User blog comment:Servant of Evillious/Six Month Report: 2013 Part I/@comment-350940-20130701055527

First, I (still) have a bad connection right now and can't check anything on NND, not even the videos I linked to in my post, so I can't see if anything has changed since March. I'm not too familiar with how NND works, either, and I haven't figured out a way to definitely trace a comment back to a user, not even my own comments on other videos. Rhia mentioned Nicozon, which I vaguely remember but never actually investigated.

I never said anything about a copycat conspiracy, nor did I ever say there was a fake Mothy. I never contested the validity of the videos or the Mothy account themselves. I don't think I ever hinted at what I thought who the sources of the comments were, but my assumption is that they're fans like us, making theories that work with currently known information. I don't believe and have never claimed that there's someone deliberately planting false info for kicks and giggles.

I asked on several occasions what the criteria for identifying Mothy's comments was, and I was always told that it had something to do with the comment's appearance, usually involving a static subtitle with colors, and no one told me anything more than that. The post was done to prove that styled comments isn't something only the uploader can do, meaning it cannot be a factor in identifying the user.

It also pointed out that if an uploader comments on their own video in a certain way, it does have special qualities, like bypassing language settings. I do remember seeing some sites last year that were talking about uploader's comments on older videos that didn't have them when I checked them, so even if Mothy's older videos lack the section I'll disregard them unless recent comments on them are cited. Uploader's Comment mostly only works as a definite "yes, this is Mothy speaking" that requires no further investigation, and a lack of it isn't necessarily a negative result but just a sign that further methods of identification are required.

It is possible that Mothy is using a secondary account to comment with, which wouldn't ping Uploader's Comment even if he did comment on one of his videos, but unless one of his main accounts mentions a secondary I'm not too sure if that could be automatically trusted. If I remember right from my test, commenting on your own video the regular way also has no special qualities and would also require tracing the comment somehow.

It's not as though I want to destroy everything we know about Evillious. I'll actually be incredibly disappointed if The Last Revolver is ever disproven, and I'll probably cling to it until the last possible moment. But surely people know of how easily the fanmade Story of Evil songs were and still are accepted as fact because many people merge sources together, and given how common it is for Evillious fans to spread information anywhere and everywhere, I don't want us to accidentally spread something that isn't proven. (Personally I'm having second thoughts on a blog post I linked to years ago that identified Irina as Meiko and Kyrill/Kiriru as Kiyoteru; it was from before the post-timeskip SoE novels and Irina has become a lot more complicated since then, but with what was known at the time it was reasonable to assume Irina/Julia had always been Meiko.)

If I'm wrong about how certain songs fit in, then I'm sorry. I just want to be sure that the fandom is doing the right thing, and I want to find a better way to identify Mothy's comments.

Or maybe people can just continue to dismiss me and my "conspiracy".