personally from before he started streaming, they were engaged and had many shared assests hence the wife title
Being romantically together for years in the same place would still qualify as "common law marriage" in court, so that's still a "wife" in any sense of the word, minus the ceremony. While there are a few factors that need to he taken into consideration to say for sure, living together and sharing assets are major ones, so it's pretty unlikely there's any valid argument if he were to claim "she's not my wife" as a defense.
The return of Gaslight Yagami was not on my bingo card
The gaslight yagami meme was the only good thing to come out of this mess…
> *sees title*
> _"oh no, it's about HIM isn't it"_
> *it's about the person, the very reason, I burned out on watching D&D shows*
> [psionically pings out a pulse of theta-radiation of sheer cortisol-induced stress]
*_{A U G H sound}_*
Yeah, similar experience here
The thumbnail doesn't look much like Arcadum, but I strongly suspected from the video title which person was about to be discussed.
SAME I LOVE BEING A STRESSED INDUCED SUBMARINE
stop trying so hard.
i only watch dimension 20 now after what happed
Yeaaaaaaaaaah, once that shit hit the fan I burned out on dnd for a while. Now it's just The Unexpectables and a game on Sundays
Despite how serious this whole thing is, the fuckin leaked calls over top of anime villains makes me loose my shit every time
Only 17.8% of viewers will get this
after the allegations and proof came out, he went into his discord's voice chat on a new account and pretended to be his own female relative, not even using a voice changer, telling weird stories about how nice he was
easily the strangest, funniest attempt at damage control i've ever seen
Why can't popular people just be normal 😭
Edit: By "normal" I mean not trying to SA a person
Because all people aren’t “normal “.
Because normal people don't really want to be popular
@@MM-lv7iynot in the dnd world, they're mostly soycringe
Many, many reasons, how much time do you have to be rambled at.
@@MM-lv7iy cuz most that play dnd are creepwrs
These streams were how I got into D&D
I'm only thankful I got new friends into the hobby and we gave D&D our own meaning
He may have introduced me to why I love the hobby, but I'm so so glad we made our own memories and weren't defined by originally being fans.
The movie Megamind is an interesting exploration of this. The presentation of "nice" doesn't always mean someone is of good morale character. When people are given power over others is when you find out who they truly are.
Nice is different than good.
I honestly don't really see what you're talking about, unless you mean the literal Redditor archetype "nice guy" the camera guy was? Which wasn't even that nice
@@crazydragy4233 I think he was comparing him to Titan
@@user-bn4cs6zu6r Yeah that was my guess but Titan literally doesn't qualify for a nice guy bc he sucked at pretending to be nice part too lol
titan did nothing wrong
I was an avid fanartist, along with many fanartists for his games, and among all of the rest of the community that he built, I could say that on behalf of them, I am genuinely sick to the core on how he shattered the trust of each and everyone that believed in him. The wounds are old but they still linger. It was upsetting, it was exhausting, and man, I fcking hate it, even now
I wasn't there for long, but his server had so many nice people that he was clearly using and taking for granted. It was awful to see.
I joined the server but never spoke in there once. I fully regret that decision I could have met so so many wonderful folks in there
The fan art community of his was so amazing. I still remember fondly joining it a couple months before it all blew up, and the support I got when asking for advice with art there was what motivated me to some of the most productive months in terms of art of my life! And it was so much fun to watch the streams, find a cool idea for something to draw live and then see yours and other people’s art live on stream a few hours later. Good times.
Cant ever forgive that twat for ruining that with his selfishness.
I probably saw your fan art at the end of those streams. Regardless of how things turned out, I just want you to know that your efforts were not wasted and are still appreciated.
Man, I was in a hurricane with my power knocked out when all the drama broke out, so I was pretty distraught when I came back and saw that the entire community he had spent years building essentially crumbled to pieces over the course of like 3 days. Painful to learn everything after that. Dude was the biggest vibe killer of all time. I still feel bad for everyone he soured for the game for.
Demons should stay in hell. Even if they’re the ones who got me into it
That is unfortunately an insult to Demons to compare them to Arcadum. At least Demons admit they're pieces of shit.
@@TheGraeyRebis well unless they are trickery demons from the abyss
Which definitely exists
Here is something many people may not know; this happened before. This was not the first time Jeremy ditched a community after his actions and attitude destroyed it (primarily gaslighting and taking advantage of people), and his method of coming back is the exact same. This was just the largest time.
I was one of his original Verum players, before he became a Twitch streamer and back when he was pay to play GM. He had a habit of picking players who were his favorites, more often women but also some guys he liked hanging out with, and in game they would always receive more dialogue with NPCs, better items, and their rolls always garnished better results. It was still a difficult campaign, but they were more likely to see success for their risks.
The ones he didn't like got one sentence responses, nothing they tried ever worked, their items were always lack luster, and anything besides pure, mechanical numbers were always harder for them. It got to the point one guy literally started keeping notes on what all the DCs, AC, etc, were, and showing us that the game was always easier for some people and harder for others. Well, I called Jeremy out on it, because THIS was empirical. Previously I was one of the people he liked, and I noticed the immediate drop treatment afterwards. He couldn't get rid of me, and I had trouble leaving, because I was the financial backer for most of the players in the game we were in; if I left, a lot of my friends were out of the game, and if he got rid of me, he was out a lot of money.
He would convince the people he treated better that he treated everyone that way, because he was such a great guy of course,, and lie to them and say that we were just being sore losers because our builds were worse, our characters weren't as interesting, or we didn't like him. It wasn't that they were treated better, we were just assholes. Then it wasn't just him actively gaslighting you and treating you like shit, your mutual friends would be passively gaslighting you on his behalf, and the people who liked him and didn't like you all tried to make you out to be the bad guy. These were not stupid people either. He was just particularly good at getting rid of people who would scrutinize him.
Well, what happened is eventually he decided to move to Twitch and the people who stayed with him when he transitioned to Twitch were the ones that he had successfully gaslit. The ones who didn't go to his Twitch were the ones who saw through his bullshit. So he started his Twitch community built up with people who were deeply entrenched, manipulated, and gaslit, and he knew what had worked to keep so many of them on board. He knew what to say to get them to dismiss evidence presented to them. Because those '52%' of people who wouldn't talk to him after the games were done? We were the ones he wanted to get rid of.
This was the early 2010s. He was *always* this person. He just got away with it for so long because he can spot people who can see through his shit, and made sure to chase them away. As he gained money and influence, he did worse things and did them more brazenly, but he had always been that way.
Wow, thank you for that narrative. Just know.. someone here appreciated your effort when writing this text.
Damn you played even before The Seven were a thing?
I remember he was like "I'm gonna stream later and explain everything"
except he got kicked out of the house, seemingly had no internet access and never did said stream
obviously it's impossible to give a good enough explanation anyways, at that point he was already done for no matter what
wait, what? he was only gone for two months?
yikes
@@letsplaysvonaja1714 He returned after 2-3 months and his return stream was playing Far Cry 5 in emote only mode with everyone spamming the universal "No" emote and he basically said "We're not gonna talk about what happened"
God, this guy actually beat Critical Role in viewership at one point. This is why we can't have nice thing.
I think he even got to talk to Mercer about playing in one of his games. Though with his record of telling stories I’m unsure how true this is
0:45 this joke single-handedly made me subscribe to your channel, i tend to forget to subscribe to people that i like after watching their videos, but this stupid gag actually made me pause mid-way through just to hit the subscribe button lmao
Yeah I talked about this last year. I still get threats over the podcast I made making fun of his attempt at a comeback.
The SA allegations make him irredeemable so I don’t even know why people feel comfortable defending him, even debating the whole “these tubers are grown woman” argument
@@BlaineSimple the people justifying SA cause they're adults-- i don't believe they have the IQ to consent like SA should be illegal no matter what age a person is. tf. Dx
@@BlaineSimple He is good at figuring out who will and will not scrutinize him, separating the two, and getting people to ignore those who call him out. He was doing it before Twitch.
Gutted to hear that. You make amazing content and knowing you've had to weather threats to keep other people safe? Good job. Can't imagine its easy
Oh my fucking god, this guy's still at it?! I thought he was done for, back when the whole thing came out.
I knew who you meant before I even clicked the video.
I miss you & your videos. Your sass is too fun.
As soon as I read the title I knew & it made me freeze remembering how fucked up this all was
I’d like to say I am utterly baffled by the concept of “Sexual favors in exchange for D&D favors”, but as the last 10 years have taught me, I should be surprised by nothing ever again.
A lot of the most creative DMs always seem to have these controlling personalities, where they get so caught up in their own ideas and the things they want to show players or viewers, that they always end up crossing lines.
I had only learned about Arcadum a few months before this all happened, thought his work was super cool and was binge watching it to try and catch up, since he had this ambitious living world thing planned that I wanted to be part of. Was terrible to hear all this news and my interest dried up overnight. I remember looking at one of his campaigns he tried starting up after all this drama, but that just made it very clear that while he makes good worlds, his players were critical to his success.
arcadum was not creative. everything he "made" was utterly derivative and generic.
Thanks for getting into this, Callous Row (now Neon Divide) was one of his projects. Following him getting exposed his own staff team cut him off. Though the scars Arcadum left are visible if you know where to look. Seeing him try and crawl out is fucking deplorable, if anyone sees him poke his head out you push him back into his hole.
I did not know that Callous Row rebranded and shifted tracks. That's good to know.
You're right about him not needing to make a comeback. Everybody has a right to make a living, but not everybody deserves to make that living in show business. Arcadum is welcome to get a normie job like me.
@@lordzaboem Yeah they weren’t very receptive as Arcadum sexually harassed some cast members. They also needed to rebrand a lot, corps go by different names as Arcadum was trying to take legal action.
Okay, this is not the usual stuff, but let's listen and see what's u-
OH MY GOD
I was one of the staff for Arcadums living world, the part for this situation that don’t get mentioned very often.
Artists were ran in on a super tight deadline from what I recall, even forced to do concept art for free. Summer tried to get all the artist on a separate server but he eventually worked his way in there.
As for staff meetings, we were pretty much at the mercy of him sleeping properly. If he stayed up to late, usually in vrchat… we would be directionless for a week.
As for his big bad events, the Violet Events, I eventually detested doing them for him. They weren’t fun, they were everything wrong with his story telling. Just things designed to make the game unfun for the living world. One example of this was him comatosing half the player base and CANCELING everything until the issue was resolved.
Another thing I tried to do to help the living world was gather everyone’s unresolved research and people frozen waiting for him, and bring it to him. He essentially got pissy and kind of tantrumed when I revealed like, 3 or 4 pages of stuff he needed to resolve. He also later decided to corrupt research too.
As for the aftermath of the fallout for Verum, he told Nurp, a trusted DM in the community and eventually establishing Syrik, he had planned to give him the server, to step back. Not even a day went by and he deleted all admin roles and basically removed all safeguards, resulting in people spamming unsavory gifs in the general chat. Rather than just give Nurp the server he literally tried to screw the living world again.
As for the VrChat community Callous Row, which I’m not familiar what happened behind the scenes or what is happening with that anymore, they essentially had to rebrand because he was trying to take it back from them, even after he said he was stepping back.
I’ve also had the misfortune of dealing with his new admin, Princeoverkill, who’s only defense for arcadum is he has evidence to disprove everything, but he can’t show it. He’s essentially trying to rebuild the Cult of Personality he had with Verum but in a more controlling manner.
how were they forced to do anything?
And it sucks so much that he was bringing in a bunch of NEW people into DnD, and that was the experience he gave them. Wish someone like Jesse Jerdak or Seth Skorkowsky could give them an experience with GOOD RPG vibes instead.
Blaine tooting his own horn got a nice little chuckle out of me.
Oh I remember this saga. Sniveling goblins like this Arcadum figure give us villains a bad name.
Just to fixate on his number crunching for a moment, I have 3 hands.
On one hand, 17% of people he ran games for becoming friends (or "friends" depending on how he's interpreting that term) might initially sound like a low number but it's actually pretty good, especially when given just how many people he was working with; It's almost 1/5 which frankly sounds pretty normal if not favourable. There's also a limit to how many relationships you can maintain at one time so I don't see why it's a problem for that number to be as "low" as it is, and while he complained that 48% won't ever talk to him again, 1) that means 52% do stay in touch at least a little, and 2) Sometimes paths cross only briefly and that's fine, not to mention imagine having to stay in even remotely regular contact with that many different people that's a nightmare.
On the second hand, if nearly 50% of the people you play/ work with go completely no-contact once your working relationship is no longer tethered to an active project and 2/3rds of the remaining half keep a certain amount of distance, maybe that says more about yourself? But idk because I'm not that sociable myself which skews my perception, and to me those numbers still don't really sound like red flag levels of avoidance; If they do for him though, which the fact he's bothered by them suggests they do, then as the common denominator self reflection seems appropriate.
On the third, and imo most importantly, to be _that_ invested in the matter that they've calculated how many friends they make from running DnD sessions is a red flag in itself. I can see it being excusable from a hyper fixation curiosity standpoint where it's not that they strongly care about what the result is like a shareholder looking at company profits, where they just want to know for the sake of knowing/ they like the maths. But to calc the numbers, and care about them enough to be annoyed that they aren't higher to a point that he can't fully hide it, you can hear it in his voice when he talked about it, is a red flag. Like he feels entitled to lasting friendships with these people because he ran a game for them, and them going their separate ways by the end of it is a personal insult.
no youre espot on. its crazy to me that hes "run the numbers" but he never even raises the idea that the problem, being the only constant in all his statistics, is himself. stories like this have really turned me off from ever running a ttrpg with people i dont already know.
@@mikeesteves8427 His fiance at the time bought and read up on a book about narcissists
He never did
This is what many people miss about evil. They think of evil as the terrorist leader, the evil dictator, the deranged criminal, or the like. People that are obviously evil and outwardly so, surviving only by being stronger than everyone else. But most evil is like this, it is insidious, it hides among us, it seems normal enough and we invite it into our life knowing no better. It is easy for evil to pass undiscovered, at least for a time.
This is the dude who said “manipulation is a tool, it’s not evil”
I love the Light Yagami clip so much. I cant believe this fucking lolcow actually said that unironically lmao
Ruh roh, man's has powdered humans into statistics.
I'm a logical person myself and even villanous but gawd dayum this dude is like... Absurdly manipulative sounding and also weirdly nerdy.
Edit: AIN'T NO WAY JOCAT IS INVOLVED IN THE STORY 🤣
Even beyond the Internet grave, this man is still a lawful good person
Edit²: 12:09 This gremlin is defending another member of his kind, oh mah lord this story is simultaneously disturbing, disgusting and hilarious to learn about
Unfortunately, Jocat does support grooming children.
As a dm this type a behavior makes me sick.
I only learned about this guy because a Let's Play series I watch has a cast member who used to be in a game Arcadum ran, and had a horrible experience. The other cast were REALLY gentle but REALLY strict about informing the community that they would not allow anyone to bring up or talk about the player's old character in that game. The way they spoke was extremely supportive and defensive and evoked genuine concern in me, so I was curious and looked into it. When I found the twitter posts about the guy and what he did, and seeing how protective everyone became of them about it, and how much it resembled PTSD, my heart sunk.
I've encountered a very manipulative and awful person before, once. They were cold, calculating, and always networking. My skin crawls any time I remember them. The biggest red flags I learned from the experience are 1: they only ever gave the time of day to people they were actively benefiting from, 2: they only EVER interacted with ANYONE in a situation where they held some kind of control or authority, and 3: they felt like a completely different person in private than they were in groups. If you ever meet someone like that, and you get a weird gut feeling about them, trust that instinct and get away! SAFELY SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH OTHERS! Once I started speaking privately to people who knew him, it turned out the vast majority of their "friends" had problems with him and said things like they "wished they could get away from him". They used the networks they built to leverage friendships with others he was connected to against them, creating the illusion that he was part of the bargain for being friends with everyone else. Really gross stuff and it reminds me of what I've heard about this Arcadum guy. The capstone to it all is that they never felt to blame for hurting others, and had zero empathy or respect for anyone else.
That name... It gives me shivers down my spine...
Don't give him the satisfaction of being considered some kind of legendary villain. He's a pathetic creep who did depraved things to feel powerful. Nothing more.
@@NixityNullt He still gives me the chills for how disgusting he is.
I fear no man, but that THING. It’s scares me
Sat down to hear the troubling news. So I was kind of shocked seeing myself in the ad at 1:38
Did you know you were being used for ads? Cause if so, other than the topic of this video, that is kinda cool.
@@kingbob514 Nope! I just knew there were going to be some youtube-based ads out soon.
Arcadum hurt me deeply. Not because I was in his games but because he had a special place my heart. He rekindled my joy for worldbuilding and dungeon mastering. He was everything I wanted to be: A nerd who could make a profit being nerdy. He was an inspiration to me because he was, like me, just some guy from the Midwest. A true Everyman. But then he had to go and throw it all away because he wanted a harem of anime girls…what a waste. I’ve had a lack of good role models in my life…and before all of that stuff came to light…Arcadum was someone I thought I could call a role model…
This is why i always have a dm whos been a good friend for ages.
My first dm helped me play and gave me roleplaying skills for my next games.
Glad my bestie is our dm whos letting us have a safewords, a story that connects our charaters and is very aware of our triggers.
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the Goker.
I knew he was bad but jeez i didnt know half of this
i love u fallen monk
@@KameronTV and I love you to Kameron TV
@@Fallenmonkd20 That was a adorable exchange :D
And i love you random citizen!
He's the epitome of sociopathy
Always interesting to think about alternate possibilities. Like if this guy had not been a creep, it seems like he could be everywhere
Oh, iirc, there was going to be a show featuring his setting on one of the now defunct sites like RoosterTeeth. I forget which one exactly. That or they were in talks or something? Point is, yea. He actually was going places, and then he blew up his whole empire.
I knew him before Twitch. He was always a creep. Fame didn't change him, it made him more him.
Just remember, at his peak he was doing better numbers than Critcal Role
i remember the "that's why i don't play AmongUs" 😭
Monsters like this guy get to keep going, Jocat has to leave the internet because psychos threaten his family over a music video which if anything was about body positivity (actual body positivity, not just glorification of obesity like what you see nowadays under that banner).
There is no justice in this world.
That's the thing. Justice never even existed. If there was justice, life wouldn't feel as bad. In fact, I personally believe justice is a lie made up by those who can't defend themselves to give themselves a reason to keep going when in reality, there will only be suffering in the end.
@@alheimianservant1499 There is justice, there's just more injustice. Or injustice is at least more noticeable than justice, like news headlines being more popular if it's about people getting hurt than people getting help.
„Social“ media amplify toxicity. Without Xitter, none of the shitstorm would ever have happened.
We love Jo in this house. Sooo many evergreen videos. „Races“ is amazing.
@@alheimianservant1499 Justice is a human construct, true, but it was created to define with a more grandiose name what each defines to be good and evil, not whatever you said.
In that sense, justice does exist, only each of us has their own sense of what justice is, the reality of justice would be to call it a moral lense by which we judge the world and the actions of ourselves and our peers.
When someone says "there is no justice in this world" what they mean is this world does not fit their moral opinion of what would be just.
@@alheimianservant1499This is incredibly cringe
Former member of THAT GUY'S music team.
Just wanted to say that with everything that happened, the musicians, artists, and even some of the players still chat and talk to each other or just hangout. A lot of us have become lifelong friends, not because of That Guy, but because we all just were having fun, and still do to this day.
Some of us run games, do commissions, or just are just doing whatever.
A lot of us still support eachother, and build eachother up, it's good to do good for one another!
An easy place to find a lot of us is through Siren Feather Studios if people are still interested in the people who were making a lot of assets for That Guy.
I feel like so many people get that DND anxiety from terrible DMs with god complexes.
I just hope all the people that ended as a victim are doing well today
The statistics thing is such a Ulillia move to make, but unlike Ulilillia, where this quirk can be seen as an endearing way someone particularly views the world, Arcadum comes off as the evil general who spreadsheets wars as "inches gained per death"
I started watching Arcadum during his first Vtuber D&D campaign. That first one went fairly well because theirs was a side campaign that didn't have much relevance to his overarching multi campaign storyline so he pretty much let them do what they wanted for the most part, but there were still some weird and uncomfortable moments in it. The second Vtuber D&D campaign was so bad because most of the players were brand new to D&D and it was one of the main campaigns of that story arc so he was putting an extreme amount of pressure in them to play good and be entertaining. When everything came out about what he was doing, I dropped him like many in the community at the time due to how terrible all the thing he did was.
Yeah I was watching during both Vtuber Campaigns but the second one was fishy from the get go, That fight where Haruka died was full stop bad DMing, sure the girls where inexperienced but he had a monster there way outside of their challenge rating with home brewed mechanics that he was purposefully hiding from the players even though at multiple points the girls had sufficiently succeeded enough intuition checks for those mechanics to be revealed to them. Even experienced players would have called bullshit on that fight. Then on top that we later learned the girls playing the home brew races weren't even given information on what their racial abilities actually did.
So to add on to what you have put in here, Arcadum has done a few other things as well.
* With one of his all male groups he chose to essentially ignore any of the issues they had. He even forced that party into a TPK because one player's character was dead and was meant to be introduced the next session when the party actually would've needed them.
* He chased off the person that made his new server by verbally chastising them in front of the group and allowing one of his current players to push him into this decision.
* He is incredibly hands-off with moderating his server and allowing cliques to form that caused a lot of backlash and favoritism amongst the mod team.
* He allows rampant racism to take place and makes crude racist remarks in VCs with others and in staff channels.
* When a player was making a hard boundary about scat being used in the game and as a "prank" by one of the players, he essentially told that player to get over it and that * it was all a joke. And one of the other players there proceeded to back up Arcadum and support the joke and say that the victimized player is too sensitive.
* He scammed a lot of money from his fans for a new Living World that fell apart due to lack of GMs and the verbal abuse he gave them every time.
* He also makes most of his money on Patreon as opposed to Twitch Subs/Ads because he charges his players over $40 on Patreon per session.
* All of his players know what he did. Some of them believed he would do the right thing and he has chosen not to while others are focused on finally being able to play in Verum.
* Currently he has secret moderators and admins that help him stay as "squeaky clean as possible" and these individuals are almost purely in his Edge of Twilight game.
He still bullies, manipulates, and deceives anyone he runs for and plays with and still heavily prefers female players.
And not to mention that he was presented a document by his admin and one of his moderators that had every victim in it and everything he did to those victims. He was pushed by those two to make him make an unmonetized video of him apologizing to each person for every action he did and that he was not to seek forgiveness, but to accept responsibility. He shook that off and said that his official statement was, "tailored by his legal team" and that if he did what was asked of him it wouldn't look good.
At this point he truly doesn't care about how many viewers he gets, or subs, or anything really. He is happy he can run D&D and make money from it on Patreon. He had a lot of help when he was coming back and he was on the fast track to actually own up to his shit and make a difference. But he decided to throw that away the moment he said in a staff channel that he wanted to pursue legal action against Folkona and he was trying to get his staff to find out what state she lived in so he could do it.
Leaving aside the SA stuff for a moment. It is a weird flex as a GM to basically boast that after running a game with friends, that most of those friends will not want anything do with you. It is a game, it is meant to be fun, something you do to relax and enjoy yourself. I've been GMing for over 35 years, and I don't think I can remember a point where I have stressed my players to the point that they needed a support group to cope!
As for the SA stuff, well, the bloke is scum.
At the top of his popularity the guy had 7 games a week, 3 long term campaigns and 4 short ones, needless to say the quality of those campaigns was less than ideal but the objective was to take advantage of his rotating "cast" of twitch heavy hitters, basically trying to change players asp, and maximize the exposure of his content to their massive communities, he was using the players for his own benefit treating them as nothing but popularity boosters and then cried that no one was his "real friend"
Dude as someone who only Dms this hurt to watch...
I knew him in the Air Force. We were both stationed on Tinker AFK in Oklahoma. It''s so surreal seeing him recommended on my feed. My experience with him as my DM was so bad it was why I avoided the hobby until little over a year ago.
Do you know if he was dishonorably discharged? That was the rumor going around for a while. A childhood friend of his implied that it was for dereliction of duty due to not showing up on time, but it was never confirmed.
@@skyn3817 So the answer to this question is somewhat complicated and I'm going to give most informed answer that I can. In the Air Force, a dishonorable discharge is very rare, despite how it's portrayed in the media. A dishonorable discharge is the civilian equivalent of a felony conviction, and thus it's only done for the most severe of crimes or if an incident in the military was made public, and an example needs to be made of them.
I do not believe he was dishonorably discharged. However, I do know for a fact that he was in a world of trouble. Most likely he had either a Bad Conduct or an Other than Honorable discharge (the characterization of someone's discharge is on their DD-214). I realize this may dox myself, but I don't have anything to hide. He and I very casually dated about a year before he was kicked out. The other thing I do know for a fact (because I got in trouble as a result of it) is that he was not allowed to be alone with women for any reason, and he was moved from his job in logistics to the Wing Headquarters building (which was directly across the street from where I worked). One morning on my way to work, shortly before he was kicked out, he asked if I could give him a ride to work. He didn't have a car and I did. It was about a three mile drive from the barracks to the operations side of the base, so I agreed. After I dropped him off at the Wing HQ building, someone suddenly shouted my name and began yelling at me. It was an officer (Major of Lt. Colonel if I remember correctly. I was an E-3/E-4 at the time) and he started tearing me a new one. I was told that he had been ordered to not be alone with a woman, in any capacity, for as long as he remained in the Air Force. I had no idea, and was very confused. I was ordered to never speak to him again. Happily, I obeyed and was furious at him for putting me in that situation.
By that point rumors had begun to run rampant about him. A co-worker of mine warned me (another woman) about him when we first began dating. We dated very casually, and I broke up with him after about a month. The friend you talked do is right in that he was always late to work. He didn't have a car, and was too lazy to wake up early so he could catch the shuttle. He had a very cushy job. I don't think he even went on to the flight line, much less deploy. He was a paper-pusher through and through.
Something else to know is that in the Air Force (or at least on Tinker), the more serious trouble someone is in, the less the general public knows about it. So the fact that no one seems to know exactly what he did speaks volumes. The other big red flag is being ordered to stay away from women. Moreover, he didn't inform me of this when he asked for a ride to work. He was very manipulative, and I was immediately reminded of why I broke up with him.
In any case, that's your answer. The long and short of it is that he did something really really bad. No one, and I mean, NO ONE, outside of Wing Headquarters and Jeremy himself knew exactly what it was. If he was telling people that he was kicked out of the Air Force for being late, that is yet another lie.
@lepuslunae Thank you, I appreciate the response. I suppose he never changed much and probably won't unless he actually makes an effort to.
I got into D&D by watching his streams, hours, and hours spent. And like many others, felt disgusted and betrayed by his actions when he was outed. I regret that during those hours of watching back then, and not being in a great state of mind, I did not see the red flags sooner before Arcadum got exposed.
I was aware that he was still active on Twitch and frankly was appalled that he still ran games, and it makes me angry that he hasn't apologized or even acknowledged his actions (which isn't surprising). I hope victims who were severely hurt recover and that Arcadum leaves the internet for good before more people get hurt by being a part of his current games.
Always love seeing love for JoCat
Aside from Blaine Simple and JoCat, I didn't recognize a single other name in this video. Huh.
He also ran games for big UA-camrs like Moistcritikal.
I remember watching the Vtuber campaign, and from what I remember, it was BAD, lol. The girls were all over the place and the story wasn't that good to be honest.
The only one I watched completely was the DM campaign because he had MontyGlu from the Unexpectables and JoCat, but it also wasn't that good
@@dillansantiago707 Ran a campaign for OTK too. He had stacked rosters.
I never even heard of this guy.
Neither have I. I assumed this would be about Adam Koebel.
Most people in the TTRPG hobby haven't.
Creeps like this make me even more grateful we have cool and chill dnd content creators like you
As a dm if you are making people your friends with no longer be friends with you thats a clear sign that miscommunication or bad dming. And as a dm buddy just don't do stupid shit dont play victim when your harassing people. I didn't know about this guy til now thanks for letting us know Blaine.
The biggest twist in this video is me forgetting who I was watching and being shocked that you were blaine the entire time
Thank you for covering this, I remember discovering the fact that he still existed a week ago and was disgusted that he was still around.
This is horrible!!! Why can’t people just be nice?
Wasn't expecting this kind of story with that thumbnail lol.
O:20 huh... Why am I not surprised Neckbeardia got outed...
He didn't, this guy's just trying to start shit because he thinks it's funny to go after smaller TTRPG channels.
Because you already didn't like them.
Apparently James got drunk and posted something publicly in a place where there wasn't supposed to be minors, but ofc there were.
@skycastrum5803 so he didn't message anyone, just posted something spicy on a public forum
@@borderlands10 Yup. And Blaine knew too, evidenced by his comment explaining the situation. Just decided to put it on video in the worst way possible.
Some other guy in that thread mentioned that Neckbeardia had also posted in the thread. A comment later same guy said Neckbeardia's post had disappeared.
During my dnd stint I didn’t have any dms like that truly a blessing
"the evidance is empirical" bruh who in he world Is this guys showing his data to get it peer reviewed
Also I don’t see what the flex is in saying 83% of people you dm for don’t want to talk to you again after.
Thanks for talking about topics that aren't easy. Great video.
I remember how hurt I was when the stuff about him came out. I was always interested in DND but he really helped propelled that interest, even inspiring me to become a writer (a dream I'm still following today). I bought his merch, I watched all of his streams, and I even modeled the way I ran campaigns and homebrewed worlds after him. I was young at the time and didn't have many people to look up to so you can imagine how devastated I was when someone who I thought was genuine turned out to be the opposite.
I've never heard of any of this. Like, not even I've ever heard of the DM. Oh, Jocat, that's the first name that I actually recognize.
Hearing some of these names made my jaw drop. I've casually watched a handful of the victims mentioned here, usually through other streamers and some UA-cam clips here and there. I never would have imagined that any of these people would have been put through such atrocities. I wish them all nothing but the best after what this monster put them through.
It took me literal half a minute of this video to realized it was about him... My heart dropped because i geniuenly thought he was a fever dream after those two long years LMAO
I haven't even heard of this guy before, and I've been pretty all in on Dnd content for basically all of 5th edition's lifespan.
Thank you for bringing this to more people's attention.
I normally go to Crispy's channel for this sort of stuff, but this is much worse than some of the worst story's on his channel
I never knew about these events or this manipulator before watching this video.
As soon as the news broke that was probably the worst i've ever felt before. I still will never understand why it did what it did. From nonstop fanart of something that happened not even 2 hours ago (GOD The fanart was so god damn good), to the dozens & dozens of Animators & musicians creating masterpiece after masterpiece, to the incredibly wonderful community, it had it all. & just like that it threw it all away
I remember there was 1 piece of fanart of a player's (G-Mart) character who was a monk who's arms were made of elements : Light & Darkness (A Custom Race) & he was solo facing off against some Yokai in a dark forest. Had that as my High School Laptop's Wallpaper. Ever since then i've been trying to find that piece again to no avail
& of course as soon as everything came to light not only did the Discord Server get vanished, but so did it's entire living world as well. That world had sooooo much potential & the lore & world building & just everything about it was immaculate to me. & now it's all gone. I wish it would have at least handed off the world to someone else who wasn't, y'know, sub-human so that they could continue it on without its influences, but I can get the numerous reasons as to why that wouldn't have been a good idea. I still remember exactly how its server reacted when it sent out announcements to go & support BrettUltima's World of IO: With reactions spelling out "F U C K U D I E 💩"
Shit still hurts to remember & hear about to this day, but at least I found my forever D&D group later on & continued to love the game ever since
I think I'm mortified, but I'm also impressed. It takes a skillful manipulator to keep this type of stuff up.
I can only imagine how things would have continued if the Momo lady didn't get the snowball rolling..
He wasn't a skillful manipulator, he was just good at spotting people who started to scrutinize him. He had been doing stuff like this for years, but when the numbers were smaller, it was easier to scrub out the people who called him out.
Fucking yikes.
damn, some months ago I saw one of the recently shorter campaigns on his channel and thought "oh this is some newer niche DM channel that posts a big number of different campaigns", I saw that he was kinda uncompromising, tryna speed up things always, kinda trying to manipulate the players into doing things and blaming them afterwards, passive aggressively insulting them, and saying stuff out of context that felt quite out of place. BUT NOW, watching this video and seeing what he did prior, DAAAAAYUM, he really sucks.
I saw the title and immediately knew who you were talking about. Dude still streams.
Bro i havent seen this channel in so long. Its great to see even if the topic is a bit dark
When the news broke out I genuinely felt sick
Got to be an ethical struggle to post things like this. I never heard of the guy, and I'm sure many others hadn't either. But now we have. This might send more traffic his way despite how much of a jerk he is. Just hope enough of his current viewers see this and leave to make up for it
I saw the thumbnail and instantly thought to myself, " Hmm..i wonder if they are talking about Arcadum" lol.
Man, I was hoping that it was him using a new account in order to deceive those who didn’t know better, but at least his arrogance will lead to people pulling up the beef when they try to look him up LOL
sounds like a lot of buyers remorse. lmfao
Oh yeah. While it was a smaller creator than this guy, my first foray into DnD was at the hands of a streamer who was awful and treated me terribly as well. And he foster a attitude in his other players that made me feel crazy for having a problem with how I was being treated
I still can’t believe how this guy is still around and because it’s been long enough new people are starting to show up for him not knowing what had happened
Watching a VTuber D&D game sounds like a lot of fun. I'm sad that it went badly.
Demon Dice has run a few, I'd definitely check them out.
If you're interested in that look up the Altered Ballad from the World of Io. Vtubers playing a short story in a living dnd world.
Just last week, Burn DMd for Nyan, vei, silvervale and lillipichu, all were part of mr. 17.8% campaigns at some point, for nyan it was her first game since back then and several times praised burn for how actually fun and "comfy" his game was in comparison with her last experience.
@@ginsover Nightmare Nexus also ran a one shot for Nyan, Lord Aethelstan, Ironmouse, and Bubi. Its also around on UA-cam.
@@ginsoverburn from gta rp?
On the real though, Start Playing Games is rad. I jumped into a Fabula Ultima game, and my party is full of voice actors and other professional dms. It's been a blast.
And f*** Arcadem, the dude is a piece of festering trash.
Thanks for this, Blaine. Never knew the details of why 'Acradum is a piece of shit', just that that was the consensus.
Never had any crossover with his channel, so it wasn't high priority for me to look into it yet. Glad to have watched this video though, so I understand a bit better what happened.
If the internet had the power to take down "Dr. Disrrspect" and Ava Kris, then sure we could takedown the asshole that made D&D a bad thing for some people
I thought this was gonna be about Adam Koebel lol
Putting his voice over light yagami footage fucking killed me
incredible.
I was very active in his community for years, and it was impressive to see how fast he fell off, even the usual reactionaries like the Quartering and Destiny saw the receipts and immediately clowned on him.
A fun thing that happened immediately after were his childhood friends that he dragged into his streams did a stream talking about it. They said that they had previously cut him out of their lives for doing similar things and that they weren't surprised. His mods also aired out a lot of dirty laundry before the whole discord got nuked. He's unfortunately making $7600 a month on Patreon, the people in his stream games pay to be there.