At some point, everyone started migrating over here to these forums. Which was good. There was a thread that Tony started to invite and direct the community over here, and I bumped that thread every single day when people stopped chatting in it. However, I stuck to the official forums along with several others till the end, basically to field misinformation and fight the green tide of Supatrolls. So, I saw the evolution of IBurntTheToast's attitude toward everything, from beginning to end.
BurntToast was a staunch supporter of the Titan Network and the SaveCoH movement in the beginning. In some ways, he was an even stauncher ally of the SaveCoH movement than most SaveCoHers in the beginning. When everyone around the Titan Network insisted on walking on egg shells around NCSoft--largely owing to the cultural divide and possible misinterpretations--IBurntTheToast was the first to point out that South Koreans are polar opposites of their more oppressed neighbors for a reason: citizens there have been willing to march for everything from democratic reform to corporate reform, to force their government and businesses to listen up and do the right thing. He was the first to defend me when I insisted that multinational corporations aren't designed to have "hearts" that you can appeal to with personal stories; they only have PR departments that can be alarmed by significant amounts of bad press. I'd like to add that at this time and the time leading up to it, he was a friendly forum personality for the most part.
BurntToast is a South Korean-American. His parents marched for democratic reforms in South Korea.
His attitude toward the Titan Network changed fairly quickly when a kind of campaign was mobilized around the ideals of the Korean concepts of kibun and nunchi. This is an area where I wasn't on anyone's side. In difficult times, it's tempting to try anything and everything, but during that particular moment in SaveCOH's history, some people discussed scenarios, generated meme images, and generally approached a threshold beyond which they would have become worse human beings than those who fired Paragon Studios without notice and shut down our game world.
BurntToast's belief is that we didn't just approach that threshold, but that we--as in all of us, collectively and by association--rushed over the edge and revealed ourselves to be racist monsters at worst, moral-deprived opportunists at best. But I know better. I know some of the people here better, though I definitely will not defend everyone. And I know myself better. I disagree with him, and in many ways I think it was he who flung himself over the edge, motivated by all of the negative experiences that a South Korean-American undoubtedly has had to deal with growing up in the United States. I sympathize with him, but that does not mean I think he is right. I think he is very, very mistaken and misguided.
Some who participated in that campaign were motivated by the kindest intentions--trying to reach out to another culture by learning and using their own tools. It was marred by those who were motivated purely by racism, which I know some were, based on comments I've received from some of you in private; and some who had the audacity to suspect that I would support their intolerance because I'm a white male.
No one ever apologized to BurntToast. And BurntToast will presumably never apologize for labeling many good and decent folks monsters by association. I do think he considers himself an active enemy of the SaveCoH campaign, and that, given the opportunity, he would sabotage or throw a wrench in any efforts underway, whether that's Plan Z, SEGS, or Hail Mary.
