It just occurred to me that some people literally only know Apollo Legend as the "guy who discovered that Billy Mitchell was a cheater".

If that's you, then please read this thread

Apollo Legend is someone who's been "involved" with speedrunning for years, and I say "involved" with massive quotes there because he's always been someone who's not really a part of a community, but has been exploiting existing communities for as long as he's been making videos.

He got his start actually far before the Billy Mitchell drama, by literally just ripping stream clips and making "Top 10 speedrunning fails" videos and the like.

So from the start, he was already frowned upon by a lot of speedrunners due to using video footage of them in his videos without permission, for the purposes of making fun of them and having the videos shared to other people who are not involved in their communities.

And even though pretty much everyone in the individual communities of the people having their clips ripped hated the guy, he started calling himself the "voice of the speedrunning community" due to how many views he was getting... from people who don't speedrun.

Eventually he started pivoting his channel to "drama videos". Not only was he making videos just about community drama that happens in every speedrunning community (and making money off of it), he was intentionally stirring up this drama as well.

Pretty much since then, he's been basing his entire YT channel off of metaphorically chucking live grenades into speedrunning communities and filming the reactions.

He also got really big into the "anti-GDQ" hate train and ended up amplifying that sentiment a lot. Every time GDQ would ban someone who's a blatant racist or something, he'd chalk it up as "ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF GDQ CENSORSHIP"

And a side note to that - If you have one racist in your community, you should try to get rid of that one racist. If you have TEN racists in your community, you should try to get rid of ALL TEN racists - it doesn't make you anymore "PC" - it just means you have more racists.

But anyway, back onto the subject - Eventually we hit the point of Todd Rogers and Billy Mitchell being outed as legitimate cheaters.

AL is more involved with the Billy Mitchell story, and although he wasn't the one to find any of the evidence or draw any of the conclusions, he jumped on it as the "guy who outed Billy Mitchell as a cheater".

Around this time he was also preparing for his marathon that he was organizing, largely fueled by GDQ hatred (And I thought at one point he was taking donations for it, but I don't know for sure).

Well, it turns out that changed when Billy Mitchell actually took action against Apollo Legend for literally stalking him in person to try to get footage for videos. At that point he called off the marathon entirely and hoped people would forget (which they mostly did).

And of course, you can't talk about Apollo Legend without talking about his defense of RWhite "Actual Literal Proud Nazi" Goose.

As soon as RWG had all the Discord screenshots published that showed him literally being as much of a Nazi as you can be (swastika and all), Apollo Legend immediately put up a video defending him, and also jumped on a podcast to defend him live on stream.

So you can sort of see then, why the situation with Connor was a gold mine for Apollo Legend. You have 1) anti-GDQ sentiments, 2) someone "cheating" (big quotes there), and 3) an audience who doesn't understand what segmented runs are, or why you'd have a video that isn't WR.

What it comes down to is that Apollo Legend isn't just a "guy who finds cheaters in speedrunning, and found a big one with Billy Mitchell". This is a guy who hates speedrunning and tries to profit out of exploiting its communities, and has been doing so for years.

And he had been waiting for years to get a chance to put "cheating" and "GDQ" in the same video, and jumped at the chance to do that, no matter how many hoops he had to jump through to draw a conclusion that Connor cheated.

I want to end this off with some shout-outs to videomakers on YT who respect speedrunning communities and really show speedrunning for what it is, instead of showing it in the worst possible light.

First off is obviously @summoningsalt - The guy's a speedrunner himself and has been making great videos for a while now showing off the commitment of speedrunners to improve their own strats and drive down WR times together.

Secondly is @EZScapeYT - This guy actually covers some similar subject matter about bad actors in speedrunning communities, but a) It's one of many interesting things he talks about on his channel, and b) It's always done with respect to runners and communities.

If you know of other videomakers who put effort into showing off speedrunning communities in a positive light, link them in the replies! I want this to turn into a positive thing, even if Apollo Legend is trying as hard as he can to make speedrunning a "source of drama".