March 2020 Revolt

This article was last updated on: October 17th of 2021

Part of the dm conversation between Charlie and Ian during the revolt.

"What happened to memeless march? Not even the dictator follows the traditions, which just further proves my theory that nobody actually cares about the traditions."

- Ian Hampton denouncing Memeless March and the Willemstan traditions in #memes, 03/23/20.

"Memeless March is secretly dissolved. Don't tell though. It's been this way since like the 10th."

- Charlie Nolan to Ian Hampton in a dm conversation about Memeless March, 03/23/20.

Lore

Memeless March was one of the many "Willemstan traditions" celebrated during 2019 and 2020. These traditions were codified into law through Willemstan Commandments legislation. Memeless March was a mandate against memes in Willemstan, where no citizens were allowed to share memes in the Willemstan Discord Server. Yet, it was discovered in late March that Sean Kavanagh and Charlie Nolan (who held administrative power at the time) were openly violating Memeless March by posting memes in #memes. After Ian Hampton called attention to this blatant corruption, Charlie worked to actively cover up the incident, escalating the situation greatly. In all, what became known as the March 2020 Revolt pretty much ended the Willemstan traditions and was directly responsible for the creation of the Willemstan Wiki.

The Revolt

On March 23rd of 2020, Ian noticed that Sean and Charlie were violating the Memeless March tradition. He brought attention to this through messages in #chat and #memes, and shared a screenshot of the illegal memes. Charlie immediately suppressed these messages and the screenshot. In response, Ian sent the screenshot in every single channel of the server. Ian also made several statements in #memes, denouncing the Willemstan traditions as a whole. In response, Charlie deleted those messages and hid the meme channel from public view. In return, Dawson Morgan joined in on the fun, distributing a screenshot of a notifications he received in #memes, keeping Ian's statements alive. Ian declared that for any one of Dawson's screenshots that Charlie deleted, two more would take its place. This resulted in 16 of the screenshots in #gaming alone.

As the spamming got out of control, Charlie employed SuS to automatically delete new instances of the screenshot. He also took away Ian's permissions to post images and videos, and demoted him from governor to citizen. Dawson's rights were not restricted because he was a part of Sean's administration at the time. Charlie also hid #gaming from public view. Following this, Charlie began to negotiate with Ian over the situation, with Ian demanding proof that the 16 screenshots in #gaming were still intact. In the conversation that followed, Charlie admitted that Memeless March was "secretly dissolved". He agreed to leave the 16 screenshots in #gaming alone, but kept #gaming hidden and created a new video game channel "#games" as a cover up.

Subsequent Events

Ian was later placed on the Enemies of the State list by Sean due to exposing the Memeless March violations, but his Governor rank was later restored. #gaming remained hidden until the Willemstan 1.1 reforms, in which the channel was deleted. While April's Willemstan tradition was announced by the SuS bot, it was not celebrated. The revolt had pretty much ended the practice of Willemstan traditions, although as Ian noted earlier, enthusiasm for the traditions was already on the decline.

Immediately following the conclusion of the revolt, Ian made a wikibox style summary of the event and posted it in Willemstan. This gave him the idea to create an entire wiki for Willemstan, which he began working on that day. The first version of the Willemstan Wiki was released on April 17th of 2020. Ironically, despite this event being the very reason for the Wiki's creation, an article on the March 2020 Revolt wasn't made until October 17th of 2021.