45th Issue: Fandom Drama
Lately the news is depressing so let’s talk about stuff that is a lot lighter and sillier. Let’s talk about fandom. I feel like most people who are reading this know what fandom is, but just in case you don’t, fandom is the collective term for groups of fans of whatever (usually science fiction or fantasy television, books, movies, etc, but has become a more all-encompassing term as time has gone on). Fandom really got started in the 1960s with Star Trek, where people would gather and discuss their favorite show in conventions. There were also mailing groups, fan magazines, and fanfiction. This continued until the 1990s, when fandom really began to explode with the advent of the Internet.
With the internet, people began to hang out together in chatrooms, forums, and share their fanfiction on various archives. Websites like Livejournal capitalized on this by making one website where everyone could create private journals, communities, and friends lists. Websites like Fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own were created to post fanfiction, but people still mostly gathered on Livejournal, until the early 2010s, when Tumblr and Twitter took over. Tumblr has begun to die down a little, and Twitter is growing, but there are now so many different fandoms and platforms that it has spread out a little and isn’t really concentrated in a small group.
Most of the truly wild fandom dramas happened in the early days, when Livejournal was a thing, because the Internet was smaller and fandoms were even smaller than that. Everyone knew everyone in fandoms, and people were often just a few friends removed from a BNF (big name fan – this is less of a thing now that fandoms are more spread out and larger). Here is a list of some of the dramas that shook fandom at the time.
The MsScribe Story: you can read it on the waybackmachine here, or someone has copy and pasted it into a reddit post here. Lying, backstabbing, sock puppets (another account created by the same person who pretends it’s a whole different person but it’s really just them), even Joe Biden! This one is very long but it’s a classic for a reason.
Cassie Claire: this one is sort of related to the first in that it happened in the same fandom, but the difference is that Cassandra Clare is now a best-selling author. First of all, she plagiarizes, second, she cyberbullies, and third, she stole money. Read more about it here and here.
Victoria Bitter/Andy Blake/Thanfiction: honestly this may be the wildest story of all of them, mainly because it involves a MURDER. Andy Blake also stays active and gathers new fans to follow him because he relies on the fact that the younger generation doesn’t know his past. Andy joined Lord of the Rings fandom in the early 2000s under the name Victoria Bitter. He changed his name to Jordan Wood, and created a convention for charity. He basically scammed various LOTR actors and fans. This person, who used to be a follower of his, extensively documented what Andy had and has done. Andy then joined Harry Potter fandom, and in 2011 he was involved in a murder-suicide. A couple years later he moved on to Supernatural fandom. Aja Romano has written a long article about Andy Blake, but she is a whole mess herself so probably not the best source. Still, it’s the most comprehensive one I can find so far, just take it with a grain of salt.
Limeybean fakes her death: I cannot find a link to this one but categorize it under the myriad of people who have catfished in fandom in one form or another. (Catfishing means you are pretending to be someone else, and in close-knit communities like fandom especially, it feels like a real betrayal).
Snapewives: Snapewives were women who believed that they channel Severus Snape, are his wives, and see him as a spiritual guide. What more needs to be said. Read up on it here.
Final Fantasy Cult House: Exactly what it sounds like – a cult in a home revolving around the final fantasy video games. I haven’t read this entire thing as it’s very extensive, but it reminds me a lot of what happened with Andy Blake and his Lord of the Rings fandom cult.
My Immortal: This one’s a little complicated. My Immortal is an infamous fanfiction that you can read here, and it’s hilarious (might only be hilarious to those who were in fandom and on the Internet at the time it was published, though). Everyone always wondered whether the author of it was writing it badly on purpose or if it was just trolling (joking). Then, in 2017, someone claiming to be the author came forward, and was about to publish a memoir about her life including information about the fanfiction itself. Rose Christo, who wrote several other books, was going to publish Under the Same Stars: the Search for My Brother and the True Story of My Immortal. In the lead up to publication, she created a Tumblr blog and began to post about it. However, Rose’s brother came forward and refuted some of Rose’s claims about her life, and Macmillan publishing pulled the book just before it came out. There are many questions remaining about this, and we may never know the entire story.
Johnlock Conspiracy: There’s a good podcast you can listen to about this here, but the main point is that John Watson and Sherlock Holmes in the recent BBC Sherlock series were written as gay, and that there’s an unreleased final episode that makes their relationship canon (happening in the show as opposed to in fanfiction only). Read up on it more here.
Winterfox/Benjanun Sriduangkaew/Requires Hate: Winterfox is an author who was known throughout fandom for being AWFUL. You can read a full writeup here, but the summary is that this woman, nominated for several science fiction and fantasy awards as a writer was known as Requires Hate since 2011. She would write angry reviews of books that she thought was racist, homophobic, and misogynistic. That’s nice, but she had a history since 2003 of going after people in ways that were crossing the line. She doxxed people (posted their personal information like phone numbers, addresses, workplaces, etc.), shunned people, and bullied them. She has apologized, but not for all of it.
Larries/Fake Baby: One Direction was a wild ride of a fandom. There was a lot of shipping going on (when you believe two people are in a relationship and you root for them), and the biggest ship was Harry Styles with Louis Tomlinson. If you shipped them, you were called a Larry (Louis+Harry). There were many subsets of Larry shippers though, and the wildest were the Larries. Larries believed that Harry and Louis were in a secret relationship but ‘management’ wouldn’t let them come out because it’d be bad for the band. (There are also Houies, which are Larry shippers who believe that the two boys were in a relationship but aren’t anymore). There’s a lot of weird drama revolving around this ship and this fandom, but the weirdest of it all were the fake baby conspiracy theorists. Read all about them here. (By the way, they are still out here, years later, and some of them are grown adults with jobs like lawyers or doctors).
Racefail 09: This fandom debacle began in science fiction and fantasy writing circles. It was meant to be a discussion of how to write people who were of different ethnicities but turned into a snarl of hurt feelings, racism, and just … nothing good.
Karnythia : This isn’t really a big drama it just is an irritation because this person was friends with Winterfox and Riley (numbers 9 and 14 on this list) and she’s still really big online now under her real name, Mikki Kendall, as a social justice person. She is most infamous for calling the funeral home of a user she did not like to verify that her dead baby was actually dead. MESSED UP!
Tati/James Charles/Jeffree Star: Makeup tutorials are huge on YouTube, and these three were the reigning Kings/Queens of that niche fandom. I don’t know if you can even call it niche anymore when you see the reach that this particular drama had – many mainstream magazines and websites were talking about it. Here’s a rundown of the drama, but it had a lot of layers to it, and ultimately nobody came out of it looking good.
Riley/Arkh Project: Riley is infamous around certain circles of Tumblr and Livejournal. They lied about their racial background, doxxed and bullied others, and did much more, but they are probably best known for staring the Arkh Project, which was meant to be a video game. They raised money for it and never actually created it, so they just scammed people and got away with it. Read more about it here.
Dash Con: This was a convention created for fandoms on Tumblr. It fell apart almost right away, with guests not having hotel rooms paid for, the convention raising money in the lobby of the hotel with cash donations, and an infamous ball pit. Wikipedia actually has a decent summary of the whole debacle here. It’s kind of like Fyre Fest, except instead of rich young adults who should know better being scammed; it was regular naïve kids who didn’t know better.
MedievalPOC: MedievalPOC is a famous and popular tumblr blog and twitter user who is often retweeted by big name authors and creators. The problem is, her history is wrong, she has no training in the time period she’s posting about, and she’s lied about being a person of color. She actually made up some wild story about how her grandmother fled the Holocaust by hiding herself in a suitcase. Here’s a good informative takedown of why her history is bad, on Tumblr and reddit.
Cookies for Sterek: Teen Wolf fandom used to be normal. Then somewhere in the second half of Season One airing, the Sterek shippers took over. These were those who believed that the characters of Stiles and Derek should get together. At that point, they had barely even interacted, but perhaps that changed over time – I quit watching at some point in the third season. Anyway, the creator of the show, Jeff Davis, encouraged fans to bake and purchase cookies to send to him and the cast and crew. So the Sterek shippers did so, hoping to sway the creator of Teen Wolf to make their ship canon in the show. That did not happen. I assume there are many angry bakers out there.
If you know of more dramas I did not list, let me know! And thanks for reading!
With the internet, people began to hang out together in chatrooms, forums, and share their fanfiction on various archives. Websites like Livejournal capitalized on this by making one website where everyone could create private journals, communities, and friends lists. Websites like Fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own were created to post fanfiction, but people still mostly gathered on Livejournal, until the early 2010s, when Tumblr and Twitter took over. Tumblr has begun to die down a little, and Twitter is growing, but there are now so many different fandoms and platforms that it has spread out a little and isn’t really concentrated in a small group.
Most of the truly wild fandom dramas happened in the early days, when Livejournal was a thing, because the Internet was smaller and fandoms were even smaller than that. Everyone knew everyone in fandoms, and people were often just a few friends removed from a BNF (big name fan – this is less of a thing now that fandoms are more spread out and larger). Here is a list of some of the dramas that shook fandom at the time.
The MsScribe Story: you can read it on the waybackmachine here, or someone has copy and pasted it into a reddit post here. Lying, backstabbing, sock puppets (another account created by the same person who pretends it’s a whole different person but it’s really just them), even Joe Biden! This one is very long but it’s a classic for a reason.
Cassie Claire: this one is sort of related to the first in that it happened in the same fandom, but the difference is that Cassandra Clare is now a best-selling author. First of all, she plagiarizes, second, she cyberbullies, and third, she stole money. Read more about it here and here.
Victoria Bitter/Andy Blake/Thanfiction: honestly this may be the wildest story of all of them, mainly because it involves a MURDER. Andy Blake also stays active and gathers new fans to follow him because he relies on the fact that the younger generation doesn’t know his past. Andy joined Lord of the Rings fandom in the early 2000s under the name Victoria Bitter. He changed his name to Jordan Wood, and created a convention for charity. He basically scammed various LOTR actors and fans. This person, who used to be a follower of his, extensively documented what Andy had and has done. Andy then joined Harry Potter fandom, and in 2011 he was involved in a murder-suicide. A couple years later he moved on to Supernatural fandom. Aja Romano has written a long article about Andy Blake, but she is a whole mess herself so probably not the best source. Still, it’s the most comprehensive one I can find so far, just take it with a grain of salt.
Limeybean fakes her death: I cannot find a link to this one but categorize it under the myriad of people who have catfished in fandom in one form or another. (Catfishing means you are pretending to be someone else, and in close-knit communities like fandom especially, it feels like a real betrayal).
Snapewives: Snapewives were women who believed that they channel Severus Snape, are his wives, and see him as a spiritual guide. What more needs to be said. Read up on it here.
Final Fantasy Cult House: Exactly what it sounds like – a cult in a home revolving around the final fantasy video games. I haven’t read this entire thing as it’s very extensive, but it reminds me a lot of what happened with Andy Blake and his Lord of the Rings fandom cult.
My Immortal: This one’s a little complicated. My Immortal is an infamous fanfiction that you can read here, and it’s hilarious (might only be hilarious to those who were in fandom and on the Internet at the time it was published, though). Everyone always wondered whether the author of it was writing it badly on purpose or if it was just trolling (joking). Then, in 2017, someone claiming to be the author came forward, and was about to publish a memoir about her life including information about the fanfiction itself. Rose Christo, who wrote several other books, was going to publish Under the Same Stars: the Search for My Brother and the True Story of My Immortal. In the lead up to publication, she created a Tumblr blog and began to post about it. However, Rose’s brother came forward and refuted some of Rose’s claims about her life, and Macmillan publishing pulled the book just before it came out. There are many questions remaining about this, and we may never know the entire story.
Johnlock Conspiracy: There’s a good podcast you can listen to about this here, but the main point is that John Watson and Sherlock Holmes in the recent BBC Sherlock series were written as gay, and that there’s an unreleased final episode that makes their relationship canon (happening in the show as opposed to in fanfiction only). Read up on it more here.
Winterfox/Benjanun Sriduangkaew/Requires Hate: Winterfox is an author who was known throughout fandom for being AWFUL. You can read a full writeup here, but the summary is that this woman, nominated for several science fiction and fantasy awards as a writer was known as Requires Hate since 2011. She would write angry reviews of books that she thought was racist, homophobic, and misogynistic. That’s nice, but she had a history since 2003 of going after people in ways that were crossing the line. She doxxed people (posted their personal information like phone numbers, addresses, workplaces, etc.), shunned people, and bullied them. She has apologized, but not for all of it.
Larries/Fake Baby: One Direction was a wild ride of a fandom. There was a lot of shipping going on (when you believe two people are in a relationship and you root for them), and the biggest ship was Harry Styles with Louis Tomlinson. If you shipped them, you were called a Larry (Louis+Harry). There were many subsets of Larry shippers though, and the wildest were the Larries. Larries believed that Harry and Louis were in a secret relationship but ‘management’ wouldn’t let them come out because it’d be bad for the band. (There are also Houies, which are Larry shippers who believe that the two boys were in a relationship but aren’t anymore). There’s a lot of weird drama revolving around this ship and this fandom, but the weirdest of it all were the fake baby conspiracy theorists. Read all about them here. (By the way, they are still out here, years later, and some of them are grown adults with jobs like lawyers or doctors).
Racefail 09: This fandom debacle began in science fiction and fantasy writing circles. It was meant to be a discussion of how to write people who were of different ethnicities but turned into a snarl of hurt feelings, racism, and just … nothing good.
Karnythia : This isn’t really a big drama it just is an irritation because this person was friends with Winterfox and Riley (numbers 9 and 14 on this list) and she’s still really big online now under her real name, Mikki Kendall, as a social justice person. She is most infamous for calling the funeral home of a user she did not like to verify that her dead baby was actually dead. MESSED UP!
Tati/James Charles/Jeffree Star: Makeup tutorials are huge on YouTube, and these three were the reigning Kings/Queens of that niche fandom. I don’t know if you can even call it niche anymore when you see the reach that this particular drama had – many mainstream magazines and websites were talking about it. Here’s a rundown of the drama, but it had a lot of layers to it, and ultimately nobody came out of it looking good.
Riley/Arkh Project: Riley is infamous around certain circles of Tumblr and Livejournal. They lied about their racial background, doxxed and bullied others, and did much more, but they are probably best known for staring the Arkh Project, which was meant to be a video game. They raised money for it and never actually created it, so they just scammed people and got away with it. Read more about it here.
Dash Con: This was a convention created for fandoms on Tumblr. It fell apart almost right away, with guests not having hotel rooms paid for, the convention raising money in the lobby of the hotel with cash donations, and an infamous ball pit. Wikipedia actually has a decent summary of the whole debacle here. It’s kind of like Fyre Fest, except instead of rich young adults who should know better being scammed; it was regular naïve kids who didn’t know better.
MedievalPOC: MedievalPOC is a famous and popular tumblr blog and twitter user who is often retweeted by big name authors and creators. The problem is, her history is wrong, she has no training in the time period she’s posting about, and she’s lied about being a person of color. She actually made up some wild story about how her grandmother fled the Holocaust by hiding herself in a suitcase. Here’s a good informative takedown of why her history is bad, on Tumblr and reddit.
Cookies for Sterek: Teen Wolf fandom used to be normal. Then somewhere in the second half of Season One airing, the Sterek shippers took over. These were those who believed that the characters of Stiles and Derek should get together. At that point, they had barely even interacted, but perhaps that changed over time – I quit watching at some point in the third season. Anyway, the creator of the show, Jeff Davis, encouraged fans to bake and purchase cookies to send to him and the cast and crew. So the Sterek shippers did so, hoping to sway the creator of Teen Wolf to make their ship canon in the show. That did not happen. I assume there are many angry bakers out there.
If you know of more dramas I did not list, let me know! And thanks for reading!
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