The GBWC Fallout

I was tempted to call this the GBWC Fallout 76, felt topical at the time. Anyway enough of that stupid joke. I've been wanting to write this since I had heard what has been going on with GBWC 2018 in the US. I feel like there is a lot more to this than just that and I felt like I wanted to address that as best I could, now a lot of this controversy is centered around the winner of the US GBWC, GundamNerd (congrats by the way), but I wanted to provide some more general advice to the Gundam community as a whole.

One of my favourite lines to come out of the Build Fighters series was, "Gunpla is Freedom!". I would expand that to, "Mechas are Freedom!". Any builder/designer should be able to go as far as they want to go and it should be okay for anyone else to have a critical or dissenting opinion. I personally, have a lot of fun building and modding kits to match my own tastes and I'll be the first to admit that my tastes don't necessarily line up with what others like. You take the criticisms with a grain of salt, some are constructive and will help you to improve your craft and some are just chaff.

This is some of my handiwork, it's a MG Zeta Plus that I completed earlier this year it is probably my best work to date and at the same time I can admit that it is still pretty rough. It certainly isn't cannon and it is very much built to my own tastes, I have gotten plenty of both flak and compliments in person and on the internet for it.

To GundamNerd specifically: I haven't actually taken a look at the the entries to the GBWC yet (with the sole exception of ED's Saisei) and I haven't seen what was said about your work on the Elitist Gundam Group, and frankly at this point its irrelevant. To have an entire group taken down for "hate speech" is a major over-reaction, and while you may not be directly responsible for for all of the reports, but make no mistake you are responsible for this. Growing a community is no trivial thing and destroying one on a whim or because one person hurt your feelings, I think most will agree that is a gross overstep. Furthermore you are responsible for destroying a very valuable resource in advice and information for your fellow gunpla builders.

To Everyone: Once more, I'm merely suggesting that it's okay to have an opinion even to be personally invested in something but you don't need to be personally offended by every single dissenting opinion. One last tidbit of advice just leave him alone, don't add fuel to the fire, don't harass or troll, just leave him be.