Limbus Company Illustrator Fired For “Feminist” Swimsuit Design She Didn’t Create

Following the review bombing of Limbus Company, developer ProjectMoon has released an official statement saying that they had fired an illustrator who the fans claimed to have alleged ties to radical feminist groups in South Korea.

The story began earlier in July when ProjectMoon revealed a new summer event, S.E.A./The Magic Hellbus for their turn-based gacha RPG Limbus Company.

In the reveal, a female character named Ishmael is seen wearing a skin-tight wetsuit instead of the swimsuits traditionally found in gacha games’ summer events.

This caused negative reactions among fans that they find the new costume for Ishmael not sufficiently “sexy” and some people claimed that she was not equal to the male characters.

The uproar largely happened among the Korean fanbase as the recent negative Steam reviews were mostly written by Korean fans.

This led to a conspiracy whereby a group of Korean players believed that the lack of swimsuit-wearing female characters was due to “radical feminism” taking root within the company, despite there being no proof.

Along with other issues, the players begin to review bomb Limbus Company on Steam and Google Play Store as a form of protest and some fans even begin cyberstalking certain ProjectMoon developers.

This is when they found out that one of the illustrators working on the game, VellMori, had some old Retweets relating to feminist movements on Twitter.

While the retweets were since deleted, some fans claimed that they have archived screenshots of them which mainly just call for an end to gender discrimination.

As Korean fans got hold of this information, they began to demand angrily toward ProjectMoon for VellMori’s employment to be terminated, despite them not being the artist who worked on Ishmael’s summer costume design.

Termination of Employment

After the uproar, ProjectMoon Director Kim Ji-hoon made an online statement announcing the termination of VellMori’s employment at the company.

ProjectMoon stated that the reason is that the person responsible did not disclose that they are posting with the nickname on their personal social media account which is also in the game’s credits.

Director Kim Ji-hoon further says that controversies arising through social media expressions can cause harm to other employees and the company’s operation.

As such, starting from Chapter 5 of Limbus Company, ProjectMoon will no longer include the work of VellMori in the game but works relating to the previous story will still remain.

However, the image illustration made by VellMori in the main UI will still remain for a period before being replaced over time.

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