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[Hamilton Fandom] The HIV+ high school AU/cannibal mermaid Hamilton fanfiction incident self.HobbyDrama

submitted 3 years ago by iwasonceafangirl Best of 2019-20

I know I said I was going to do a writeup about YA Twitter drama next, but then I remembered that this is a thing that happened and I just had to post it here. I swear to god, I am not making any of this up.

This is one of those incidents that’s difficult to summarize because I honestly don’t even know where to begin. There’s so much to talk about that it’s almost overwhelming—sockpuppeting, medical fraud, false identities, and god-knows-what else all played a part in making this drama one of the biggest scandals in Tumblr history (or, at least, the biggest scandal that doesn’t involve illegally mailing body parts to people via the United States Postal Service. Don’t even ask.) Now, you may be thinking that the title probably makes more sense in context, but I can assure you that it absolutely does not. It’s just as insane as it sounds at first glance. To make it abundantly clear how nuts this whole debacle was, I should probably start by detailing Hamilton and its obsessive fandom.

Hamilton is a Broadway musical that came out a few years ago, and unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard someone at least mention it in passing. It’s one of the most successful shows in recent history, and it’s beloved by tumblr.com for a variety of reasons. The main, though not sole, reason is that it’s actually really good (and I say this as someone who isn’t a crazy theatre kid.) It focuses on the life of Alexander Hamilton from his arrival in the Thirteen Colonies to his death during a duel with Aaron Burr, and it’s all done surprisingly well for a musical that attempts to tell a story about the American Revolutionary War via rap battles. It’s one of the few shows in the world that can get away with including stage directions like “ELIZA BEATBOXES MATERNALLY” and still be taken completely seriously by both fans and critics.

Reason number two why Tumblr loves Hamilton is the same reason Tumblr loves the MCU and Superwholock and all the other franchises it obsesses over. There are lots of male characters and thus lots of potential slash ships (ships meaning relationships.) If you’re wondering why on Earth anyone would want to ship the Founding Fathers with one another… well, join the club. I have no idea. But some fans really liked the idea of Alexander Hamilton and [insert literally any other character] hooking up, so Hamilton the musical spawned an abundance of fan fiction and fan art featuring the signatories of the US Constitution. Keep in mind, though, that by Tumblr standards, this is not that weird. A little unusual, sure, and certainly less common than traditional fictional character shipping, but nobody’s really going to start a riot because people want John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton to have sex. This is Tumblr we’re talking about. Remember how I mentioned people mailing human body parts to one another? In comparison to those incidents, shipping the Founding Fathers is not that strange, so the rabid Hamilton fans were mostly ignored by the rest of the site. And this allowed their community to grow quite large. Nobody wanted to be the one to poke at the hornet’s nest that was the rapidly developing hive of Hamilton-obsessed fans, so they all just kind of let It be. And, in the complete absence of outside scrutiny, that community grew and grew and grew. By 2015, the amount of people who dedicated countless hours to writing Hamilton fic was far greater than anyone could have imagined.

One of the many Hamilton fics floating around on Tumblr was a piece entitled “To Scale the Blue Sky,” which was an alternate universe fanfic set in a high school. Again, taking the Founding Fathers and putting them in an American high school in the 1980s a la Clone High may sound bizarre, but that’s such a common fan fiction trope that people didn’t even question it. There are probably more high school AUs on Tumblr than there are stars in the sky at this point. The unique thing about “To Scale the Blue Sky,” though, was that it addressed an important issue affecting the LGBT community in the ‘80s: HIV and AIDS. This is a story in which Alexander Hamilton, the guy who appears on the $10 bill, gets HIV while in high school. And, ordinarily, this type of writing would have rung at least a few alarm bells; after all, fan fiction is generally not the best way to address the AIDS epidemic and the deaths resulting from its mismanagement. But “To Scale The Blue Sky” was cut some slack, partially because of who its authors were.

The main author of “To Scale The Blue Sky” was Israa, a nonbinary Chinese-Pakistani victim of sex trafficking. The other, mostly uncredited author was Israa’s wife Raj, a Catholic-Somali lesbian of color. Both were HIV+, and they ran a popular blog about how the disease impacted their lives, which was entitled hivliving. They used hivliving as a platform for activism, but also a way to share their personal experiences with various forms of trauma and discuss how being HIV+ has impacted them. They also occasionally used it to promote their fanfiction.

Unfortunately, just as hivliving was reaching the height of its popularity, Raj and/or Israa suffered some terrible, debilitating medical issue that left them in need of expensive medical treatment right away. A cash.me link was posted, and thousands of followers who credited the couple for educating them about HIV and helping them through their own diagnoses jumped at the chance to donate. And everything went exactly as planned, up until fellow Tumblr user digoxin-purpurpea noticed something was up with the cash.me.

Digoxin-purpurpea was another Hamilton fan, and she also went by the names digitalis, candiru, and cardiotoxin (this is less suspicious than it sounds; most Tumblr fanfic writers use different usernames for different fan fiction sites.) Under the blog name Cardiotoxin, digoxin-purpurpea messaged Israa and Raj shortly after the cash.me was posted, saying that she had a difficult time believing they were truly living in India, because the cash.me indicated they were within the United States. One thing led to another, and long story short, the mod of hivliving wound up making a huge confession: she didn’t live in India, and she didn’t have HIV. Israa and Raj don’t exist. The real person behind the blog, and behind “To Scale The Blue Sky,” was an American college student, Alix. That may not be her real name, but I’ll refer to her as such for the purpose of this post.

This, predictably, caused an uproar. Alix later tried to backtrack by saying that Israa and Raj were digital personas based on real people, but it later came out that not even that was true. Their lives and backstories were entirely made up just so Alix had an excuse to write HIV+ High School AU fan fiction about Alexander Hamilton without being judged too harshly for it. By pretending to be a woman with HIV+, she could deflect any questions about whether writing this type of thing is really okay by claiming that it was a coping mechanism to deal with her own disease. She also made up the additional sympathetic pieces of Israa and Raj’s tragic backstories because they made people more likely to feel bad for the couple and support them financially. Finally, their Somalian, Chinese, and Pakistani heritage allowed Alix, a white girl, to be put on lists of POC writers that she never would have been able to get onto had she not lied about her identity. Basically, Alix made up two entire people and started a HIV support blog exclusively to promote “To Scale the Blue Sky” and works like it.

Naturally, when it came out to everyone that Alix was a liar and Israa and Raj weren’t real people, a lot of fans were very upset, especially those who had donated to their bullshit cash.me. They demanded their money back, and Alix agreed to refund them, but that never actually happened. Meanwhile, other people started digging up dirt on Digoxin-purpurpea, as some people were concerned that she’d also been making things up in order to get rid of hivliving and boost her own popularity. What they found was, arguably, even stranger than a plot to reduce her competition by scrubbing hivliving from the internet—Digoxin-purpurpea was a relatively well-known author of real-person supernatural fanfiction. No, not Supernatural TV show fanfiction—I mean stories about ghosts, mermaids, and other mythical creatures, having sex with each other and real people.

At around the time Alix started asking for donations while posing as Israa and Raj, Digoxin-purpurpea was being criticized for various bizarre works she’d written, among them things like ghost!Hamilton erotica and at least one work in which Lin-Manuel Miranda, who plays Hamilton, is a cannibalistic mermaid. People quickly realized that Digoxin-purpurpea wasn’t dragging Alix for purely selfless reasons. Alix and her friends had made fun of Digoxin-purpurpea for her weird and “problematic” stories, so Digoxin-purpurpea exacted revenge by exposing Alix.

After this revelation, both Digoxin-purpurpea and Alix deleted the majority of their work, which was unsurprising, considering how much the rest of Tumblr was making fun of them. Hivliving shut down, which was to be expected, seeing as the people who ran the blog were actually one person who didn’t actually have HIV. And, finally, Tumblr learned a valuable lesson about donating to gofundmes and cash.mes without doing adequate research first. People continue to ask for money for various causes online, but Tumblr users are a lot more skeptical now, because you never know when that baby with cancer or that woman with cerebral palsy are actually just crazy Hamilton fans using medical conditions as an excuse to write stories about the Founding Fathers having unprotected sex in a high school.

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