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Dissecting How Bullying Works in a Mini Fandom Part 3: The Content Mill, the Brief (?) Lolcowing of Vincestsaga, and the Attempted Lore-Milking of Yukimura Makoto

Something I commented on before the manga ended was a troubling attitude I was seeing in the fandom: the manga was being treated as a kind of holy text, free of all sin, that had basically written itself, and was merely in the process of revealing itself to us mortals. Two things were happening to Yukimura. People talked about him like he was literally perfect, but in practice he was also dealing with a lot of people harassing him and making demands on his time. Japanese fans commented that they felt like English-speaking fans were taking advantage of how nice he is, and if you look at the viral posts where he replies, it is the English-speaking fans doing it. The Japanese fans aren't asking him for birthdays. There's probably a reason for that.

Now that the manga's over, I think seeing him make Bug/Niska canon has wiped the gloss off for a lot of those same fans, but I can't say that it's been replaced by a healthier understanding of boundaries. Instead, we now have a more typical 2026 fandom, where some people alternate between fawning over his validation and a kind of latent hostility towards him for failing to supply what they wanted. Which is an endless supply of lore and free content for their favorite character. But not lore they dislike!! God no! If we see lore we dislike, we need to track him down on Twitter and demand alterations!

I feel like VS Twitter fandom has become centered around people's efforts to claim ownership of a certain character and be seen as "CEO of XYZ". It's about acquiring instead of enjoying what you have. The canon isn't viewed as a story that Yukimura made up because he wanted to interrogate ethical questions that are important to him. It's viewed as a real universe, and Yukimura—to some—is our faulty window into that universe, who wrote a bad story when he failed to explain the entire timeline of a certain character's life. But I have yet to see a single demand that would actually serve the writing goals Yukimura has always been clear about. What would this or that piece of lore say about Thorfinn's relationship with violence and slavery? Nothing, usually.

We don't need a blow by blow of Thorkell or Bjorn's entire life, because it's just not important. We don't need to see or learn anything else about Snake. We honestly don't even need the Miklagard arc. If Yukimura couldn't research enough to confidently flesh out his ideas for that arc, then it just can't become part of the story. That's life! It's not like those events actually happened and Yukimura's denying us access to the footage. But that's how fandom approaches fiction these days, as though the author is a hostile entity who needs to be harassed into sharing a correct version of the story.

This is of particular interest to me because it also pertains to the way people have harassed me in this fandom. I really don't want to go into all of it at length again, but the reasons people give are fascinating. The characters I write about are valued so little that nobody's ever pretended to be offended on their behalf. No one has ever brought up Torgrim being severely mentally disabled. No, the one reason people consistently cite for my harassment is that I'm not supplying fandom with the correct material.

As a writer, I'm viewed pretty openly as a public utility, and like every other creator in the Vinland Saga fandom, I'm tasked with the responsibility to make the fandom bigger and thus more appealing to other creators—who are important because, of course, they will have this same duty to supply Content of the popular characters. The type of Content that Yukimura foolishly forgot to put in the manga because he was so busy telling a thematically resonant story, or whatever bullshit those YouTube essayists are getting out of Sexy Viking Boys: The Comic. It's not okay that I wrote around 200 fanfics that I wanted to write because they spoke to me personally. It makes people mad when they go into an AO3 tag and see things that don't appeal to them.

The author above never wrote for the fandom again. I had already written more than 15 Gen pieces for the fandom, mostly focusing on characters and relationships that no one else had ever taken on. I actually found these comments about myself when I clicked on a fic that had egregiously misused the "/" symbol in the Relationship field. I could tell they meant to use the "&" instead, and thought I would warn them so they didn't get dogpiled for the wildly problematic ship they'd accidentally created. I found that their author's note was complaining about me, but graciously left my comment anonymously, and restrained myself from adding, "No problem. I wouldn't want people talking about you like they talk about me."

This is the one and only reason anyone's ever given for why I need to be harassed and treated like I'm ruining the fandom: I wrote about things I enjoy personally, instead of whining my useless ass off about how there's "not enough" of this or that. Nobody ever considers what I have to suffer when I go into the tags and see things that aren't Torgrim's dick in Atli's assorted holes. When do I get my time in the sun?

And before you say that I posted too much and it clogged the tags up, let me point out that no one would be saying this if I wrote for a popular ship. Artists who post on Twitter every day are celebrated. Yet some of my primary harassers have been the most popular artists in the fandom, people who would never accept their own posting habits being talked about the way they talk about mine. At my peak, I posted a couple of times a week, keeping my summaries extremely short and confining my work to the website that exists solely to show you fanworks. I didn't promote my work in the main tags on other sites.

And people were complaining about my mere existence before I even had all that much posted. After a few months, I had (according to this person) 31 total fics. The number of interactions looks small, but that was most of the fandom at the time.

What was the problem? My ships didn't "deserve" to be on the sidebar of top 10 ships. Why not? Well, no real reason. My work certainly wasn't considered dangerous. People actually found the concept funny. It's just that that they didn't want me "beating them" in this imaginary competition, because there was only one of me and so they could get away with saying that. They could get away with stalking me and gossiping about me in their groupchat because they had an instinctive feeling there would be no consequences for doing it. That, in itself, made the activity and the thought process appealing.

All the same, there was this perpetual belief that any day now, I might just turn my eye towards their own favorite characters. It was unthinkable that I wasn't even tempted. I'll say now as I've said in the past, you guys were never in danger of having to see this thing you obviously really wanted to see me write.

People involved with that thread above, created by Linenor, the most popular artist in the fandom at that time. admitted pretty openly that they had been stalking my output for weeks, counting and predicting how much I could potentially write in order to "win" over the more popular and deserving ships. Other users, in a comment I never screencapped, admitted to "stalking" my Twitter, in their own words. The groupchat Linenor mentioned appeared to contain most of the current fandom. All this was justified by the problematic nature of my ships, or so they claimed.

But what was the fandom's most popular fic at the moment? It was something called All The King's Men, and Linenor herself was the one illustrating it. The plot concerns Canute having sex with a harem of slaves that physically remind him of Thorfinn. It has no archive warning for rape/noncon, even though having sex with a slave you own is inherently rape, something that people pretend to understand when it comes to Ketil and Arnheid.

The fic handwaves it so that Canute asks for consent and tells the slaves they "don't have to" give him blowjobs if they don't feel like it. But this is a mere fig leaf, just as much a fantasy as my fics that present a fantasy form of healthy, non-damaging incest between Torgrim and Atli. Slaves cannot have consensual sex with someone who legally owns them, and no reasonable slave would believe someone who told them they could walk away without punishment. Bare minimum, they would assume that going through with sex would mean being treated better. The subject of sexual exploitation under slavery has been talked about pretty comprehensively in recent years.

Most of the people stalking me and talking about how I needed to be treated as an enemy of the AO3 tag were reading this slavery fetish fanfic simultaneously. As a work of art, All The King's Men was exactly as problematic as what I was writing, except that it was a popular ship, and a ton of people in this fandom get off on the idea of Canute raping slaves while refusing to admit they have a rape kink. The subject actually comes up a lot, if you'll believe it. Come on in, ladies, the water's fine.

Nobody ever wrote a callout post for ATKM. And naturally, I'm not asking anyone to make one. I'm just wondering how and why the official illustrator for this fic, and so many of its proud readers, thought that I deserved a callout thread that essentially gave everyone in the fandom carte blanche to stalk me, and treat me like someone who was stealing from their ships simply because I was creating for my own. I assume they would have been very upset if someone had done the same thing to their friend who wrote ATKM.

So why me? Because it was possible to do so. At the time, I didn't even have a username on AO3, because I was posting anonymously from my main account. (🤫) No one in the group chat was standing up to say, "Hey, guys, this is getting a little creepy." Nobody shared my ships, or even cared about the characters I was writing about. It was easy for them to think of me as a total outsider, not a real human being. They probably didn't think their actions had any meaning or ability to affect the outside world. They saw me as a freak and an oddity without feelings, and of course I also threatened what they saw as Th*rnute's natural right: the right to be at the top of a meaningless list of ships on the AO3 side bar.

I was so far from being a threat to this position that they had to add together the numbers for my various ships in order to make me look like I was a danger to the popular ships. At no point was there any chance of Atli/Torgrim becoming the #1 ship on the AO3 sidebar. I'm a human being, not a robot. This was a threat the fandom invented because they saw me as some kind of machine without human limitations or feelings.

There's no rule on AO3 or in fandom saying that you can't write a lot, or even make up the majority of a fandom's tag, and I had only written about 40 works at this point, but nonetheless this was deemed important enough to make a warning thread about how I didn't deserve this kind of success, and was somehow impeding or attacking other authors. This would not have happened to me if I'd been writing a more popular ship.

Much later, someone in a larger groupchat, a Discord server, commented that people "used to go crazy" when I posted something new. Obviously he was talking about that groupchat. I don't know what they posted about me, how much of their time I took up, or anything like that. It's better not to know, of course, but it leaves a mark.

I'm sure Linenor never meant to make me feel stalked. I know she wasn't the only person involved. I also don't think any of those people really thought of me as a person with feelings at all. This can be categorized as standard lolcowing, something a lot of people do on the internet without seeing it as wrong. Doing this to weirdos is a tradition that probably goes back thousands of years. The essence of humor, after all, is someone doing something "wrong". I know I've rubbernecked at stuff like this myself in younger years, because this is just what people do on the internet. You could say that being on the receiving end taught me an important lesson. If anyone reads this post, maybe it'll teach them the same thing less harshly. I will say in my defense that I mostly just looked instead of participating.

This went on for months. I don't know when exactly it stopped. So all that gave me PTSD, and a feeling of paranoia that I've luckily been able to compartmentalize in my other fandoms. I had no way of knowing whether I was safe here. I wonder all the time when a major bout of harassment is going to start up. They say you never see it coming. I've seen what happened to other people, even people who wrote about a topic with the intention of condemning it.

I developed the feeling that I was always being watched. As I've said, I checked the tags/search bar for fandom keywords frequently, and after the stalking incidents, I would wait for months to see if new people I saw talking about the series were safe to interact with, even glancingly. You could say I became the stalker... but you would be wrong, because I do it in a God-honoring way. I assume by default that new people will be hostile towards me, and are probably in at least one groupchat where I've been threatened or something similar.

And indeed, I tried joining two different groupchats and found that in one, teenagers were threatening to violently kill me (the mod they were speaking to did not seem to regard this as an issue—incidentally, this mod later got a callout post for acting like a typical Discord mod with teenagers, but I can't find the post now so I will not name names).

In the other groupchat, I found people dancing around in a circle, kicking their heels and squeeing about the idea of Canute buying Thorfinn as a slave and abusing him, including sexually. They explicitly compared the situation to Ketil and Arnheid. But, they added, of course the fandom at large should not be exposed to this delightful idea, or The Fandom would start shipping it in problematic ways, something they clearly all did already.

I was almost heartened enough to ask about the chat's policy towards proshippers—and then my name came up, and of course, everyone was careful to delineate me as a freak and weirdo, including another popular artist who ships Askefinn while pretending not to. All this and they still needed me to be their boogeyman, proof that their fantasies about Canute abusing and raping slaves were NOT!!! problematic! They were not like that sick freak Vincestsaga, who probably wants so badly to write Th*rnute and wishes they were related!

(Author's note: I didn't want to write that.)

Have you noticed a recurring theme with people wanting Canute to fuck/rape his slaves in this fandom? These people have to know they'd be strung up for that in any fandom that wasn't, pardon the expression, cracker central. You can't write slave kink in a lot of fandoms. It makes you.... ominous guitar strumming... a proshipper?!?? The subject of callout posts? Just like that nasty freak Vincestsaga?

Anyway, I think it's interesting how people who go after me specifically want Canute to be the aggressor in their fantasies. I wonder if there's anything to that, psychologically. Do they think they have a god-honoring rape fetish because it empowers a character who gets called a woman in canon?

In fact, their torrid fantasies about me writing for their ships usually involve Canute as well. Jeez, Canute. You've gotta stop getting involved in this stuff. It's so offensive.

Here's another anecdote. In the very early days after the anime started, a lot of people were joining the fandom for the first time, although technically the manga had been ongoing since 2005 and there were traces of previous fan activity, like a LiveJournal community. Someone I found by searching for the series name had posted a screencap of the AskeBj*rn tag on AO3, complaining that they were extremely "sad" about the number of fics, which was about 50 back then.

50 fucking free works of art into which people have poured their time and energy, some of them quite long and intricate? Are you kidding? I don't know how many fandoms have given me 50 fics of my ship that I didn't write. I certainly don't have 50 fanworks from other people here. Do readers understand how fundamentally insulting it is to tell the authors who do create for your ship, "You didn't make enough, and that makes me mad"?

The person who posted this was, let's say, old enough to know better. And they went on to imply that everyone in the fandom was a pedophile because most of the fics were about Thorfinn... you know, the main character? (As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up.) They claimed he was 12 years old, and apparently expected their followers to believe all those fics were explicit smut. But prologue!Thorfinn isn't 12, he's 17. And then for most of the story, he's even older. Statistically, most fics on AO3 are perfectly SFW, even the shippy ones. That held true here. You can go see yourself. There was very little smut about Thorfinn. Askefinn wasn't even really a thing in English fandom then, except for 1 or 2 people.

So why would someone make those mindbending assumptions? Because they perceived the Thorfinn fics to be stealing from their AskeBj*rn basket. That's the only reason. Because they decided people writing about Thorfinn were enemies to their ship, those people had to be made into the enemy somehow. So they mentally eliminated the knowledge that people can write fanfiction that isn't explicit dick'n'balls smut, and refused to even look at the rest of the tag before making some pretty nasty allegations about the entire fandom.

From what I saw, by the way, they did not go on to recommend any AskeBj*rn fics that they actually liked, and they didn't leave any comments for authors either. Just swept in and out, with nothing to offer except for pedophilia accusations that were based entirely on the fact that people didn't give them a high enough Number of free content to gloat about. To them, this implication was deserved because the label is something they get to use for people they don't like. To be fair, they're not alone in that.

Do you see how mentally damaging it is to focus on the Numbers? Both of these incidents were sparked by people looking at a Number and deciding it wasn't high enough compared to what other people were getting. And now all of you guys are pedophiles. SMH. Maybe AO3 is responsible for making people obsess over that too much. You had to crunch numbers for a while to get those stats back on FF.net. (They called FF.net the Pit of Voles back then, and we had to live with that level of knee-slapping humor. It was all we had.)

But this mindset is why (~some~) people are so confused that Yukimura chose to "damage" his own story by not hyperfocusing on a thousand insignificant details about the minutiae of every single character's lives. People in this fandom struggle (to a degree I've never seen before) to understand that other people may not be very interested in the things they personally like. This is a skill called "theory of mind" that many neurodivergent people have trouble with, but I'm not here to be a kindergarten teacher who gently explains that everybody in the world has a different brain from you, so I'll just leave it at that.

Oh, and for some reason, even though most of the fandom is now avowed antis who think proship fan creators are pedophiles who deserve death, it's still okay to support Yukimura, obsess over his validation, advertise his manga, and construct your entire identity around the fruit of his brain, despite the fact that he retweets Askefinn and deliberately made most of the marriages in his manga involve a woman under the age of 18. He's a popular cis man and they know they can't harass him into oblivion, so they don't even try being consistent.

It would be kinda funny if someone tried leaving him a mean comment about shipping and got ethered by all the people who obsessively leave over-familiar comments like "I love you Makoto" on all his posts in a desperate hope to go viral. At least, I'd enjoy it. Did you know he replied to me before any of my current batch of haters? I know how I pulled that off, but I'm not gonna tell.

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