“The sins of this town, Hollywood, are beyond count and comprehension, today marks…”

  Victor Graves began his speech railing against Hollywood. The audience members at the Oscars ceremony thought it was a joke at first, and laughed, but it soon became apparent that it was no laughing matter at all. In some versions of the Gravesverse, he starts getting booed, in others, there’s stunned silence, in others yet, awkward chuckling as people aren’t sure what to do.

  They start playing music and eventually cut off his mic. He kept speaking, though, and when his mic was cut, he just started talking louder. Security personnel tried to get him off the stage but his concubines, which were all up there with him to accept the award for best picture, fought with them to allow Victor to continue speaking. As an aside, nobody was aware at this point that Victor had concubines, and nobody was aware that he considered himself to be a modern-day Genghis Khan. They knew afterwards, though.

  The whole thing had been recorded by the secret cameras hidden in the group’s clothing. The whole thing was uploaded to YouTube shortly afterwards, so people could see for themselves what Victor had said. As it got pretty rowdy at the end of the speech, Victor and Gloriana both came onto the YouTube video to explain what they intended to do. They meant to shake up the whole Hollywood system.

  They couched it all in language that largely spoke of bringing power back to the common people, to the communities. They wanted the local theaters to have more leverage, they wanted the corrupt executives who abused newcomers to be brought under their thumb, and they wanted to tip the scales of power in favor of the American people, the theaters. They said that Hollywood was overpaid, and that the celebrities and executives who were given all this money by the American people were using it irresponsibly, absconding with it to overseas destinations and never giving back to the country which allowed them to earn it in the first place.

  Victor and Gloriana declared war on the town, announced to the world that they were Genghis Khan reborn, and declared that they would one day be president. They said that they were willing to work with the malcontents who’d work with them. That the sooner the people who had been targeted came over to V&G’s side, the better of a deal they’d receive. The video in which Victor announced all this was quite aesthetic indeed, showing him with all his concubines dressed up in their fanciest clothing.

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  People weren’t quite sure what to think of the whole affair. It was certainly entertaining, and people were mostly amused by it, I believe. The news media was a bit at a loss for words once they ran the original report on the video that Victor had made. He made them understand what he intended to do, though. He and his wife went on a media blitz across the country, decrying the sins of Hollywood to anyone that would listen. He modified his arguments based on the program he was on. Fox news would get a different angle than CNN, et cetera. He tried couching his arguments in language that would make it appeal to the American people as a whole.

  This was a test for our would-be conquerors. They needed to be as charismatic as they possibly could to win over the hearts of the country. They took a serious tone with what they were doing, framing their arguments as if they were a topic of significance for the people of the country, which Victor and Gloriana believed that they were.

  When it became apparent that Victor and Gloriana Graves were earnest about declaring a War on Hollywood, people were all the more amused. This was in the 2020s, when feeling of resentment were at an all time high from both sides of the political aisle. Victor and Gloriana made sure to deftly maneuver in between the two political parties themselves, not wanting to get labelled as a member of either one, wanting to appeal to both groups. Their strategy was, overall, a successful one.

  Their first task was rallying the movie theater owners over to their side, which we have talked about a bit already in previous entries. Hollywood could just as easily and collectively have said to the owners that any of them that played Victor and Gloriana’s works wouldn’t receive any movies from the rest of Hollywood. Fortunately, Victor and Gloriana had already begun work dividing and conquering the industry.

  Their first stop was Disney. The Mouse was a titanic competitor to them, and not one they wanted to upset. They went to its CEO shortly after the awards speech and explained, in brief, what they intended to do, presenting some of the evidence they had of exploitation within the industry. They asked Disney if they would sit out of the fight, at least for now. They tried to be as reasonable and acquiescent as they could, understanding that the Mouse doesn’t like to be threatened.

  By some strange stroke of luck, the CEO of Disney agreed, as he was personally interested in seeing what was going to happen in the coming in the months. That was one problem resolved. Now the next thing they needed to do was start dividing and conquering. They went through and did the Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein thing I’ve described in a previous entry, getting just a smidgen of Hollywood under their thumb. After that, they had to rally the Gravers themselves, preparing them for a fight.