Sexual assailant interviews game leaker to discredit WayForward Technologies
Local community culpable for enabling the involved less-than-honest actions
It’s commonly known that Magnus Hestveen, better known as “Mangs” from the Fire Emblem community, had pulled a whole host of base behaviors including sexual assault, the bulk of which had been reported about here on July 8, 2020. Despite this, to date, Hestveen’s YouTube channel has over 120,000 subscribers and is a clear top search result for “Advance Wars” on YouTube, with Hestveen, to this day, still managing illegal and malicious actions insufficiently challenged. One such action was leaking information on Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp on September 4, 2021, well before even the game’s first intended release date (December 3, 2021), with aid from a spiteful ex-employee of WayForward Technologies. Recently, Hestveen had interviewed the ex-employee on Discord, who proved willing to leak even more information.
This pic in particular, directly from the video, is taken to highlight the hollow standards of “Anvil” (whose identity is protected by Hestveen), that he claims to have wanted to respect the Non-Disclosure Agreement, yet he would be in violation of it simply by sharing the information that would later be confirmed true, to somebody who was not only well known, but was called out by users in the Fire Emblem community for unacceptable conduct, rightfully so at the point of aiding and abetting the NDA breach. Hestveen has been living in America for about 6 months, so he has committed a crime on US soil, even if it’s relatively minor compared to something like sexual assault. Involved parties such as WayForward Technologies not being blameless in their own right even if the leaked information is to be ignored does not change this.
Having law enforcement address this would be the obvious answer, but that much happening would have eliminated the needs of the efforts made with the video “Mangs & July 2020” by “Mekkah” as well as a blog post titled “Why Mangs content is not allowed on the Advance Wars Wikia” by one of the Wiki’s Bureaucrats with full support from the other (semi-)active one. Both came out well after even the initial leaks of Advance Wars Re-Boot Camp, or especially after the July 2020 allegations, and it all tracks back to one problem: a completely bloated ratio of supporters of Hestveen the sexual assailant VS those who would stand against him.
What does not help is the false defectors from Hestveen’s abuses. They will claim things like how Hestveen “terrifies them” even when they leave unchallenged the likes of Hestveen’s “missile chan” meme (a post on TVTropes.org’s forum confirms that Hestveen is the meme’s author), and they do such things for malicious propaganda. This is not a new strategy on their part either, as the Wiki blog post testifies about similar abuses, and it’s also worth noting that the “Mangs & July 2020” has a comment thread, found early with “Newest First” sorting, that accuses “Mekkah” of child abuse just to destroy HIS credibility. These are people who will do anything to shut down efforts to combat Hestveen’s abuses, and it shows after they already exploited chaos in the ranks with “Goosaphone” and “Chaz Aria LLC” being called hypocrites.
Seeing through the false defectors’ lies does little good as well, because they have the support of key powers that be such as GameFAQs, Fandom, Reddit, and even Discord, who will have their own double-standards definition of harassment. HERE is actual harassment:
The user behind the “Pay your rent” comment was responding to a snapshot provider who was simply talking about the Super Mario RPG Switch remake, and has his avatar and username show his connection to Fire Emblem and therefore to Hestveen. The snapshot provider, who you may note to be the one behind the Wiki blog post, reports to have been harassed like this in the past; in fact because of that and Hestveen’s own behaviors that aren’t even relating to sexism, racism, or homophobia, the snapshot provider even directly moved against Hestveen on July 4, 2020, 4 days before the allegations came out. To these people, the snapshot provider’s very existence constitutes as harassment, not any of the random vitriol-filled comments toward him.
This is why GameFAQs, Fandom, Reddit, Discord, and the Advance Wars communites all can’t be trusted. They will make up ANYTHING if it means bolstering their entertainment first agenda, and it has seriously compromised efforts to do things like keep alive display of a post by Nyvelion on May 29, 2020 where she was outlining abuse by a Yandere. (The post was deleted on the non-Web Archive version, in response to the follow-up user, once again the Wiki blog post maker, going off on the administration for their mishandling of the situation with Hestveen.) People like that are how Hestveen has a girlfriend for whom he moved into the states, and if you think warning the girlfriend about Hestveen’s evil is going to be a bright idea, she will sick Hestveen’s known followers upon you to pull derision and context twisting.
This brings me to one final point: I am scared of what Hestveen involves. And yes, this cements that the false defectors’ behaviors are them trying to be parody of people who genuinely want Hestveen brought to justice, but in case you have any doubts thanks to them and their lies, I can cite that I have to worry about inadvertently recruiting Hestveen’s spies or simple bad actors, of which Hestveen’s supporter count proves is a high number. I have to worry about Hestveen or his supporters stealing my ideas. It gets in the way of any sort of game design I could try to handle, because as long as they’re out there, I’m susceptible to sabotage. Oh, but don’t worry, because this is just the start.
What terrifies me perhaps even more, is how easily I could be Hestveen if I were to stop doing things like trying to make sure my ladies would be all happy and warm. I have compromised my political position before to call out a vibrant personality being overworked into lifelessness, and I did so in November 2019, some 8 months before the July 2020 mess, so it has NOTHING to do with me having to worry about alt-left idiots, but all the same, I am uninterested in being complacent for enough reason. Something I can bring up to help prove that at least I’m Not So Similar is a Pastebin I posted, Unlisted, on August 30, 2014, before I could have had any active familiarity with Hestveen, although the Pastebin is something I’ll still be wary about sharing directly, about a Manic Pixie Dream Girl character, as I have been thinking lately about how all she in her general design would need for being a guaranteed Pure Good/Magnificent Baddie hybrid would be her subtly sanctioning volunteer child soldiers to enkindle a case of Player Punch that would already be a reason for the story to bring them up, simply to fulfill the “bad enough” part for the MB qualification. If you think that’s hyperbole, then how about this: we already have fictional characters like AndrAIa from ReBoot, Hinata Hyuuga from Naruto, Shirley Fenette from Code Geass, and Artemis Lian Crock from Young Justice, all of whom are additionally better because they are just as kind-hearted to others as they are to their blatant Quirky Good love interests, and you can see where I would be going with the MPDG character in general there. I bring this up to particularly cite that Hestveen’s girlfriend, in her sadism, is NOTHING like any of those characters, so I get to make the call that Hestveen is definitely interested in the clear-cut enabler.
My goal with this post is to make sure enough people know about this for ensuring that YouTube and/or the law take the needed action against Hestveen and his supporters for all that they have done. This is a convoluted situation, and until it is met with healthy resolution, we have the precedent that remorseless sexual assailants and spiteful leakers can do whatever they want and be empowered for as much while rallying and boosting bad actors in their own right.