From Fiction to Fact: The Truth About Fandoms

Fandoms. Love or hate them, they’re the backbone of the internet, able to take the most niche content and turn it into a media behemoth with as much lore in the fandom as in the content itself.

Humble Beginnings

Fandoms can influence real life. And that’s pretty cool, I’d say, in nine out of ten cases.

But that tenth case? Well, when you aren’t on the receiving end of the drama, it can be pretty intriguing to watch.

I’ve been in fandoms since 2014 when I was twelve years old, and – instead of ending up on Wattpad like my debatably more fortunate peers – I ended up on Quotev—never heard of it? Exactly.

If Wattpad is known for pumping out possibly the strangest One Direction fanfictions, Quotev is known for being a lawless land.

The Good Old Days

I met some of my best friends on Quotev. And we’re still friends going on nine years later. We had the odd fake GoFundMe scam happen or somebody bullying themselves, but the drama was relatively inconsequential. Still, in terms of Real World Consequences, nothing much happened.

I want to gesture instead to the infinitely more lawless Overwatch fandom and its fascinating history.

I was fourteen when Overwatch came out. I joined a random Discord server, made some friends, accidentally started a popular server, and was delegating tasks before I knew it. Did we have a few Tumblr blogs spring up dedicated to holding people accountable? Yes. Do I know who was behind them? Also yes.

But the real-world consequences come later and make the stolen Tumblr blog behind it all look like nothing.

Embezzling Money… For Charity

There are so many prominent players in this that I’d never manage to list them all. But I feel it’s essential to introduce Lynn, one-half of a Tumblr blog mod team and leader of the fanzine that would end in at least a thousand dollars stolen from charity and unanswered questions that keep me up at night.

(Seriously, I want to ask Lynn what they did with the garage full of zines.)

I knew Lynn. At one point in time, they were a moderator of mine. They were behind one or two callout blogs in the Overwatch fandom but above all else? They had a lot of influence over the fandom. You tended to trust them.

So, when a charity zine was announced, everybody was pretty stoked. Proceeds would be divided between LGBTQA+ charities related to the characters. Everybody would feel good about themselves as life went on.

Then, the empty PayPal account was discovered.

The Fallout

Suddenly – and this sentence will be the funniest thing I have written in a long time – the Voltron ItaBags on Lynn’s Facebook account made much more sense.

The few zines that went out on time were handed out at cons. The rest? Well, it allegedly shipped out. And then Lynn disappeared.

If you ever find yourself wanting out of not one but two fandoms, with a flashing light above your head screaming, “I may or may not embezzle money that is supposed to be going to charity,” do what Lynn did. And, for the people that sent them money for unfulfilled commissions, they knew their name. I haven’t seen them since.

For quite a while, the anonymous Tumblr blog had seemed suspicious to those of us who look back at the era and let out a sigh thanking our lucky stars they weren’t associated with us when this happened. It went from exposing them to asking for support with a lawsuit to putting its hands up and going, “I can’t help,” before falling silent in 2019. With Lynn’s love of exposè blogs, I would not be surprised if this was their way of taking back control of the situation.

But we may never know.

Fandom Going Mainstream

Fandom drama isn’t just incidents like this. Cassandra Clare, a fascinating case on her own, started in the Harry Potter fandom. And, if you’re familiar with all of the going on between different archives before we had Archive of Our Own there to save us, you’re likely to be familiar with Ms. Scribe. Fifty Shades of Grey, divisive as it is, started as Twilight fanfiction. We’re seeing the relics of the mid-2010s coming to the big screen in the form of One Direction adjacent franchises.

This isn’t even touching on the organization of fandoms. They can unite for good just as quickly as they stand together to ‘punish’ those they consider the enemy. I’d name these fandoms, but I enjoy the relative peace of my online life. I don’t want to be doxxed or have my future sabotaged for saying I don’t like [popular thing here].

Because you don’t need to scam people with a fanzine or a GoFundMe, sometimes, a bad take on a fandom you aren’t even involved in can be the cause of those real-life consequences.

Don’t Take Cookies From Con Attendees

It feels fitting to conclude this article with a more recent incident. Allegedly, back in 2017, a Taiwanese fan convention was going on. An undertale fan-artist was in attendance and was given a cookie by a fan of their work.

Sweet, right?

In theory, sure. But in practice? The cookie had needles in it and pierced its tongue. And all of this is because of a piece of ship art they drew.

The practice of real-world ‘consequences’ for doing something the broader fandom doesn’t like isn’t isolated. There is a reason that Renee Ann Drouin, a doctor of philosophy, wrote their 2021 dissertation titled FANS ARE GOING TO SEE IT ANY WAY THEY WANT, focusing on the relentless harassment of the Voltron fandom – both online and off.