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

[zanarkand]

i was a part of the hannibal fandom when the show was first on, so i was certainly part of the put flower crowns on everything revolution. i feel like the revival of the fandom is much more infamous for drama and they seem to be at the epicenter of the pro/anti battle which i will have no part of  back then the fandom was maybe like, a mini superwholock adjacent one so it was a little known for being weird but i didn't think there was a reputation for being annoying like there is now. i don't care for the show anymore and i'm a little glad about that....

[dirtnap]

how niche is niche? how far must infamy spread? i permanently changed the lanscape of the only free server on a little-known mmo, does that count?

the mmo in question was called wurm online. it still exists and is now wurm unlimited and is no longer an mmo, but can be played offline or on various private or public servers hosted by players. notch worked on wurm before minecraft. you can see a fair bit of minecraft in wurm.

it's a crafting, building, survival/sandbox game. the kind that's generic and overdone now but which was new and incredible at the time. except it's not block-based, it's tile based. each tile was its own polygon, with four vertices. you could raise or lower each vertex independently of the other four on the tile, though it would also effect the the connected vertices of the other three tiles that met there. this is a system that creates slopes, not steps. honestly, in many ways i prefer this system over minecraft's (and in other ways prefer minecraft's system, they're good for different things), and would like to see some other games make use of it.

the building system was tile-based and edge-based. you can place a floor on a tile, or a wall on an edge. it was...really robust, and interesting, and sadly was deeply hampered by the glacial speed of the game. playing unlimited on a private server with fast levelgain and instant buildspeed is by far the superior experience if you just want to build cool things.

but, when it was a true mmo, the effect one player could have on the game was profound. it took a lot of time and dedication, but it was permanent until someone else changed it.

structures would rot over time, taking slow damage until they reached 0 health and disappeared. active players could easily maintain their structures so this was functionally a non-issue, but it caused abandoned structures to slowly fall apart.

wurm had one server that was f2p, and i was on it because i was f2p. in my time there, i removed two mountains, created forests, populated them with deer, and changed the entire coastline of two islands.

when i first started playing, i chose to live near in a small settlement just outside the protected spawn area, right against the main road. i had originally intended to stay only a short time, until my skills (both in-game and as a player) were improved and i could move on to more interesting parts of the map. but i fell into the trap that would later become common in all such games i played: i put too much effort into my starting camp.

my small shack evolved into something larger and more elaborate. it lay at the foot of a large hill, which was difficult to farm on (slopes that are too steep cannot be farmed on, and are hard or impossible to walk on). i gradually flattened out the bottom of the hill, creating a steep cliff to the rest of it. i could farm on the bottom, but the most easily accessible trees (and deer habitat) were above. i couldn't farm on the road, and across the road was a sheer cliff to the sea. i didn't have enough crops to sustain myself.

the sensible option would have been to find somewhere flatter, but i was not sensible.

i flattened the hill out into a series of terraces. neatly fenced off, a different crop on each level. it looked neat and civilised. the hill above, i had nearly deforested. in fact, i had taken down a great number of trees in the area, as had many other newbies passing by.

i planted a slew of saplings, and in a couple of weeks had a large forest. this, i populated with deer that i had tamed and brought in from the more dangerous wilds where spiders and bears often roamed.

and i wasn't satisfied. i found more saplings and expanded my forest into rolling hills and flat fields. i found an overgrown, delapidated stone castle that i still think about sometimes. i went back to it often, inexplicably expecting to find that its owner had returned and was restoring it. the locals knew it simply as "the old castle", and spoke of it as if it were haunted.

i tutored many a newbie to that game, who set up camp somewhere near or in my forest. i would see them regularly for a few days or weeks. most of them would logout never to be seen again. a couple picked up and moved elsewhere, looking for some empty landscape they could colonise or a bigger settlement to move into.

i discovered a small cluster of houses and shops at the foot of the cliff opposite my forest. it was difficult and perilous to get to, but would be most convenient if i didn't have to eat fall damage to get down there. i soon became friends with the people of the seaside, and we build a ramp weaving down the cliff to ease my passage. it took us days of constant work (in that one of us was always working on it). the seaside saw a lot more newbies, after that.

there was a particular mountain between two nearby towns that significantly lengthened the journey between them. this mountain was pock-marked, full of holes dug by players in need of stone. the residents of these towns joked often that one day the mountain would no longer be a problem, because they would have mined it all to expand their towns and "officialise" their roads.

(there was a certain ruleset for how roads had to look in order to be "official" and put on the official map. the rule was 3 tiles wide in flagstone, with a tile of sand on either side and lamp-posts at some regular distance. it took a lot of stone to make an official road)

and i said, why wait? and i started to take down the mountain.

i was sometimes helped by others who needed the experience or just thought it was a good idea, but mostly it was just me. i took down an entire mountain by myself.

i had bulk storage bins (or "BSB" which hold thousands of items) full to the brim with dirt. i had put them in a prominent, public place, and put a sign next to them which read "free drit" (a genuine typo: fixing it would be annoyingly time-consuming so i just left it) i did the same with the stone, but most of that disappeared quickly. everyone needed stone, no-one needed drit.

eventually, the mountain was gone, and with that inconvenience resolved the road was re-pathed much more closely and i returned to my forest and did my best to hawk the BSBs full of drit. in the right circumstances, even dirt can sell in bulk, but i could not give the stuff away.

i learned that, for months, the seaside town had fallen into disuse because they couldn't dock their big ships because the water was too shallow. they had been working on building a dock out into deeper water but it took an insane amount of dirt (one of the pitfalls of the game engine was you couldn't build on water, so a dock of floating wood wasn't mechanically possible: it had to be real dirt, all the way down to the ocean floor)

did they know i had hundreds of thousands of units of dirt just rotting in BSBs?

we did not stop at a dock. we took the entire coastline out to deeper water, forming steep cliffs that imperiled many a newbie. we dropped sand on top to maintain the seaside look.

as a reward for providing all the dirt (and much of the labour transporting it down in carts), they offered me a trip in one of the ships.

and so i came to waffle island.

it was at war with pancake island, because that's the era of the internet we're talking about here.

both were relatively flat and unremarkable small desert islands.

the few people still present on pancake island were having a hard time defending their position. the fleet i had sailed amongst had brought an insane quantity of stone (much of which came from the mountain i levelled, it had been disappearing down to the coast the entire time and i had no idea). they just needed labour. and so i helped wall an entire island off and unwittingly chose a side in the waffles vs pancake war.

we built a town on waffle island, with a castle and guard towers, and soon found it was too small for us. we needed to expand.

i rubbed my hands together in glee. this game's levelling system was "you use a skill, you get experience in it". i had done a lot of digging.

it's really hard to emphasise just how much digging i had done.

i was, despite being the youngest character by months, the highest digging level by a significant amount on that island.

and so off i went with a couple of ships to rob the local coastlines of sand. i learned about dredging and drag-nets that night, as we sailed up and down a coast in a rapid and comical imitation of erosion. we broke down half the walls of waffle island, expanded its borders significantly, and erected new walls.

i made a lot of changes to the world map. most players didn't know who made those changes, how, or why. but they could see them, and they could walk them.

[Barbs]

The fandom that had the most impact on me in my early teens was the Dan and Phil / YouTuber fandom with all the parasociality inherent to it :’)
Getting into that fandom also kicked off my emo phase!
I also got really into making fanart for that fandom, and bought my first drawing tablet around that time! It was such a creative community even if it was a bit strange that we were all so obsessed with drawing and writing about two real people lol.
I feel bad for the guys, it must’ve been a very isolating experience to be treated like that online. I’m happy to see them thriving and enjoying their privacy nowadays. And that they felt comfortable enough to come out to their audience makes me very happy!

I’m still very fond of their content and still watch it from time to time, especially their pre-2014 stuff because it reminds me of a simpler YouTube where people were just posting videos as a creative outlet and branding and monetization weren’t important.

[caracalled]

The fandom that had the most impact on me in my early teens was the Dan and Phil / YouTuber fandom with all the parasociality inherent to it :’)
Getting into that fandom also kicked off my emo phase!
I also got really into making fanart for that fandom, and bought my first drawing tablet around that time! It was such a creative community even if it was a bit strange that we were all so obsessed with drawing and writing about two real people lol.
I feel bad for the guys, it must’ve been a very isolating experience to be treated like that online. I’m happy to see them thriving and enjoying their privacy nowadays. And that they felt comfortable enough to come out to their audience makes me very happy!

I’m still very fond of their content and still watch it from time to time, especially their pre-2014 stuff because it reminds me of a simpler YouTube where people were just posting videos as a creative outlet and branding and monetization weren’t important.

Oh I remember being super into them as well! Recently revisited their early content too, and even if it's not really up my alley anymore (especially new videos) rewatching them does make me feel nostalgic! Like you said, it makes me so happy to see them happy and comfortable nowadays!
I think it was also my early teens for me and just like for you it absolutely kicked off my emo phase and I enjoyed being around a lot of people who were also making fanart for all sorts of things.
I hadn't even thought of the monetization aspect but you're so right, it really was a different time and aside from some smaller Toutubers I rarely see that anymore :((

[Memory]

I wasn't really in the middle of any drama, but I can admit that I was a brony from like 12 to 15, and later joined the furry fandom instead because brony culture upset me too often and I hated season 4 and onward, haha. I suppose those are infamous, but I am not really in the middle of any of it.

[OneMillionFurries]

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.

[BlazingCobaltX]

I was never a major player but I absolutely was an avid participant of the Naruto shipping wars... These "wars" pertained the big four pairings: Naruto/Sasuke, Naruto/Sakura, Sasuke/Sakura, and Naruto/Hinata. On NarutoForums you had a stickied thread for continuous pairing discussion, which was getting at least one post a day for at least several years. The thread was an attempt at level-headed discussion but things could get pretty heated all across the forum.

At the height of my participation in these wars I was 13/14, which is funny to think about when some other participants in this were well above their twenties. As a twenty-something myself now I cannot imagine getting into a flame war with someone ten years my junior over fictional pairings, but early 2010s surely were different. I came out of it relatively unscathed, just having some mutual animosity with people, but there's others who faced harassment over their shipping preferences.

When chapter 615 came out and the final pairings seemed set in stone, I cooled down from participating in the shipping arguments. Ultimately I had a fun time being part of a 'clique' of sorts, but looking back the ferocity of the whole thing is rather cringe.

[MrsMoe]

I was in a lot of infamously batshit fandoms back in the day (MLP, Voltron, SU, etc.), but to give a totally unique example that's no one's really gone into yet, I was a part of the Sherlock BBC fandom.

And yes, I was a major shipper of Johnlock.

I was so deep into that shit that I actually found and spread those Tumblr posts about the terrible final episode being supposedly fake and that the real one was "Apple Tree Yard". I genuinely believed that crap because Johnlock seemed like an absolute inevitability and the writers would have to be insane NOT to make it canon, right?

Then Apple Tree Yard came and it was just some other TV show. The last episode was sucked....just because Steven Moffat sucks. I feel like that moment (and the hbomberguy video that came out later) immediately soured the entire show for me.

[Memory]

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.

[BlazingCobaltX]

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.

I think it counts. I have personally been put off from engaging with them - I mean, imagine coming at them while liking Metallica. 

[Swiftpaw]

Most of the things I was involved in are more obscure and known mostly just to people of a certain fandom. Like the old Warriors website forum culture (which involved things like collecting kits I remember most notably), and also early Pokemon click sites. Though I'm not sure how noteworthy those things would be considered now.

Later on I was involved in early Brony fandom stuff from 2012-2013, and saw a lot of infamous fanfiction and ask blogs when they first popped up. There were also many other fandoms I was involved in during or before their initial rise like Undertale comes to mind (I first played it in 2015 and remember sending asks to early ask blogs).

Then even later I realized I was fictionkin and a system and witnessed the rise of a lot of drama with those. The go-to example I have for how much worse the state of kin discourse was back then is someone who claimed it was racist to identify as an Absol from Pokemon because it's based on a Chinese myth. I also watched the rise of modern syscourse and a lot of community staples and arguments we have now, but unlike fictionkin I feel like its still in a very bad state. Admittedly I always had a problem of keeping myself out of discourse so I was involved in a lot of stuff as a teen that I'm still undoing as an adult.

All that though is kind of why I wish for communities like this to push for less drama on the internet. That stuff is toxic and damages you to get involved in. Thankfully I've chilled out a lot as I've entered my 20s and stopped engaging in places like that, but I still think that's important to address.

(I also want to share for people who miss ask blog culture, it's actually still active in the Pokemon fandom! Nothing's stopping you from making an ask blog either)

[creaturefeature]

Oh my word, I've been apart of so many fandoms, since I am Ancient (in internet terms apparently).

I definitely remember the Once-ler fandom. I like to tease that it gives me psychological damage, BUT honestly? If people are having harmless fun, I say have harmless fun! cringe is dead! hear hear!

At the same time, I also remember a lot of Loki ask blogs, since people were thirstin' for Tom Hiddleston.

Same! It's so strange, since I'm still on the tumblr dot com. There's new waves of people who are using the site, and the culture is definitely changing! I wanna believe that they'll figure out this relic of tumblr history and go back to doing it again at some point.

Some of still do thirst for Tom specially in light of there being a new Season of Loki about to premiere soon.

Speaking on tumblr anyone remember Rise of The Frozne Dragons or somethings. I think it was the animated version of Superwholock, where people wpuld makes crossovers with the main characters of brave, frozen, rise of the guardians and how to train your dragon it was wild.

I also remember being really into the indie game Off, it was certainly one of the most unique games i´ve played and i only heard of it because other users were talking about it.

Also really into the all the avengers live in the tower, and sometimes loki shows up and is hanging out for some reason. Those were the days

[Numberedpaws]

Definitely the Object Show Community. I love Object shows and I definitely recommend it to everyone but the community is a toxic cesspool due to everyone being fairly young, including the people running everything. It was pretty much a giant community where there was hourly drama which basically would boil down to "this autistic person said something and we're going to misinterpret it as offensive on purpose and harass them into submission while they're offline and can't defend themselves"

I mean, besides the weirdness with the community, there's the weirdness of the subject. Have you ever seen objects and numbers in love?


Photo of myself (an anthropomorphic number Four/Algebralien) and my boyfriend's objectsona (an anthropomorphic keycap)

[1337nightbug]

When i was a teenager, i was into countryhumans. I discovered it during summer of 2018, while ironically watching some animation memes bc i was into countryballs at the time and i heard ppl memeing on it bc it sounded weird to them. I'd say that i was into it from 2018 to 2020, when i left the fandom out of pure fear because i'd heard that people were getting sent nasty things for just existing in the fandom i understand that the fandom had some controversial things in it, but you shouldnt dox and send awful things to people who are just existing in a fandom you dont like!! also the tags on instagram were flooded with gore frequently in the months leading up to me leaving, horrifying!
like 99% of the drama in it involved ships, and im 100% sure that the shipping shenanigans there completely burnt me out of shipping in general. I only liked two ships, and both of them were really rare :( which is sad bc both of them were based on actual historical alliances
"mira why did you stay in the fandom though???" i had a little bubble of ppl who made object head versions of the characters that had flags for heads called flaghead, it was nice but one of the ppl i was friends with ended up being kind of mean so i ghosted her and then quietly left the community
I have a few random stories from the countryhumans fandom, maybe I'll tell a few of them if enough ppl are interested
by the way, i never really participated in fandoms before countryhumans, i mostly drew personal stuff and browsed fanart of stuff i liked but i barely made fanart until that time

[Mo/Otto]

Oh, old fandom stuff... None of my stories are particularly infamous, but I've been on Tumblr since before Dashcon. I've seen a lot.
I ran a somewhat popular (like 300 followers?) Pokemon askblog throughout high school. I still love the OCs from that story dearly, even if I don't do much with them now.
Also, I did get indirectly canonized in a Wordpress side story for a particular series of operas. A couple of other fandom members got in too, also I had a weird display name so I doubt anyone else will recognize me.

Also, I was born on Homestuck day and it has haunted me ever since.