So I’m not completely sure but I think you can pinpoint the disappearance to the month following Dashcon. Like, the entire year prior, things were going fucking insane; The DW 50th anniversary, Sherlock returned after a hiatus, Dean became a demon or something I don’t remember. Point is, the fans were worse than ever. 

And then Dashcon happened: All those people got together for a nightmarish event in the ball pit (for anyone who doesn’t know what Dashcon was, look it up and read any of the news articles about it. I promise, you will not be disappointed). 

Now, I wasn’t too active on tumblr at that point because of school reasons, but I remember finding out that the new season of Supernatural had aired on TV, and I saw NOTHING about it on tumblr. Not a single post on my dash. It was a miracle, but I was so confused. How had the whole fandom just vanished like that? I still don’t know for sure, but it was very shortly after the Dashcon incident. 

Then Doctor Who returned. New doctor and a new companion. Same scenario. Nobody said anything online. I was still big into DW so that was kind of a bummer but it was still astounding.

I went back online more readily and started realizing that fandoms, as I had known them, were essentially dead after that summer. It was like everybody simultaneously realized how toxic those communities were after they all got together in person and proved themselves to be a disgusting bunch.

It was the fastest and most unsettling jump in internet culture I’d ever seen. Overnight it became an embarrassment to admit that you were in a popular fandom. All because of fucking

“Superwholock died as a result of Dashcon” is the most fascinating theory I’ve heard in a while amazing

(And you know, seasonal rot and kids getting older and all that but s t i l l)

As someone who reported on Dashcon as it was happening, I can confirm that it had a lot to do with superwholock dying out. You put a bunch of toxic, shitty, entitled kids in the same room with each other and they realize how shitty and annoying and embarrassing they are. Not only that, but when Dashcon reached news outlets, people were merciless in how they talked about it. I think that really reached a lot of the superwholocks that didn’t go, because they were seeing in news sources how embarrassing they looked. Dashcon embarrassed superwholocks into the depths of fandoms past.

But!!!!!! That’s not all!!!!! That’s just skimming the surface of what was going on underneath.
(((I promised myself I wasn’t gonna get into this but here we are.)))

So, an interesting thing: The ages of the core Superwholock/Superwholock adjacent fans. So you’ve got all of these kids, a lot of whom were realizing they were queer, a lot of whom were seeing the world in darker shades, a lot of pessimism going on in their own personal lives. A lot of the core of superwholock were ageds 15/16/17 around the time the fandom died out. They were maturing, realizing a lot of things about the shows they hadn’t questioned before, developing new interests, meeting new people, and also, honestly? Getting jobs. Getting really serious about school.

MORE INTERESTINGLY…. it was really heartbreaking to see, but a lot of the reason the fandom died out was fighting. Fighting about who topped and who bottomed (always a pointless/ridiculous argument in my opinion), arguments about IS STEVEN MOFFAT THE ANTICHRIST???? and that time teenagers sent that man so many death threats, about him but also about his entire family (which was completely unacceptable and unforgivable!!!!! wtf), arguments about serious stuff in fandom: racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etc., all brought people down.

They weren’t just arguments, though. They weren’t just discussions. They usually weren’t civil at all. No, they were violent. Death threats were thrown around. Everybody and their master was being accused of being problematic. One slip up by a person, blogger or celebrity, could send hordes of people wishing their downfall. I saw friends get death threats, I saw groups of friends break up over nothing. Tiny things were exploded into huge fights. Everything was a Big Deal, and if you didn’t agree, you were just as bad as them. You were problematic, and a piece of shit, etc, etc. 

Now, people becoming aware of issues with a fandom and with their favorite shows/movies etc isn’t a problem!!! if everyone is going to act mature about it and deal with it maturely. But that’s… that’s just not what happened. It felt a lot like people wanted out and needed to give themselves a reason. A lot of people fell back into their old fandoms, or found niche fandoms to quietly back into. A lot of people, especially after Yahoo bought Tumblr and all of their redesigns (which was practically an APOCALYPSE on this site) ran to other sites. They abandoned their blogs for places like Ello; Ello becomes less popular, they sort of disappear.

Or come back as an aesthetic blog. Tumblr was always a form of escapism. When fandom here could no longer provide that, because it felt threatening, aesthetic blogs jumped through the roof. A picture of some succulents isn’t gonna get you death threats. But shipping the #Wrong couple might.

To tack onto that, around that time was the beginning of Doxxing culture. If you got into an argument with the wrong person, your full name, home address, and your family’s phone numbers could get posted. It didn’t matter if you were only 15. People didn’t care. 

That’s kinda similar to what happened to me, actually it started because of Dashcon. I made posts and wrote about what was happening there. I talked to the management team, and I talked to panel members and con goers and I didn’t hold anything back. I wrote about minors being let into 18+ panels, about the management scamming, and I got doxxed for it by a bitter panelist.

And I feel like a lot of things really came to a head at the time of Dashcon. Fandom arguments were bad before dashcon, but afterwards, nothing was held back. Anyone could get doxxed. Dashcon was the catalyst of this big fandom shift from unpleasant at times, to completely dangerous. And people jumped ship because they were afraid of this emerging callout and doxxing culture. Fandoms weren’t a place of joy anymore, it was stressful, and people left. 

2014 was a pretty bad year for fandoms.

I remember having just followed you prior to dashcon and watching you and others post about it was unreal. Then when the hardcore doxxing started, I was terrified. I ripped so much of my personal details off the internet, it took awhile for me to feel like “damn, okay, maybe that’s mostly over.”

Oh yeah, I didn’t even post my name until, like, a year after this happened. I’ve only in the past few months gotten back into posting selfies, but I still don’t really like posting them that often, and I don’t tag them so they’re harder to find. A lot of the privacy techniques I still use today (blog codes, IP trackers, blocked pages, not tagging, putting personal posts in read mores so if I want to delete them, no one would know what it said) are leftovers of the whole Doxxing era here.