The Trial of Nyarlathotep was a campaign against Nyarlathotep by members of the SCJP as part of their mission to rid WIDEVERSE of what they describe as "white noise midwit posting". He was eventually ousted, although with great effort in an attempt at reconciliation by Prude.

Background

The Trial of Nyarlathotep
	; Judge Prude presiding over the trial
Date	March 25th, 2023
Location	Beefy Boys Discord
Result	Nyarlathotep banned, rule changes regarding culture considered
Belligerents
Commanders and leaders

Nyarlathotep joined The WIDEVERSE on August 8th 2020, claiming he was a Goon who had never joined BMW previously, but knew of the group via its antics and threads. It had long been theorized it was either Alt or Jones on a burner account, but such accusations were never proven nor disproven.

In early 2023, Taylor stepped down as WIDEKING then disappeared from the Community Discord server in Feburary, largely due to what he saw as a degredation of the communities culture, mostly from a overabundance of Commentary Culture, mindless shitposting, and general lack of activity. He cited many members of the community as the primary culprits in this, but time and time again singled out Nyarlathotep as the worst offender, most notably when it came to games, wherein Nyarlathotep would rarely, if ever, contribute to discussions about them without it relating to outrage culture. The SCJP was repurposed from a Fediverse meme to an organization to fight the ills of WIDEVERSE in the wake of this, with Taylor leading the charge as Chairman.

History

While simmering for months, things reached a fever pitch on the afternoon of March 25th, when Taylor as usual called out Nyarlathotep for mindlessly posting yet another literal who in relation to internet drama, pointing out that part of the WIDEVERSES decline had come from people being much more interested in petty irrelevant drama than the groups own culture. Later that afternoon, as part of the Open Source MOTHER Initative, Taylor posted a set of criteria in which he would assume WIDEVERSE "saved", one including finally purging "midwit posters". This finally led to Prude, acting as WIDESTEWARD, to take the matter seriously, calling forth a "trial" of sorts to finally hash it out.

Taylor, along with several other SCJP members, laid out their case that white noise posting did nothing for the community, and in fact did more harm in the eyes of casual members of the community, especially in the case of Nyarlathotep shitting on Diablo 4, a proposed "anchor game", using very flimsy Outrage Culture talking points. While originally the SCJP sought to rid WIDEVERSE of several of its worse members, a compromise was struck to just target Nyarlathotep. When he came to his own defense, he admitted that he didnt see any reason he should be removed and stated in no uncertain terms he would not do anything to change his attitude, unlike Oxballs who had similarly been called out weeks before and had made efforts to stop being such a terrible poster.

Prude dragged his feet, trying his best to remain impartial and unwilling to cull the cancer that was very apparent on The WIDEVERSE. However, he eventually relented and banned Nyarlathotep.

Aftermath

To a few, the banning was controversial, but most saw it as a necessary move to attempt to rehabilitate the community. Work began on crafting new sets of rules to stem future problems in the form of anti-Commentary and Outrage Culture rules.