how did I miss this?

[sciatrix]

This morning kicked off in an excellent way when I absent-mindedly glanced up at T, mind still on the Last Podcast on the Left episode I'd been listening to while emptying the dishwasher, and said, "Hey, do you remember Mark Twitchell?"

See, I'd only found out about Twitchell from the podcast, and the man was apparently in the middle of fandom (at least, cosplay fandom and fan-filming stuff) in the early 00s right up until October 2008, when his fannish involvement was curtailed. Being arrested for having catfished two separate men on Plenty of Fish and trying to murder them--he failed on the first one and succeeded on the second try--will do that to you.

I was a little astonished that I'd never heard of him--this sounds like one hell of a thing!--and much more astonished that T hadn't, because this would have been at the height of T's fannish involvement on the Toronto anime and cosplay scene, when they were busily helping organize Anime North (and Yaoi North). (T was actually more startled about not having heard of him than I was.)

It's possible that the case was overshadowed by other wanks happening at the same time; it's also possible that Twitchell's notoriety was overblown by his non-fannish biographers, or that he was a known quantity among straight-guy fandom communities rather than the corners of fandom I was in by then, and I don't think either of us shared his main fandom (which looks to have been Star Wars). Still, it seems like the sort of thing that folks in the more congoing corners of fandom would have been talking about. Apparently not; so far no one I know who was in fandom at the time has any memories of Twitchell or the case.

We also got to talking about surrealism and shitposting, especially in the context of the fandom of yesteryear, and on balance--I don't think Tumblr fandom is actually any more clearly fascinated with surreal humor than media fandom on the old LJ/DW circles, either. T kept pointing out Heero Is Not Toast, which is something that wouldn't be out of place in any Tumblr reblog chain (although the Relena-killing thing would be now, thank fuck). I kept thinking about things like wingfic or some of the weirder crackfic premises I saw c. 2006ish. Seriously, what the hell was with wingfic? It's easily as weird as anything SuperWhoLock came up with, and it just appeared everywhere--like A/B/O, actually, but less explicably.

Comments

[thornsilver]

I have to disagree. Nothing is explicable about A/B/O. (On the other hand I am in a fandom that gave genitalia to giant robots... so I have no right to throw stones.)

[sciatrix]

Look, A/B/O at least has psychosexual and gender-dynamic overtones that make sense in the context of "yeah, this might be real id-tickly for a sizeable subset of fandom."

What the hell made "Character X wakes up with wings; absolutely no one including the author has any sense what is going on" so very appealing?

[thornsilver]

I donno. I would love to have functional wings.

[cimorene]

I remember someone somewhere on Tumblr saying that if you see a trope idea like that it's probably from anime (though a few times it's from something else. Star Trek did seem to originate a fair number of tropes, although in retrospect they are less weird than the Woke Up Like This trope).

Apparently the thing with timers embedded in people's wrists and the thing with soulmate tattoos are from some kind of anime?

So waking up with wings could be from one like that. I'm trying to think if there are any western media that feature it and coming up blank - there are angels with wings but not people waking up with them, to my knowledge.

In terms of insane crackfic ideas my favorite concepts include

- the Panic at the Disco fic where someone turns into a belt
- the fic where someone turns into a lamp (was that also bandom??)
- the fics where people turn into their own action figures (multiple fandoms)
- the fic where someone turns into a pencil (mayyyybe bandom??)
- the one The Professionals fic where they are teddy bears

Compared to these, the ones where people wake up or were always animals are positively tame.

[sciatrix]

Oh, that makes sense. Didn't know that was where the soulmate writing idea came from--it's been so very elaborated that I sort of assumed it originated in fandom, too. I was similarly bemused by the hanahaki thing that keeps cropping up, which I understand is a similar sort of concept.

(Admittedly, the idea of a disease that makes you cough up flowers because some kind of parasitic flora is taking up residence in your lungs mostly just makes the xenobiologist in me flex her worldbuilding ideas, but that may just be me.)

(no seriously how is that plant fighting off your immune system, is it just depressed? how does it hone in on being unloved? EXPLAIN)</small) I have fond memories of snake mpreg and "my two middle aged characters woke up and found themselves to be Japanese schoolboys", myself! I've also read the action figures one, I'm pretty sure.

[cimorene]

By "snake mpreg" you couldn't mean the story that I refer to as Immortal Waycestuous Assbaby Snake Frank, do you?

+ When it comes to worldbuilding, I don't have a professional or scientific expertise, and none of my hobbies have been super relevant to one of these yet (except my ~3yrs' undergrad socio- and anthropology is relevant to like, all of them). But I am inclined to ask an avalanche of clarifying questions, so I often come out of these stories (which are often pretty insubstantial in length and detail anyway) with more words of worldbuilding logistics questions than the total length of the story.

I still sometimes think about doing something about that colorblind until you meet your soulmate society that I posted about a few years ago.

[writerkit]

I don't know about the wingfic, but someone did write down a history of A/B/O: https://archiveofourown.org/works/403644/chapters/665489

They include a fairly detailed tracing of the various elements and how they solidified... which was a great relief to me when I found it, because I have never watched any Supernatural and thus was *so confused* about why every single fandom seemed to have it.

ETA: Wait, that first link was the link to the *primer* which is where I got *this* link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1022303/chapters/2033841

Which is the link to the actual history.

[sciatrix]

Oooh, thank you! This looks like it's going to be a lot of fun to read.

[siderea]

"Hey, do you remember Mark Twitchell?"

Whoa. First I'm hearing about this.

astonished that T hadn't, because this would have been at the height of T's fannish involvement on the Toronto anime and cosplay scene

American here, but the impression I get of Canadian cultural politics is that a nuclear bomb could go off in Edmonton and Toronto wouldn't notice until the winds blew due east.

[sciatrix]

T's reponse was to yell "I was born in Calgary! I'm constitutionally required to love everything bad that happens in Edmonton, because Edmonton is a shitty place and Calgary rocks!" Take this with all the grains of salt you will.

(Personally I've gotten more or less the same impression re: broader Canadian cultural politics, not gonna lie.)

[wanderingnork]

Wingfic is a weird one for me because my first Fandom that qualifies for the name was Maximum Ride...all of my protagonists came ready-made with wings at the height of wingfic's popularity. I can't help but wonder if the Maximum Ride fandom had some bleedover into other fandoms?

As much as I love it (I've written two fics with it), it's definitely a bizarre story premise...

[sciatrix]

I mean, it started popping up when I was largely reading in Good Omens, so I believe that my first exposure to the concept was actually anti-wing-fic, in which characters who canonically have wings wake up and have no wings. Or sometimes different wings--I recall one where Crowley woke up with bat wings despite canonically having the same feathery ones angels did, which he found first laugh-inducing and then very upsetting indeed.

[staranise]

Hunh, weird. I'm from Edmonton; I stared at your description of Twitchell, and then went, "Wait, the guy who tried to make his own snuff films?" This is definitely the first time I'd heard the full extent of his involvement with/popularity in fandom.

[sciatrix]

Apparently he did a Star Wars prequel fan film that he managed to get the dude who played Boba Fett to cameo in? And he was scamming folks with plans for a future fan film that was supposed to get cameos from, uh, Jeff Goldblum and Alec Baldwin. This piece here is probably the best reporting I've seen of his fannish involvement; it looks like he did a lot of cosplaying in various places in addition to the fan film. I believe he was working on an Iron Man cosplay at the time he was arrested.

He has apparently been whining that the footage from the last piece he was working on is largely being held by the cops, so how is he supposed to mount his major film comeback?