#he was vastly irrelevant in the zine since it was made from and for the recent fandom but simply i can draw 2 characters

[cerosin-bis]

A Krueger I made at the beginning of the year for a CoD fanzine 💥

[prettycooregrey]

Just some nonsense rambling under the cut about seeing how the fandom’s progressed over its lifespan.

The OFF fandom is... so weird man, yknow? It’s not that it’s dead (as far as I know there’s up to 3 Discord servers, none of which I participate in LMAO), Mortis Ghost still sells official merch and interacts w the fandom tho he’s largely made it clear he wants to make new things these days, the 10 year stream had a totally crazy turnout, there’s still ask blogs for some of the characters, people still make merch and zines, well-known fans are still around pretty much...

But it’s old enough as a fandom, and small enough, that going back through old art for queue purposes leads to all sorts of weird dead-ends. A lot of the blogs are deactivated or deleted. In other cases, the person has actually purged their old OFF art from their blog. Sometimes, most often I think, the blogs are still around but have long moved on. Merch posts are often long irrelevant and there’s no trace of them on the linked etsy pages - those gorgeous hoodies that were kind of all the rage because of how awesome they were still exist, but in vastly reduced color options and the design is different. Not that I don’t understand of course, making stuff like that would be prohibitively expensive, especially for a fandom that’s way quieter and stiller than it used to be.

People disappeared, or lost interest, or passed away. It’s a weird place to be in, especially since I strictly limit the amount of personal contact I have with other fans (including Discord servers) based on my own largely negative experiences in the fandom talking with others.

It almost feels weird to still be finding places to queue art from, regardless of whether the blog is inhabited or not. If it is, I absolutely feel like I’m bothering the person whose blog it is, digging through their crap for stuff they may have forgotten about or maybe aren’t interested anymore. If it’s not, it feels more on par with breaking into an old house and helping myself to their stuff.

It’s just. There’s a reason that people remark so often (and it is very often) about how they thought the fandom was dead by now, despite evidence to the contrary. I follow a lot of super active blogs, and a decent amount of people follow me, and we all interact with each other’s posts every day. But there’s definitely this air about the fandom as a whole if you don’t manage to quite find your footing in those spaces that nobody’s around anymore. It’s very ghost town-esque, particularly if you really do look at remnants of people who used to draw tons of art, or ran a character blog, or made animations, or sold merch, and hit dead ends like a deactivated/deleted source.

And OFF’s definitely not the only fandom this has happened to, but I can’t actually think of any others I’ve been in myself that has this universal air of being visibly reduced down to a few points while also stubbornly refusing to disappear entirely, enough so that people’s reactions to it are almost always the same: “Wow! I thought this fandom was dead!”

I’m glad it hasn’t, but it’s also a little sad to see in retrospect.