Hello, my name is Seraph IX Basarab and I’m an opinion piece writer and analyst of Eve politics and war here at EN24. The thoughts and opinions written here are mine and not meant to represent anyone else’s.
Introduction
Sion and Endie were both long time members of GSF. Sion was more oriented toward diplomacy where as Endie was more interested in spy networking. Around the time of the Mittani’s now infamous kickstarter, Endie and his entire corp departed from GSF and joined Pandemic Legion. He was one of several high ranked “brains” that drained out of GSF before WWB and arguably a reason GSF seemed so ill prepared to deal with MBC forces. Naturally there is some tension among former comrades that is to be expected. Sion vented his frustration on the something awful forums.
Globbyy was nice enough to post the rant from SA to reddit. I encourage you to work through it yourself but in case you don’t feel like dunking your head in a bucket of bleach, it’s basically a five thousand word tirade about why Endie, is an awful person. I didn’t have much interest in reading it initially. Why with other previous stellar contributions from Sion it was hard to imagine how the Imperium Diplomat could sink any lower. I mean if one were to ask “Have you ever bad posted so hard you failcascaded your coalition?” Sion is probably one of the only people who could claim such an accomplishment. But this goes beyond just bad posting and into the realm of cringe posting where you actually feel physically embarrassed for the other person’s actions.
You really have to wonder what point a man is in his life where he feels the need to bring in a murdered individual to fight his petty internet squabble with another player. I’m not exaggerating here either, that’s exactly what Sion does throughout his rant. He has a very simple formula: bring up some alleged disagreement/tension between Vile Rat and Endie, side with Vile Rat whatever the supposed issue is, make Endie look like he is at fault, and repeat it until you get a five thousand word block of text about it. No really he mentions him directly by name around 30 times.
You’ve read Sion’s words yourself but what exactly is it saying? Endie is presented as a manipulating dishonest and malicious individual who uses his position for ego boosting while being essentially useless at his Eve job. Sion places Vile Rat as the opposite of Endie and funnels his own criticism of Endie through Vile Rat. Endie is also time and time again placed on the “wrong side of history” in regards to internal debates on what GSF should do. One specific example was the GSF’s invasion of Branch which Endie seemed to have warned against. The funny thing is if you read Mittani’s article regarding the fall of Branch, he portrays GSF’s attack on the region as somewhat reluctant, more of a reaction to White Noise’s invasion of Deklein. This seems to stand in stark contrast with Sion’s version that everyone seemed ready to go while Endie was digging his heels in the ground for the sake of opposing Vile Rat.
Supposedly Endie would be “trolled out” of whatever command channel or position he was in and only returned when Mittani personally asked for his presence. This begs the question why the hell would Mittens do that if Endie was such a trouble maker? Either Mittens is terrible at making decisions and makes awful ones, or Sion might be misleading us with his story. In the same thread where Sion posts his thread, Mittens also makes a comment along the lines of “if I would have realized at the time how much drama Endie created…” This again contrasts starkly with the high praise Mittens showered Endie with for half a decade. So is he a liar or an idiot?
Sion avoids directly going after Endie and instead prefers to use Vile Rat as his proxy by comparing and contrasting and always quoting an “other” to buttress his narrative.
“As one member of the CSM would later say, and which I think well sums it up, “he’s the most casually cruel person I’ve ever met” and that he would “use any words you say in any context as a weapon against you if he thought he could gain from it.” Or to put it another way, Vile Rat built people up and set them off to better use their talents, Endie brought people low and crushed them so he could better control them.”
Within the tirade Sion also states that Endie’s GIA was a complete joke, vastly inferior to what the public perception and propaganda presented as and served mostly as an ego hat for Endie. Sion assures us that the current iteration of the GIA known as the Black Hand is, much more capable. I found it comical reading that considering a recent interaction I had with Porkbutte on the “Talking in Stations” show hosted by Matterall. Not to disparage Porkbutte as I actually think he’s a decent person, but he stated quite a few things that led me to believe GSF’s intel program is far from capable. First he mentioned that through “Boson leaks” he had become informed of certain things that I knew for a fact were blatantly wrong. And for all the spies the GSF intel had, they did not even pick up on Co2’s head diplomat speaking with yours truly negotiating perhaps the largest defection in the history of Eve online. Talk about not seeing the elephant draped in Christmas lights hiding in the room. Lastly Pork still seemed convinced that Co2 intended to gank their supercap fleet which is blatantly false and at this point a meme in itself. Personally I think GIA was okayish at its job but not much worse than its current “Black Hand” version. Anyway…
Let’s look at this as political analysts almost as if considering changes or tensions in North Korea’s regime. What kind of motivation would the head diplomat of the Imperium have for rehashing some petty argument with some member that left a year ago, especially considering how totally not important Endie was? The one possibility that exists is that Sion’s position of authority currently being challenged within his own organization, or at the very least feels somewhat insecure. In either case he’s invoking the memory Vile Rat, placing him in opposition to his own enemy, Endie, and then hiding behind Vile Rat’s memory for credibility. This in turn becomes “Oh it’s not me Sion, the disreputable pseudo intellectual whose incompetent policies landed my whole coalition in some serious shit hitting Endie, this is Vile Rat saying these things, our holy martyr we wheel out for propagandist reasons and I, Sion, am simply agreeing with this man you can no longer ever criticize.”
All of this is coming along while in the background TMdC are looking to rebrand themselves under a different name and as their chief editor Matterall stated Mittens and Sion are not going to be involved with it. Of course no one is naïve enough to believe that but it does indicate something very interesting. Sion was barred from the CSM because of his involvement with TMdC, them promoting non-Eve games, money being involved and so on. To me this is simply an attempt by Mittens and Sion to place distances between themselves and their media outlet in order to have another go at the CSM next time around. However for all intents and purposes the media site will continue being the media arm of the Imperium regardless of what the official positions will be.
Now to be clear, I’m not criticizing or even saying that Mittens and Sion using TMdC to further the interests of their coalition is somehow bad or wrong. I’m simply stating it as a fact the same way one would say water is wet. By all means, if you have the power and capability, why wouldn’t you do such a thing in a game like Eve that revolves around scheming and meta gaming? And Mittens and Sion have shown that that is exactly what they have done in the past. One of those examples is this article from 2014 in which Sion interviews Kimsemus, a former diplomat of sorts for NCdot.
Long story short, Kimsemus defected from NCdot to GSF only to get unceremoniously kicked out later on. He explained to me that as part of his defection deal and “golden parachute” he had to create this article with Sion and Mittens in order to bad mouth NCdot under the guise of an interview. This recent tirade by Sion may not in itself be a singular cause in this analysis, but it’s certainly an indicator along with a few other factors that show some of the internal re-workings of the ‘Imperium.’ However, Sion’s clearly miscalculated the effect of his attack on Endie and invoking the name of Vile Rat has come off as crass and politically incompetent.
Goons always freak out at me “oh Seraph why do you always attack Goons lol r u Gevlon 2.0 haha!” Well your leaders make painfully stupid remarks that you can’t help but have to address again and again and again. I mean geez Sion, even Mittens is keeping his head down these past few months. Leave Vile Rat out of your petty squabbles with Endie. Granted, Endie may well be this awful individual Sion claims him to be and attacking him may be politically savvy internally for Sion. But in his usual fashion he goes about the whole thing in a very clumsy manner. As a meta gamer I can respect the attempt, but at the same time I have to face palm at the completely incompetent way he goes about it. I’m pretty sure even the lowest plankton IQ individual in your coalition can pick up on how bad the attempt looks. Even people on SA forums ridiculed the post.
I’m going to pre-empt some things I’m sure are going to pop up on the other end of this discussion. Specifically while I was in TISHU a couple members thought it would be funny to make a Vile Rat character and a Hillary Clinton one, fly to the Saranen undock and have “Hillary” shoot “Vile Rat’s” pod while “Vile Rat” spammed “plz hilary dun bengoozi me.” This wasn’t unique in TISHU as dark edgy maymay pepe posting was the norm from Bataclan massacre to dead Syrian boys washed up on the beach. I strongly advised against it but I certainly didn’t chalk it up as anything more than people trying to be edgy. However to my surprise who comes riding in on a white horse? No other than Sion Kumitomo riding in as a gallant knight acting the part of the offended party with all the sincerity of Mittani bemoaning the epidemic of child gambling on IWI.
“Seraph, are you willing to accept this kind of behavior from your alliance members?” Sion asked with all the charisma of a damp cardboard box. I told him they can say whatever they like even if I didn’t particularly care for the content. He was trying awfully hard to rope me into some kind of guilt by association which makes this piece all the more comical. You have the right to be as tasteless as you want and ranging from getting people to try to get a fellow player to kill himself like Mittens did at fanfest (that’s right, not letting this go away) or trying to use doxing as a motivating factor to get people to vote for your CSM picks we can say Sion’s in good company. But I also have the right to call you out on your bullshit. And digging up Vile Rat’s corpse for a little dance every time you need a propaganda boost or to hash out petty arguments is perhaps not as obnoxious as what the TISHU people did, but it’s certainly much more insidious and tasteless. If the guy truly was your friend have the decency to let the guy rest in peace and find some other way to sling mud or maneuvering your meta game.
