Only livable wages can prevent warehouse fires. 💰 🔥

#EatTheRich #LateStageCapitalism

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?"

Capitalist bootlickers (mockingly): "You just want FREE STUFF!"

Me: "Duh. What the fuck is wrong with you that you don't?"