Chapter 332 A Storm of Ridicule and Negative Reviews
Chapter 332 A Storm of Ridicule and Negative Reviews
Amelia and Dorian had braced themselves for the backlash. They knew the Instagram statement would attract skeptics, trolls, and maybe even a few death threats.
What they hadn’t anticipated was the sheer scale of it—a tidal wave crashing over them without mercy, leaving them no chance to catch their breath.
At ten a.m., Dorian shook Amelia awake from a restless sleep. The moment her eyes opened, she reached for her phone and pulled up Instagram. …and her heart sank. The statement they'd posted last night had already racked up hundreds of thousands of views. The comment count had already surpassed ten thousand. Even the hashtag #AmeliaAzure had climbed to number three on the trending list. Amelia had only created her Instagram account the night before. She wasn't even verified. Under normal circumstances, even with a repost from River City Daily and the hashtag boost, the post wouldn't have gained this much attention. There was no way her reach should have exploded like this overnight. The real catalyst came at one-thirty in the morning.A prominent medical expert with over three million followers had quote-tweeted Amelia's statement. His caption was brief, laced with contempt: [A high school junior who has never touched real medical research or clinical trials, whose entire scientific education amounts to AP Biology,] Claims she's Azure—the author of a Tier-1 FSI paper? My doctoral advisor didn't publish a Tier-1 FSI article until he was in his fifties. The audacity of kids these days is truly something.] His credentials gave the post instant credibility. Within hours, the post had spread widely across social media. Content farms and gossip accounts had picked it up and run with it. Amelia's statement quickly climbed the trending charts, pulling the original post and hashtag up with it.
"What the hell is his problem?" Dorian stared at the post, her jaw tight with anger. "We're defending Professor Lewis. What does this have to do with him?" "He just had to jump in and mock us. Just because he couldn't do something at seventeen, he thinks nobody else can either?" Amelia's reaction was quieter.Her reaction was quieter, more measured. Skepticism was inevitable. After all, even Trevor hadn't believed her identity until they'd spent nearly an hour debating a highly specialized research question. She had answered every challenge he threw at her. Besides, this so-called expert's wording was almost polite compared to what was waiting for them in the comments.
When Amelia opened the comment section beneath her statement, she and Dorian got their first real taste of just how ruthless the internet could be. The cruelty was surgical, multifaceted, designed to cut deep.
The comments read: [What kind of normal high school girl skips class to have a private lunch with a man in his fifties? Think about it.]You know exactly what kind of person she is.] ["‘Grooming an underage girl’ is a false accusation? As if. More likely, this Amelia threw herself at him first.]
[Sleep with a man old enough to be your grandfather, and you get a guaranteed spot at Aurora College. For some people, that's a fair trade.]
[Is this high schooler talking about the paper Celestria Daily praised last week? The one about "groundbreaking contributions to rare disease research"? Did she just see it trending and decide to claim credit today?] [Good thing I looked up what FSI actually is at three this morning.[I might've fallen for this garbage.] [How much did Trevor pay this girl to post damage control at one a.m.? If you're going to lie,…at least do your homework. You think dropping the name "FSI" is enough to make people believe you? Pathetic.] [Let me put this into perspective. Right now, across all of Celestria, fewer than two hundred professors have published in FSI, and fewer than thirty papers have ever been classified as Tier-1 contributions.]
[The youngest professor to publish a Tier-1 FSI paper was thirty-two at the time. This seventeen-year-old girl claims she did it? That's completely delusional.]
[I already sent this to my med school group chat. Everyone found it hilarious. This might be the most ridiculous thing I've seen all year.]
[First time I've ever seen someone call themselves a "genius" unironically. This girl's comedy gold.]
[A fifty-something "distinguished professor" just hands a high school student a guaranteed college admission out of the goodness of his heart? Who would believe that?] And we're supposed to believe there's nothing shady going on? Do you even believe that yourself?] [Expecting a high school student to contribute to biomedical research?What a joke.] ["‘Personal reasons’ for turning down the offer? Who in their right mind refuses guaranteed admission? She probably just couldn't settle on a price.]
[God, this Amelia girl makes me sick. She tells everyone to "wait for the facts."] Easy for her to say—she's not the one who got sexually harassed in a teacher's office, is she?] [Reading between the lines, this whole situation seems pretty obvious. She’s basically calling everyone who defended the victim a bunch of mindless sheep, like she’s the only one who sees the truth.] [Didn't the cops already take Trevor in? They should arrest this Amelia too while they're at it.] [These photos were taken two days ago outside a restaurant. At the time, Professor Lewis and I were having lunch together.]
Not everyone piled on. A few voices tried to push back against the backlash. Some users recognized Amelia from previous viral moments.One commenter pointed out that she'd been accused of sleeping with Osborne during a piano competition scandal, and that claim had later been proven false. Maybe this was another misunderstanding. Another noted that she'd once saved someone's life on the street, risking her own safety in the process. That didn't sound like the person the comments were describing.
A third pointed out that Amelia had fought in the Abyss Underground Fights to recover a stolen national treasure.She played piano like a prodigy and fought like a cage fighter. She wasn't your average high school student. Could someone like that really be lying? Maybe she really could have written that paper. But those voices were almost immediately drowned out by a relentless flood of vitriol.