Owlor 🦋

Y'know, everyone knows about the Gadget Hackwrench cult, but I don't have any evidence that it ever amounted to more than one meetup among Russian fans with kind of a funny gimmick. To me, the most inexplicable things about the fandom in retrospect are:

1. It's perhaps the most homophobic fandom I've ever seen, to the point where actual stills from the show was deemed too gay to be posted. This wasn't uniformly the case, of course, and there was a lot of resistance. The owner of the RRdatabase did some hosting shenanigans to be able to showcase gay CDRR art while remaining technically allowable to be linked to from the main forum.

2. There was an oddly big overlap with the star trek fandom and multiple fans had their own fantasy shipyard and would roleplay as starship captains. The only connection this show has with space is that they meet aliens in one episode and end up on a space shuttle in another, that's really it.

3. The longest thread on The Acorn Cafe was called "Poke", it was a link to a Flash game where you poke a penguin until it explodes. It turned into the lengthiest forum roleplay thread I've ever seen, with multiple distinct phases and storylines, some of which being more like a freeform paintball fight and other being more like a star trek adventure. I'd like to think it's still going.

4. The fandom fell apart circa 2010 basically a solid majority of the remaining fans became obsessed with My Little Pony instead.

5. The 2022 live action movie was so bizarre it caused many in the fandom to get back together after not having talked in a decade just to be able to discuss the burning question of "what the hell was that?"

Mar 28 at 5:38pmWeb
Show threadOwlor 🦋Mar 28

6. The fact that every time I mention having been part of the Chip n Dale's Rescue Rangers fandom, someone brings up the Gadget Hackwrench cult as if this would be new information for me. It's literally the only thing most people know about the fandom and they will not stop talking about it.

7. Despite the fact that basically everyone has talked about it, including people in the fandom while it all went down, I STILL have no idea what's up with that, how many people where actually involved or if there's anything to it besides a meetup with a gimmick that got a little out of hand, the conversation never really progress beyond the same handful of photos and "hey did you know about the Gadget Hackwrench cult?"

(A youtuber I used to watch had kind of a thing with Revolutionary Girl Utena, cus everyone who sees her reviewing vaguely weird anime tells her she should check out Utena to the point where it's kind of become a berserk button for her. It's occurring to me that if I had any kind of platform like a youtube channel , "did you know about the Russian CDRR cult?" would be my Utena.)

Show threadOwlor 🦋Mar 28
I think the reason people make such a big deal about that is they severely underestimate how many fictional characters had quasi-religious movements dedicated to them in the 90s/00s. They didn't even need to be that popular, as long as they where at least mid-tier someone somewhere have probably had a religious experience with them.