I've recently received a few asks about the liquidation sale happening at the costume shop where Andy used to work. Basically, a combination of factors including the pandemic, the strike, debt, and the sudden death of one of the owners made it impossible for the surviving owner to continue running the business. Now the investors want their money and have demanded that he liquidate the shop's inventory and equipment. Before the sale began, the shop had over 400,000 costumes and items of vintage apparel in its inventory; I'm not sure what's left now. The major concern is that whatever doesn't sell is going to be sold by the pound to the rag house and will most likely end up in landfills. Despite no longer being an employee, Andy has volunteered to handle the social media side of things and is tweeting almost non-stop about the sale.

The sale is legit. Yes, Andy has a decades-long history of lying and catastrophizing, but all of the above is true and has been publicized on various media outlets. I cannot vouch for every detail that he shares about people showing up or not, how much money they need by whatever date, etc., but the basic story as I've summarized above is accurate.

I got one ask from a person who's considering being a remote volunteer for the sale--I don't know whether you want me to publish your tumblr name, so I'll answer here. There's no reason to worry that you'll put any shoppers at risk by volunteering to help with the sale. Andy won't be there and he isn't getting any money from it. You would be the only one potentially at risk, as you have to contact Andy via social media in order to volunteer. I generally advise people not to reach out to Andy, but I also understand your reasons for wanting to help with the sale. Ultimately, it's up to you. Whatever you decide, I would not recommend staying in touch with him once the sale is over.

hi tea! sorry for bugging you twice in a row, but do you happen to have any links to padawns/padawansidoius andy’s live journal where he posed as Elijah Wood?

I’ve been looking everywhere and everything is like “it exists”, i just wanted to dive a little deeper into that aspect

thanks so much,

concerning-aragorn

Andy cosplaying as Viserys is so on the nose it's almost funny. That said, after mulling on it awhile, I think Abbey's right on the money; no correct archetype for him to latch onto. Additionally one of Andy's primary fandom contributions seemed to be meta which means he had serious competition in regards to the GoT fandom. Also, maybe off the mark here, but one of the feelings I got from DAYD is that Andy really liked adding "adult" or "mature" events 1/2

These are all really good points, Anon. Thanks for the insight!

I saw a few posts about Andy trying to get into the GoT fandom but never seemed to take off, do you have an idea why?

I wish I had a good answer for you. Andy made the occasional Game of Thrones headcanon post, did at least one art and one cosplay commission, cosplayed as Viserys and the Knight of Flowers, and put together an elaborate GoT-themed feast. The latter got the most attention on Tumblr, but that was only about 200 notes. I'm honestly not sure why, but for whatever reason, he never got a strong foothold in the fandom.

Hi Tea, I’ve been researching Andy a lot lately and was wondering if you had any good sources for his pre-LOTR days (Strwriter/Voagerbabe). I’ve been struggling to find good links and sources for that era.

I love your blog and it has been an incredible source for me, thank you for the work you do.

Thanks, Anon!

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of good sources out there for Andy's early fandom activity. As far as I know, all of his Sharpe and Horatio Hornblower messages were lost when Yahoo! killed Yahoo! Groups. His old Usenet posts are still floating around, though. If you Google alt.startrek.creative, alt.tv.due-south, or alt.tv.due-south.creative, you can then search the archives for Strwriter or Voyagerbabe. @notreallyhappeningtoday has also shared some highlights: 1998 | 1999 | 2000.

There's also this document, written by someone who knew Andy pretty well in the Star Trek: Voyager fandom. (Note that it refers to Andy by his birth name and with she/her pronouns.) The writer describes her interactions with Andy, his parents, and his sister; the introduction of Voyagerbabe/Ciyerra Tallaver to the Voyager fandom; Voyagerbabe's horrifying (and utterly false) backstory; and the death of an almost-certainly-fake boyfriend.

Hey Tea, is there a list somewhere with all the urls of the various warning blogs about Andy that have existed over the years? Reading the timeline reminded me of the existence of watchfulnonny who I'd completely forgotten about! That got me thinking about the art blog whose name I can't remember and also one set up by some Supernatural fans. And one using a white theatre mask as an avatar which I think was different to the Supernatural one.

@kumquatwriter

@1purp0se-blog

@tracerthanfiction

@notreallyhappeningtoday

@watchfulnonny

Thanks so much for compiling all of Andy's tweets together — I had no idea just how OFTEN he was tweeting @ the Critical Role cast. Would you say he was genuinely angling for some kind of costuming job with them? (The way he kept mentioning he was moving to LA soon, wanting them to see his portfolio, etc.) I'm sure the cast are good @ recognizing weird/disturbing fan behavior, but they've partnered with or employed quite a few of their Big Name fans. If he'd wormed his way in—what a nightmare

I can't say too much because I don't have permission, but I'm 100% positive that Andy was trying to get costuming work with the CR cast. He was very serious about it. Luckily, they were warned about him before he could get too close.

I did say it would be soon...

Part VII of the timeline has just been posted, which means that the timeline is now current!

Whats the ETA on the next part of the timeline?

All I can say is, "soon"! I'm almost done uploading and linking all the screenshots, and then I have to go over the whole thing again to edit and make sure all the links are correct. It's a long and tedious process, but the end is in sight.

How did Andy pass his costuming course if didn't do the assigned work?

My understanding is that he did as much as he needed to get by. When it came to making things for productions, sometimes other people had to take up his slack or things just didn't get done. Or they got done badly.

Did Andy ever have any contact with or get to meet any of the Critical Role cast?

He met one of them briefly, but then they were warned about him and unequivocally cut ties.

Will we get more details about some of the things mentioned in the timeline preview in the actual timeline? Like examples of his unlikely personal anecdotes or what he did that got him reported to the college or what he did/said that was sexually harassing?

Unfortunately, I can't give specific details without making it easy for Andy to figure out who my source was. I distilled our conversation down to those bullet points and got clearance from them before adding it to the timeline.

Timeline update

I'm currently working on part VII of the timeline, which will span from 2016 to the present. (Or close to the present, anyway, and I'm not sure yet how I'm going to handle future updates.) This part is much shorter than the last one: Andy slowed down for a while after he started college, and although he is currently a very prolific Twitter user, not much of what he tweets is of interest. But boy, does he share a lot of memes about redemption narratives and about people refusing to believe you've changed! I've included maybe a third of those, and it still feels like a lot.

Here's a preview of the beginning of part VII:

January 19, 2016

This is Andy's first day at Virginia Commonwealth University. He majors in Costume Technology. According to a fellow student, while attending VCU, Andy:

Is Andy's claim of having long covid true or is it likely to be another scam/way he can get sympathy?

I don't have any evidence that it isn't true; all I know is what Andy shares on his Twitter (@CraftyCatDad).

Another lie

I just received an email referring to Andy's bio, as shown in this post of mine. From someone in the industry:

To clarify, Andy was working for a costume house until he was sidelined by long COVID, but it was not a "large" one. The costume house this person is referring to would be one that Andy worked for when he first came to LA.

The closest thing to a portfolio that Andy has, as far as I know, is his costuming Instagram. At least one of the costumes featured in it broke the first time the commissioner wore it and caused them extreme physical discomfort (unrelated to the breakage). I've heard that other people who have commissioned from Andy have had issues with their costumes that they've had to fix themselves, or pay others to fix.

Andy unpriv'd their twitter and they had another post blow up--- not sure why his posts of all things always blow up but he'll gain a few hundred followers each time before he deletes them for apparently being "too popular" but he deleted right after i QRT'd saying something along the lines of "woke up to andythanfiction in my 4u tab, what a morning" ----Now, I don't condone harassment but he's been gaining a following again from his 'helpful' posts and idk, that the shit he used to do and ick.

Yup, this has happened a couple of times recently.

Last month, Andy went viral for the Tracy Chapman thing--tweeting commentary on a woman's outfit at an awards ceremony--and freaked out and briefly made his Twitter private.

i’m somewhat new to the andy lore and i’m sorry if this is question is an overstep but like… do we know why he’s like this? like parental issues? trauma??? why is he the way that he is?

It's not an overstep, Anon, but unfortunately, I don't really have an answer for you. Pretty much everything I've read about Andy's early history came from Andy himself, so it's hard to know how much of it to trust, other than very basic, verifiable information. Even if I had a more reliable source, I'm in no way qualified for that kind of analysis.

I'm going to quote from a post that I wrote several years ago about my own abuser, whom I refer to as X:

X isn't exactly like Andy, but I think this fits well enough. I hope it helps somewhat.

Can you give me a run down of Carlanime/Necromommycon's relationship with Andy?

I'm just going to call her "Carlanime" throughout because it's easier and less confusing. This is not comprehensive; it would be ridiculously long if I tried to link everything she ever said about Andy.

On February 22, 2005, Carlanime emailed Turimel about Chris/"Rennie Gade", the Marine sockpuppet that Andy had brought into the Bit of Earth Yahoo! group in 2002. She pointed out that the originating IP addresses for one of Andy's messages and one of Chris's were one digit apart, which strongly suggested that they were the same person.

Carlanime apparently continued to follow events related to Andy over the years and posted about him occasionally on her LiveJournal (LJ).

On May 21, 2011, Carlanime emailed Turimel a copy of Andy's "eulogy" to Brittany, which he had posted publicly in the DAYD Facebook group. This is how Turimel found out about Brittany's murder and Andy's plan to make the New Zealand hike in her memory.

During the spring or summer of 2011, Carlanime started working on a murder mystery novel starring a character based on Andy.

The podcast is called This Week in Fandom History. And I thought that claim was inaccurate. They specifically said Little Sam wasn’t real and it confused the hell out of me because normally they seem to be drawing heavily from your timeline so I thought I’d go to their obvious source and ask.

Yeah, Little Sam is a real person, although that's not her real name. It looks like they were confused and thought she was one of Andy's Others.

Here's a link to TWiFH's two-parter on Andy. I haven't listened to it yet; I'm going to try to get through it tomorrow.

I'm half an hour into the first This Week in Fandom podcast about Andy and don't envy you trying to fact correct it!

Despite claiming to use Abbey's blog (and very obviously your timeline) as sources, the presenters somehow don't know seem to know really basic things about the story like whether Amy Player was Andy's real name or not!

They say things are true that aren't, like Andy's claim in the Sharpe group that he lives in a place so rural he doesn't have access to a library, which people who grew up in the same area easily debunked.

The podcast is called This Week in Fandom History. And I thought that claim was inaccurate. They specifically said Little Sam wasn’t real and it confused the hell out of me because normally they seem to be drawing heavily from your timeline so I thought I’d go to their obvious source and ask.

Yeah, Little Sam is a real person, although that's not her real name. It looks like they were confused and thought she was one of Andy's Others.

Here's a link to TWiFH's two-parter on Andy. I haven't listened to it yet; I'm going to try to get through it tomorrow.

The podcast is called This Week in Fandom History. And I thought that claim was inaccurate. They specifically said Little Sam wasn’t real and it confused the hell out of me because normally they seem to be drawing heavily from your timeline so I thought I’d go to their obvious source and ask.

Yeah, Little Sam is a real person, although that's not her real name. It looks like they were confused and thought she was one of Andy's Others.

Here's a link to TWiFH's two-parter on Andy. I haven't listened to it yet; I'm going to try to get through it tomorrow.

I just heard a fandom history podcast say that one of the bagend-ers wasn’t a real person. But that isn’t accurate, right?

No, that isn't accurate. Abbey (@kumquatwriter) and the other Bagenders were all real. Out of curiosity, what podcast was this?

Why do you think that Andy specifically uses fandom to build cults/manipulate people, rather than more conventional religious or spiritual ideas?

This post is pretty long, but well worth a read, and gives a number of reasons why fandom has been the most convenient avenue for Andy to abuse people. Here are a few excerpted points:

As I noted in my reblog of that post, Andy did add elements of various religions into his cults, especially as a means of explaining how "channeling" worked and why it was a legitimate practice:

Hello, just a warning I’ve noticed him gaining traction again in BG3 fandom etc and with this tweet:

https://x.com/craftycatdad/status/1754957402984857688?s=46&t=vU4Y5j_XQUjEqLgzVKiOlg

Here's a clickable link to that tweet.

Andy followed that up with another claim that he totally doesn't want that kind of attention, oh nooo. He went private again, briefly. Of course his alleged fear of being noticed doesn't stop him from doing things like tagging artists on videos of Nuggie singing along to music.

I haven't seen Andy tweeting anything about BG3, but it's possible I missed it; he tweets a lot. Do you have a link?

your link in the important posts section to Viva la Cosplay is broken; just thought I'd let you know

Thanks, anon! It's fixed now, and so are a bunch of links on my tags page.

Hi! Thank you so much for compiling this blog as a resource and archive of this man’s behavior. I’m curious if you know how/why Andy left the supernatural fandom; if there was some kind of large fall out like with bit of earth, or if he just generated enough ill will that he moved on. Thank you for your time and effort!

I think a number of factors contributed to Andy's exit from SPN fandom. One was that he started attending community college in August 2013 and didn't have as much free time as he'd had previously. Another was that he was receiving an increasing amount of criticism and negative attention on Tumblr, especially throughout 2014: there was the cancellation of Camp Ouroboros, talk of his stalking Osric Chau at DC Con, the Finelookingcat incident, and considerable backlash in response to his decision to participate in GISHWHES again. In addition to all this, the word was out about his long history of abuse and bad behavior to the point that he issued multiple fauxpologies and assembled an FAQ about it. SPN fans had been warned about him so many times over that Andy probably felt it was getting difficult to draw new people into his orbit. I think he decided that he'd gotten what he could out of the fandom and that it was time to move on to something else. He'd already been putting out feelers in the Teen Wolf and MCU fandoms throughout 2014, as SPN gradually faded away from his Tumblr, and by August he'd switched gears to SJ blogging.

Do you think the reason Andy planned the cons

Was to stress out the people he was living with so they wouldn’t notice the things he was doing to them or do you think he actually thought he the cons would work out

The stress that trying to arrange all of the Bit of Earth events caused the Bagenders definitely made it easier for Andy to manipulate them, but I don't think that was the reason he planned the events.

I think that on Andy's part, the point of Tentmoot (as well as Hall of Fire and Lost Palantir) was for the Bagenders to meet celebrities, and for him to get credit for making that happen. He only seemed to care about the success of those events in so far as he could get celebrities involved.

It seems likely to me that Andy initially did believe that he could pull off Tentmoot, but there had to be a point fairly early on when it became obvious to him that there was a lot more work, money, and logistical detail necessary to put on a convention than he'd realized. Rather than admit that, he piled lie upon lie, made escalating demands of the Bit of Earth staff, and continued to try to get anyone involved who was connected to the LotR movies and could even remotely be considered a celebrity. He definitely knew that there was no way the convention was going to work out as planned, but I think he'd decided that if he could get at least a few celebrities to show up, that would be better than nothing and he could somehow lie his way out of whatever fallout there might be. He clung to that idea right up to the point that Turimel canceled the New Zealand actors' flight reservations.

I've recently heard that Andy was once in the NBC Hannibal Fandom during his Supernatural days and I'm wondering if this is true? It's a horrifying thought considering he thought he knew real medical knowledge

No, Andy was never involved in the Hannibal fandom. He absolutely hates Thomas Harris and the character Hannibal Lecter, as demonstrated in this response to someone trying to get him into the show.

Do you think Andy deserves redemption? If so why?

I don't think that's for me to say. It's up to the people Andy's hurt to decide whether he's earned any kind of redemption.

I'm curious abt your opinion on this bc you're very familiar with Andy & w/ cults in general-- Do you think Andy researched cult-leader techniques & set out to start one when he started luring in Abbey when he was 19? I find it unlikely that he just accidentally stumbled on the sleep deprivation --> unreality, planted false memories, & gaslighting methodology. But at the same time, 19 seems *so* young to intentionally set out to start a cult, I don't think I've seen another example (1/2)

I think Andy must have read something about cults or cult building techniques before he started working on Abbey. The way he went after her was textbook. There were plenty of resources online, even in the early 2000s, both for reading about famous cult leaders and for telling people what to watch out for.

Who is Andy??

…really?

Well, his list of aliases is in my bio. This page has links to my ridiculously long (and still in progress) timeline of his twenty-year history of abusing and taking advantage of people in fandom. Said history includes:

I've been going through some of the timeline after Strange's video-- maybe this is a silly question, but I have to ask, how did Andy go on such a long hike just two months after being shot in the leg? Was it just a minor wound, was he just grazed, or was he reckless in forcing himself to go? Do have any details about that? Just curious, since it was bugging me.

A bullet was lodged in Andy's ankle, but he was very fortunate in that it only did soft tissue damage. No tendons or bone were involved. The bullet was removed and by the time they started the hike, he was healed enough that it wasn't a big deal.

just curious— is he only on Twitter? not on Instagram anymore? I’m on embroidery and costuming Insta lol

Andy is active on Twitter and Facebook. He has two Instagram accounts, but hasn't used one in ages (amb_specialtycostumes) and has never posted on the other (craftycatdadmakes).

I dealt with something in the Kingdom Hearts fandom years ago that is eeirely similar to Andy's behavior. I need to know for my own peace of mind--has Andy ever been known to be active in that fandom?

No, Andy's never been involved with any video game fandom. I'm sorry you had to deal with that, Anon.

Hi. Diagnosed DID (by three professionals now). Not how it works. At all. While I appreciate you setting the record straight, it sucks that you had to add the bit about doubt in the psychiatric community. It’s already hard enough to experience bias in the medical field for reasons I can’t control. You can shame Andrew Blake for the million shitty things he’s done (and you should), but leave DID doubt out of it. I appreciate all you’ve done to document him and keep online spaces safe.

I'm very sorry, anon. As a layperson, it's really not my place to say what the psychiatric community thinks about anything, and that has nothing to do with Andy anyway. I need to work on staying in my lane. For whatever it's worth, I do believe that DID is real.

Andy has stated that he was sexually and emotionally abused by people in the theater department at the first college he attended, which caused him to have break with reality and contributed to his own abusive behavior. In one particular email to a DAYDian, which you linked to in the newest timeline, he references a particular incident that he claims is relatively well-known. Is there any truth to this (as far as you can tell) or more fake abuse allegations?

The way that email is written is confusing--deliberately, I think. Here's the passage that I think you're referring to, from this email:

Bear in mind that this email is only one of several versions of this story that Andy has told. In this version, Andy says that his break with reality started during puberty, when he allegedly began experiencing blackouts and missing chunks of time during which his body was under the control of "alters", for lack of a better word. He claims that these were more developed and more fully realized than typical DID personalities, had skills he didn't have, spoke languages he didn't, etc. Right.

So in the passage above, Andy is actually talking about more alters. One of them was based on the character he played at Colonial Williamsburg, and that one went away when he stopped working there and started college. He claims that a new alter showed up at that point, "the little asskissing theatre queen". Andy doesn't say that other people sexually abused him; he says that this alter did, by using his body without his consent to have sex with other people. This is the only time I've ever seen Andy make this claim and I have no idea what the truth of the matter actually is.

I do know that DID is a highly contested disorder in the psychiatric community, and that even if we assume that it is 100% real and valid, what Andy describes is not how it works. Nor does this description of his symptoms correspond to schizophrenia, his currently claimed diagnosis. I also know that Andy had a boyfriend during college (that's who he's referring to when he says the alter "almost married [him] off") as well as a brief relationship with a woman during that time (see Part II of the timeline). That's about all I can say on the matter, though.

Hi ! It's a very specific ask, but I just read this post, at Jeanine's LiveJournal, about the eulogy that Andrew wrote for Brittany Quinn. https://turimel.livejournal.com/103145.html There, Jeanine claims that Andrew's mother is also a flakey person and calls her "a horse thief, having stolen and then negligently killed a pedigreed Arabian mare". Is there anything that would back up this claim, or is it Jeanine alleging things and essentially saying "dude, trust me", or possibly trying to make Andrew's relatives look bad ?

(TW for massive transfail at that link.)

I have no idea. I've never been able to find any evidence pertaining to this allegation, and I've looked pretty hard. While she was writing and later promoting the book, Jeanine heard from a lot of people who were in some way acquainted with Andy and/or his family. My best guess is that the allegation came from one of them and that whatever happened was probably sometime during the '80s or early '90s. Without anything to support or refute it, I would take the "negligent horse thief" thing with several grains of salt. As a former horse owner/riding instructor/barn manager, I can tell you from long experience that there is no drama like equestrian drama.

(I don't consider the whole Andy thing to be drama. To me, "drama" implies that it's overblown and kind of ridiculous.)

Hi ! It's a very specific ask, but I just read this post, at Jeanine's LiveJournal, about the eulogy that Andrew wrote for Brittany Quinn. https://turimel.livejournal.com/103145.html There, Jeanine claims that Andrew's mother is also a flakey person and calls her "a horse thief, having stolen and then negligently killed a pedigreed Arabian mare". Is there anything that would back up this claim, or is it Jeanine alleging things and essentially saying "dude, trust me", or possibly trying to make Andrew's relatives look bad ?

(TW for massive transfail at that link.)

I have no idea. I've never been able to find any evidence pertaining to this allegation, and I've looked pretty hard. While she was writing and later promoting the book, Jeanine heard from a lot of people who were in some way acquainted with Andy and/or his family. My best guess is that the allegation came from one of them and that whatever happened was probably sometime during the '80s or early '90s. Without anything to support or refute it, I would take the "negligent horse thief" thing with several grains of salt. As a former horse owner/riding instructor/barn manager, I can tell you from long experience that there is no drama like equestrian drama.

(I don't consider the whole Andy thing to be drama. To me, "drama" implies that it's overblown and kind of ridiculous.)

ValancyRedfern here again -- I've been spending some time since Strange Aeon's video down the Andy Blake rabbithole again. And, having now seen again, from a distance, what he tried to pull and have other people pull on his behalf (remember chordak7? I didn't until last night!), I am now pretty convinced that he was behind lying about me. I don't want to publicly bring in the name of the person who believed the lie about me, but it was that I posted something insulting about them. (1/2)

I had to look back through a couple of people's archives to find that one, but now I remember. For everyone else, "chordak7" was someone who popped up out of nowhere in 2015 (under a different name) and decided they wanted to do some kind of true crime type writing about Andy. They said they were "drawn to dangerous people" and compared themself to Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs. First they contacted Andy himself; then they started asking Andy Awareness blogs very general questions about him, apparently without having read much of anything first. They were very persistent. The bloggers directed chordak7 to particularly informative posts of theirs and warned them that talking to Andy might not be a great idea. When they refused to do interviews, chordak7 got hostile and rude. A couple of months later, they contacted Abbey to apologize and made a weird and awkward attempt to make friends, while persisting in their intention to write about Andy. Abbey understandably was not receptive and chordak7 finally backed off after that, blaming the whole thing on Andy. It was all very strange.

From the interactions I saw between chordak7 and AA bloggers, and what I just read on their blog from that time, I wouldn't be surprised if Andy had been egging them on. They were very angry with him.

I also wouldn't be surprised if Andy were behind that lie about you. Mr. "I never send anons!" was caught sending an inflammatory one about an AA blogger back then, so who knows how many more he sent to stir shit behind the scenes. I don't blame you for being angry.

From Andy’s talk about his new name as mentioned in the timeline update it sounds like he knew Andrew Blake was the name of a porn director when he chose it. Since identity-hopping seemed to be a ploy to get away from his past (he’d already become known as a man as “Jordan”, it wasn’t like changing his first and last name was novel!), do you have any idea if that was chosen on purpose—sharing a name with a real person which, if googled, would bring a celebrity (and for that matter, porn) up first—including if you added terns like “Hollywood”, “California,” etc? Point being, searches lead to a guy who is obviously not Andy (born in 1948), the domain “andrewblake.com” is the filmmaker’s website, he’s famous enough that he’s won awards…

It’s still the case that if you search his name on tumblr instead of “thanfiction” porn clips/stills are the first thing to come up and I can only imagine it must’ve been worse when tumblr allowed NSFW content.

There’s a semi-known Andrew Blake who’s a scientist at Cambridge too but iirc in the timeline it said that Andy Thanfiction knew who the porn guy was. Is there anything more there or is it just tinhat stuff?

Andy and Abbey were still together when Andy legally changed his name. She has said that he started going by Andy when he took on the "duplicate soul" of Orlando Bloom, and that Blake was a shortened form of Blakewell, the last name of the "real" Pevensie children from the Chronicles of Narnia.

Having said that, there was a museum of erotica on Hollywood Boulevard from 2004-2006, and it's possible that Andy visited it and saw the name Andrew Blake there, but I believe Abbey's version of events. I think the fact that he shares a name with a famous porn director is just a coincidence.

From Andy’s talk about his new name as mentioned in the timeline update it sounds like he knew Andrew Blake was the name of a porn director when he chose it. Since identity-hopping seemed to be a ploy to get away from his past (he’d already become known as a man as “Jordan”, it wasn’t like changing his first and last name was novel!), do you have any idea if that was chosen on purpose—sharing a name with a real person which, if googled, would bring a celebrity (and for that matter, porn) up first—including if you added terns like “Hollywood”, “California,” etc? Point being, searches lead to a guy who is obviously not Andy (born in 1948), the domain “andrewblake.com” is the filmmaker’s website, he’s famous enough that he’s won awards…

It’s still the case that if you search his name on tumblr instead of “thanfiction” porn clips/stills are the first thing to come up and I can only imagine it must’ve been worse when tumblr allowed NSFW content.

There’s a semi-known Andrew Blake who’s a scientist at Cambridge too but iirc in the timeline it said that Andy Thanfiction knew who the porn guy was. Is there anything more there or is it just tinhat stuff?

Andy and Abbey were still together when Andy legally changed his name. She has said that he started going by Andy when he took on the "duplicate soul" of Orlando Bloom, and that Blake was a shortened form of Blakewell, the last name of the "real" Pevensie children from the Chronicles of Narnia.

Having said that, there was a museum of erotica on Hollywood Boulevard from 2004-2006, and it's possible that Andy visited it and saw the name Andrew Blake there, but I believe Abbey's version of events. I think the fact that he shares a name with a famous porn director is just a coincidence.

Was it ever determined whether the pagan priestess who supposedly initiated Andy into being a “rare lesbian paladin” actually existed?

There's no definitive evidence either way, but I think it's worth mentioning that Andy told Abbey that the pagan priestess was 87 years old (see p. 295 of When a Fan Hits the Shit), but told someone who interviewed him in 2014 that the priestess was in her twenties.

Personally, I have never believed she existed. I think she was a convenient fiction. Initially, she gave an air of authority to all the bullshit Andy was feeding Abbey about LotR being real, gods reaching out to them via the characters, etc. Later, she became a scapegoat that Andy could blame for making his alleged mental illness worse.

Part VI of the timeline is finished! It is available as its own Google Doc, or as part of the doc containing the entire timeline. Part VI covers 2013-2015, the years that Andy was most active on Tumblr.

Edit: Oops, I forgot to make the doc public! It's fixed now; sorry about that.

This is ValancyRedfern, whom you may or may not remember from years back. I've been reading your archives, and at one point Andy and defenders became very insistent that he did not do things just to hurt people. I made a post pointing out his getting one of the Daydians on that hike to lance a mosquito bite with a hot needle and then laughing about it, and I thought (and think) that he does do things just to hurt people. After I made that post, things got WEIRD for me on Tumblr. (1/2)

These are the messages I answered earlier, now published with permission. And I believe this is the post to which ValancyRedfern is referring (from April 8, 2015).

To the person who just messaged me: I'm not sure whether you wanted me to publish your messages, so this seemed like the safest way to answer you.

I do remember you, and I'm sorry that happened to you. I don't blame you for wondering--I would not be surprised at all.

Hey, costuming anon again - I was reading back on TF-talk a bit more and this was on the most recent page, have you/anyone else by any chance found confirmation of it or posted about it here?

https://tf-talk.dreamwidth.org/600.html?thread=1680984#cmt1680984

It’s a warning thread from late 2020 which also has allegations of having fucked someone over financially, lied to them on the job and stolen a dress? That would put his last serious industry fuckery that we know of three years ago, not five.

I can’t access the Wayback link (it won’t load for me) but googling the person’s handle they really do seem to be a costumer in LA since well before 2020…

I actually was able to find confirmation of this: here is a screenshot of a Facebook post about it, to which Andy responded.

In summary, this person sent Andy a dress to work on for an upcoming wedding, paid him in advance, and then Andy proceeded to ghost them for months as they tried to contact him by various means.

Is there by any chance a screenshot of the details of the shaman wizard battle in a better resolution? I cannot make any of it out

Here's a screenshot of another archived version.

In case that doesn't work, here's the full text of the LiveJournal entry in question. m_oquinn is Brittany, who wrote the emails from her and Andy. To avoid confusion, I've put the emails from Brittany and Andy in italics.

28th-Dec-2009 11:32 am

Okay, my friends, here is the sum total of the Astral Undead Shaman Wizard exchange. I am leaving out the contact info and also one entire email that contained extremely specific personal info about Cfc, who is completely innocent of all of this and had no idea this was being done behind her back.

The worst part of this? Cfc has kids, and Andy and company divulged her address and other personal info which should never, ever have been revealed. So that part is left out.

So, I found out about this whole drama through Strange Aeons and her video. But I have one nagging question and there is likely no answer but I'll pose it anyway. What is Andrew Blake/Thanfiction's ultimate end goal? Does he went to enter the friendship circle of celebrities he's a fan of? Does we want to start a Scientology-esque cult? Or is this just an effect of whatever ticks in his head where he can't go about anything without a lot of drama/complexity? What is the rationalization if any?

The only time I've suspected that Andy was trying to get close to celebrities for his own sake was when he was trying to get Molly to introduce him to the cast of Critical Role in 2018--he was extremely fixated on Taliesin Jaffe. Of course, Megan and friends of Andy's are/were fans of Critical Role, too, so I can't be sure that it didn't have something to do with them. Generally, when Andy does things involving celebrities, it's in order to make himself look important and connected, to draw other people closer to him, not because he's actually interested in the celebrity.

I don't see a Scientology-esque cult in Andy's future, both because that would be too much work and because Scientology is ultimately all about money. He doesn't care about money beyond what he needs to pay the bills and keep food on the table.

I think what Andy wants, more than anything, is control over people. He likes to have a core group who will do anything for him, believe whatever he tells them, submit to "trust tests" and the like without questioning him (i.e., when he changes stories to see if anyone will call him on it). He wants people to see him (and praise him) as a super-resourceful, wacky, creative, non-problematic, compassionate genius who knows a little something about everything and is The Most Fun. He'll take that however he can get it.

Whatever happened to Andy’s posse that made him turn up with no friends or place to stay in LA back in 2018? I’m trying to track the timeline, but Chris C and CFC seem to have still been on his side at that point, and he’s married to Meg, right? It just seems really weird that he turned up completely alone after two decades of constant house-and roommate-sharing, including in CA, claiming he had a (permanent?) job there.

At least on tumblr it seemed like necromommycon stayed online defending him into the void through 2019 even when he wasn’t on the site anymore and most of the AA blogs were almost entirely quiet, but that’s not the same thing as a friendship.

I know others are not the subject of the blog, but I’m trying to figure out if he’d dumped people over or if the remnants of the second cult are still going.

Well, the second cult was really the DAYDians, and that's well and truly over with. Others' opinions may vary, but I believe the posse was just a group of friends. Most of them, as far as I know, are sill friends with Andy.

I don't think Andy's decision to go to LA in 2018 had anything to do with the posse; I think he just really wanted to get there and start networking in-person as soon as possible. Meeting the cast of Critical Role may also have been a goal.

Andy claimed that he had a job in LA for the whole summer. In reality, what he had was an arrangement for him to work for a shop on an "on-call" basis when the owner needed an extra hand. The owner did not consider him to be an employee. He also didn't have a place to stay for the whole summer. His then-friend Molly had only agreed to let him stay with her for a week, but he free-loaded off her for another week on top of that. She then said that he may as well stay until the end of the month, but she wasn't happy about it. That was shortly before one of Molly's friends recognized Andy from Lord of the Rings fandom and alerted her, leading to his unceremonious eviction.

Same anon re: costuming. CW for weight gain/loss & mentions of EDs

Yes, just as a couple of examples of things which I’ve dealt with which sprang to mind reading about Andy’s history and made me go “yikes”, from school:

- When taking measurements, were taught to *ask* people if they wanted to know them or not (if not, we wrote them down but didn’t say it out loud). I once had someone say before I could ask, “Please don’t tell me, I’m recovering from an eating disorder and can’t know stuff like that”.

- Re: not commenting on weight, that included changes. I re-measured someone from a start of the first semester show to end of the second and she looked significantly different. She kept apologizing because her measurements were larger and finally said that she’d actually lost a bunch of weight because she’d been sick and that’s why she’d been smaller before. I stuck to saying I was glad she recovered, but she was clearly scared of being judged for how her body had changed.

Those are just two things, but thinking about how he habitually talks about weight gain/loss, fatphobia, beauty standards etc around women—the negging, backhanded compliments and lectures from 2018, but also some of the stuff he reffed in that thread (and further back the way those types of situations were exploited for abuse!)—you can see why I find it alarming to think about that being a voice of authority in the context of an industry where actors are (far more than in the context of an art school) consistently under insane pressure with regard to diet and exercise culture, often at the expense of health.

With regard to stunts and SFF/Adventure genres, see here: https://amp.theguardian.com/film/2016/jun/29/why-stuntwomen-are-in-more-danger-than-men

Follow-up Q from reading back on the timeline: is there a place on here/elsewhere where screenshots or Wayback captures from AB’s blog are, if such things exist? Since he deleted his blog (or possibly just made it private) there are a lot of dead links etc., or analyses of an original post which appears nonexistent.

PS thank you for still being here. I know a lot of AA bloggers are not, which is understandable because he seems to have gone quiet for a few years, but coming from someone on the West Coast who’s also trying to get into costuming, seeing the bullshit he’s pulled around the entertainment industry/film/TV, and then realizing that he’s also in fandom freaks me the hell out. I’ve met that ‘type’ before and body-shaming is such a rampant issue around costuming (and even tailoring more broadly) that day one of my education on the subject was “Do not ask a person for information about their body which you do not absolutely need; so not make comments on their body (including “compliments” on their figure etc); and put their physical safety and comfort as a top priority”.

I found your blog because of the Strange Aeons video and was sad to learn that much of the early bullshit happened in my hometown, but when I came back to this blog I was far more horrified discover that this person is also a serial sexual harasser and body-shamer not only had gone viral one here (the “cis people can get dysphoria” tweet went around costuming tumblr for obvious reasons) but also was/is in this industry. That is such a dangerous position to put him in, not just because he’s clearly a sexual predator, but because bad costumes regularly cause people serious injuries. This is especially likely to be the result of directors trying to make women look skinnier or otherwise “more attractive,” and the harm is often most serious in scifi/fantasy contexts where lots of stunts happen. Good costuming requires ETHICS when it comes to things like health, body image and, yes, gender. Mr. “Complimented his ex on her weight loss when she was literally starving because of him” should not be trusted with such a job ever imo.

I hope there are no dead links on the timeline--all the links on there should be to screenshots of Andy's posts rather than directly to his blog. There are definitely dead links in a bunch of my old tumblr posts, though.

As far as I know, the timeline is the only place to find a significant number of screenshots from Andy's blog. The Wayback Machine has captured some of it, but it's scattershot and some of those links don't work. archive.is also has a little bit.

I’ve been reading back through the blog and of all the apology posts I was most disturbed by Andy’s “admitting” that he had raped and sexually abused people, but then putting it down to mental illness. But I also noticed something about the limited stuff he admits to: it’s all things which likely couldn’t actually be prosecuted as rape, because, as he claims repeatedly, everyone he’s ever had sex with consented to it and didn’t know that it was an alternate persona. He admits to rape by deception (which nobody has ever accused him of) but the deception is ‘pretending to be someone who doesn’t exist’, which is again not something you could prosecute.

Do you think he does shit like that on purpose—only admitting to harm done when he can stop it from coming back to bite him in a major way? Or is it all just coincidence?

Yes, I believe Andy does that on purpose. The wording of his "confession" was very deliberate and he strongly and repeatedly emphasized his claims that he never did anything sexual to/with anyone who did not or could not consent. We know this is a lie, though, because Diamond has very clearly stated that she never consented to have sex with Andy. I don't think he will ever admit to that.

The First of Many Warning Posts

This is another extract from the timeline. The rather lengthy, bulleted analysis of Andy's response to an anon about the warning post doesn't actually appear in the timeline--I'm including it here so I can link back to it later.

February 25, 2013

Tumblr user F makes the first warning post addressed to the SPN fandom with regard to Andy, in response to an anon ask that refers them to Abbey's and Colleen Doran's blogs. F sends Andy a couple of private messages regarding these allegations, and when they don't receive an answer, they publish a response to the ask in which they include links to the posts the anon mentioned, as well as some other references, and suggest that people read them and draw their own conclusions.

Andy gets aggressive with F, referring to the content of the warning post as "scandalous allegations" that need to be removed or made private. He claims not to have received F's messages, chastises them for not calling him instead, and tries to get them to take the conversation to Skype or phone. F refuses, finding it disturbing that Andy has immediately asked for "personal, offline identifying information" from them, and says that any discussion between them will need to occur in public space. They later publish a message from Abbey and direct readers to her blog.

Andy responds to an ask about the warning post. In this instance, Andy doesn't tell many outright lies, but he does bend the truth quite a bit and ignores facts that are inconvenient for him. Taking it point-by-point:

Thank you for all your work on the Andy timeline project! Reading it over really helped me fill in the gaps/stuff I'd missed over the years. Are you still working on new parts of it? The post SPN years are where I really lost track of him, and would love to see it all put together in one place.

I am still working on it, yes! It's slow going for a number of reasons. In the earlier parts of the timeline, I covered mostly offline events, but for several years after the end of the DAYDverse cult, it's all about Andy's online activity. He was extremely prolific on tumblr, and a lot of what he posted was pretty fucked up in one way or another, so there's quite a bit to cover.

I posted an extract from the next part of the timeline a little while ago (The Wal-Mart Parking Lot Sex Incident) and I'll post another one shortly.

It looks like his current twitter (CraftyCatDad) has been cleared of recent tweets since Strange Aeons' video. Does he still have a tumblr or other social media?

I'm still seeing Andy's recent tweets on CraftyCatDad, but he's been pretty quiet lately. Mostly he's been retweeting other people or talking about his long COVID symptoms.

Twitter and Facebook are the only social media sites Andy is using right now, as far as I know, and he rarely posts anything publicly on Facebook. He made an Instagram for his embroidery (@craftycatdadmakes), but he hasn't posted anything there yet.

I just learned about all this from strange aeons. When i watched the video I thought maybe andrew had disappeared after Abby finally got out. However I've been diving into his cult and I found out that not only did it keep happening, but he managed to get someone killed. I feel horrible for Britanny specially knowing there was never reconciliation with her father. People like andre make me sick is sad that nothing can really be done legally to stop him

What happened to Brittany was horrific, but to be clear, I've never felt that Andy "got her killed". Brittany and a housemate were murdered by her ex, Jason, who then shot Andy through a closed door and killed himself. I believe that at most, Andy may have exacerbated an already very bad and dangerous situation that he probably didn't fully understand. But Brittany's death was the fault of only one person, and that was Jason.

The murder was related to Andy's Harry Potter fandom cult in that the cult was what got Andy and Brittany together, and in that Andy used Brittany's death to manipulate other members.

The Harry Potter cult was Andy's last true cult. What he had in Supernatural fandom was an extremely tight-knit friend group and a tumblr on which he tried hard to attract a following of vulnerable young people and exhibited a lot of very toxic behavior. He spent some time after that cosplaying Bucky (MCU) and repeating many old behavior patterns from his "channeling" days. In 2017 he showed up in Critical Role fandom, and when people made it clear he was unwelcome, he declared that he was leaving all fandom forever, only to spend the following summer trying to get someone close to the cast to introduce him. He's been pretty quiet since then. A lot of people are understandably unhappy that he's been working in Hollywood as a costumer, but as far as I know, he isn't up to anything sketchy, legally speaking.

This may have been pointed out already, but I think he's using the term "artificer" because it was used in Rings of Power. The Elf Arondir says “There are [healers among Elves]. But we call them artificers. Most wounds to our bodies heal of their own accord, so, it is their labor instead to render hidden truths as works of beauty. For beauty has great power to heal the soul.” Tolkien also uses it to mean "builder, smith, wright". I think he's doing an obscure call back to his LOTR days.

Oh, he does that kind of call back a lot, to the point that I long ago gave up on screenshotting every time he mentioned Gollum or "the Precious". It's not necessarily harmful, just gross.

In the notes to the post by @carriesthewind, though, @wednesdaysky suggested it was a D&D/Critical Role reference, and I think that's more likely the case. Andy played (possibly still plays) D&D and was really into CR for a while. Based on the way he talks about his approach to costuming, especially making new things out of everyday objects, I think Artificer is probably a class with which he identifies strongly. Having "a tool for every job and a solution to every problem" (per RPGBOT's description of the Artificer) is definitely how Andy would like to be perceived.

Oh, this fucking guy.

So apparently Andrew Blake (hereafter Andy), aka thanfiction, aka (now) CraftyCatDad, aka a whole bunch of other people over the decades, is back attempting to gain a(nother) following on social media.

Before I begin, a big thank you to @bemusedlybespectacled for identifying Andy as the author of this popular tweet thread, and spreading a community warning about him.

Unfortunately for everyone, Andy decided to post an (indirect) response. BemusedlyBespectacled and the truly incredible @theteablogger have already posted (excellent) discussions of his tweet thread. But his thread really pissed me off, and so I am going to do a breakdown of the some of the manipulation tactics he is using.

Unlike some other analysis posts I’ve made, I am not going to be looking at this thread in isolation – this is not a close reading within the four corners of our document. And that’s because, to give him credit, Andy is a good manipulator. I’ll be pointing out examples of this as I go through, but one of the tactics he is using in this thread is that a lot of it sounds reasonable outside the context of his history. While the extensive documentation of Andy’s history of abuse is both an independent good and useful to help warn people, the sheer amount of material can also make it difficult for a casual newcomer to know where to begin. This is particularly important when people point out behavior on Andy’s part that seems fine on the surface, but in context is part of a long history of a pattern of abusive and manipulative behavior.

One of the tactics that Andy uses is tailoring his narratives* to be simple and easy to fit within his target audience’s normal understanding of the world. He can present a straightforward and emotionally compelling narrative that completely mischaracterizes his history, but contains just enough truth that breaking down the lies and explaining what actually happened may require delving deep into the details of more than two decades of lies, cons, and abuse. And while some people will see the words, “LOTR hobbit cult”** and immediately drop everything to find out more, others will see the walls of text and bounce off completely – leaving them with, at best, the impression that there was a lot of weird drama in the past, maybe?

"Going private renders this site basically useless" ...only if your intent for twitter is to gain followers and engage with people who dont follow you andy. I have a twitter account thats been private for years and not only is the site still more than usable (...or at least as usable as twitter is capable of being these days) ive even still managed to make friends on there like. Thats suchh a cop out excuse its ridiculous. I'm sure his bext thing will be 'well if i go orivate people will say im trying to hide what im doing' or some shit but its really really easy to engage with social media in a way that doesnt lead to growing a following. Unless you are someone who isnt trying to avoid doing that.

He did go private recently, but it didn't take him long to make his account public again. This is a useful perspective; thanks, Anon!

obviously how he personally id's is up to him and ofc no one should deadname or misgender him (not that ive seen any of that other than like. old old old sources but certainly nothing recent) but in those tweets him claiming he has 'carefully not claimed to be cis' is frustrating bc he very actively has referred to himself as cis many many times. Maybe he just means like. Lately? But it is patently false for him to claim he has never id'd that way. After your most recent post i looked back thru some old posts of yours on here like yesterday and there is one where he explicitly is like 'no im not coming out as anything other my typical cis and straight' so this was fresh on my mind

This is an excellent point! Thanks, Anon.

And yes, many trans people (especially those who have transitioned a long time ago) identify as cis. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's disingenuous for Andy to claim that he hasn't id'd that way, especially since he has a history of making negative and harmful comments about the trans community, for which he has never apologized. (Not to mention his treatment of individual trans people--see the bottom of my "important posts" page for info about his 2018 visit to LA to read about that and more.)

Apparently Andy is back as "CraftyCatDad" on Twitter. Highlights so far include humblebragging about his follower count, explaining to all of us how best to be an ally to disabled people, and nursing a baby sparrow back to health (that he claims will be eventually rehomed as a pet to someone else, since he and his wife have cats – why it's okay for the sparrow to be there now is a mystery to me).

Andy recently changed his Twitter handle from andrewmblake, as this anon points out. Supposedly this is because he bravely goes toe-to-toe with literal Nazis on a regular basis and doesn't want his full name attached to it...but mostly he's been posting costuming "pro tips" and documenting his latest sparrow son. He got other Twitter users to buy all the supplies he needed for the bird faster than I've ever seen anyone crowdfund anything.

Timeline Part II, Redux

I have edited and updated the Lord of the Rings portion of the timeline to add a great deal more information gleaned from Turimel’s book and from other sources that I found after I initially posted it. It now includes some of Andy’s early explanations of the hobbit channeling, more on what happened with various Bit of Earth events, and a simplified explanation of Turimel’s airfare saga, among other things.

Here it is as a Tumblr post and as part of the Google doc with the entire timeline.

I'm glad to hear you're doing better! Going through the old timeline I noticed that Andy nearly always tagged his posts with "This Matters" was that a means to gain attention? Was it a popular tumblr tag at the time?

I'm not aware of "This Matters" being a tumblr trend; I think it was just Andy's way of adding emphasis and drawing attention. It may also have made it easier for him to find certain posts without having to dig through his archive every time he wanted to reblog one of his messages to troubled teens or something.

the fact that Andy's Critical Role favorite character is Mollymauk- the sweet amnesiac alter-ego of Lucien, a cult leader who got his entire friend group killed in a desolate wasteland by following voices that only he could hear and turning his back on everything outside his mental illness- is so fucking ironic to me. He stans the cult leader's alter ego, but he's just the manipulative, obsessive cult leader.

Oh, wow. I wasn't aware of Lucien before; thanks, Anon! That's creepy as fuck, especially given that several times, Andy has claimed that all his previous bad acts were committed by "Others" and that he's a completely different person.

For example, he blamed everything that happened with Bit of Earth on the Jordan Wood persona (the "duplicate soul" of Elijah Wood), and then "became" Andy (the "duplicate soul" of Orlando Bloom), who continued to run an abusive cult for several years. After Abbey left him, he kept the name Andy, but took on yet another persona, allegedly believing he was an Irish-American who'd fought on both sides of the Troubles and had a heart condition that would soon kill him. That persona was responsible for the DAYD cult and many of Andy's Tumblr shenanigans. A couple years into his time on Tumblr, he claimed to have realized that all of his memories were false and rediscovered his true identity, which was thereby absolved of blame for anything save (maybe) what he'd done during his earliest days in fandom.

Basically, at the same time that he claims to accept responsibility for his past, Andy wants everyone to see him as the sweet alter ego who did nothing wrong.

Also, the whole "desolate wasteland" thing makes me think of his and Abbey's attempt to walk across the Canadian border, and now I'm sad and creeped out.

Sorry to be so late, but I don't have a tumblr or twitter. I just saw your blog about the "The Wal-Mart Parking Lot Sex Incident". It sounds beat-for-beat about an encounter Andy blogged about on LJ that ended up with him breaking his promise to himself about not having casual sex and sexing some single mother on the floor of her apartment. This would have been in 2009, I think. I didn't say anything at the time, but it really felt like he was playing manly man to his audience.

Another anon:

I wonder if this was the same woman that he allegedly had oral sex with for six hours...

If you haven't listened to the podcast "Something Was Wrong", you're missing out. The first episode starts with the host saying that she's never heard another story like this. Within a couple minutes, I knew that I had--and so has anyone who's at all familiar with Andy's history. I should note, though, that if you've ever been in any kind of relationship with someone like that, it's likely to be very triggering.

NB: I'm only on episode 4, so I can't speak to any other stories the podcast might delve into after the first one ends.

The Wal-Mart Parking Lot Sex Incident

That’s a hell of a subject line, isn’t it?

I’m working on the timeline again for the first time in five fucking years. The last time I touched it, I got through the aforementioned incident and then needed a  mental health break. I did not intend for it to last this long. But a lot of big, complicated real-life things happened that kept me very busy, and when I did have any free time, sitting down with my latest embroidery project and a true crime podcast beat slogging through Andy’s old Tumblr posts hands down. I always intended to come back to it, though. Andy wrote and did some pretty fucked-up things from 2013 onward, and the fact that it was so long ago and much of it happened on Tumblr doesn’t mean that it isn’t important to know about now. There’s dogwhistle racism, rape apologism, transphobia, lies and fauxpologies galore, abusive behavior toward friends, creeping on much younger people, and more. I’m trying to be as concise as possible, but it isn’t easy. 

As sort of a preview, and to show that Part VI of the timeline really is underway, here are the entries for the Wal-Mart Parking Lot Sex Incident of March 2013. NSFW. Contains fatphobia and lookism.

2013 March 16 Andy writes that his “big problem with no” has caused him to have sex with a person he met at Wal-Mart, to whom he was not attracted in any way—in fact, he didn’t even want to talk to this person and hopes never to see her again. He says he did it “because [he] felt too guilty about how behind [he is] on [his] fanfic obligations and the fact that…[he] can’t call [his] friend when she’s sad.” This is, in my opinion, a passive-aggressive means of making people feel guilty for wanting anything from him as a writer or a friend. He claims that he has a history of doing things like this not because he needs validation, but because he selflessly wants to validate other people and give them pleasure. This story is questionable, to say the least.

Andy receives two anonymous asks that point out that he’d never mentioned his alleged history of ill-judged one night stands until he started watching SPN and started over-identifying with Dean. He responds by taking offense on Dean’s behalf and his own, invoking Brittany’s murder, and claiming that the sexual encounter at Wal-Mart was “in fucky consent territory”.

I hope you're doing okay!

I am, thank you! Several people have sent asks like this; I'm sorry I haven't answered before.

I was not doing well for a long time: my spouse and I lost one of our best and oldest friends last year, and it sent me into the worst depression spiral of my life. I've finally pulled out of it (thanks to a solid support network and changing my meds) and have gone from feeling like it was a super productive day if I managed to shower, to having more energy and better focus than I've had since college. Being able to get things done again is incredible!

Overall, life is pretty great, although I miss my friend and always will. My spouse and I both have careers that we're excited about and that present us with intellectual challenges every day. We've made some good friends where we're living now, so we actually have more of a social life than we did pre-pandemic. And I haven't seen or communicated with X (my abuser) in three years now. At this point, it's rare that I think about them at all.

Oh, and I am still keeping an eye on Andy's social media, albeit not as a "friend" or follower of Andy or anyone associated with him. Just the public stuff.

Sure, Jan.

The commentary in this tf-talk thread (these three comments in particular) about Andy’s claim that Ian McKellan hit on him is absolutely spot-on and everyone should read it.

Also, I would like to add that the original question was, “What older man would you seduce?” as opposed to a general celebrity question, thus making Andy’s interjection an even more blatantly performative attention grab.

Sure, Jan.

The commentary in this tf-talk thread (these three comments in particular) about Andy’s claim that Ian McKellan hit on him is absolutely spot-on and everyone should read it.

Also, I would like to add that the original question was, “What older man would you seduce?” as opposed to a general celebrity question, thus making Andy’s interjection an even more blatantly performative attention grab.

I'm not sure if you're still keeping track of Andy but I just found out he's still in LA, working in fx industry shops, and no one in LA knew he was still here. It seems like after the Crit Role stuff he found another group of nerdy industry people just far enough removed to not know him. There's a lot of us in the pro industry not comfortable that he's still taking advantage of our community, so we're trying to get the word out to each other.

Another Anon: “Heads up, that Andy Blake/Andrew Blake/Thanfiction dude is still in LA (as of 12/04/20) and is now working off and on for film industry Makeup FX shops. You probably have a larger audience than I do, so if you are able could you get the message out?”

Sorry, anons, I honestly thought the word was out that Andy was living in LA again. I announced it last June, but have posted very little since then. I also emailed a friend of Molly’s about it on the same day I made that post, so at least that group was warned.

Yes, Andy is still in LA. He and Meg are living there permanently: they’re married and have bought a house, thanks to a VA loan, although they’re currently in limbo because COVID has many buyers’ escrow processes dragging out forever. Meg is enrolled in college, which I mention only because people have expressed concern over whether Andy would prevent her from pursuing her educational and career goals. And that’s all I’m saying about her and about their relationship.

Andy is working in a professional costume shop and occasionally doing work for at least one more that I’m aware of. I will not be naming the shops because to the best of my knowledge, there isn’t anything nefarious going on with Andy’s employment. Do I think his motives for getting into this field in the first place were pure? Absolutely not. But do I have any evidence that he got involved with these shops under false pretenses, or that since 2018, he’s tried to use his work in costuming to get close to a particular celebrity or take advantage of anyone? No, I don’t. If I did, I would have posted it as soon as it came to light.

The owners of said costume shops seem to be happy with Andy and his work, and he has become close friends with them. Before COVID threw Los Angeles into chaos, one of them was going to have Andy open his own fabrication shop as a joint venture with his workshop in its new location. The other recently commissioned items from Andy for a livestreamed theatrical production, and they seemed to go over well. It appears to me (very much an amateur) from pictures I’ve seen that Andy is doing better quality work for these shops, and for other commissions, than he was doing at VCU, or for friends and commissions as recently as the summer of 2018. They’re not all knock-your-socks-off amazing, but definitely an improvement. I haven’t heard anything about a commission gone wrong, and if the pros he’s working with have any complaints, they haven’t come up publicly. As long as he’s actually doing the work, which all the evidence says he is, I’m reluctant to call that “taking advantage of [the] community”. At this point, he is part of the community, part of the industry. Even if I had the power to affect that, which I don’t, I wouldn’t want to, unless I had good reason to believe that he was using his job or reputation in the industry to hurt or take advantage of people. And as of this moment, I do not.

I'm not sure if you're still keeping track of Andy but I just found out he's still in LA, working in fx industry shops, and no one in LA knew he was still here. It seems like after the Crit Role stuff he found another group of nerdy industry people just far enough removed to not know him. There's a lot of us in the pro industry not comfortable that he's still taking advantage of our community, so we're trying to get the word out to each other.

Another Anon: “Heads up, that Andy Blake/Andrew Blake/Thanfiction dude is still in LA (as of 12/04/20) and is now working off and on for film industry Makeup FX shops. You probably have a larger audience than I do, so if you are able could you get the message out?”

Sorry, anons, I honestly thought the word was out that Andy was living in LA again. I announced it last June, but have posted very little since then. I also emailed a friend of Molly’s about it on the same day I made that post, so at least that group was warned.

Yes, Andy is still in LA. He and Meg are living there permanently: they’re married and have bought a house, thanks to a VA loan, although they’re currently in limbo because COVID has many buyers’ escrow processes dragging out forever. Meg is enrolled in college, which I mention only because people have expressed concern over whether Andy would prevent her from pursuing her educational and career goals. And that’s all I’m saying about her and about their relationship.

Andy is working in a professional costume shop and occasionally doing work for at least one more that I’m aware of. I will not be naming the shops because to the best of my knowledge, there isn’t anything nefarious going on with Andy’s employment. Do I think his motives for getting into this field in the first place were pure? Absolutely not. But do I have any evidence that he got involved with these shops under false pretenses, or that since 2018, he’s tried to use his work in costuming to get close to a particular celebrity or take advantage of anyone? No, I don’t. If I did, I would have posted it as soon as it came to light.

The owners of said costume shops seem to be happy with Andy and his work, and he has become close friends with them. Before COVID threw Los Angeles into chaos, one of them was going to have Andy open his own fabrication shop as a joint venture with his workshop in its new location. The other recently commissioned items from Andy for a livestreamed theatrical production, and they seemed to go over well. It appears to me (very much an amateur) from pictures I’ve seen that Andy is doing better quality work for these shops, and for other commissions, than he was doing at VCU, or for friends and commissions as recently as the summer of 2018. They’re not all knock-your-socks-off amazing, but definitely an improvement. I haven’t heard anything about a commission gone wrong, and if the pros he’s working with have any complaints, they haven’t come up publicly. As long as he’s actually doing the work, which all the evidence says he is, I’m reluctant to call that “taking advantage of [the] community”. At this point, he is part of the community, part of the industry. Even if I had the power to affect that, which I don’t, I wouldn’t want to, unless I had good reason to believe that he was using his job or reputation in the industry to hurt or take advantage of people. And as of this moment, I do not.

How are you doing?

I'm coping with the dumpster fire that is 2020 much better than I might have expected. This is largely due to finally being on the right combination of meds, taking a break from social media whenever the constant flow of rage- and despair-inducing news becomes overwhelming, and finding ways that I can help with BLM from home. (I have people in my life that are immunocompromised, so I'm going out as little as possible.)

It also helps that I have several major projects that were on hold for a long time because I was too busy to work on them and too anxious on the rare occasion that I had a chance. For example, I've finally been able to start sorting and scanning my deceased uncle's papers, as well as at least a couple thousand photos and negatives that my grandmother never got to finish sorting before she died. (She, her mother, and to a lesser extent her daughters were/are somewhat compulsive about taking pictures.) They date from the end of the 19th century to about 2013, and I'm learning so much about her and my grandfather's families that I never knew!

In addition to that, Andy is still on my radar and I'm still working on the unfinished parts of the timeline. It's one of the aforementioned personal projects that were stalled for so long, that I've now picked up again. This is a post that's helped me break out of the anxiety-paralysis induced by the sheer amount of STUFF that I still needed to do, and start taking better care of myself while getting shit done.

I hope you're doing as well as possible under the circumstances, Anon. Thanks for checking up on me! <3

Cryptic post is cryptic

Anon: Not yet, but it’s in the works. For a number of reasons, it would be counterproductive for me to bring it up just yet.

Hi there! Someone recently send you a podcast recommendation and you said you listen to a lot of cult related podcasts. I'd be really interested to know what you listen to, and particularly which ones you rate. I really value 'Indoctrination' but it's the only cult related podcast I listen to. Thanks for all your work here!

“Indoctrination” is great! for those who may not have heard it before, the host is a licensed marriage and family therapist who has worked with cult survivors, and she talks with both survivors and cult experts on the podcast. The idea is for listeners to learn from others’ experiences so they can better protect themselves and their friends and family.

Here are the other cult-related podcasts that I listen to, starting with those that feature actual survivors. 

Heaven’s Gate - A survivor of another cult interviews former Heaven’s Gate members and people who lost friends and family to the cult. It’s not all about the mass suicide; they also talk about the history of the group, their beliefs, and why they joined in the first place. 

Dear Franklin Jones - When he was a child, the host’s parents were followers of Franklin Jones, aka  Adi Da Samraj. As an adult, he’s re-examining his own history and Jones’s, talking with former and current followers of the “guru”, and trying to decide whether this group in which he was raised was actually a cult.

Cult Talk with Erin Martin - Martin was born into a cult (The Church of Bible Understanding). In what she describes as “a conversation, not an investigation”, she talks with her mother, other ex-members of COBU, and cult experts. 

Andy is back in LA.

I don't know whether he has a job, exactly where he's living, or...much of anything else, really. But he and Meg have moved to LA.

Also, Andy now has an Etsy store in which he's trying to sell the GoT-inspired ballgown and another dress he must have made more recently. The GoT dress description says that it was only worn once, to be graded, but he also had Meg wear it to Katsucon. There's obviously a lot of walking around and navigating crowds involved in attending a convention, which tends to make people a little sweaty, so that seems like a significant omission to me.

Andy is back in LA.

I don't know whether he has a job, exactly where he's living, or...much of anything else, really. But he and Meg have moved to LA.

Also, Andy now has an Etsy store in which he's trying to sell the GoT-inspired ballgown and another dress he must have made more recently. The GoT dress description says that it was only worn once, to be graded, but he also had Meg wear it to Katsucon. There's obviously a lot of walking around and navigating crowds involved in attending a convention, which tends to make people a little sweaty, so that seems like a significant omission to me.

Hi, I don't know if this would be of interest of you (or if you have already heard of it) but I just started listening to the podcast "Let's talk about sects" and I thought it might be something you might like (it takes the subject of cults a lot more seriously than the name suggests). I have only just started listening to it, but based on the episode I have listened to I think, even with its focus on one cult per episode, it has interesting commentary on the role/personality of a cult leader

Hey, Anon, I’m sorry I didn’t answer this when you sent it a month ago, but life has been utterly ridiculous. I did start listening to “Let’s Talk About Sects” on your recommendation, though, and it’s great: well researched, well presented, compassionate, and respectful. It got me through the end of our move and a week alone in our old apartment (spouse went ahead to set up the new place and I stayed behind to clean). I listen to a lot of cult and true crime podcasts, and this has become one of my favorites. Thanks for the rec!

there’s also the option that andy didn’t actually graduate but just changed his status...

Possible, but I doubt it.

I didn't see him in any photos from commencement that are on the school's social media, but you can look up any graduate's portrait(s) at gradimages.com with their surname, school, and year of graduation (assuming their school uses that service). Andy's is there. He's wearing a cap and gown that appear to be fresh out of the package. It's unlikely that he obtained those without meeting the requirements for graduation because the company that rents them takes student ID numbers and verifies orders with the university. This is pretty standard for most US colleges.

There is a loophole of sorts. Like many other schools, VCU allows students to participate in commencement activities without having completed their degree requirements, if there are extenuating circumstances. Per the VCU website, "Permission may be granted only when six or fewer credits are lacking for degree completion and the student demonstrates his or her intent to complete the needed credits by the end of the summer session." If the student doesn't follow through, they would still have walked with their class, and would have their graduation portrait and tassel to show for it, but would not receive a degree.

I suppose this could be the case with Andy, but there's no way to tell. Even if I were creepy enough to contact the school for verification (which I am not), no one could tell me either way without committing a FERPA violation.

Interesting to read about the faked/exaggerated eye injury. I remember there being photos of Andy with (I think) his hand/fingers in a cast while Project Elanor was going on, and then there was his faked heart condition that meant he could go at any time...have there been any more? Does a full list of all the illnesses he's faked over the years exist anywhere?

There have been quite a few, but I don’t think anyone has made a complete list. I should also note that I can’t prove that Andy was faking or exaggerating things; I can only say that it’s very unlikely that his illnesses and injuries were as severe as he claimed. 

This is not a complete list, but here’s what I remember or can easily find in my notes:

What got me most about the eye situation is his claims he was at risk of actually losing his eye! I mean, c'mon! It's like when he had the cosplaying glue mishap that lead to his "skin sloughing from his body". There may have been an genuine complaint there to begin with, but he always has to ramp everything up by 110% for MAXIMUM DRAMA!!!

Oops, I just left the glue thing off the list of faked/exaggerated illnesses and injuries. I’ll just go back and edit it in...

But yeah. Whatever Andy has, it’s always the worst case anyone’s ever seen, with the weirdest and most extreme symptoms. And while he portrayed himself as needing someone to take care of him when he had the eye infection, he’s usually gone for self-medication or other forms of self-care since then. I think this is partly to make him seem tough and resourceful, and partly to make others worry about him more.

Interesting to read about the faked/exaggerated eye injury. I remember there being photos of Andy with (I think) his hand/fingers in a cast while Project Elanor was going on, and then there was his faked heart condition that meant he could go at any time...have there been any more? Does a full list of all the illnesses he's faked over the years exist anywhere?

There have been quite a few, but I don’t think anyone has made a complete list. I should also note that I can’t prove that Andy was faking or exaggerating things; I can only say that it’s very unlikely that his illnesses and injuries were as severe as he claimed. 

This is not a complete list, but here’s what I remember or can easily find in my notes:

Just read the BoE messages and it's wild going through the infected eye saga, especially all the supposed updates from Some Ozzie Bloke (Andy's partner). As someone who got into the Andysphere due to an interest in Munchasen by internet cases, I can't get over how by numbers the eye drama is. Do we know how much truth there was to the story, if any? Did Andy genuinely hurt his eye but exaggerate it to a hospital stay? Were the updates from Ozzie bloke actually from Andy?

My feeling at this point is that something probably did happen to Andy’s/VB’s eye, but he blew it way out of proportion in order to get sympathy and attention from the group. I asked a doctor about the plausibility of the eye infection story while I was putting those messages together, and they told me that it was possible for a corneal scratch to become infected to that extent literally overnight, as Andy said it had. They said it sounded like he wasn’t washing his hands before inserting/removing his contact lenses, and that the “pink goo” (sorry, that’s gross) that developed after he started treatment was probably just a side effect of the medicated drops. On the other hand, they felt that a lot of the stuff about bandaging both eyes, keeping Andy in total darkness, etc. was exaggerated, and that it was very unlikely he would have been hospitalized. He may have had to go back to the ophthalmologist a few times, but it’s easy enough to put eye drops in at home.

(As a sidenote, with as many illnesses and injuries as Andy has faked over the years, it’s been incredibly useful to have friends that are healthcare professionals and don’t mind answering weird questions about people from the internet. They are the unsung heroes of this blog.)

On his LJ at the time, Andy claimed to be on antibiotics for a total of five or six weeks and said that he was going to have anywhere from 30-75% vision loss in the infected eye. I hadn’t reread that at the time that I spoke to the doctor, so I didn’t get to ask about it, and I have no idea whether Andy really has significant loss of vision in one eye. Hilariously, he also wrote on LJ that he would have to wear colored contacts all the time once the infection was resolved because he wouldn’t be able to see the clear ones well enough and would risk injuring his eye again. He made sure to specify that they had to be “heavily colored”, not just lightly tinted for visibility. Right.

As for the “Ozzie Bloke”, I’m almost 100% certain that was Andy. The real Ozzie Bloke left a couple of comments on Fandom Wank in 2004, under his real name, and the writing style was different from the messages he allegedly wrote to the BoE list. Aside from that, the BoE messages claimed that while Andy’s eyes were bandaged, the Ozzie Bloke was:

I'm still reading this article about the cult at Sarah Lawrence College, but already I'm beyond disgusted with Larry Ray and so sad for those kids and their families. It didn't take long for me to recognize an MO very similar to what Andy used on the Bagenders and DAYDians.

I can do a brief write-up if people are interested, but tl;dr - these fuckers are all the same. The trappings may be a little different from one to another (former CIA vs. man on the run from government black ops agents), but when you look past that to what they do to people, how they isolate them, how they work on them and use them...they're all the fucking same. And they're all terrible.

Just wondering, did you ever put together the short guide to all of Andy's misdeeds you said you were going to do after the LA cosplay lot said the timeline was too confusing/long to deal with? Thanks.

Well, I made this. I had to be selective about what to include in the interests of brevity and accessibility for people who aren't familiar with any of Andy's old fandoms, but it hits the most important points.

hey, i'm anon because i don't use this site anymore, but i've been following this mess since dashcon in 2014. i'm reading through the timeline and during the boe years there are several links to the actual yahoo group page, but they're unreadable unless the reader is logged in. would you be able/amenable to posting screenshots (obvs somewhere down the line since i know you're a busy person) so that i don't have to create an account just to read this madness? -xx long time reader, 1st time caller

I’m glad you asked about those messages, Anon, because I’ve been meaning to deal with them for ages. This isn’t an ideal solution, but for the moment, here’s a Google doc with all of Andy’s posts that I archived from the BoE Yahoo! group. I didn’t archive any fic, or most of his reviews of other people’s work, and I left out a number of other messages that weren’t particularly important or interesting.

When I have time, I’ll change the links in the timeline so that each one leads to the relevant message in the doc. 

hey, i'm anon because i don't use this site anymore, but i've been following this mess since dashcon in 2014. i'm reading through the timeline and during the boe years there are several links to the actual yahoo group page, but they're unreadable unless the reader is logged in. would you be able/amenable to posting screenshots (obvs somewhere down the line since i know you're a busy person) so that i don't have to create an account just to read this madness? -xx long time reader, 1st time caller

I’m glad you asked about those messages, Anon, because I’ve been meaning to deal with them for ages. This isn’t an ideal solution, but for the moment, here’s a Google doc with all of Andy’s posts that I archived from the BoE Yahoo! group. I didn’t archive any fic, or most of his reviews of other people’s work, and I left out a number of other messages that weren’t particularly important or interesting.

When I have time, I’ll change the links in the timeline so that each one leads to the relevant message in the doc. 

How complete is the Andy timeline these days?

It’s…not. I’m still working on it, but very slowly, mostly because I have so much less free time and so much more going on in my life than I did when I started it. 

The other reason for my glacially slow progress is that 2013-2015 was pretty intense. Andy was very prolific on Tumblr then, and I need to include a lot of his posts because they show the image(s) he was trying to project and the ways he used fandom and social justice issues to work on people. There’s also the posse to consider: it’s hard to balance respecting their privacy and leaving them out as much as possible with accurately portraying what Andy was up to during that time. I need to be careful not to drift too far into speculation about their individual relationships with Andy beyond what I see in Tumblr posts, so I end up having to edit quite a bit.

And more specifically, I’ve stalled for a while on things like the Wal-Mart-parking-lot-sex bullshit. I thought it would get easier to write about incidents like that over time, but no. It’s all just as repulsive as when I first heard about it, and it still makes me full-body shudder. He can be so exploitative and dehumanizing and…ugh. 

It’ll get done, though. In the meantime, at least there’s an overview in my sidebar.

y’know, it’s been a while since I made this reasonably popular post about how my abuse was the fault of my abuser and my society, not the fiction she used as an excuse.

But I want to talk a little bit more about how I came to that realization, because it wasn’t easy, but it was extremely important to how I conceptualized what happened, and what systematic abuse means.

During and immediately after the abuse - as in, for a little more than a year after we’d broken up and I moved away - I hardcore blamed Twilight for what happened. She called herself the lion to my lamb, she called herself a vampire and said she couldn’t resist me, she…. basically LARP’d twilight at me (and yes, even then, when it wasn’t terrifying it was hilarious). Of course it was Twilight that made her like this, she’d all but explicitly said so. She compared her emotions to Edward’s on the regular; of course Twilight was normalizing those emotions for her. Everyone thought Twilight was romantic so of course she thought things like stalking and controlling me were romantic! I was so sure. I never harassed people, but it’s part of why I chose to study media in college; to analyze unhealthy relationships in media and try to get abusive content recognized as harmful.

And then, almost two years after leaving her, I started talking on tumblr about her, on my main. Just a little, a few stories, comparing her actions to those of a character in a webcomic and pointing out that casting those as romantic is why I’d gotten abused. How she’d talked about twilight’s romance and some of her more distinctive and awful behaviors.

And then I got a message. “Was her name *****?”

It was.

Same shit, different day

Earlier this week, I received an email from Claire, one of the people who met Andy in Los Angeles. She’s the woman whom Andy complimented on her “trophy boyfriend”, who was actually Kyle Hill. She is also the person who first alerted Molly to the existence of the Andy awareness blogs. After another friend recognized him from LotR fandom and filled Molly in on some of his history, which led directly to Andy’s eviction from her home, Claire started looking for more information and found the AA blogs and tf-talk. 

On December 12, I posted about the “trophy boyfriend” incident and noted that Andy had in fact been aware of who Kyle was before that happened. Andy read the post and decided to reach out to Claire. She had blocked him on all of her accounts, or so she thought, but Andy looked around and realized that he was still able to contact her via her Facebook fan page, which she checks infrequently. On January 29, over a month after I made my post, he sent her the following message, which she didn’t see until this past weekend:

Andy writ large

Several people have sent me links to the New Yorker article in which Ian Parker exposes author/editor Dan Mallory as having lied, gaslighted people, and engaged in other manipulative behaviors for many years in order to further his career. When confronted, Mallory tried to blame it all on mental illness. Anons have been discussing this on tf-talk and FFA, noting that Mallory sounds a lot like "the prestige drama version of Thanfiction", and I have to agree. I've written several times in the past about people who reminded me and others of Andy (Aiden Sinclair/Richard Outhier, Travis Aaron Wade, Kevin Spacey, Teri Hoffman and Tyler Deaton), and the similarities in this case are even more striking than any of those. So here are the things that stood out to me in Parker's article. This is a pretty long list, so I've broken it down into several sections for readability.

Generally manipulative behavior:

Did you ever hear from Necromommycon again?

I’ve been kind of checked out for a bit because my spouse had a serious accident--they’re okay, but their mobility will be limited for a while--so I just looked through my e-mail, PMs, etc. in case I missed something. I haven’t heard from her at all since November 4.

Can you explain what it was about the recent anon's story that raised your suspicions it was fake/exaggerated?

The email that I received was very similar to the comment in tf-talk. I still don’t want to bring this guy’s identity into it because he did ask me for anonymity and he posted anonymously on tf-talk. So here’s the original email, exactly as I received it, minus a couple of identifying details:

Just posting to verify that this comment really is from me. I will not publish the private conversations that I had in the process of trying to confirm this person’s story two months ago. Nor will I reveal my sources, as I promised them anonymity, although I will clarify that Andy, his parents/other family, and Meg were not among them. (I’ve never had any contact with any of them at all, other than one reply to an email Andy sent me in July.)

ETA: Other people who have emailed me and not heard back yet: please don’t take this as an indication that I don’t believe you or am being dismissive of you/your story. Between a plethora of real life concerns and working on the timeline, trying to keep up with anything currently going on with Andy, and corresponding with Andy “survivors”, I get exhausted and sometimes let chat/email conversations lapse. (I wish I didn’t, but unfortunately I can also be that way with RL friends and it all comes down to a bunch of tl;dr mental health stuff that doesn’t belong on this blog.) 

This is the first time I have EVER had a red flag come up when someone’s contacted me with a story about Andy, and while my first instinct was to talk to this person and see where that got me, there were a number of reasons entirely unrelated to Andy that made that seem like a bad idea. 

Can I ask what you use to back up your blog locally and online? I'm having a hard time fing a way to back up my 7 year old blog.

Sorry, this probably will not be very helpful. I wish I had a clever, automated method to show off, but I don’t. I write my longer posts in Word and periodically go through my archive to save shorter posts and reblogs as .docx files. I did the same for my static pages (timeline masterpost, etc.) and I saved the HTML for my theme. They’re all saved, along with my other Andy-related material, on my HD, my backup HD, and a thumbdrive. I used them to create my backup blog manually, with a lot of copying and pasting. I also have all of those files backed up on my Google Drive.

You can use Tumblr’s export service to save all of your posts, pictures, and messages in a .zip file. This won’t preserve your theme, avatar, description text, or any static pages you’ve created. I’m not sure whether it saves audio and videos. Wordpress and some similar sites have Tumblr import tools, but I have yet to find one that will bring over the items that Tumblr’s export service doesn’t cover. 

Are you planning on making a backup archive for all of this in case things go south with this site?

I have two local and two online backups of everything. If all else fails, I can make one of the online backups publicly viewable and share the link on tf-talk.

So I was watching a rundown of The Final Fantasy House saga by youtuber Fredrik Knudsen and the amount of similarities between that and the Bagenders saga is astonishing. Have you heard of it? It's pretty scary to think this is a specific behavioral pattern that repeats itself and has many unnamed victims we'll never even hear about.

I love Down the Rabbit Hole! Here’s a link to that episode, and here’s Knudsen’s chronological retelling of the story. 

Yes, I have heard of the Final Fantasy House. I agree that it’s similar in many ways to the Bagenders, and even to Andy’s DAYDverse cult (although most of them weren’t living together). There has been a startling number of cults involving “channeling” and similar concepts. LB Lee’s “little tin cults” tag has information on several of them.

I think the most obvious difference between Jen’s behavior and Andy’s is that Jen is so focused on money and material possessions. Most people who have written or talked about their experiences with her have described how she drained their savings very quickly, spending it all on frivolous things that she claimed were “magic items” or that she otherwise just had to have. She’s also exploited artists for free fanart, and others for free work on her websites and other pursuits. And in more recent years, when it’s looked like she was about to lose someone, expensive gifts have been her means of drawing them back to her. 

Andy has exploited people financially, yes, but for living expenses more than anything else. He just doesn’t like to work unless he absolutely has to or there’s a promise of a big, immediate reward. And he has used money to keep people close to him, but rather than buying them expensive things, he’s bailed them out of difficult situations or paid for them to have experiences they otherwise could not afford. (And sometimes he’s rounding up donations from other people instead of or in addition to spending his own money.) He’s also used art for that purpose. I feel like Andy’s a little more savvy than Jen in this respect.

I don't know if this has been mentioned before but apparently "it's about power" is a popular Buffy quote. Was Andy ever in the Buffy fandom?

Not to my knowledge. Andy has been known to bring characters and concepts into his mythology from various media without ever participating in the associated fandoms. (All the Narnia and X-Men stuff when he was with Abbey, for example.) That said, I’m sure that either Andy has watched some BtVS, or some of his DAYD-era friends were into it, because Abbey has reported that the “mindhole” through which all of Andy’s “Others” allegedly came was known as the Hellmouth at that time.

It’s been about 15 years since BtVS ended, but in case anyone still cares about spoilers, here’s your warning.

For context, the phrase “It’s about power” is the first and last line of “Lessons”, the first episode of season seven, and it is sometimes described as the crux of the entire series. Below, I’ve copied bits from the script for “Lessons”, which I found here.

The episode’s second scene (the first is wordless) opens with Buffy and her younger sister Dawn in a graveyard at night. Buffy is training Dawn, and as they prepare to stake a vampire, Buffy repeatedly stresses something that she wants Dawn to keep in mind any time she encounters one of them. She begins by appearing to echo the same condescending, gender essentialist message that she received from the Watchers’ Council during her own training.

I feel like I'm suffering from a Mandela effect or something and I can't find answers anywhere. I few years ago I came across DAYD, I loved it. I year or so later I went back to reread it, but it was gone, except for the epilogue. Everyone was trying to figure out what had happened in comments. It was soon discovered that the author had taken the story down because they had been mentally ill while writing it and had since gotten help; the rest i will put in another Ask

Part Two:

This is sort of a complicated question. I’ll address the mental health angle first.

While Andy was writing most of his DAYDverse stories, he was pretending to channel many of the characters (as well as his own OCs) and interacting with fans of his work as those characters. Some people initially tried to interpret this as roleplaying, but Andy was very clear about what was “really” happening. For example, when one reader asked “Luna” a question, Andy pretended not to understand roleplaying terms like IC/OOC (in character/out of character) and said, “…you’re not talking to Andy at all here.” (Conversation part 1 | part 2 | part 3) Via e-mail, in chat, and even in person, he convinced some of his readers that they were actually speaking with the characters and he was just the conduit. This went on for more than three years, while Andy abused his friends/followers in various ways, in what amounted to a fandom cult. 

Later, Andy claimed that this was all because of mental illness. One major problem with this is that (with the caveat that I don’t know whether he has any or all of ADD, PTSD, and depression) his alleged diagnoses don’t make any sense based on the symptoms he’s claimed, and most are nonsensical in and of themselves. The other problem is that he’d also used the channeling shtick to start his first cult in Lord of the Rings fandom, and had used mental illness to excuse that, too. He’d already claimed in 2007 that he was getting help and wouldn’t hurt anyone again, so it was suspicious, to say the least, when he said essentially the same thing in the wake of the DAYD cult.

I've already responded on TF talk, but I wanted to contact you here as well. That childhood channeling comment is not NC's. It's mine. If necessary, I'll contact you again to confirm this is the case. I've seen people claiming that she "confessed" this comment is hers, which I haven't seen any evidence of as of yet. It's very disturbing if true, because that means she's a liar on top of everything else.

Also posted to tf-talk: 

I’m going to add a correction to the post where I brought this up, too.

Do you have screengrabs of all the posts that were made on the Thanfictioning blog or just the rape apology one?

I have all of them. At least, I think I do. 

When an anon on tf-talk posted a link to the Thanfictioning blog on 11/2, there were only two posts on it--the first two that are linked below. The same anon sent her an ask that day and she answered it; then she posted the following day about how shocked she was that people had seen her public, tagged posts about Andy. Finally, she posted about how she doesn’t think Andy raped anyone, leaving it up for only a few hours before deleting the whole blog. The PM she sent me on 11/4 said that her “mind dump” had consisted of four posts, and I’ve only read three, so there may be one more that I’ve never seen.

July 19, 2018: Reader, I Messaged Him - Tells the story of how she and a friend first tried to contact Andy (by catfishing him, basically) and makes flippant reference to “the internet diagnosis of sociopathic serial rapist”. 

October 26, 2018: First thing we do, let’s channel all the lawyers - All about her opinion that Andy isn’t really dangerous, was never a cult leader, and didn’t do anything that much different from other people in dysfunctional relationships, so what’s the big deal?

November 2, 2018: Response to an ask - Claims that the two posts we’ve seen so far were just a “mind dump” that only a couple of people were meant to read. Specifically states that she wasn’t addressing “emotional upset” when talking about Andy’s potential to do harm, indicating that she doesn’t feel that having spent years abusing people emotionally and psychologically makes Andy dangerous.

Did Necromommycon ever respond to the email where you confronted her about the dates of the Thanfictioning posts?

Nope! I don’t think she ever will. But I’ve given her more than enough of my time over the last few days, so I’m not going to brood over it.

More on Necromommycon

(I got tired of typing out the whole name, so it’s just Necro throughout this post.)

I mentioned before that I’ve been looking through her blogs on archive.org and trying to figure out what I missed. This anon has a lot of good points that I can see in hindsight, but didn’t catch at the time. I also see this:

Necro's first LJ post about the whole thing (at least, her first public one) said that she was most concerned for Andy, called Abbey a "joiner", and said she didn't believe Andy had actually been a cult leader. That was in Nov 2011, after Abbey had posted a 5-part explanation of how she ended up in the cult and what it was like. In retrospect, I realize that she never actually apologized for this (at least, not in public) or stated that she no longer felt this way. I don’t know why I thought she had.

Before Sunday, I believed that after reading about the horrific extent to which Andy body-shamed Abbey, Necro had re-examined what she knew about Andy in a different light, and her opinions had changed. Now I suspect that the only reason the body-shaming shook her was that it was the first part of the narrative that she could relate to from the abused person's perspective.

As far as I can tell, deliberately or not, she drew a dividing line from that point. On one side went things that she found personally upsetting, and on the other side went things that didn't bother her: that is, pretty much everything else Andy did. A few things seemed to shift to the "bothered" side as she looked back over their correspondence and realized that Andy had been manipulating her in ways of which she wasn't conscious at the time, but too many stayed firmly in "not bothered" territory.