A potential link between Leth and E1331 [WARNING: HAZARDOUS LEVELS OF COPIUM]
Okay we've all seen the conclusion to E1331's countdown by now. It tries to look like a message from Team Cherry while simultaneously denying any involvement with them. This was then almost immediately backed up by Leth on the discord, who said he knew nothing about E1331 outside of him shitposting. Now maybe I've gone silksane, maybe I've finally overdosed on copium, but I swear there's evidence out there which could actually point towards the two having direct communication in the past.
It all starts off with one of E1331's trademark silkposts in November last year. In this particular post, he edited some of Leth's tweets to make it look like he was insulting other indie games. The post's deleted now, so I don't have all of the images, but it was pretty outrageous stuff to put into someone else's mouth, especially considering Leth's a PR guy and it could potentially hurt his career.
this is the only surviving image from the post afaik, imagine like 5 more of these
A day later, E1331 made this post where he stated that he'd been contacted by "a certain group" (Team Cherry, obviously) who told him to stop making posts about them. This was presumably because of the post with the fake tweets, because it was deleted that same day. Crucially, the flair was set to "other", not silkpost, which he is normally very careful about. In addition, his message was strangely genuine, which is a departure from his normal tone.
This is the only capture I could find with the flair set to \"other\" on the Wayback machine.
Most of you probably remember it, but this then lead to a massive community outcry. The subreddit opinion of Team Cherry plummeted into the gutter for murdering our favourite shitposter. However, 4 days later, E1331 returned and seemingly debunked the whole situation as another elaborate troll. He changed the flair of his departure post to silkpost, making it seem like the whole thing was just a setup. In the comments, he makes up a weird story where he gets into a childish argument with Leth in his DMs. After this, Team Cherry was largely forgiven and E1331 returned to silkposting as usual.
This never sat right with me because of how outright malicious it seems. People were really pissed off at Team Cherry, and understandably so, it's not a good look to threaten your community members with legal action for making jokes. Also, E1331's posts are normally harmless fun and tagged as a silkpost. The Leth post alone was cutting it close, but pretending they took legal action against him while insisting it's real is on a whole other level.
Fast forward to E1331's countdown, and with 1 day to go E1331 posted this:
For those not in on the loop, in this post E1331 uses the word "nobody" to refer to himself and "somebody" to refer to Team Cherry. Substituting those names shows that E1331 planned to make silkposts until Team Cherry returned with news. It then implies that Team Cherry reached out to him because someone was impersonating them. This impersonator was called "a representative of a certain group", the exact same phrase as in E1331's departure post. They are also said to have "tricked" E1331.
I think this is indirect confirmation that a member of Team Cherry, most likely Leth, has directly contacted E1331 in the past, because it perfectly explains the weird behaviour behind E1331's sudden disappearance and reappearance. After E1331's initial post, the impersonator pretended to be Leth and silenced him on the grounds that he was damaging their image. Leth was lurking in the subreddit at the time, which people noted by looking at the medals on his account. Seeing the uproar, and the fake Team Cherry member contacting E1331, he likely reached out to clear up any misconceptions and let him come back. This lines up with the line in the poem "somebody let nobody finish his punch line" with Team Cherry letting E1331 continue silkposting.
I'd argue this shows Leth has contacted E1331 in the past and likely knows more than he's letting on. This is significant because the conclusion to the countdown leaves this ambiguous. In the post, E1331 casts doubt as to whether he wrote it or a member of Team Cherry did. Leth was also online on discord within an hour of the post to state that he knew nothing about it. The reason for his denial is probably so he could communicate with us to apologise for the silence without getting the press to dogpile it. It also reduces the community outcry for not mentioning a release date, because you have plausible deniability that it's not even communication in the first place. In the post, E1331/Team Cherry says that Silksong is probably their "final game we work on together" so if TC split up after the game launches, we'll know that it was real.
I'll also quickly suggest an alternate explanation, in which there was no impersonator all along, and that it was Leth who told E1331 to stop, then let him continue after he saw the shitstorm of bad PR. I'd argue more strongly for this scenario, because the fake tweets had very little to do with Team Cherry as a whole and were mostly focused on Leth. Your image is really important if you're working in PR, and you really don't want images out there of you insulting your potential employers. Also, E1331's return post later jokes that Leth was the one who childishly contacted him to get him to shut up.
Anyway, believe what you will, I've not seen anyone else point this out so I thought I'd put it out here. Am I overthinking it? Absolutely. Are the people claiming it was nothing underthinking it? Idk probably not. I still think it's worth putting out there in the off chance that I'm proved right and get to say "I told you so". The real conclusion here is that you should just play other games instead of devoting your mental energy to the comings and goings of random users on the internet in a schizophrenic subreddit.
TL;DR please release the game Team Cherry my sanity can't take any more
EDIT: various typos I can't spell