By the time DriFella emerged, the early glow around Milady had already curdled. What began as a playful, anarchic corner of NFT culture had become a battlefield of competing aesthetics, internet grudges and moral scandals.

The cuckcore account captures the texture of this breakdown. Milady had been the first truly memetic PFP of the post-pandemic “vibe shift”... a mix of irony and wounded sincerity that gathered a strange online congregation. Remilia, the collective behind it, had come up through fringe art spaces like the 𝐈 𝐋𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐒𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 show in a New Zealand vintage shop, and for a brief period it offered a sense of chaotic new possibility.

That aura didn’t last. The slow mint, the scandal around Charlotte Fang’s online past, the defection of early collaborators, the rise of derivatives on cheap minting platforms all chipped away at the mystique. Milady went from being a talisman of outsider cool to an embattled cult at the centre of NFT drama.

It was in that fractured moment that MiFella appeared... An irreverent boy-Milady with manic energy. To many it felt like a parasite; to others, like a mirror showing what Milady had become. Its creator’s eventual self-destruction. In the cuckcore telling,

“ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑑 𝑠𝑜 ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒”

Leaving behind both a legend and a void.

DriFella stepped into that void. Evil Biscuit took MiFella’s “essence” and spun it into a new myth: the soul of MiFella injected into a Dratini, resurrected not as a saviour but as a trickster-jester. The timing made it more than just another derivative. To the Milady faithful, it was a challenge to their lineage. To the growing faction of skeptics and exiles, it was the moment the derivative turned the tables on the original...

The conflict that followed (sometimes darkly comic, sometimes vicious) became known as the Milady–Fella schism.

Biscuit and others framed Milady as trying to “abort” DriFella, portraying the clash as a generational struggle: the decaying parent cult versus the unruly mutant child. Memes of half-formed DriFellas in sinks circulated alongside long threads debating whether the project was heresy or salvation.

Seen in retrospect, the schism was less about a single project than about a shift in gravity. The old centre, defined by Milady’s original aura and the Remilia ecosystem, no longer held. A cluster of Fellaverse projects (DriFella first among them later joined by Constant Fella, Chair and CuckFella) created an alternative pole. The derivative stopped being a mere knock-off and became the place where cultural energy was gathering.

It’s this context (the fraying of Milady’s supremacy, the derangement and death of MiFella, the folk-historical “cuckcore” telling of the whole saga) that makes DriFella’s appearance feel like the true beginning of a new chapter. The schism wasn’t just a fight over aesthetics. It was the moment the offshoots stopped orbiting the original and began to define their own constellation.

By the time DriFella emerged, the early glow around Milady had already curdled. What began as a playful, anarchic corner of NFT culture had become a battlefield of competing aesthetics, internet grudges and moral scandals.

The cuckcore account captures the texture of this breakdown. Milady had been the first truly memetic PFP of the post-pandemic “vibe shift”... a mix of irony and wounded sincerity that gathered a strange online congregation. Remilia, the collective behind it, had come up through fringe art spaces like the 𝐈 𝐋𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐒𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 show in a New Zealand vintage shop, and for a brief period it offered a sense of chaotic new possibility.

That aura didn’t last. The slow mint, the scandal around Charlotte Fang’s online past, the defection of early collaborators, the rise of derivatives on cheap minting platforms all chipped away at the mystique. Milady went from being a talisman of outsider cool to an embattled cult at the centre of NFT drama.

It was in that fractured moment that MiFella appeared... An irreverent boy-Milady with manic energy. To many it felt like a parasite; to others, like a mirror showing what Milady had become. Its creator’s eventual self-destruction. In the cuckcore telling,

“ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑑 𝑠𝑜 ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒”

Leaving behind both a legend and a void.

DriFella stepped into that void. Evil Biscuit took MiFella’s “essence” and spun it into a new myth: the soul of MiFella injected into a Dratini, resurrected not as a saviour but as a trickster-jester. The timing made it more than just another derivative. To the Milady faithful, it was a challenge to their lineage. To the growing faction of skeptics and exiles, it was the moment the derivative turned the tables on the original...

The conflict that followed (sometimes darkly comic, sometimes vicious) became known as the Milady–Fella schism.

Biscuit and others framed Milady as trying to “abort” DriFella, portraying the clash as a generational struggle: the decaying parent cult versus the unruly mutant child. Memes of half-formed DriFellas in sinks circulated alongside long threads debating whether the project was heresy or salvation.

Seen in retrospect, the schism was less about a single project than about a shift in gravity. The old centre, defined by Milady’s original aura and the Remilia ecosystem, no longer held. A cluster of Fellaverse projects (DriFella first among them later joined by Constant Fella, Chair and CuckFella) created an alternative pole. The derivative stopped being a mere knock-off and became the place where cultural energy was gathering.

It’s this context (the fraying of Milady’s supremacy, the derangement and death of MiFella, the folk-historical “cuckcore” telling of the whole saga) that makes DriFella’s appearance feel like the true beginning of a new chapter. The schism wasn’t just a fight over aesthetics. It was the moment the offshoots stopped orbiting the original and began to define their own constellation.