Midori / MysticDistance Reveal

Submission 940

Overview

Midori / MysticDistance Reveal refers to the revelation that Midori, a video game news leaker thought to be a Japanese woman, is an alternate persona of leaker MysticDistance, a white man in his 20s. The reveal was done by an anonymous group in the video game leaking community and confirmed by MysticDistance. It led to jokes about MysticDistance's attempts to convincingly play a Japanese woman on social media.

Background

Midori, Twitter / X handle @MbKKssTBhz5,^[1] launched on Twitter in October 2022. The account built up a reputation of being a fairly legitimate video game leaker^[5] by posting information about Sega properties. Some of their "leaks" about items such as Persona 5 Tactica DLC,^[2] Persona 3 Remake’s DLC^[3] and Sonic Rumble ^[4] have been passed around gaming communities and seen as credible information.

MysticDistance was a disgraced leaker in the Persona community due to posting inaccurate information and for previous suspicious behavior in Discord and their association with a leaker named Zippo. In a thread in the subreddit /r/Gamingcirclejerk^[6] on June 12th, 2024, Redditor NIN10DOXD wrote:

Mysticdistance and Zippo were "leakers" who got blacklisted because they mostly lied and because they were in a Discord server with another leaker named Sabi who got in trouble for hacking, grooming, communicating threats, and ab*se. He threatened to take down the other guys with him right before he deleted his Twitter because he was being sued by Nintendo.

Also on June 12th, 2024, an anonymously written document posted to 0bin^[7] exposed that Midori was MysticDistance posting as a Japanese woman. For evidence, they posted one of Midori's translations^[8] that had comments from MysticDistance using his real name. That day, the Midori account confirmed that they were MysticDistance^[8] and that they would retire from leaking (shown below).

Developments

The revelation led to shock from the video game leak community as it spread. In particular, an October 2023 tweet from Midori in which they claimed to have a boyfriend got significant attention. On June 12th, 2024, Twitter user @clotifiles^[9] screenshot that tweet and commented on how it was "crazy" that Midori was a white man behind the account, gaining over 3,700 retweets and 31,000 likes in one day (shown below).

Others posted jokes about the reveal. On June 12th, 2024, Twitter user @ArtemaSeeker^[10] posted a joke comparing the reveal to a moment from Tekken, gaining over 1,300 retweets and 10,000 likes in one day (shown below, top). The same day, user @auzziejlee^[11] posted a screenshot from The Office to joke about the reveal, gaining over 1,000 retweets and 9,200 likes in one day (shown below, bottom).

The news gained significant interest in multiple Reddit threads, including on /r/GamingLeaksandRumours^[12] (1,600 points in one day), /r/TwoBestFriendsPlay^[13] (440 points) and /r/GamingCircleJerk^[14] (570 points).