A heroes story, needs a villain, but what happens when the monsters are in short supply? Make one up!
Comicsgate the movement, was a decentralized reaction to the quality of corporate comic books, and the progressive politics that were crudely forced onto long term characters and into their stories.
Ethan Van Sciver's Comicsgate, is a merchandise crowdfunding club for YouTubers. Van Sciver creates or provokes a feud with individuals or groups, and then uses that conflict to entertain his audience. A side effect of this dynamic is that Comicsgate and its audience has gradually been filtered to a group that relishes the slapfight of the week.
Van Sciver appears to finance his lifestyle from tips (superchats) on YouTube from an irascible audience. Van Sciver then purports to use the attention to promote crowdfunded comic books from his associates and his own the same audience. The challenge faced by Van Sciver is that there is little incentive for the persons cast as villains. Frequently his selected "enemies" mock Van Sciver to the point where he forgoes the feud, or simply ignore him. The Comicsgate audience often appears to be confused why they should be angry at a particular enemy of Ethan.
When a chosen enemy of Van Sciver, declines to participate Ethan often constructs an elaborate caricature of the person and then attempt to taunt and provoke the target into an angry response to produce fodder for his livestreams. YouTuber Eric July turned comic book publisher of the Rippaverse, ran afoul of Ethan and has been a primary target of Van Sciver's "TrashCast" streams for the past year. Eventually July adopted a disciplined approach and resolved to deprive Van Sciver of attention. Van Sciver and his fans were unable to endure a drama-free diet, so Ethan continued a one-sided feud targeting July's fans and even promoting AI-generated puppet shows of a character named "Derick Julyz". Puppet shows are the pinnacles of Comicsgate culture.
Parsing the comments on the video, becomes a window (well licked) into the minds and tastes of Van Sciver's audience. Davide7605 observes that "The pause fart is my favorite part", and Tomasivanko9140 echoes his love of fart sounds with the insight "That fart instead BLEAH is work of genius."
Genius has likely seen better days.
It is no surprise, that reasonable men decline to be cast as villains for the delight of potato men.
Interestingly enough both Ethan Van Sciver and Eric July have current campaigns for their graphics novels. July has consistently delivered his offerings on time or early, while Van Sciver has offerings that are years late. It is somewhat amusing that July has largely ignored Ethan's dramatics to his credit and profit. July's campaign for a hardcover omnibus which can be found here has accumulated 501 preorders compared to 351 "backers" for Van Sciver, despite having been active for a shorter time.
Conflict is an inherent component of the culture war, particularly within the segment of pop culture. Contrived feuds, and fart-jokes seem to set the aspirational bar rather low. Van Sciver's Comicsgate has inadvertently become both the joke and the punchline.