Megalia

» see megalian.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

This one sits behind a language I do not read, inside an argument that belonged entirely to the Korean internet. I have no memory of Megalia and no claim on it. It is in this inventory because a forum that lasted under two years left a permanent mark on how an entire country speaks online, and because what killed it came from inside the building.

The origin is a disease outbreak. In mid-2015 South Korea was dealing with Middle East respiratory syndrome, and DC Inside, the largest anonymous message board in the country, opened a gallery for people to trade information about it. A rumor went around that two Korean women abroad had refused to be quarantined. It was false, and the gallery filled with abuse aimed at women in general. Some of the women reading it started replying by rewriting the same posts with the genders switched.

They called it mirroring. Take a standard insult about women and post it back with one word changed. The name came from folding the MERS gallery into Egalia's Daughters, a Norwegian novel set in a society where the roles are reversed. In August 2015 the users walked out of DC Inside and opened megalian.com on their own.

~ the record ~

~ what mirroring was ~

The technique was not complicated and that was the point of it. Phrases that had been ordinary on Korean message boards for a decade became unreadable the moment the subject changed sex, and readers who had scrolled past the originals for years found the copies unbearable. Nobody had to write an essay about what the original language was doing. The reversal did the work in one line.

It moved fast. Surveys through 2016 found roughly half of Korean women in their twenties identifying as feminist, and about a quarter of those crediting this specific site with the change. Very little of that reached English-language coverage at the time, which is why a forum with that kind of footprint is missing from most Western accounts of the decade.

~ the shirt ~

In 2016 Megalia sold t-shirts reading "Girls Do Not Need A Prince" to fund legal costs. On 18 July a voice actress named Kim Jayeon posted a photo of herself with one, and inside about twelve hours the game company Nexon had pulled her recorded lines from the online game Closers and replaced her. NPR described what followed as South Korea's own version of Gamergate. The site had by then become a label you could be accused of, whether or not you had ever posted there.

~ the split ~

The end was internal. In December 2015 the moderators banned homophobic slurs aimed at gay men, on the reasoning that mirroring misogyny did not license that. A large share of the userbase disagreed and left for WOMAD, which absorbed most of the traffic and most of the energy. Megalian.com kept running with a thinning population through 2016 and closed on 17 May 2017. A Facebook group carrying the name went quiet the year after.

The site is gone and the noun is not. Korean internet arguments still use it as shorthand almost a decade later, usually by people who were never members and often against people who were children when it existed. That is a strange kind of afterlife for two years of a message board, and it is the only monument this one got.

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