Fuckin' Crazy Fans: CRFH!!!

I said I'd turn to insane fandoms in time, and so my prophecy comes true. As a bonus, those who wanted articles on people like Dan Shive can live vicariously, because while Dan might be a pretty cool guy, his fans are batshit. Rejoice! My talent shall be directed upon them via proxy.

Since this is the first one of these, I'll clarify the scale used as I go.

Fandom Profile: College Roomies From Hell!!!
Fans Call Themselves: (any wacky nickname the fandom uses to describe itself) Boardies
Reason(s) Listed: (why are you picking on these people?) A fandom full of self-insert authors, zany gimmick posters, and more? Asking why I'm writing this article is like asking "why did you take the hanged man's wallet?": because it's there, and it's tempting me.
Tangents Factor: (does Robert "Tangents" Howard participate in the fan community, and to what degree) High
Catharsis Factor: (does the author of this piece have any sordid history with these people he'll be forced to air so he doesn't look like a hypocrite) Sadly, this one's going to be "High" as well
Reused Material Factor: (how much of this article is modified from previously-written sources) about 50%

Confession time, folks: I was a Boardie for a few years. About the only defense I can put up is "I was young and retarded", as I was guilty of oh-so-many sins of fandom: self-insert fics (legendarily bad, even among CRFH fandom (SERIOUSLY DO NOT READ THAT god damn I am so embarassed by that still being around to this day)), postcount whoring, and being an immature little brat who was an attention whore of the highest caliber. There are pictures of me floating around in there, some in drag. I dated a woman I met amongst the fans. I'm sure I've forgotten more of this, and it will probably come up down the line.

I admit this offhand to get it out of the way, because no matter how much respect you've just lost for me, I can still claim some sort of superiority over the people to be highlighted because, for one thing, I've never, say, caused permanent nerve damage to someone's foot, or had a restraining order filed against me.

Oh yeah. We're in for a fun ride. But one last warning before I begin: I make less of a claim to accuracy than usual on this article, because I can't be arsed to slog through about three or four forums worth of posts, some of them broken by upgrades, just to find one piece of evidence or correct a timeline based off of my own memories. (Did I mention this is going to be one of my rare, if not only, narrative posts? It's storytime in dramatown!) Apologies to those who love my link-heavy style, but rest assured an article or two is coming up for you folks sometime soon.

I first popped onto the CRFH (no, fuck you, I am not adding those exclamation points every time I type it) forums around October 2002, and it was a complete madhouse. Things would be off the first page within a few minutes of being posted, so many people were around and active. Add into this a dial-up connection at the time, and my social inadequacy, and I crept in slowly, via the easiest possible way: forum games. The CRFH boards have had longtime topics known as the nonsense contest: it's pretty much the ultimate "postcount +1" topic. (Oddly enough, despite this, it's since been replaced in terms of "largest thread" by two newer post+ games, from the looks of things, despite being ongoing.) The simplest way to sum up what this was like is to basically point you at the El Goonish Shive board and go "Okay, imagine a less perverse version of this", but I'll grasp at a metaphor anyway. There was technically a "PG-13" rule imposed by Madam Campos, but more than one exception was made (a younger Fletcher would end up seeing Barney porn on said boards, among other things).

Some of this may admittedly be nostalgia, but amongst this flurry of postings, I recall some damn good artists, and some arguably talented young writers. (I put more faith in my memory as to the artists, than the writers, however.) There was a large quantity of roleplay going on in the form of "(war/party/fuck-all excuse for RP) threads", and the majority of posters, myself included, had a persona for such occasions. (I'll refrain from sharing that, but a quick search reveals it's just as painfully badly created as you'd expect, with a slash of Mary-Sue.) This led into what would eventually, years down the line, drive me away: PFFs, or "participation fanfics".

The concept is about what it sounds like: fanfics loosely based on the comic, with people "volunteering" their avatars for some spot within the story. Now, again, this is part of that "my memory is shit" process and I'm probably ruining the timeline, but to hell with that, cranky old grandpa's telling a story and he's not letting weather records get in the way of his ten miles uphill in snow. A subgroup of fans would arise around this time, known as "FLEET", usually all in caps. If it was an actual acronym, I'll never know, because to my knowledge it wasn't. I seem to recall the original reason for founding being that a shitload of people were playing Homeworld at the time, and they used it as a reason to form a weird sci-fi boy's club. It would, over the years, spiral into a vortex of dementia from which no reason could escape.

Now, I'm not going to summarize the comic's plot here in any detail, because a) I haven't read it in years, and b) if you're really THAT interested, these anal few have summed it up with more detail than you'll need for where I'm going with this. If you get confused, look over there until it makes sense/your eyes glaze over and you go "you read this for how long?". The only reason I need to bring this up is so you'll understand why I keep saying a constant (the only?) theme in PFFs was shooting Satan down to keep the comic characters safe. Yeah, I know, I know. I was young, and fuck you. I'm sure you did something stupid when you were in your teenage years, it just probably wasn't online.

Anyway. Around this time, Fleet suddenly decided that they were superior to all of us, because... I don't even know why, exactly. E-penis waggling? At this point, I will come clean: I was not a member (technically), I didn't hang with them in their private room, and most of this from here on out came to me secondhand. Still, it's a damn good summary of the insanity. They made their own PRIVATE channel on IRC (and by "private" I mean "you could join but one of the founders would usually kick you with a 'go away/insufficient clearance' type message given"), and began to take on the Robbie Tangents *plots evilly* type of persona.

Incidentally, this may come as a shock, but they really fucking hated him. I'd later discover they had a private forum. I got access to it for about a day or so once (and stupidly fucking blew that later) and there was a thread devoted to pointing out who had burned him on the boards and where. Think the "Culture of Nice" deciding to turn cannibalistic on itself into a giant circlejerk of nerd rage.

So at about this time, we had that beginning. Some people complained and asked them to keep their crap private instead of going "WE HAVE NEFARIOUS PLANS" every chance they could, but by this point Maritza was just going "Meh, all you roleplayers look the same to me" and letting it slide. (She would later end up "honorarily" inducted above the Admiral (oh yes, did I mention they all started calling the founder Admiral?) as "the Goddess".)

I need to stop using sarcastic question marks, but good god, it's so hard to type this without wanting to gag, because I was in a socially-awkward teenage geek phase, and I knew no better. That changed a bit after the first Boardie meetup at Comic-Con in... 2004? (Incidentally, for a quick laugh, this is something Maritza wrote at the time, about the boards. That tells you a large part of what this madness was like, because for one, the PG-13 rule was piss-poorly enforced, and you really COULDN'T have something to do if you wanted to keep up with it. Threads would be off the first page within a half hour at some points of the day.)

But anyway. So meeting some of them really made me realize how insane they were. The "Admiral" was, admittedly, the most stable in the group. I also met some others, who ranged from "decidedly nice" to "how are you not locked up?". By the end of the day, they asked me where good food in town was, since I was the lone local. One, an Australian, ended up wanting (and fighting tooth and nail for) Boston Market, because apparently it's the only place that, in his words, "cooks chicken like they do back home".

This led to a trolley ride across the town with three lunatics: the Australian, the Admiral, and Bob. The Australian was a little nuts, the Admiral was composed, and Bob...

Bob was (is still?) demented. He wore steel-toed boots, kept pointing out he worked in a nuclear plant, and proceeded, all night, to smash my feet. Well, foot. To this day, I can't really feel a single thing in my right foot, and haven't since that night. It speaks of the trio that two of them (one who "outranked" Bob) would just sit there watching a 20-something guy trample the shit out of a teenager and they'd just laugh, when the kid was their guide to the city. After that weekend, I started dodging most of that crew if I saw them, and I don't regret it. (Also of note: apparently at a later gathering, Bob would proceed to tell the story of why my right foot no longer feels anything, with pride. I was not there, but I guess it was just too good to pass up the opportunity?)

Anyway. From here on out, they began getting more and more secretive (and spending more cash on this sort of shit: if I recall, they scraped together around $200 for a theme song, at least $100 for a comic based on their fanfic group's exploits, and I have no idea how much money for uniforms for their own meetups), and I just stayed away from them. Now, this was 2004/5, and the CRFH boards were starting to hemmorhage regulars. I lost touch with a lot of people I actually liked around this time, and more than a little of that was FLEET treating the place like it was their playground and we just rented it. More and more PFFs where, even if your 'character' was allowed in, you were just fodder while OMG FLEET SAVES THE DAY, and less and less people who wanted to put up with them coming into comic discussion threads and use some shitty stock response like "Well, X happened because we did this this and that..." or "QUICKLY MEN, TO BATTLESTATIONS", or some such.

During all this, though, I stayed in the #crfh channel on IRC more, around an hour or two a night, because some of the people moving off-board headed into there. At one point, though, I got a private conversation from Bob. It was an 'apology' of sorts (read: he did not apologize, but gave me a link to FLEET's private board, at which point a younger, stupider me made some awful account name, forgot what it was, and then never could recall it to get a password recall, so I never got back in.), and about the last contact I had with the founders there. I never joined their channel, because I couldn't give a rat's ass about most of their babbling at the time and I certainly wasn't giving up cash over a message board.

Now, here's a side-story I mention last because it only comes into play around this time. When I first registered at CRFH, one of the first contacts I made off-board was someone I'd end up learning was a relatively (to them) irritating troll. Let's call him Ben. Ben took pride in pissing off proto-FLEET, and would continue to do so for years, until he was the first ban I ever saw (and to this day, he may still be the only one) from the CRFH boards. It's actually rather nice that he was my first contact there, because when he vanished, I took up the mantle.

They had a website at the time. (It's been updated all of ONCE since it was created years ago. Nice move, dudes.) Now, I had the link to their boards, recall? And it appears Bob had either forgotten that, or loved the ensuing chaos as much as I did, since he never mentioned that when his fellow geeks, after hearing I'd "accidentally" let Ben have their board link (note: it's not linked from any page ON the site) combed every line of code on the site twice, looking for accidental links to the forum.

Needless to say, I was not popular amongst certain members of FLEET from then on. Which is why, years later, when one of the last people I spoke with on the boards tried a silly little RPGMaker project based around their "extended universe" and was doing moderately well for such things, and got shithammered HARD by FLEET as a result, I left with him. I could go into that story, but it smacks of sour grapes from my side and it's not nearly as interesting as you might think. Ask me later and I'll type it up or something.

Anyhow. That's about all that's coming to mind right now, but there's usually more, I'm horrid about forgetting little details. If I missed something, point it out, and to all FLEET guys reading this (since I know one will stumble upon it in time), amuse me! Toss me your side of the story, I'll put it up! I'd love to hear how our viewpoints differ, or to get more background on all this.

I know this turned into more of a "Fleet dudes are nuts" post rather than "CRFH fans are nuts", but let me explain: that crew is the only group I know that stayed amongst the fans for the continuing run of the comic. Most just gave up on the glacial pacing, or left because that crew were assholes. They stuck around, because hey! Free forum (or two). Really, all you missed in there is that EGS came along and took the "zany postwhore" title away from CRFH's fans on Keenspot, and a stable fanbase all but vanished, with only the die-hards, FLEET, and newbies to keep at posting. Activity has slowed to such a crawl that as I type this, there are threads on the first page which have gone almost three weeks without activity. Going back a single page ups that to almost two months. There's only one piece of fanart (NSFW?) on the board that I see, and it's apparently part of an ongoing serial that (stop me if this sounds familiar) switches the genders of every main character in the series. It's also a sign that the PG-13 rule is still pretty lax, given that I had to potentially warn people from peering at it.

Frankly, picking on the fans at this point makes me feel somewhat guilty, just because so few remain. It's not just shooting fish in a barrel, it's shooting dead fish in a bucket with buckshot. At any rate, I think we can all agree it's still fun to point and laugh, even when the trainwreck is more of a slight derail.

Next time? Either more fans, more failures, or more fury. (Probably that last one, to be honest.) See you shortly, Sue Believers!

please don't sue, Stan