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im sorry but faking your death instead of just changing your name and saying your soul died and was replaced by some guy instead of just coming out as trans is so fucking funny to me. guys we have to start doing that regularly

"trans people are liars" factoid actually statistical error. lord of the rings andy, who is trans and lies 10000 times a day, is an outlier and should not have been counted edit: i'm trans, i can make this joke

You know it’s gonna be a wild one when *psychic abilities* are introduced less than 12 minutes into a two hour opus.

what i'm really getting out of this was that celebrities in the 2000s were NOT scared about attending random events held by weird online communities

Hi there! I'm Abbey. I've actually been a subscriber for over a year, so it was a fun surprise to see my own life pop up in my feed! I'm impressed with the work you did to sum this up. It's SO MUCH to cover but you did it well. Thank you! Oh and I eventually changed my mind and am again working on a book - especially since people are still talking about all this 20 years later ETA: Y'ALL the amount of kindness and support has been amazing! I've had a lovely time reading them, and sending screenshots to Mom ☺️

Jeanine being a doctor makes the needless transphobia and homophobia soooo much worse

Abby's mom did more to take down Andy's little cult in a month than Jeanine ever has or will in her entire life

I teared up at Abbys mom being ready with all the cult deprogramming and group psychosis therapists. That's so touching

as a trans girl, this has made me realize my years long struggle to come out was actually totally sane, I didn't even start a cult.

Janine is literally the most irritating part of this because she kept doing extremely stupid things with her own money and then wrote a book about how none of this was her fault when like. Sis you were directly involved you are no less at fault than anyone else here

youtube video: so then vb faked their death and was replaced by the spirit of elijah wood me, crocheting a bee: oh my god no way

why are multiple online cults just "let's do christian fundamentalism but with a wildly popular fantasy novel"

VB not thinking Cate Blanchett is hot should have been the first indication that he was not, in fact, a "bisexual woman"

Committing soul suicide and becoming elijah wood certainly is a... creative way to transition

The fact that Janine wasn’t the main villain of this story says a lot about how fucked this whole situation was

Abby's comment of "I didn't need to be another Jeanine" is...really, super self-aware. She saw the damage that vindictive retaliation had done and she chose not to engage, not only for knowledge of the consequences, but also for her own self worth and mental care. I hope she's doing well. I hope Diamond is, too. And fuck it, Sean Astin as well. Edit: the part about Abby's mom always makes me tear up.

Between this, snapewives, and the final fantasy house, applying esoteric new age beliefs to your fandom and turning it into a cult is weirdly common.

when a strange æons video is longer than the 2004 movie adaption of a series of unfortunate events (starring jim carrey), you KNOW it’s gonna be good

The way the terf is just bragging about bullying abuse victims for what their abuser has done is just… what a piece of shit. I hope Diamond and Abbey and all the cult members are doing great now.

Holy crap. Sean Astin is just built different. He showed them exactly how an adult acts in these situations. They are still playing make-believe thinking things can just manifested into existence and catch Sean up with their delusions of this garden, and he comes in and actually makes the garden happen. That was a turn in the story I didn't see coming.

God, I do NOT miss the flowery and overly-self-important way that people used to write in fandom spaces back then.

if this story has a hero, I think it's definitely abbey's mother. I mean can you IMAGINE having that level of patience? knowing for years that your own child is in a horrible situation where they're being constantly manipulated, but your only option is to wait and prepare and plan for your one and possibly only opportunity to get them out of there. what an incredibly resilient person

As someone completely unfamiliar with this story, “this brings us to the one-year anniversary of 9/11” was such an amazing and unexpected transition.

The thing that really bothers me about Janine is that she thinks that since she was manipulated that means her actions are completely disassociated from her. Abby and Diamond clearly recognize that although they were manipulated, they are still partially or wholly responsibility for the things they did while manipulated. Janine acts like the catalyst of Andy's manipulation absolves her of all responsibility for her decision to pay that money, for acting like a loan shark, for celebrating as mentally ill kids suffered. Girl that was all you.

i love it when lesbians make 2 hour videos about stuff i have never heard about before. my favorite genre of videos.

Of all the “I do ___ so you don’t have to” KZfaqrs out there, Strange Aeons’ “I dig up messy fandom discourse so you don’t have to” is definitely what I’m most thankful for

I am SCREAMING. I got most of the way through this video before realizing I've interacted with Andy before on a very surface level. A few years back, I was friends with him on Facebook because he was a Bucky Barnes cosplayer (under the name Andrew or Andy Blake). Suddenly, he started posting about how people were trying to ruin his life, making up lies, etc. so he had to leave fandoms forever. I remember him mentioning something about LotR. I thought it was something petty since he's really great at acting like the victim. I NEVER woulda guessed it was ANYTHING this clown shoes bonkers

Despite everything, as another trans man I completely understand why Jordan tried to lie and say he was from a pagan cult to change his name and gender. The legal way is so tedious 😅

jeanine's harassment of diamond over email, purposefully seeking out andy and abbey to mock them in the street , just the general obsession with causing as much hurt to these very clearly mentally ill kids is so weird and scary. she could've chosen to help abbey and the rest of them when she saw how abusive andy was but instead she chose to harass them and then write a book about it. andy sucks and so does jeanine.

Hi. I'm Talisha, or rather T now (they/them). I was going to be married at Tentmoot. This video has dragged up so many buried memories, now I can't sleep. I feel sick. But honestly, thank you for talking about this. I guess I should finally convert my old wedding vhs and my dv of Halloween 2003 spent in Bag End LA before the shit hit the fan. Might actually have Jordan... Andy? somewhere recorded there. 😔 Still can't believe I was in this mess at one point.

I was so rooting for abbey when I saw those pictures of her at the garden project, and devastated to hear about all the events that came after. I started sobbing when the level of research and planning abbeys mom devoted to saving her daughter was revealed, and I’m devastated that Diamond, who escaped one cult with nothing to her name only to get sucked into another and then put in a truly dire financial situation worse than when she started, had to escape both situations on her own. My heart breaks for Bob also, who watched his friends go through struggle after struggle and not be able to reach them, while obviously not being in a great place to begin with. What the fuck do you mean this happened again

"Tolken would have loved gay fanfiction shut up idiot" is my new favorite quote

Your absolute exhaustion when you were talking about VB's "psychic abilities" elicited such a visceral sympathetic reaction from me. For a second, it was 2012 again and I was listening to someone explain to me how their maladaptive daydreaming was actually the Actual character Castiel from Supernatural who lived in their head as a role-playing muse.

"VB said that he would be leaving fandom forever," I hear, squinting at the 80 minutes remaining runtime.

God, I feel so bad for Sean Astin for being sucked into this. Dude just did his job well in a movie and was catapulted into this crazy shit. I can’t even imagine.

Abbey's mom and Bob, true heros. Bob must have been in grey stone mode for ages, being so close to the nexus of things. "Try to be boring enough that the manipulator ignores you."

Cate Blanchett not being hot enough for LOTR is an extremely wrong take. -Sincerely, the most asexual asexual to have ever asexualed.

This story joins that of Ms Scribe, Cassandra Clare and the Snapewives on the list of reasons I'm endlessly grateful I was in elementary & middle school during these years.

after all of the manipulation and batshittery, the reveal that abbey's mom was watching out for her the whole time and waiting to be able to help her seriously made me cry. lovely to hear something so sweet in an otherwise harrowing story.

Strange: VB my horrible gremblin brain: vacterial baginosis

Shoutout to Abby's mum for being amazing and managing to get her daughter out of that horrible situation. Her and Samwells actor are the only thing that keeps this clusterfuck from being purely depressing

Love how the first thing she mentions is how there was a cult, really sets the mood

I know that we all agree that Jeanine is very much the secondary villain of this tale but the fact that she attempted to turn a profit on this whole nightmare at the expense of Abby and Diamond, while actively going well out of her way to harass and stalk them is absolutely insane

I looked into Andy's Harry Potter fandom days out of curiosity and it's even more wild than I could have imagined. Excited for Strange to cover it because Wow.

Jesus christ janine could have been the main villain of a million other fandom dramas but she somehow landed herself in one of the few where shes second fiddle to an absolute monster. And Abbeys mum.... goddamn this was depressing to listen to and the sudden introduction of an honest to god hero to the story made me tear up.

There's something to be said about how much Janine prides herself on being Jordan's number one hater and enemy, while simultaneously doing everything in her power to push his victims closer to him

That last minute sent absolute chills up my spine, because I had dealings with Andy during his foray into the Supernatural fandom. Something you said there, that getting Abbie to meet the celebrities at all costs, that he was doing all of this for her sounds eeriely similar to things he said when we took part in GISHWHES together. If you ever want to talk about that era of his internet backstory, feel free to hit me up. I am incredibly lucky that I managed to avoid getting sucked in to another one of his cults, but the comments about his magnitism are completely true. GOD this brings back so many weird memories and I am super anxious about what fandom he's going to attach himself to next.

I’m crawling out of my own skin thinking about this involving the actual actors. Passing away. It’s just too much.

Funny how Janine wrote a whole book that’s essentially “woah is me I did so much for these people :(“ but essentially only ended up exposing herself as a cruel and miserable human being, she and Andy should both lose internet access forever. I feel so bad for Diamond having to deal with emails from a grown woman who is literally a wealthy doctor. Two can play at that game. Get rubella Janine.

1:39:31 I always think I can't be shocked anymore, but those emails Janine sent Diamond had my jaw on the floor. Her harassing and threatening a young, manipulated cult survivor...and being proud enough of it to publish it in her book. I was sick to my stomach

"When a fan hits the shit" is an amazing title for a book about fandom drama and I'm so sad it got claimed by someone like Jeanine. Also Abby's mom is awesome, she was like the only happy part of this story. I think part of me died at the end of the video when you said Andy did it again.

This makes DashCon look like a well planned success.

Ok, I knew about Jeanine’s lashing out at others, I knew she was transphobic, and I knew she was cruel to other victims but hearing you describe all that she said makes me livid. Also, I hadn’t realized till now but she had to be at least 5-10 years older than everyone. It makes her attack on Diamond and Abbey even more wicked. God, it concerns me that she's a doctor. How does she handle domestic abuse victims? LGBTQ+ people?

“i’ve just been outed to my parents as not only a lesbian but a slasher” he’s so real for that

I did some further reading on Abbey's blog-- she seems to be living a good life! I am sad to report, however, that Bob passed away ten years ago, in 2013. Rest in peace Bob, you seemed like a cool dude.

Its so scary how close to being in this circle i was. Not sure if it's touched upon here but after Andy left the LotR fandom, he migrated to the Harry Potter fandom and created a wildly popular fan fiction based on students who were stuck at Hogwarts during the time the death eaters took over, i believe it was called the DAYDverse? Same weird behavior ensued and tangled more people into this web of cringey chronically online bullshit. WELL HE THAN expanded his horizons to the SUPERNATURAL FANDOM (can you guess which fandom i was?), more specifically, the Destiel fandom, which i at the time was also pretty invested in, not nearly in the scale of others, but i was part of an EXTREMELY modest fan podcast dedicated to Destiel. Well turns out i was really close with people who were themselves REALLY close to Andy, and i had actually talked to him only twice very briefly (constantly called me Princess... didn't sit right with my soul, i was 17/18). I had no idea about Andys previous incidents at all, and he had gotten my friends to believe that he was innocent and would convince their friends(like me) he was innocent. But even than i knew he was min-maxing being the perfect fandom leader, he attached himself to Misha Collins and was an AVID participant of GISHWES and all of the popular destiel fans were on his scavenger hunt team(a lot of them were my friends and some of them were members of our modest destiel podcast). The last interaction i had with him was when MY PHONE NUMBER WAS GIVEN TO HIM by people in the destiel circle, and he begged me to go to a GISHWES event because none of them could go and i lived closed to it and he... really didn't want to hear me tell him no, which i did and than right after that blocked his number, i can tell he was used to people bending over backwards for him and i was just so disinterested it frustrated him, and i definitely feel like i was painted later as 'not a big enough fan' to be a part of my friends circle anymore where it involved him. Honestly i didn't care much about it at the time, i had a very strict relationship with the internet even then so none of this fandom wank or obsession really effected me. But oh my God did this video just unlock deep dark memories of my cringey fandom tumblr past 🤣

he was kicking around the critical role fandom a while ago! i was young (18) and a bigger name fan at the time (fic writer and gifmaker as well as a mod for the unofficial discord) and just thought he was a cosplayer and was briefly mutuals, but older fandom friends recognized him and DRAGGED ME AWAY and raised the alarm about him. i am eternally grateful to this day knowing i was that close to him but they realized.

Haven't watched the video yet beyond the first minute but I'm LOVING these disclaimers up front! I read the book about this situation some years ago, and the emphasis on "he LIED about being a MAN" was so deeply frustrating. Andy is a dangerous person and I'm glad more people will be learning to avoid him by watching this video, but the transphobia is totally unnecessary.

there's something kind of iconic about going to the Social Security office and declaring yourself a Pagan Cult baby for the sake of your transition-related legal name change. what a bonkers story.

Years ago I fell down an andythanfiction rabbit hole which led me to a Harry Potter fan fiction podcast interviewing the man whilst he did a severely upsetting Irish accent and got really intensely nasty at one of the hosts who didn’t like how he represented snape. This genius work of video essaying sent me looking for it again. Potterficweekly episode 87 it’s worse than I thought. Ta for the memories!

Oh my god, the revelation that Abby's mom had been keeping an eye on her and that whole time almost made me tear up ;-;. It couldn't have been easy for her, to just stand back and wait for a call, but she loved her so much she was willing to wait. And that love was what helped Abby to realize that she did not deserve to be treated so poorly. I'm glad there are some heroes in this story. UGH my heart.

'Nurturing mother goddess that manifests as Pippin' is a hell of a sentence to be listening to when you're taking a sip of tea

Despite all the insanity you have got to admit trying to kill your dead named version of yourself and register as a whole different person is metal as hell

The part where Abby's mom was keeping tabs on her the whole time to make sure she was safe, and was just waiting for Abby to call and ask for help made me cry a little bit. Was not expecting to cry over a video about a lord of the rings fan website that existed before my time on the internet, geez.

Well whatever else you can say about this mess, Sean Ashton is an absolute saint. I hate that his kindness was abused like this

If I had a nickel for every time Strange discussed a manipulative, narcissistic cult leader who lied to the police, changed their name, and was obsessed with someone named Abbey, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

This video continuously shocked me with Sean Astin's willingness to cooperate with these people.

I heard “Andrew Blake” and “cult leader” early on went…wait a second, this sounds awfully familiar. Then you started talking about others and it sounded even more familiar. When I heard that last sentence about there being another one, I was positive it was gonna be the Final Fantasy House - but no! Apparently this has happened at least three times, and not even all by the same person!

Diamond's story broke my heart. Finally escaping what sounds like a religious cult and abusive upbringing and finding what was essentially a new family in the Bagenders, doing everything she could to support their life and their goals, and ultimately being so heavily psychologically abused by a person she cared about deeply to the point of effectively a complete mental breakdown, being isolated and villainised by former friends for things she didn't do. Plus from the sounds of it she had to face coming out of it almost completely on her own. From the epilogue it sounds like she's doing better but I hope she finally gets the life she deserves. Also like. Pertaining to the former friends, You have to be a particular type of unlikeable to be featured in a story where you were scammed by a psychologically abusive cult leader and still come off as part of the problem, Janine.

I just get more and more mortified as this story goes on, especially in them including Sean Aston, who just sounds like an extremely genuine and sweet guy. I am baffled at every opportunity they had to work with him 😭 I just wanna like apologize to him and I wasn’t even aware of this situation an hour ago. Not to mention all the other actors they worked with/bothered. The whole story is just horrifying

Holy shit. I genuinely thought I was the only person alive whose manipulative fandom partner used "you have DID" as an abuse tactic. Learning that somebody else out there went through it was weirdly comforting. Speaking from personal experience, it is terrifying. When you trust your partner that much, and you're spending every single free moment with them, you get really sucked into everything they say. You start believing and acting out their narrative, which becomes a twisted form of "proof" that you are crazy. It's disorienting, and destabilizing, and scary as hell. My ex never tried in earnest to make me believe I was forgetting things, thank god, but the whole description of assigning different alters to different emotions/facets of personality is dead on. That's exactly what happened to me. I've noticed that intense fandom spaces seem to draw in a weird amount of manipulators, pathological liars, and groomers. Which sucks! Because fandom also attracts a large number of people who are incredibly vulnerable to psychological abuse (due to neurodivergency, isolation, overactive imaginations, queerness, or any combination thereof). Strange has definitely touched on this in other retrospectives, but there's a lot of groupthink/morality policing in fandom spaces. Which, on its own, is already concerning. But I think it's at its most dangerous when it intersects with the "anything goes" philosophy of many fandoms (especially in regards to erotica, interpersonal boundaries, and internet safety in general). Taken together, they can quickly become: "We can write anything we want, conduct our friendships however we want, interact with celebrities however we want, and if you question any of it, you're an ableist misogynist who hates everything neurodivergent women hate". And I agree, fully, that misogyny has led to some serious double standards when it comes to male vs female fan activities. But, in a weird way, I think that it has also shielded certain female-dominated fan communities from more meaningful criticism and examination. If a fandom is written off as "just silly girl stuff for silly nerd girls", nobody looks too closely at the insane amount of grooming, abuse, and harassment that go on. If everyone who feels uncomfortable or suspicious of certain content/behaviors is automatically assumed to align with extremist traditional killjoys, nobody ever feels confident enough to speak up. And when we picture an abuser, we don't picture an excitable teenage girl, a socially awkward young woman, or a dorky housewife. Or even a trans man. Especially not a small, young, geeky trans man (speaking as a small, young, geeky trans man). We're much more likely to view those people as potential victims, or as so ditsy and out of touch that they'd be unable to pose a real threat anyway. That underestimation, paired with the normalization of some really weird shit, and the dogpile-style harassment of any naysayer, means that a lot of red flags go missed when they happen within the context of fandom. I know for a damn fact that if I'd been in any other online space (as opposed to anime Tumblr), and someone engaged with me the way my ex did, I'd have been really grossed out and just blocked them. Especially if they happened to be a cis male. But I felt so guilty over my suspicion and discomfort that I just repressed all of it and told myself I was being ignorant and problematic. I'm ten months out, and it's still hard for me to know if I'm being dramatic or unfairly judgmental when I condemn certain things she did. Because they were silly! Because a lot of them were confined to our special fictional world! Because no real people were truly hurt! All the children she wrote about were fictional! Adult women don't groom adult men! And all of her behaviors were considered fairly normal by the fandom's unspoken rules (never mind that they'd have been super creepy and alarming if done in any other environment). Like, if a man I'd been chatting to online started spontaneously sending me very explicit photos, and asked me to RP graphic sex scenes between 14 year olds, and assured me that it was "normal" and "not sexual at all", I'd have been incredulous, massively creeped out, and just blocked him. I'd probably have deleted my damn account. Instead, because she was a sweet and awkward college girl, and none of the content she made or consumed featured real people, I second guessed all my reservations. I trusted this woman so much that I moved across the country for her not once, but twice, wrote incredible amounts of creepy porn with/for her (often, swear to god, while she was actively on the job, teaching 3-4 year olds), and let her convince me that we were soulmates, reincarnated to be together. Towards the end, she had me believing that I was an involuntary age regressor suffering from DID and/or BPD. I truly, truly believe that the lack of respect for fan communities is at least partially to blame for how these manipulators (Ms. Scribe, HivLiving, Andy, the crazy Snapewife people, my ex, etc) get away with their BS. The tendency to dismiss these situations (and people) as ridiculous hinders meaningful conversations about recognizing and preventing abuse. And we need to have those conversations! Desperately! Internet cultures change so rapidly, and online fandom is such a new phenomenon, that we truly have no idea how the fuck to participate in a healthy way. There's no agreed-upon framework for how healthy fandom friendships should operate (how much you should trust people you've never met irl, how fast online friendships should move, how much personal info you should share, etc). There's no understanding of what types of smut are acceptable, when or if it is acceptable to incorporate smut into your friendship, or how to navigate setting boundaries when it comes to the creation and consumption of smut. (I hate that I have written that sentence, my god.) And I do think a lot of the permissiveness comes from that same place of not taking afab people, women's sexuality, and therefore, fandom, seriously. Women and neurodivergent people are considered so weak and helpless that nothing they do is "threatening," or "alarming". It's just "weird". It's just "dorky". And it's a hell of a lot easier to get away with shady shit when people are too busy laughing at you to believe you could ever be or have an actual problem. Maybe if we took fandom more seriously, we could establish some healthy, acceptable norms, expectations, and boundaries. Maybe we could hold actual discussions about internet safety and what warning signs to look for without it feeling like an ironic joke. Maybe more victims could come forward without feeling embarrassed about their participation in "shameful" and "immature" hobbies like fanfic and fanart. Maybe we could be appropriately alarmed by the abuse that too often takes place. And maybe, hopefully, we could prevent some of it from ever happening to begin with. TLDR: I have a lot of feelings about this. It's late and I'm a bit stoned, so I'm not sure how coherent I've been. But yeah. Thank you for really acknowledging the level of fucked-up that was Andy's behavior, and not just dismissing as a funny story it the way other video essayists might've done.

Bruh if I pissed off Samwise Gamgee and he spoke sternly to me, I'd have to seriously reconsider my life

so far i'm only about halfway through the video but i'm already squirming with secondhand embarassment watching these people fumble MULTIPLE events and be so unprofessional and disrespectful in the presence of their favourite actors. It can't possibly get worse than this, right? Edit: OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD JESUS CHRIST

janine: what's the point of having 2 mastercards if i never use them? janine months later extorting a young cult survivor with no support system: it's my BUSINESS to ruin your life unless you pay me back my doctor money, hope your friendship with the older people in your cult who held power over you was WORTH it

Mindhole this Mindhole that- "This brings us to the one year anniversary of 9/11" is the transition that sucker punched me Can't wait for the unholy Thanfiction sequel - Harry Potter Edition

"And it was around this time....sigh... that VB revealed his psychic abilites to Abby" the fact that this is only *eleven minutes* into the video, wooh boy, we are in for a wild ride

As an organization, BOE is impressive. Imagine having what is basically like seven LOTR dashcons on your resume. Just incredible!

Shoutout to Abbey's mom, I am so impressed by everything she did behind the scenes to prepare to take care of her daughter when the time came

As a South Carolina native, I want to say that Jeanine is either lying about relocating sea turtle eggs or admitting to breaking the law. You're not allowed to relocate sea turtle nests in this state. You can rebury eggs that have become exposed or are beginning to wash away perhaps from being buried too close to the water, but that's it. We're not even permitted to open the nests if there's a hurricane incoming, so she shouldn't have been messing with those sea turtle nests.

omg "an extra named Bret McKenzie" that's BRET from Flight of the Conchords!!! Maybe he wasn't famous then, but a couple years down the line he was a legit celebrity working with Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi.

Amidst everything else about this saga, Bob pitching pre-megafame Flight of the Conchords to play at Tentmoot and Andy dismissing the idea out of hand is an underrated moment. On par with telling the Beatles “guitars are on the way out”

The way my heart dropped when you said “Andy Blake.” I knew of him from the Harry Potter and Supernatural fandoms. I never got tied up in his cult shit, but I do remember other people warning me away from him and reading his fanfic. It was basically torture porn.

the huge sigh of relief i breathed when you said Abby underestimated her mom. ngl i teared up when you said she had been keeping an eye out for her daughter all these years and educating herself of cults and the abuse her daughter likely faced. i can't imagine what it was like for her to get that call from Abby, or for Abby to hear her mom be so supportive

I would've named the book "when shit hits the fandom" but I guess leave it to a terf to fuck up the clever title

Fun fact: "Kalimac Brandagamba" really is Merry's actual name according to Tolkein. It's complicated but basically he pretended to be translating the books from Westron, so he "translated" Kalimac into Meriadoc, which is an actual Celtic name. wheels within wheels...

I want to feel bad about Janine, but like... she was kinda completely awful to Diamond and Abby. Like, I get that the loans and the money were terrible and I empathize with that, but the threats and such were just... the worst? Like, that is terrible. Especially considering the brainwashing going on behind the scenes. Also she is transphobic??? And like, Andy sucks and is the worst, but like... dont be transphobic???

Don’t co-sign anything for anyone unless you’re willing to accept the full responsibility of it falling through. Same goes for loaning money to people.

As someone who worked in a convention for over 7 years *man* does this whole thing make me want to fucking evaporate. I cannot begin to go on about all the meetings, the anxiety of getting guests and planning events, and the constant stress of the weekend of and wondering if the numbers are as good this year as they were last year and oh god can we sustain this an- My point is, it's so much work, and I die from second hand embarrassment from the absolute mess that BitOfEarth was. I've seen mini conventions that run in bowling alleys, it's not big but you can feel the passion behind it and the people running it know what they're doing and have realistic expectations. Hearing that a group this small was expecting, 4,000 attendees? In LA? My brother in Christ you'd be lucky to 400, 140 at most if you advertise well and budget accordingly. I've also been a part of a con that fell flat on its face because one of the heads was a fuck-up and the other was a vet who had unrealistic expectations. This just hits me hard, man. Also Janine, real fucking heel turn in the second half not gonna lie.

Æons mentioned multiple times how this is a weird grift cause theres no profit. The profit, as discussed by the end, was purely immaterial. It was control. People like that get off on it. I've met people like that, even got horror stories myself, and it's horrible. They'll do anything to have control over you, even if it means pushing you to suicide attempts.

To this day, reading Abbey's autobiographical telling of that night spent on the border moves me to tears. Her bird named Boo (the one Andy would later attempt use against her, because of course he did) really gave her so much strength and I am so happy she had him. I believe she still has his body preserved in a touching diorama, which might seem morbid but hopefully serves as a reminder of how she was able to overcome her hellish experience.

It’s amazing that Janine lucked out of being the main villain because of the dude that lied about being on the run from his IRA family and started a cult about him having a psychic connection with Hobbits

28:39 oh god i can imagine this situation of them acting like Elijah Wood is possesing them and the theater kid energy is off the charts

Insulting someone for their gender, race, physical appearance, identity, etc is the MOST low hanging fruit. Address their behavior, the thing they actually control, not their personhood. When we demonize people we reduce the pain of their victims.

This is one of those stories that really makes you realize that you sure can do whatever with your life. I personally do not want to follow in Andy’s footsteps, but man. He sure is living his life in a way that never would’ve occurred to me

Man, theres so many sinister details to this too. Like Andy convinced Abbey she had been abused by her parents and coached her into writing a letter to them accusing them of horrible things. One of his Others was Elrond, who was Abbey's special guide and became a father figure. When channelling the children from 1944, Abbey was like their mother, so she felt she couldn't cut Andy off because that would mean losing her father and children too. She posted pictures of notes and letters from the children (written using Andy's body of course) and its soooo creepy.

I was a “Wanka” - someone who hung out at Fandom Wank - when all this went down. I remember the initial posts from Jeannine, her discovering Fandom Wank herself and often coming over there to laugh until she got mad we wouldn’t let her keep misgendering Andy. She eventually got banned? I think? When she made the shooting death of one of Andy’s friends a Fandom Wank post and was almost gleefully reporting it. The woman was not normal. I understand being upset you lost money, and I can even understand her vitriol at Diamond about the loan - if you co-sign a loan and the person defaults on it, it tanks your credit too - but what started as bizarre wank turned into an over a decade long crusade for this woman. Not that Andy is a great person by any stretch, he’s not at all, but Jeannine was relentless, which like Abbey said, is just pushing Andy further into his delusion with his chosen people.

This was such a wild ride from start to finish. I was a kid in the Portland area when Project Elanor was going on. My mom helped run a separate (non-cult) fan group that was also helping out with the garden project and we were both there helping with the landscaping. Honestly my mom did a huge bulk of the work (she's a complete legend in a garden!) Sean Astin was wonderful and most of the people there who actually did the work weren't even from Bit of Earth, they were from my mom's LotR fan network of local friends, so I had no idea that Bit of Earth has spearheaded it (though wow I remember Andy and remember my mom kinda herding me away from him lol). When it fell into disrepair a few years later, I remember my mom saying it was because the people who were supposed to maintain it "had flaked." I don't know if she knew about the cult thing, but it makes sense now why they didn't follow through on taking care of the garden after it was planted. That plot of land now has much simpler landscaping that's easy to maintain and the beautiful tree is gone. Excellent video! This is so well researched and totally threw me for a loop when I started hearing about events I'd been to with my mom and realizing I'd met this guy.

i might actually not be strong enough to finish watching this. the real involvement of the actual actors is literally sending me into hell everytime they're mentioned. usually fandom stuff is contained into its own septic tank online, at most an awkward question at like meet-up or something. but the crossover into irl actual interaction with real (ACTUALLY NICE? WELL MEANING?) people, who are donating time and generosity, and giving the benefit of the doubt to genuine goobers.... listening to them getting sucked into this radioactive vortex of lotr forum mania and seriously outragious behaviour -- i can't. it's been a long time, i'm a web vet fr, but i'm cringing so fucking hard. i tried fast forwarding. double speed. it's literally crushing, it's so fucking juicy but i'm not strong enough oh. my god. oh my god. strange why

Andy Blake: and so, i do not feel over bold in making a request- Me, watching this video for the 8th time: and you truly never will