For some reason, the Snapewives really stick out as the creepiest of the examples listed. A lot of nutty fan behaviour is just overblown lashing out at contrary views, but declaring obsessive quasi-religious love for a fictional character? That's way weirder. (Unless their extravagant fawning over Snape is a reaction to people pooh-poohing less obsessive pro-Snape fandom, which is possible.)

The thing with Twilight is that even though there are thousands of craaaa-aazy fans, I have not gotten wind of any one or two, er, BNFs who were especially, continually, and notably crazy. Anyone have any epic accounts detailing a perticular fan's craziness ala MsScribe? I mean, we hear new stories of a Twilighter (or anti-Twilighter) doing something nuts all the time, but no one person. To me, that is less interesting.

I suppose the Twilight equivilent of the Snapewives is just too common to be of any note. Hundreds of girls are saving themselves for Edward. Only time will tell who is the most insane; I suspect most of these ladies have short enough attention spans that they will move on soon enough.

Maybe the Harry Potter fandom offers better crazy because the book series was longer and took so long to come out? Twilight seems really hit-and-run to me; by the time I had even heard of it the first movie was in production and three of the books had already come out. Then again, Final Fantasy 7 offers some premium-grade wacko. Hmmmmmm...

Would furries count in any way?

Because God damn.

Well Harry Potter offers more variety, certainly. It has a much wider cast of major characters, for a start. This allows for pockets of crazy that don't necessarily interact with each other. Almost all of Twilight's obsessives get thrown into one of two much more crowded pools, and those two are in direct conflict.

As for the religion angle, if you're not careful, it's going to read like a challenge: Pick a fandom, start a religion, but don't pick anything too easy. No Star Wars, Trek, or pretty much any SF with a religion already there. Hmm, Fraggle Rock, maybe?

Fans of pairings.

No, not just any bullshit pairing, like sitting down and writing about how Megatron and Starscream really do love you, but the nutjob ones; the ones who actually sit down and collect actual canon evidence that it could possibly be possible.

Shad/Amy fans who analyse every moment they spend together (and there's not much of it) with every line analysed for subliminal meanings of gazing into each others' eyes. Shenzi/Banzai fans who carefully analyse the movie and all canon spin-offs and note that no, there is nowhere they are referred to as brother and sister.

Yes, pairing fans are the most obsessive and frantic.

As someone who writes more shipper fic than I care to admit, sometimes you kind of have to analyze your canon to make it work. Especially if your pairing is...Well, a bit outside of the usual fandom shipping circles. You do it for your own defense. Inevitably there's going to be someone who takes the time to tell you how absurd your ship is and, whether or not they're being civil about it or a prick, it's your responsibility not to look like a fanbrat. I'm not saying every author needs to have a lengthy reply ready for their detractors, but it's nice to be able to say something aside from: "Piss off if ya don't like it!"

As someone who was part of the Harmonian and Zutara fandoms when they were in full swing, I can say with confidence that there was a ton of crazy people in those fandoms. Of course, there was also a number of sane fans who just participated in the fandom wars because of all the crap they got for just being part of that fandom.

Then there were the rest of us who just laughed at the others and read fanfiction. (And wrote it, but let's not mention that. My one and only Harmonian fic isn't very good.)

I never understood the appeal to going crazy over a real person. Sure, I could admire their work and maybe like them as a person, but that's what they were to me. Just people, not superstars.

Okay, I'm in the Supernatural fandom.

Why?

I like the show. Genuinely. The monsters are scary, the characters are funny, I like the dialogue and direction and plot. There's no romance, a fav thing of mine with shows. It's about a pair of brothers who act like brothers. I can relate to both characters in my own way; I'm bookish, like Sam, and I like seeing a nerdy little bookworm also get to be a badass. But I relate to Dean in that I have three younger sisters. I get what he feels for Sam, that insane need to protect my younger siblings. He raised Sam, I raised my younger sisters. They're my sisters, but they're something almost like my daughters too. When he threatens to kill Bela for siccing Gordon on them, since Gordon is desperate to murder Sam, I really understood him when he said he was going to kill her and meant it. If someone did that to one of my little sisters, I'd be just as quick to kill the bitch.

Then I got into the fandom. Where crazy-ass girls take a familial bond and twist it into incest, with the most batshit insane defenses about how no brothers are that close, and they just look so good together, I am honestly creeped out as hell.

I don't know if it's because none of these writers have siblings they're close to or what, but to me, it's pretty disgusting, and pretty wishful thinking of a sick and twisty level.

Now, if they were just shippers, I could deal. I wouldn't see them anyway. But no. They're everywhere. And they're obsessed, to the point of weird.

And then there are the particularly frightening crazies who are obsessed with the actors: Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki, and Misha Collins. Now, these guys are apparently friends off-set, seem like nice guys in interviews, and are now all married. (Collins might even be expecting a baby with his wife, so yay for him) Whatever, I don't really care. Not that I'm not sure they're cool guys, but what do I care? They're not the characters, and that's who I like. Characters do not equal actors.

Tell that to these people.

They slash them together, stalk them, and post nasty messages about their wives. They follow them on the convention circuit like rabid wolves on a bunny and seem determined to stick to their firm beliefs that this is okay behavior. Which says a lot about these freaks.

Back in the '80s when you wore leg warmers to school, a girl got her fifteen minutes of fame by publishing a book titled I will marry Simon Le Bon which later became a low-budget movie. It wasn't much about Duran Duran as it was about being a teenage in those times.
Then Simon Le Bon gets married to Jasmine Parvaneh (your spelling may vary) and I will make Simon Le Bon get a divorce comes out. This did exactly what it said on the tin: it was RPF in print.

The plot: author projection girl idolizes Simon Le Bon, girl falls into depression when Simon gets married, girl seeks a way out by visiting a gipsy witch and asks her to make Simon and Jasmine split, girl needs something belonging to Simon for the ritual to work, girl stalks similarly-obsessed girl during the Venice carnival and steals the Simon autograph she kept with her at all times, girl with a satisfied smile reads tabloid with "SIMON/JASMINE: IT'S OVER" front page. The object of such undivided attention only appeared in name, which is probably how the author managed not to get sued. It was particularly depressing that the protagonist didn't even, say, try to move to London now that the subject of her dreams was attainable again. "I could have him" seemed less important than "No one else can have him.".



The book even had illustrations, the type of pencil sketches you'd see on DeviantArt. I wonder whether the publisher was a vanity - the glossy paper makes it tough to break even.

EDIT: sorry, I should have mentioned that the two books are from different authors. While the author of the first is no JD Salinger, she should not be confused with the person responsible for the other trainwreck.

Oh I may have something.
Whenever you meet ship wars, you should post something like this:

Quote:

No matter what ship you support, you will never beat that awesomeness:

There's a fairly BNF in Torchwood fandom who writes truly excellent Jack/Ianto stories, that range from epic adventures to out and out crack. He manages to catch the voice and mannerism of the two so well, it's a little bit scary at times.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, one of his many betas convinced him to start writing RPF. The justification being, I suppose, that John and Scot ARE gay and married.

Now, I like slash as much as the next fangirl, but RPS has always squicked the hell out of me. It squicked the hell out of me when I was in Due South fandom, writing Fraser/RayK, and people kept writing RPS starring Paul Gross and Callum Keith Rennie, both of whom were straight. I suppose it wasn't helped any by the fact that Paul Gross, who was writer and director of the show for the third and fourth season, discovered slash fanfic online, and though it was funny enough that he actually wrote the subtext into the story (the end shot of the show is Frser and RayK dogsledding off into the sunrise together). But he was so subtle about it, it didn't come across as intrusive.

I guess what bothers me the most about Torchwood RPS is the fans simply assuming that since John and Scott are gay and married, it's okay to write stories about their sex life, despite the fact that none of the writers have ever met either of them, and they tend to keep their private lives private. I don't think the John Barrowman you see in public is the same John Barrowman that exists in private, and I've never even heard Scott speak out loud. All I have to go on is pictures of a couple of good-looking guys who seem to be very happy together.

I'm sure they know RPS exists about them, and I hope they have enough of a sense of humor to just laugh at it. But it still bothers me, in the same way Wincest bothers Lapin. I watch(ed) the show because it was interesting and the characters were good and, as Morgan said, it was nice to see gay men presented on TV as not being some sort of strange exotic species of wild life, but simply two guys who liked each other.

I still like Sam's Torchwood stories, but every time he writes RPS, it makes me cringe. From my POV, it's disrespectful to the people involved, even if they ARE openly gay. It would be akin to people writing stories about President Obama and Michelle's sex life. Nobody knows what goes on inside a couple's bedroom but the couple themselves, and that's how it should remain.

I think the issue is with the fans who insist a pairing is canon and real and anyone who pairs up anyone else is wrong and hates the real canoness of the real pairing which is real and true and real and canon.

But yeah, if you like a non-canon pairing, coming up with some basis on why the pair might work is better then just insisting it will just because you say.

I have a... well she's not crazy but she does have some fairly unique ships.

This is Merlin 2008 fandom.

The main ones I've heard her go off about are Arthur/Freya, Gwen/Aredian, Lancelot/Nimueh and Gwen/Alvarr.

Problem with those ships. Arthur killed Freya, Aredian nearly had a friend of Gwen's executed, Lacelot and Nimueh have never met (and also she's dead) and Gwen and Alvarr have also never met (never mind that he was more interested in Morgana).

She just keeps saying that they'd all work 'if explained properly' but never bothers to explain them. Which is actually probably a good thing.

Pretty much every shonen series has a crazy fanbase behind it. The Death Note fandom especially can get pretty horrible, considering the original author is rather sexist already. And that doesn't even begin to cover the crazy shit that happens at anime conventions between L and Light cosplayers.

Toastuh wrote:

Do people whose batshit is exacerbated by fandom count? Because, uh, if the stories to believed, Hojo and Jen.

I read that site so many years ago, but it still scares me that such people exist. D:

FrolloFreak.

Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame fandom was pretty much divided into two camps: Clopin fandom and Frollo fandom. (No, there was really very little fannish attachment to the nominal heroes: all the focus was on the villain and the supporting character with eleven spoken lines.) Oddly for such a split fandom, the two groups were pretty much on good terms: there was an attitude of, "Fine, you write your fics about that character's Gypsy lovers and his long-lost daughters, and we'll write our fics about this characters Gypsy lovers and long-lost daughters, and everything will go well."

Except for FrolloFreak.

Where to begin with FrolloFreak? Shall I start with her webpage? Any fan can create a page around the notion, "Hi, I'm Janie Fangirl, and here's my page all about John Filmstar" -- or even about a fictional character: "Hi, I'm Janie Fangirl, and here's my page all about the wonderfulness of Jack Machoman!" Any fanwriter can create a page that purports to be written by her own original character: "Hi, I'm Mary Sue, and here are all the stories about my adventures with Jack Machoman!" But it takes a very ... special kind of fan to put together a substantial webpage based entirely around Jack Machoman's praise and celebration of Janie Fangirl. But that's what FrolloFreak put together: "Hello, I am Judge Claude Frollo, and here is my website devoted entirely to the wonderfulness of my twoo wub, FrolloFreak!" (There was an uncanny blending and shifting of identities between FF and her character Danisha, so it wasn't easy to state whether this version of Frollo was celebrating the one or the other.)

Or shall I start with her revisionist characterization? Frollo, as I've said, is the villain. Clearly established in film-canon: he accidentally killed Quasimodo's mother and felt no remorse, he raised Quasimodo only as a penance (and emotionally and physically abused him), he's a vile racist bigot, he's bizarrely sexually obsessed with Esmeralda to the point of rape. But nooooo, FrolloFreak only wanted to be attracted to a NICE man. So her version of Frollo was Quasimodo's stern but protective foster-father, wasn't a racist at all (the Gypsies deserved the way he treated them, apparently by their inherent criminality), and was a hapless victim of Esmeralda's seductive wiles. The part where he killed Quasimodo's mother? Oh, that was only in flashback and was told by Clopin, you're not going to tell me you believe a Gypsy's account, are you?

Or shall I jump to her efforts to impose this New-And-Improved Frollo on the entire fandom? See, canon Frollo was an abuser of women -- so if you liked this character as a villain, appreciated the character for what he was, you were condoning and supporting abuse of women. You were saying that abuse was a good thing and that all women deserve to be abused. An attempt to start a round-robin story in the Frollo fandom never got off the ground, because of FF's insistence that every writer adhere entirely to her vision of Frollo.

Or her trolling of the Clopin fora under false names, and her relentless Clopin-bashing in her fics, in a (largely unsuccessful) attempt to stir up shit between the two camps of the fandom? (She later claimed that the trolling at the Clopin sites wasn't her own at all -- that it was done on her computer, yes, but by her sister's teenaged foster child. Yes.)

Or her posting to rec.arts.disney, asking the fans there to come over and castigate the Frollo fans for not properly appreciating her fics?

Or some of the most entertaining sockpuppeting I've yet seen? ("How dare you criticize FF's stories? I'll have you know I'm her mother, and she's lived a life of unrelenting agony, and these little stories you're so relentlessly and cruelly bashing are the only tiny pathetic enjoyment in her life!" And later, "How dare you criticize FF's obsession with Frollo? I'll have you know I'm her minister, and I regularly use her fics in counseling sessions as examples of a happy and loving relationship between people of radically different backgrounds!")

FrolloFreak makes me wish retroactively that FandomWank had been around back then. This was SnapeWives-level obsession.