Last week we reported on an exceptionally strange individual spending their precious, limited time on this Earth creating an alternate cut of The Last Jedi that massively reduced the role played by women and tried to make it so none of the male characters ever experienced a moment of embarrassment or contrition. Pretty straightforward stuff – OR IS IT?
Thanks to some intrepid internet sleuths, it has come to light that there might be more to this story than meets the eye, specifically, that we made the cut ourselves with the intention of discrediting the much beloved and wholly respected institution of men’s rights activism.
Now, I’m relatively certain that this is not the case, as I wrote the original article and do not have the spare time and patience required to spend hours staring at Final Cut Pro chopping up a terrible camrip of a 155-minute film, but in the noble pursuit of truth, I have decided to look into it.
The first sign that something was awry was the timestamps on the torrent and the post of our article, as brought to our attention by a number of very persistent individuals defending the honour of the ‘MSM’ (either ‘men’s rights movement’ or ‘medium-range missile’, not sure):
That’s a very good question, Twitter user @BlackBeard20096, what time *is* it in Australia when it’s 2:30 am GMT? In order to get the bottom of this, I decided to use something called ‘maths’. As you can see from the screenshot, the torrent in which we found the edit was uploaded at 2:31 am January 14 GMT. Our article was published to Twitter at 4:29 pm January 15 GMT+10. If we convert the publish time to GMT, we see that we posted it at 6:29 am January 15 – that’s right, a mere 28 hours after the torrent was uploaded. Pretty suspicious stuff.
But it doesn’t stop there, as Twitter user @MnemoniXs points out, there were absolutely zero mentions on the internet of the fan-edit until we posted about it, making it highly likely that we, in fact, only knew about it because we made it. I mean, sure, there was this Reddit post that someone made a full day before we found the torrent and, yes, I originally saw people talking about it thanks to this tweet from Birth.Movies.Death writer Andrew Todd, that was posted four hours before our story went up:
Never underestimate how much effort people will put into being, just, complete shit pic.twitter.com/S82YjA1Kd8
— Andrew Todd (@mistertodd) January 15, 2018
Still, though. They could have been false flags to throw people off our scent.
Lastly, how did we know that the person who made it was an MRA? Sure, they might have been explicitly making MRA talking points that lined up with the bizarre MRA criticism of The Force Awakens, but at no point in the description of the torrent do they straight out say ‘btw, I’m an MRA‘. Damning, I think you can agree.
In conclusion: was the edit a concerted effort to confect global mockery of otherwise highly regarded men’s rights activists, or simply a labour of love from a very, very strange person? There’s no way to tell. The truth is out there.
