The Crazy in LOTR fandom

[cimorene]

Going through my LOTR recs and adding them to delicious, I've been struck by the sense that grade-A crazy bitches were thicker on the ground there than in other fandoms. That could be partly because it was just a bit smaller so they were more noticeable than in, say, Harry Potter, where the crazy ones are famous but everyone knows there are 200,000 ordinary-ish ones for each. Or it might just be a bizarre coincidence that I happened to know a handful personally. (I do think you can pretty much count the LOTR RPS crazies here since their fandom, while a distinct subgenre, can't exist without reference to the LOTR movies and it definitely sprang out of LOTR fandom initially.)

Thoughts? Lotr: crazier or not? Why?

Comments

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

LOTRiPS: Setting the bar for crazy since 2001, oh yes.

The real question in my mind is, was popslash fandom super-crazy? Because IMHO generally speaking there's nothing that brings the crazy like a RL component in the fandom. Not just RPF, but actor replacement, actors finding out, etc. -- anything that blurs the line between fantasy and reality.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I think fans are just as likely to have those problems with reality (if the fan in question is so predisposed, I guess) in media fandoms, because they can just fangirl/stalk the actors when they're into tv shows or movies. There was some woman (or more than one?) who moved across the country to stalk an X-Files actor, which aside from VB and Orangeblossom was definitely the most egregious and large-scale crazy I've ever heard about in fandom. Popslash wasn't especially crazy - there were only a very few instances of big crazy that I remember, and most of them had nothing to do with the real people involved or anyone outside of fandom

[cimness.livejournal.com]

In fact, if you leave Harry Potter out of it, then after the lotr-lotr rps constellation (where the craziest by far came from the FPS side of fandom), then Smallville is probably the next most frequently-present fandom in fandom wank for craziness.

[fandomfan.livejournal.com]

Popping my head up to cast a vote firmly in the CRAZY column. Specifically where Lotrips was concerned, I'd say. Yes, it was an offshoot of LotR, but I think the crazy tended to concentrate there. I'm totally with mecurtin that the RL stuff brings with it insanity via lack of barrier between the real and the imagined.

At the height of Lotrips, it seemed like every week we were getting a new theory about the secret ways the actors communicated their gayness to each other or a story about some fan giving the actors print-outs of her slash stories. Heaven forbid any of the actors made a statement indicating any smidge of affection for any of the others. *shakes head*

By far the craziest fandom I've ever been involved in. Also the only RPF fandom I've ever spent any significant amount of time in. Yes, I think those two things are completely connected.


And for all that, there are times I get nostalgically misty-eyed for Lotrips heyday. Not for the crazy, but for the delicious zeitgeist-iness of it all.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

The tinhats attracted other tinhat-predisposed people to them and encouraged craziness, certainly, but one can't forget VB and Orangeblossom, who were definitely crazier than MsA or her followers... though far less numerous. They weren't the only crazy bitches in LOTR, though, just by far the craziest.

[fandomfan.livejournal.com]

That's LotR/Lotrips fandom for you, layers upon layers of CRAZY.

[karmenghia.livejournal.com]

There was a whole book about some LOTR crazies

When the fan hits the shit
http://liheliso.com/buzz/archive/00000224.htm

I only read the review, but even that was eye-widening.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's part of the reason I said that the fandom was full of crazy. I knew them.

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

I think that, in reality, there is massive crazy in most fandoms, but we don't hear about it. The Tinhats were unique in that they were basically united under a single leader, who had a talent for spinning their crazy into something that sounded edgy and academic and righteous.

The actual ideas were nothing new, and you can see snatches of it currently in bandom and SPN fandom. But most really insane fans tend to be relatively quiet, and their fellow fen are really, really good at not hearing them.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention it, I do remember hearing of the SPN tinhats several times. I suppose LOTR's biggest coincidence was combining vb and msa in one place, and that was really all that was required to give that impression of OVERWHELMINGLY NUTS. Man, I still wish I could've been a fly on the wall that time when they met.

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons we heard so much about VB is that there was money involved. You don't hear so much about truly insane Trekkies (like the one who was sending death threats to Brent Spiner and went to cons dressed in a rather extraordinary white...Krishna-y outfit), or Holmesians, or anime fans, because, as a rule, they don't commit felonies. At least not against people who are able to speak up about it. (If a celebrity stalker makes the papers, it usually means somebody, somewhere has failed to do their job.)

I just used the phrase "makes the papers." Jesus, I'm old.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Hm, that's true. Any scandal that predates fandom being networked and online didn't disseminate as fast, either. Although for MsA it wasn't the money so much as the constantly engaging with/attacking regular people who said she was crazy, besides letting most of it hang out in public for so long... and their type of crazy was for the most part entertaining and essentially harmless.