"Fanfiction writer" truly had the highest mortality rate of any career in history based on my experience as a reader in the 00's-10's

tbh im seeing the title and thinking which one

faking your own death so you don't have to finish a fanfic is actually so relatable

Hello. Fanfic author who faked her death here. My name is Berklie Novak- Stolz. I go by Berk. My all time favorite band is Bastille. I love books. The Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, Supernatural fanfic, etc. I live in Alabama. It's actually incredibly lovely and I'm very glad to be here. When I grew up I wanted to be an English teacher, but right now I'm a writer and content creator. I play the flute, piccolo, violin, cello, and banjo. I love classical music. And sad indie girl music. The Atlanta Symphony still gives me chills, but I got to go see the New York Philharmonic last year and had a similar response. And I got to go backstage and give their fist chair clarinetist a worm on a string. I do still love Yo-Yo Ma. I ramble. A lot. And now I get paid to do it. I got an ADHD diagnosis a few years ago and never quite grew out of my "weird phase." I'm still here if you need to talk. And I get to talk to lots of folks now, which I think is mighty neat. The end. :3 I'm more than happy to answer any questions about me, fanfic, Mitt Romney, or anything else. (also, I did write and publish a poetry book called "lazarus rises (amongst other things)" and I can promise I am still very much alive if you'd wanna read that bad boy.)

I read a fic where someone wrote "this will probably be my last fic, im 90 and my cataracts are getting really bad.", but ive never seen someone fake their own death

oh yeah the minute they said she died of lung cancer, I was like "just like the fault in our stars, right? that was 2012, right?" so glad we're on the same page

“Lung cancer is kind of suspicious but ok” 😭😭

The wildest thing about fanfic is I saw the title and thought “which one? Didn’t a few do this? Or like pretend to have cancer or something ?” the internet is chaos lol

Real carley heads locked in immediately

“Allow me to infodump onto you - the niche thing I’m interested in” CARLEY MY BODY IS READY

"i'm not yelling; i just love caps" is so real.

In before Carley fakes her own death so she doesn’t have to finish the Riverdale recap

I should have thought to do this when my 5SOS fanfic went on hiatus and I got SO much hate!! Only the smartest girlies think to fake their death

Stopppp, the Sherlock Holmes mind palace edit is sending meeeeee 😂😂😂

"who are you at 14 if you're not crafting" that really jumpscared me i thought that would be a Dan and Phil ref

“you’re dead jackson” is KILLING ME

thank you for naming the trauma of abandoned fanfics. a voice for the voiceless

This is the third story I've heard of someone faking their death to avoid the consequences of their actions online and it's one of those "It's weird it's happened twice" situations about it's thrice!

she fr gets the unhinged fanfic girlies

the icarus pendragon and uncarley crossover i didn’t know i needed???

Icaruspendragon is hilarious, I’m glad they’re getting recognition for the important work of bringing the omegaverse to all (in all seriousness they have done great work talking about fanfic and ways to protect the community and stay away from people trying to profit off of them)

i’ve been following berk for years and their lore is INSANE

The title of this video alone was like a carrot tied to a stick to me. Edit: I came for the faking their death story but stayed for the leading that Republican Party member Mitt Romney is an Omegaverse icon… bro what the fuck…

republican politician mitt romney being an omegaverse icon is the real surprise here

Man, back in the day, on Ye Olde Livejournal, fanfic authors used to fake their deaths all the time. I literally will sometimes stop in the middle of my day now and be like “you know what I want… a nice, juicey, fanfic author faking their death internet drama!” Thanks Carly for showing me that this specific brand of fandom insanity is still going on in corners of the internet I’m just not aware of now that I’m a grass-touching adult and not a teenager in 2002. Somehow that’s weirdly heartwarming.

“It’s old, from like 2012”…. Oh Carley you sweet summer child, I was in flame wars as a young teen in like 2002 😂 I was THERE for My Immortal

i used to absolutely love berk’s videos back when i still had tik tok, if someone truly gets the unhinged fanfic experience it’s them

“We need more representation of people who cannot work on things unless they are obsessed with them” girl you get me

This is so relatable. Outlandish and wild, but I also would have done this at 14. I would have rather faked my death than deal with consequences of my own actions.

having the internet friend whos texting you about committing suicide LMAOOO why was that such a common experience 😭

Honestly that thumbnail saying no one on the internet knows your alive fucked me up already before the video started

Being an adult is not stopping to read fanfics. Being an adult is reading fanfic in secret and not giving a shit about the writers as long as they keep writing.

There are only ever 2 types of multi-chaper fanfic writers: the ones who fake their own death, and the ones who apologize for updating a week late because they'd just given birth & are typing from the hospital

not me 23 minutes into this video realizing i follow the person in question on tumblr

love how quickly this video shifted to explaining Mitt Romney’s involvement in the omegaverse! thank you for the treat Matron Carley

thank god someone's here to report REAL news.

I'm sorry but the Sherlock Homles Mind Palace segment was so brilliant and hilarious. Award worthy, tuly. Traumatic, yes, but iconic.

Berklie in the thumbnail makes it an immediate watch

You and Strange Aeons are single-handedly (or double-handedly I guess) supplying me with all the fandom drama I could ever need.

I love Berk! She's my favorite TikToker lol

I did not see THAT twist coming and be more bewildering than the fake death lol

oh also something similar you might be interested in, there was an influencer who faked their death by cervical cancer and later posted on their Instagram going hello im not dead, i did it to create cervical cancer awareness 😭 and went on posting like nothing happened kinda girlboss im ngl we stan an activist queen

Can’t wait to find out why mitt Romney is in this thumbnail.

"Rosepetal Aurora Skittles" jumpscared me because I am actively eating skittles as I watch this, how dare you?

Something I love about online is that based on the title I thought I knew this story of an internet author faking their death but no this is actually a different internet author faking their death

Love how you’re talking into the Epcot ball

I'm used to book drama, I'm used to fandom drama but seeing them cross together like that makes me feel like I've been fed internet brainrot as a medieval peasant. Idk faking your death to me sounds more book community than fandom associated and that is exactly the phrase that would kills me as a medieval peasant

Watching this unlocked a core memory for me which is probably the only secret I’ve ever managed to keep. When I was 13 I wrote a 77 THOUSAND WORD fan fic over the span of 3 months then just abandoned it when I lost interest. I went it and found it now and it has over 250 reviews, some of which are so critical of my writing and I’m cackling because I was literally 13 trying to write an enemies to lovers fan fiction about vampires.

Every so often I think about this kid at camp who refused to tell us his name and instead went by Thog

This was definitely 100% relatable including the ditching fanfiction net to go to ao3 when I was in my 30s (so couple years ago), people being obsessed with me updating and annoyingly so, and when I was a kid (2006 when I was 16) I faked my death on fanfiction net using lung cancer as the reason then a year later I said I was in a coma…so yeah, that happened

the only journalist to ever exist 🙏

genuinely so sad i can't make tiktoks about teaching my mom about the omegaverse. she already reads it 😔

Damn, second KZfaq video this month I’m watching about a writer who faked their own death! The podcast Respect the Dead did an episode on a romance author who pretended to be dead on her Facebook group for like two years (meanwhile she was still posting on other social media, but no one from Facebook thought to check).

not the mind palace edit 💀💀

IM NOT YELLING I JUST LIKE CAPS, THIS IS THE MOST CHILL INSTANCE OF THIS HAPPENING WITH A FIC AUTHOR IVE EVER SEEN LOL

the mind palace sent me thank you for playing that out in full... truly stunning

Love that you give a short explanation about the different fanfiction sites, as if all of us watching this have not spend multiple nights clicking next chapter on a 200.000 words enemy to lovers slow burn angst with a happy ending

me, a contracted wattpad writer, watching the WP explanation: yes.

i'm just imagining a first grade alabaman teacher calling for an Aurora Blayson Nix amidst a class of chads and penelopes and wondering how much it would take for this hypothetical girl to be hate crimed solely due to her name

my experience with the fake death scenario was when i was in the dance moms fandom... also lung cancer!

with the title alone I know this is gonna be a banger

im loving this carley-the-internet-historian era we're in right now

berklie is honestly one of my favorite creators on the internet. they are absolutely insane, the lore is wild, i live fo their content and own not only their book, but also a string worm they sent me in 2022.

the first thing I thought was "which one?" because across the internet this happens like anywhere from 2-5 times a year

this is part of the core lore of the fanfiction community, and yes we needed a deep dive on that

I loved hearing this story again. Back in 2021 during a reporting internship, I got to interview Berklie and another fan fic writer who faked their death for a feature project on the internet and death. This video was a good little reminder of that project and how feral early fanfic spaces were. Berklie was so cool to talk to and I have since learned so much about the omegaverse and the prevalence of Hozier in fan fiction from her tiktok. Amazing video Carley!

Oscar for the mind palace segment

HELP I’ve been following Berklie for years 😭 I didn’t know she faked her death via fanfiction but it’s incredibly on brand for her

If we ever hung out, I think we would fall down a rabbit hole and never come back out 😂😂😂

1:46 as if I don't already treat all the videos like a podcast while I'm cooking 💅🏾💌

It's important to me that you know they actually published a poetry book about grief with ties to fandom culture. It's amazing and I loved it and would recommend it. Its called Lazarus Rises (amongst other things)

i used clean my mac for years when I was a Mac user. you've really made it and i'm so proud

Honestly having five different accounts with wildly different personalities and faking your own death on one of those accounts is simply iconic and I love it

I had the same reaction in the chip aisle when I read the papa johns expose in Forbes. The fresco that papa john schnatter commissioned of himself on the ceiling?!! I had to devour the whole thing immediately.

i love the fact that my orchestra teacher also calls it "squirrel" when she yaps to much

carley the sherlock mind palace section gave me WAR FLASHBACKS

ive never felt more represented than carley 'need more representation for characters who cannot work on things unless theyre obsessed' not the adhd rep we need but the adhd rep we deserve

Also important context is AO3 launched in 09 and ff had been around since 98, so ff was definitely dominant in the early 00s and then people migrated to AO3 in the 2010s. In 2012 AO3 was still quite new so ff would have been on a more equal tier with it because of familiarity and size of user base. It was still for sure dysfunctional, but it was the one people had been using for way longer.

I love how Carley just dropped that Mitt Romney is an Omegaverse icon and then dips.

one of my fans faked their sewer slide, came online posing as their sister. i was devastated. made a memorial on my profile and everything. then their irl friend came online and said they faked it. turns out they were right. it was terrible.

I’m a Canadian solo-travelling rn and have been so homesick today, but then new Carley video!! I’m cured! Little piece of home!

realizing that not every person whose been obsessed with fanfiction since they were tween knows what omegaverse is really made me reconsider my reading choices

the way you uploaded this mere minutes after i arrived at home from a hectic day. i can never stop thanking you for ur service 😭

As someone who did read on wattpad before AO3, there is some genuinely good stuff on it (fanfic or otherwise) but the second wattpad became monetized the way it is, it became exponentially worse.

‘For the chronically online and sick in the head’ 😂

berk also had a long standing beef and scavenger hunt with misha collins that only went so long because his comment on tiktok was censored because he asked for berks address

I'm using this video as a credible source when writing articles about fanfiction

I truly was not expecting the Mitt Romney twist

Mom that said omegaverse was explained to here. I'm still not over it, but have always been and continue to be wildly proud of my Berklie girl and her amazing heart. Sidenote: Berklie has published a beautiful book of poetry, Lazarus Rises (amongst other things) about her grief from losing her older brother, my son, Christian to PTSD induced suicide the night before her 25th birthday in May 2022. I can confirm that we do, indeed, still live in Alabama and Berklie is no longer sad about it and has embraced being southern. Quirky Berklie lore: her grandmother was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2022...she survived.

almost makes me want to go back and update my abandoned fic…

the sherlock mind palace moment was my favourite thing I've seen this week

I think Carley reading aloud what the omegaverse is might be my new Roman Empire.

i immediately knew this was gonna be about berk i love their account so much, ive been following them for years

Carley, my queen, please I beg of thee, do a video on the Maya Henry book about the “fictional” retelling of her relationship with Liam Payne. I need that Carley flavor in the retelling😭😭

absolutely insane ride of a video thank u queen

The fact that I didn't discover fanfiction and fandom online until adulthood despite being super into Sherlock and Supernatural at the height of superwholock is amusing to me. The fact that I'm an omegaverse author who learned about it from Alpha Omar's Big Sister during Ramadan tiktok, and Berk through omega Mitt Romney though makes it even funnier.

the simplest way to describe the difference between fanfic sites is to say that wattpad is middle school, fanfic is highschool, and ao3 is college

It’s insane how you keep kicking the bar further up with your content. Thank you for this. I feel blessed

I'ma be honest I faked my death in an online RP group when I was like 12. I got overwhelmed and they were so pushy and needy and I thought dying would be better than saying no 😭 kids are fucking WILD

sees title: "do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?"