which niche-but-infamous internet fandoms and phenomenons were you a part of?

[fatgrrlz]

While I think cringe culture is dead, I do have some very cringe-worthy fandoms/phenomenons that I was a part of in an “oh jeez, I was/did THAT?”

I used to be a moderator on a somewhat prolific Minecraft forum - when I was 13. I don’t know what’s worse, remembering the elitist holier-than-thou shithead I was back then or the fact that Minecraft is more than a decade old now still, I had a love for the game, and for making skins/texture packs/et. al.. It was fun but looking back, moderator tools should’ve been as far from my grubby little new-teenager hands as possible.

I was also around for some of Warframe’s most vitriolic eras (the one update where they unveiled the player characters as kids and all that came with it, the original Archwing release, the whole Guides of the Lotus mess), if that counts. Not sure how toxic the fandom is nowadays but what I remembered of it was genuinely horrible - like mass harassing a community manager to resign over one of the volunteer moderators (that nobody knew/cared about until people started raging about their existence) being neurodivergent and acting as such (back in the year of like, what, 2015-2017 or something? - what trendsetters they were! /s)

[grovyle]

Oh yeah also, my mom made this infamous Furby cake.

Bless her, what a legend

[egbert]

i was part of this tumblr knockoff called wafrn. it was this very small but tightly-knit community where everyone knew eachother. it later got fediverse compatiblity and that was so lame to me i had to leave. super fun tho! i even made ads and promotional posts, i was the spokesperson and all. i was even the developer's assistant!

warning: the spoilered ones may cause eye strain or worse. if you have photosensitive epilepsy don't unspoiler these, ok?
 

Spoiler

[close]

wafrn is still up right now, actually, go take peek, ok?
now, it's infamous because. the developer was doing a really bad job at advertising it. he would screenshot wafrn posts and post them on r/tumblr and r/curatedtumblr and people hated it because he was abusing loopholes to advertise a knockoff. like it was so bad i'd constantly tell him to just use the ads i made but when he actually started advertising on actual tumblr he used a reddit-style approach (gross-out humor) which just made the site seem like a fetish forum. anywho. i just tuned it out and don't know what he's doing in terms of marketing now

[Y2KStardust]

Does the "elitist" metal fandom count? It was such a gatekeep-y and awful space to be in, but I felt so cool being accepted by the brvtal and tr00 metalheads. It's actually sad to think about now because although I still love metal, I listen to so much that they'd label as music for posers now.

Oh *man* we would have had legendary arguments as tweens, I was and still am an avid babymetal fan who giggles at the 'ur not rEAL METAL!!!1!!' stuff :3c

[Capybara]

I named some Pokemon shippings, but they were shitposts or random crack pairings AKA not anything popular. I was friends-of-friends with someone who named a semi-popular anime pairing though.

There was also an incident on a more tight-knight forum run by a friend where an infamous soulbonder (she would join Pokemon forums claiming Pokemon were real and she can interact with them) joined and convinced half of the other members they were soulbonders too... But all of them dropped it when she left.

I followed season 1 and 2 of Friendship is Magic as they aired and was in parts of the early brony fandom. I actually first saw when Derpy's voice was changed in season 2 via a panel at a furry convention I went to, and as soon as I came home and went online I saw all hell break loose... (Bronies and furries used to hate each other and denied being remotely similar in the very early stages, by the way. At the convention there were things posted on the bulletin board in the hotel about how it was stupid to be watching a children's show, even though there was also Pokemon stuff on the same board... do you see the irony here.)

[fieldofhate]

Creepypasta. No further comment.

[ashton]

wayyyy back in the geocities days i was apart of a "webring" of digimon ocs called "fdds" (fictional digi-destineds lmao): my oc was named lily kamiya, and she was tai & kari's sister, which was about as predictable as you imagine LOL. her digimon was basically just a gatomon recolor, but at the time i was like... 11-ish? maybe 12? as were all of the other people in this webring. we were just kids playing around with our favorite 4kids-dubbed anime and having a blast doing it. i remember lily + her digimon were decently popular. that was probably due to the group being fairly small but still, its something i think back on with a lot of fondness. i wish i had been better about archiving then (but also i was a kid) because i don't have much left from those days, but the memories are still something i hold very dear - this was also my first foray into creating ocs at all

Years later, i got really into dangan ronpa (specifically sdr1 and sdr2) & joined a twitter rp group as souda kazuichi. that was an Interesting time in my life LMAO. it was fun and i met some pretty cool people doing it, but as you might expect in a fandom full of teenagers/20-somethings on social media, there was a lot of needless drama. the thing that sticks out most in my memory now is that there was a separate group of sdr/sdr2 rpers who Also had a souda in their ranks (because ykw, popular thing, lots of people want to roleplay it, so it goes) and that souda felt they had sole control over who did or didn't get to rp him. so much so that some of the people from this group made a not-so-subtle effort to try and get me to quit and delete my account. ultimately it was for naught, and i stuck it out for a few years - long enough to make some friends i really cherished. the thing that finally killed that account was just my losing interest in sdr2

there are probably other stories i could dig up from my memory archives but i think those are two of the most prominent in my mind!

[mahoroa]

I have a bad memory AND I'm a pretty boring person who's parents would give them an hour on the computer, so my apologies if this is lackluster.

My earliest memory was being on an Animal Jam blog made by someone named uhhh snowyclaw? or something. There was def a lot of drama there considering we were all 10 year olds on a blog for a kids mmo but I don't remember anything.

Another memory. If you were on kin tumblr back in 2016-ish you've probably heard of the fake Komaeda finger audio. I was mutuals with someone who was mutuals with the person who made the audio. I think I was also mutuals with someone called betanaegi? Apparently they're infamous but idk anything about what they did. Never rlly talked to them.

I guess I was in the Voltron fanbase. I didn't really like the show but everyone else was talking about it so. Some of the shit I saw in that fanbase got so nasty it scared me from interacting with fanbases of stuff I like.

[villiersterrace]

I had kind of a following in the tally hall fandom in 2020 when a lot of the drama was happening. IDK if that fanbase is famous but they are generally hated among music nerds. I haven't engaged with the fanbase in any meaningful way in years and I don't listen to them much anymore, that is probably for the best.

[Janus]

I was a very active (and at one point *paid*) member of the "BZ Power" (formerly Bionicle Zone) Lego Bionicle forum, and holy crap that place was a hot mess... never have I seen moderation that was simultaneously overbearing and asleep on the job like that. I recall there was some kind of behind-the-scenes falling out with the main competing fan site, "Mask of Destiny", a short drama period where any mention of it was aggressively nuked until they put the matter to rest with a blanket policy prohibiting links to any other forums, no ifs-ands-or-buts. The Lego Club official comic's artist, "GregF", joined the forum at some point (2004, I think?) and started responding to fan queries, precipitating another peak drama episode after a link was provided on the official Bionicle website, leading to massive influx of new members. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I believe the site admins got overly excited about this development and proclaimed that they were ThE oFfIcIaL fAnSiTe without Lego's authorization, and had to walk it back almost immediately after... IIRC, GregF quietly stopped posting after this went down.

The "Completely Off Topic" board for everything not Lego or Bionicle related was next-level PG-rated insanity... I personally started "The Official Sonic Topic" (how do ya like that infamous fandom?!) with one lackadaisical moderator's approval, and it was frequently -the most- active thread on the entire website for days and weeks at time, had an oddly violent sprite comic spun off from a handful of it's most active poster's OC's, and there were a couple of furry pr0n containment headaches following links to fangames off Newgrounds. That thread somehow raged on as a dumpster fire for almost 300 pages of posts before it got shut down because too many reasons

Elsewhere on the site, moderation was so aggressive that you literally couldn't say "sucks" in any context. Gotta hand it, though, some of the rules were downright silly, and frankly hilarious to see enforced... they had a disembodied head mascot, "Hapori Tohu", and an unwritten but easily-inferred rule that no one was allowed to use derivative names or avatars. How were we to figure this out, one might ask? Well... there was a hall of shame for the accounts locked for violating this rule... the "Frowned Upon by Hapori Tohu" members list

This is just scratching the surface... the push-pull between wannabe interweb anarchy and arbitrary censorship really only played out in a couple corners of the site. I'm skipping over a lot of really cool stuff - for instance, there was a whole pixel art scene supplying people with custom avatars and whatnot, a buy/sell/trade market for the randomized collectibles, and superb guides to the surprisingly deep Bionicle flash adventure games - one of included a crafting system surprisingly ahead of its time for browser games, never quite finished that one.

[Misanthropic Monster™]

This thread is so fun and great!!

I have been using the net since 1996 and I've been either a part of or VERY aware of via proxy some insane fandoms and internet cultural phenomena, I wouldn't even know where to begin tbh.

[tertiaryapocalypse]

haha, this thread was basically made for me. from about 2019-2021 i was hugely into this web series called sanders sides-- i don't actually know how well known it is out of its little corner of the internet, so i'll elaborate a bit. it was more popular in 2016-17ish but at that time i was interested in other things and more offline. if you were a frequent vine user you probably know of thomas sanders? the storytime guy. anyways, he moved a lot of his work to youtube and, at some point, made a short where he had three characters, called sides (& played by himself), represent his morality, logic, and creativity, which helped him sort out his identity (just a little bit.) the concept proved really popular and it became a narrative driven series :-)

anyways. i got into it right around when remus was introduced, and a lot of my art at the time was fanart, and i even gained a decent following on instagram, to the point where i'd be willing to bet maybe half of my current followers only know me from sanders sides. on tumblr, too, some of my more popular art posts are sanders sides related, and for a short time i ran a daily blog with my partners at the time.

at some point in my tenure thomas introduced a patreon to help supplement his youtube money, which really did not go over well with some fans, and since 2019 the amount of episodes released has DRASTICALLY slowed down. production value's definitely gone up, but... it's been somewhere around 2 years since the last episode? in retrospect, the narrative isn't the greatest, but it makes sense for something that came out of a one off idea.

man, the fandom was a cesspool, though. i was... pretty heavily involved in some shipping discourse at a point (which i am really not proud of). a lot of the fans were racist & ableist, too, though luckily my pocket of the fandom i hung around in wasn't super terrible in that regard. a lot of fans would boil characters down to just mischaracterised archetypes to the point where even the SOURCE material started falling into those archetypes, and the way a lot of fans would depict the sides to differentiate them from thomas ended up being thinly veiled racism. people would often use terms specifically used for certain disorders (the main two that come to mind being schizophrenia and d.i.d.) to describe the series or make shitty fan theories, despite people in the fandom with those disorders telling them not to-- which would be typical fandom b.s. if it weren't for the fact that sanders sides was very much a show that focused on mental illness.

it's really funny, at the time i'd go to follow a cool tumblr user and check their carrd and see that they had sanders sides fans DNI in it, which is honestly fair. god, 2020 was one hell of a year. i ended up making a few friends that i still hold very dear to me, and even got some creative inspiration of my own from it ^_^

other than that, i'm currently a big homestuck fan, which probably speaks for itself, and i'm plural and otherkin but my involvement with the communities for those are minimal.

(if anyone else was active in fandom instagram in 2020, do you guys remember those discourse accounts that used character sprites to say the most irrelevant shit about queer identities? wasn't that weird?)

[litten]

I've been in the furry fandom since I was 11 but surprisingly have never been in the middle of any huge drama or phenomenons? Like sure I was around when big shit happened, but I was never really involved.

...

So does anyone here remember Animal Jam? Cause I accidentally caused some shit in the Animal Jam community in like 2016 or so.

If you don't know: Animal Jam (now "Animal Jam Classic") is a social MMO, like Club Penguin or Habbo Hotel, where you can play as many different animals.

There are many ways to customize your animal, including colors, markings, eye shapes, and items. One of these items included a headdress modeled after a Native American war bonnet. This item was very controversial in the AJ community and was not released again after it's initial release (on Thanks Giving, of course) but was never taken out of the game, thus making it incredibly rare and sought after.

The AJ community was very active on Instagram at the time, and I was an active part of it. I managed to gain a good amount of followers to my account, I think mainly just because I was friends with and appeared in videos by a Jambassador (an AJ Ambassador, AKA someone who had a lot of subscribers to their AJ YouTube). So when I made a post saying "Hey, I'm going to be blocking my followers that have looks with headdresses on." and gave my reasoning's (see: cultural appropriation) it blew. the fuck. up.

Again, this post was meant to be addressed to just my followers, but I got harassed because of it. People made YouTube videos on it, the comments on the post was getting flooded by kids defending the headdress, someone even started taking selfies I posted and photoshopping the in-game headdress onto me?? It was wild. I remember people saying I only did that for attention, meanwhile I was having a panic attack class watching my phone blow up because I have HUGE social anxiety :P

A few days of this go by,  by the end of the week things finally start to calm down...

And then another fucking Jambassador makes a video on it and it all blows up again.

Unfortunately the ending to this story is kind of anti-climactic. All that follows is another week of constant panic attacks and harassment. The item is still not removed from the game. In fact I've even heard that it's in the new version of Animal Jam.

But uhh... Yeah. That's how I accidentally caused some major drama in the AJ community :P

...

Oh yeah also, my mom made this infamous Furby cake.

animal jam is still around and there's still a pretty big fanbase for it! i played as a kid and returned to the game a few years ago and. it's certainly something! there's still a lot of discourse surrounding hds, a lot of people still trade for them and wear them, but thankfully a lot of people are now against them being in game. i think i heard their value is starting to decline a bit (but they still go for a Lot).

the rest of the community is a bit of a shitshow. there's a lot of discourse and drama and even doxxing(?!?) for a semi-dead kid's mmo from the early 2010s. people play this game like theyre fighting for their lives, i'm not exaggerating. most rooms you enter people are advertising their shops and trading, and whenever some youtuber you've never heard of goes live with a giveaway, there's bound to be at least ten people advertising their stream in the same room. because of the aging fanbase, there's also people who circumvent filters and say vile things in the chat without caring that there's still children who actively play aj. it's not great 

it's fun to revisit my favorite childhood game with friends who have returned to the game for similar nostalgia reasons, play minigames and adventures and even roleplay in sarepia forest like old times. i just try to avoid Everything Else about the game, lol.

[pixiez]

okay, let's see. off the top of my head...
+ i was VERY active in the roleplaying forum for moshi monsters, which was basically where all the weird tweens went to make edgy ocs and all the usual stuff but also had a weirdly in-depth little micro-subculture going on. we had our own nicknaming system, a list of fifty informal rules we all followed, and after the moshi monsters forums shut down, there was this weird digital diaspora where we all made our own forums and wikis and stuff.
+ i was there when the tide turned on steven universe on tumblr.
+ i was PRETTY active on book tumblr? particularly in the gone series and grishaverse fandoms. the author of the latter reblogged a few of my posts actually, and then i helped a couple of autistic headcanons get kinda popular.
+ i was there for a lot of infamous tumblr incidents actually. i was a weird autistic teenager on the internet so a lot of other weird autistic teenagers followed me and then theyd all get into fights... it was wild
+ i was kind of part of a theatre org that was a cult? it was called averno, it was huge on tiktok, and i was only a remote team artist making music and helpin with socials but the bosses were so awful to me that some other folks roped me into what was basically a coup where it was revealed that some really awful stuff was going on, from not paying people to straight-up religious manipulation. also, one of my bosses was and still is a huge tiktoker, and it's weird because i'm sitting on a lot of information about wild stuff she did.
i could go on, but i'm pretty sure those are the big ones.

[PurpleHello98]

Come to think of it, does musical.ly count as niche? It never felt like everyone was using it besides a lot of 9-year-olds. Anyways, when I was in elementary school I had musical.ly for a little bit and I don't even remember what I lip-synced to---probably Disney channel songs. It wasn't the best experience, but hey, it's musical.ly. I do remember it was a bit of a craze amongst my class, but even then most probably didn't have it.