I joined canvas 2025 about a day in. Looking around, I eventually stumbled into the — at that point relatively complete — EU flag area. There was a Canadian, Brazilian, and South African flag, which may or may not have been what gave me the idea to pull a joke and replace Hungary with Ukraine. I'll touch on it a bit more later, but one great motivator for that punchline here is that Hungary is vetoing chances of Ukraine joining the EU. Thus kicking out Hungary and taking in Ukraine in its place seemed like a fun thing to do.
I joined the matrix space, announced the idea, shot a quick once-sentence justification, and together with a few people replaced the original Hungarian flag with a Ukrainian one. I also then added the text "soon", to represent the wide-spread hope that Ukraine may soon join the EU.
Then, I filled the remaining space of the EU flag area with Malta and Cyprus (getting some help in making the "free luigi!" sign move out of the way and constructing my designs), and built some other flags (redesigning Slovakia) to complete the EU minus Hungary. I saw Brazil get taken over by a neon-green Esperanto (the conlang), but didn't really care.
At that point I took a pause. Esperanto (the neon-green conlang) was redrawing its flag to its own shade of dark green, and unbeknownst to me was at the same time clearing some space and building a second flag below the EU area, which Hungary then took over and attached to the EU flag area.
I come back and see another Hungary has spawned, and even deformed the entire flag area from a perfect rectangle into a non-rectangle with a bump on one corner.
So I did the only reasonable thing and turned it into Switzerland.
Didn't even announce anything, just went ahead and when the design became clear I was even helped by a few others without further communication.
At that point the area was quite packed, and I distracted myself expanding the (moved) "free luigi!" sign's luigi with two more luigis to cover up the Bahia flag that looked like a stylized US flag. Believing all the remaining EU flags to be well defended, I didn't notice Hungary steal Esperanto again. Let me repeat that, Esperanto built/stole two flags, which both one after the other got stolen by Hungary.
So I finish up the 3rd luigi, and see the 3rd Hungary. Right in the center of the EU flag area.
At that point I tried to turn the flag back to the earlier Brazil still fresh in memory, without thinking about it for too long. My objective at this point is to get rid of Hungary for good, they can't keep getting away with stealing their way back into the EU.
This attempt at replacement however ended up forming into a more balanced conflict (probably because noone actually cared about Brazil so the enthusiasm on the replacement side was far lower than before).
When I requested for help in the Matrix chat, this raised attention to the ongoing idea, but caused a larger discussion in the matrix chat in parallel to the canvas action. I went through the full ropes of why I wanted Hungary out (Basically as a message about their ongoing sabotage of the EU), and others raised various counter-arguments ranging from simple completionism to some complicated arguments about geography, political relations, which was naturally hard to argue for when there was a flag of Canada, Switzerland (I did build that myself but totally used it in the argument anyway), Ukraine (... see above), and Iceland (I built that one too, though it replaced South Africa).
Fundamentally, I suspect people were seeking for reasons to oppose this replacement here but not before, because Hungary→Brazil does not pass the underlying vibe-check for the EU flag block. Take for example the US flag, and stuff looking similar to it (sorry Bahia), which are obviously not a fit. Canada meanwhile is an easy yes.
I don't think there are overly strong connections between Europe and Brazil, if anything they seem positioned slightly antagonistically to me.
This would lead to the vibe-check conclusion that Hungary is dumpable, but Brazil also kinda shouldn't be there, which presumably most tried to justify with a range of more or less matching arguments.
Meanwhile, on the actual canvas, I was seeing that enough people simply didn't want a Brazillian flag in the EU region (completely understandable, it was a stupid choice on my part), so I pivoted to a second ukranian flag, and eventually opted to instead simply add "for now" to the Hungarian Flag, as an inversion to the "soon" of Ukraine.
The Matrix argument had been somewhat messy, no doubt in no small part due to my ulterior motives with it, though I think I did mention I didn't particularly care for Brazil.
Eventually, the argument progressed to where the consensus Brazil sucks too was reached, and the pivot to 2nd ukraine was eventually decided.
Not many people cared at that point, maybe because there was already a Ukraine, or because people (justifiedly) got sick of the entire topic and everything involved.
One other canvasser however really missed a lot of those pivots and kept getting hung up on the messy discussion.
They ended up with the goal of preserving the Hungarian flag perfectly without any compromises.
At that point truly almost noone cared anymore, so it was basically us two battling around writing vs destroying the text "for now" on the Hungarian flag. All the while the other user getting increasingly unhinged to the point it started being quite entertaining, while I had determined they weren't gonna change their mind in any way warranting arguing in serious. So I was basically rewriting "for now" in increasingly high-contrast (and thus ugly) colors, having fun with their attempted insults on Matrix and simultaneously solving puzzles of how to keep the text readable in the various conditions I cycled through. Occasionally someone joined in on canvas to add a few pixels on either side when the battle threatened to become one-sided, and in Matrix it was a more or less illustrious group of people watching and engaging with whatever the fuck that was. We have been shipped, had more and less ranchy fanfic written about us; I was fully prepared to spend the remaining 4+ hours of canvas time rewriting "for now" and being weird on Matrix, and I don't think I would have regretted any moment of that.
The Matrix chat is public, you can have a read in #canvas-general:aftermath.gg and judge for yourself. Together with the canvas data it should be possible to recreate everything here. (And I have backups of that stuff)
Anyway, this went on for a while until a certain cabinet assembler asked "can also help with something else if anyone needs help" to which I promptly jokingly replied :"I have this text I want to write". "'for now'". "on the hungarian flag in the eu flag block". "since hungary is at risk of being stripped of membership rights or smthn".
Intended as a joke since that had been all the entire chat (including this user) got to hear for hours.
At that point something triggered and a ton of people dogpiled into the flag, to the point the text quickly morphed into a ball of noise. So I did the only reasonable thing and restarted the ukraine project, slowly and methodically laying out the colors, and a bunch of people joined. Nuggsy went and built an entire patch of grass with heart flowers, it turned more amazing than I could have expected. Their words: "The flowers just kind of happened organically. In the back and forth for 2nd Ukraine, the green of Hungry started to kind of look like grass/flower stems and I just took advantage while people were distracted" - Nuggsy
The main Hungary supporter at that point had to come to terms with Hungary being a lost cause, so probably tried to compromise, though I think I missed a lot of that. Nothing much of anything was happening at that point, they were randomly trying to rebuild the flag into Scotland so as to not have two Ukraines, but were doing so by themselves in a way that made me doubt they would be able to do it. The remaining Ukraine-building people, me included, blocked those attempts.
At that stage, grant (canvas admin) stepped in, kicked us both (deservedly), I instantly rejoined, and did not receive any other comment about it. They did tell the other to take a breather and mentioned sending some DMs. After some time they came back and appeared far more cooperative. We agreed on replacing the flag, Armenia was proposed, though thinking about it I thought a blue background fit the flowers, and ended up agreeing that Scotland was perhaps a good option. I agreed with the other person to leave the flowers intact at first, which they said they didn't like but which I liked a lot. Then I whipped up a properly (poorly) aliased design for Scotland and a few people slapped it together in a few minutes (at that point canvas end was closing in). Then we further agreed to trim some grass, and after some back and forth we got what I think is an even better design that keeps the beautiful flowers on grass in front of the Scottish flag.
So that's how the 3rd and final Hungary was replaced by a Scotland with heart-shaped flowers.
Edit: I'll be editing typos for a while
lmao