On April 20, 2021, the Detroit Free 

Press broke the news that CEO of 
Activision Blizzard — one of America’s 
premier AAA game companies, 
publisher of juggernaut franchises 
like “Call of Duty” and “World of 
Warcraft” — Bobby Kotick gifted $4 
million to the University of Michigan 
to establish an esports minor. Kotick, 
who studied Art History at the 
University, dropped out in the ’80s, 
supposedly based on the advice of 
Steve Jobs.

According to the Free Press, the 

minor was created in an effort to “help 
students get ready for a career in the 
esports industry.” The courses funded 
by Kotick are being jointly developed 
by the Schools of Kinesiology, 
Engineering and Information, with 
the first offerings expected by 2022. 

However, on July 20, 2021, 

Bloomberg 
announced 
that 
the 

California 
Department 
of 
Fair 

Employment and Housing was suing 
Activision Blizzard. 

A two-year investigation found that 

the company had rampant workplace 
discrimination 
against 
female 

employees and consistently failed 
to combat discrimination, address 
harassment or prevent retaliation. 
Company president J. Allen Brack was 
named in the suit; Brack subsequently 
stepped down at the beginning of 
August to be replaced by Jen Oneal 
and Mike Ybarra. After only three 
months in the role, Oneal resigned at 
the beginning of November, leaving 
Activision Blizzard to “create better 
support, resources, and guidance to 
women in the gaming industry.” 

The culture of the company 

was likened to a frat; a male-
focused 
culture 
of 
excessive 

drinking, 
harassment 
toward 

female employees and crude jokes 
permeated the workplace. This 
culture allegedly degraded female 
employees, as the men cited concerns 
about workplace efficiency due to 
prospects of pregnancy and familial 
obligations. Female workers also 
noted being constantly delegated 
work before being hit on by fellow 
male workers and supervisors, who 
would make vulgar jokes about rape 
and talk about desired sexual actions. 
The lawsuit mentions one worker 
taking her own life after her private, 

sexually explicit pictures circulated 
around the company without her 
consent. Some men stepped forward 
as victims as well.

Although Activision Blizzard is not 

new to scandals (2019’s Blitzchung 
controversy being a prime example), 
the lawsuit broke a dam, causing 
massive 
walkouts 
and 
complex 

debates within fan communities. 
People questioned their comfort 
playing games developed or published 
by Activision Blizzard and how to 
best support the developers while 
denouncing the company itself. Lines 
were drawn, both in real life and on 
Twitter. If you bought the upcoming 
“Diablo II: Resurrected” or “Call of 
Duty: Vanguard” or even continued to 
play “World of Warcraft,” you weren’t 
an ally. Matters were made worse 
when a second lawsuit was filed, 
this time by investors who claimed 
the company purposefully failed 
to disclose its ongoing problems in 
regards to the sexual harassment and 
discrimination, leading to artificially 
inflated stock. The investors argue 
that if they had been aware of the 
internal issues, they would not have 
invested. Kotick was personally 
named in the lawsuit as someone who 
was “instrumental in the spreading of 
false information.” 

The initial lawsuit was then 

expanded, the state of California 
adding temporary workers under the 
suit’s purview and stating Activision 
Blizzard has obfuscated investigations 
through NDAs. Around the same 
time, the company was also accused 
of shredding evidence. The Securities 
and Exchange Commission started 
their own investigation in September, 
subpoenaing Kotick along with other 
senior executives. Things continued 
to get worse.

According to a recent report 

published on Nov. 16 from the Wall 
Street Journal, Kotick was aware of 
the sexual misconduct allegations for 
years. He purportedly hid information 
about incidents from board members, 
and personally had accusations of 
general misconduct that had been 
settled out of court. One terrifying 
account of Kotick’s behavior states 
that “In 2006, one of his assistants 
complained that he had harassed 
her, including by threatening in a 
voicemail to have her killed, according 
to people familiar with the matter.” 

Arts

“I’m writing a piece about Superwholock.”
My roommate’s eyes fill with maternal 

disappointment after I tell her my weekend 
plans. “That is,” she struggles for the words, 
“that is the last thing I wanted to hear.” I see a 
glint of hope in her eye — hope that I’m joking, 
that this all a nightmare, but I only nod with a 
feeble attempt to fight back a smile.

“Maddie.”
My roommate is desperate now, pleading, 

but not even she cannot stop the oncoming 
storm. My hubris is immeasurable and my 
work indispensable — I must memorialize 
Superwholock. Even if I must burn bridges in 
the process. 

I’ll concede, my roommate and I were only 

ten years old when Superwholock invaded 
Tumblr in 2011, but we’ve both been haunted 
by it for the last ten years. Superwholock, 
for those who are blissfully unaware of this 
pop culture phenomenon, is the name of 
the fictional alternate universe in which the 
characters and plots of the television shows 
“Supernatural,” “Doctor Who” and “Sher-
lock” inhabit the same universe. If you had 
really never heard of this before I fed you from 
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, 
your follow-up question might be, “How did 
this happen?”

 “Sherlock” and “Doctor Who” shared pro-

duction teams under the BBC and had similar 
mainstream appeal in the U.K. The crossing 
over truly began in the U.S. as “‘Doctor Who’ 
and ‘Supernatural’ fans filled similar roles — 
as small but enthusiastic fan bases made up of 
young people with an interest in science fiction 
and fantasy.” The “Doctor Who” reboot began 
the same year that “Supernatural” premiered 
— 2005 — but these fandoms didn’t experience 
much interaction in the States, so “Sherlock” 
had to act as the proverbial bridge between 
the two. “Sherlock” was already inherently 
tied to “Doctor Who,” but the show’s ability to 
employ a fantastical grittiness was what drew 
“Supernatural” fans into the triad. 

These common threads helped all three 

shows enjoy simultaneous and meteoric rises 
to pop culture stardom in the early 2010s. Each 
show spawned avid fandoms that eventually 
joined together to create a conglomerate fan-
dom, dubbing themselves as “Superwholock-

ians.” The Superwholock universe is wide and 
complex; the main characters from all three 
shows coexist and go on any number of adven-
tures together — sometimes Sherlock and the 
Doctor are lovers, and other times “Sherlock 
and the Doctor occasionally switch trench-
coats and imitate each other just to mess with 
Sam and Dean.” It’s difficult to trace the exact 
origins of Superwholock, as some believe it 
first appeared in January of 2012 while other 
sources claim the trend started as early as 
2010. But, it is generally believed that Super-
wholock originated in 2011 since the first-ever, 
now deleted, post under the Superwholock tag 
on Tumblr dates back to August of 2011. 

For the next three years, Superwholock 

continued to explode in popularity, and this 
rampant proliferation of the fandom was due 
to a number of elements. In the “Doctor Who” 
universe, fan-favorite David Tennant had 
bowed out of the role of the Doctor in 2009 
and was replaced by new fan-favorite Matt 
Smith in 2010. The BBC’s “Sherlock” had fin-
ished its first season in the winter of 2010 and 
was between seasons, and “Supernatural” had 
wrapped up its sixth season only a few months 
prior and was still coming down from its Apoc-
alypse storyline. Tumblr had “emerged as one 
of the fastest-growing consumer-oriented 
Internet sites … with its audience surging from 
4.2 million visitors in July 2010 to 13.4 million 
visitors in July 2011,” while popular fanfic-
tion website Wattpad reached a milestone of 
1,000,000 users in the same year. Fans were 
left with their three favorite shows in states 
of limbo and newly popularized social media 
sites made for creating and sharing original 
content, so it’s no wonder that Superwholock 
exploded onto the digital scene in 2011. 

The peak of Superwholock’s popular-

ity lasted for approximately four years, but 
its aftershocks are still felt a decade later in 
the way my roommate groans when I say the 
phrase within ten feet of her. “It was the most 
ambitious crossover event in history,” she 
relented after I convinced her that this article 
was a good idea. “It was a cultural reset.” She’s 
right — it’s difficult to emphasize the impact 
Superwholock had on online fandoms, and 
its ability to exist solely on the internet was 
what made it so unique. All three fan groups 
involved had survived offline; “Doctor Who” 
premiered 30 years before the internet was 
made available to the public, so the crossover 
was exclusive to the web and, more specifical-

ly, Tumblr. For one of the most popular social 
media sites of my time, Tumblr is as disor-
ganized as they come — it is built to largely 
promote single paragraph blog posts, small 
collections of images, stream-of-conscious-
ness content and does not allow for blogs to 
combine into larger groups. I opened my now-
defunct Tumblr account to test just how dis-
orderly my dashboard could possibly be and, I 
was right. I could feel a headache forming after 
approximately two minutes of scrolling. 

With this in mind, it seems to me that the 

miracle of Superwholock is that it was ever 
organized in the first place. The mega-fandom 
was based almost entirely in online interaction 
on one of the messiest social media platforms 
we use, and yet it formed and grew at a daz-
zling pace. Suddenly, you couldn’t spend more 
than a few minutes on Tumblr without being 
bombarded by “Supernatural” GIFs or seeing 
absolutely outlandish usernames like tardis-
in-the-impala-at-221B. Currently, on Watt-
pad, searching Superwholock yields 43,700 
results. 43,700 fanfictions, one shots and AUs 
written over the last decade dedicated to one 
mega-fandom. Superwholock even marked 
the advent of similar conglomerate fandoms 
like Rise of the Brave Tangled Dragons or Bee 
Shrek Test in the House.

If Superwholock proved nothing beyond its 

sheer size and power, it proved that fandoms, 
whether mega or micro, could organize and 
move in less than ideal circumstances, and 
all online. Superwholock was one of the first 
fan-made and controlled crossovers of its size, 
and it did it without traditional media, fur-
ther evidencing that these groups could and 
would learn how to exist online if measly bar-
riers, like the cannon of the individual shows 
involved, stood in the way. With internet fan-
dom culture still fresh in the early 2010s, this 
completely changed how fandoms operated 
because, once fan groups learned to organize 
and manipulate social media to their will, 
there was nothing they couldn’t do and noth-
ing they needed permission for. Fans con-
nected across borders of any kind to bond over 
this behemoth that they created and nurtured. 
Superwholock meant so much to its fans 
because it was a fandom of their own creation, 
and they broke molds by showing the world 
how they could create trends, memes and art 
all their own, without ever meeting or engag-
ing in more traditional forms of fandom. 

Strangely, it was in-person interaction that 

seemingly killed Superwholock in 2014. Dash-
Con, a fan convention organized by Tumblr 
users and aimed largely at fandoms like Super-
wholock, occurred in the summer of 2014. 
Plagued by shady funding, poor organizing 
and mistreatment of panel guests, DashCon 
was Tumblr’s Fyre Festival. After the con-
vention’s failure, Superwholock utterly dis-
appeared, perhaps from the embarrassment 
Tumblr fandom culture sustained in the after-
math of DashCon. When assembled in real life, 
Superwholock crumbled and cemented that 
the organization of its fans, like other fandom 
crossovers after it, could only be sustained 
online where it was born and raised. And it 
was sustained.

When I recently checked the Super-

wholock tag on Tumblr, I spent about 20 
minutes scrolling through posts and still only 
made it to March of this year. Superwholock 
has carried on for a decade despite its failures, 
and I see no evidence of the original mega-fan-
dom truly dying any time soon. 

Superwholock was, for lack of a better 

word, a god of its time, and in calling it as such, 
I also admit that I feel like a minor prophet 
writing this article — a mortal hearing the 
word of the divine and putting it down for the 
masses to receive. This feels like a call back to 
a time when I was most deeply entrenched in 
the Superwholock fandom, but I could never 
look back on that period of my life with a spirit 
of animosity. Rather I see myself, aged 13 or 14, 
sitting in front of a school-administered iPad 
happily devouring any fanfiction or GIF sets 
that interlocked my three favorite universes. 

I respect this as a time of real growth for me. 
Superwholock gave me and thousands of oth-
ers a chance to grow into an admittedly very 
nerdy side of ourselves that would not have 
been fostered as safely in any environment 
other than online fan communities — because 
if you think I didn’t refer to myself as a “high 
functioning sociopath” and didn’t get bullied 
for it at least once in middle school, then I am 
here to tell you that you are dead wrong. Ulti-
mately, though, I often feel a deep-rooted nos-
talgia for those years that cannot be replicated. 

The fact that today, as a junior in college, I 

can make Superwholock jokes with my room-
mate and even pitch this article should prove 
the longevity of Superwholock not only in my 
life but in the life of the internet as well. Super-
wholock’s popularity may have peaked long 
ago, but we all know nothing can ever really 
be deleted online; it is still worth praising 
how the fandom has persisted all these years. 
The shows at the foundation of this trend 
have weathered immense changes — “Super-
natural” has ended, “Doctor Who” has cycled 
through two more Doctors and “Sherlock” 
has not released any new content since 2017. 
The fandom has changed too, as its members 
age and enter new phases of life, but that is to 
be expected when they created this universe 
a decade ago. The sheer gravity of a decade, 
ten years, is in itself an ode to the passion of 
fandoms that really love what they create. 
Superwholock was a god. Today it is a house 
of memories built with love and care, its doors 
open to generations to come for several more 
decades.

An Ode to Ten Years of Superwholock

Design by Michelle Kim

MADDIE AGNE
Daily Arts Writer

puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com

By Ed Beckert
©2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
12/08/21

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

12/08/21

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, December 8, 2021

ACROSS

1 Midday tide-me-

over

6 Landlocked 

African land

10 Acrimony
14 Common wrist 

measurement

15 Tatting fabric
16 Geometry 

calculation

17 Execs who only 

look the part

19 Pics for docs
20 Stephen Colbert’s 

network

21 Jury makeup
22 Beyond heavy
23 Burden
24 Screwdriver, e.g.
25 Ostentatiously 

nice sort

31 MLB game-

ending 
accomplishments

32 Tomatoes used 

to make paste

33 Guest beyond a 

velvet rope

35 Pac-12 squad
36 Shrink in fear
37 Spreadsheet input
38 Debussy’s sea
39 Expert
40 More delicate
41 Pompous types
44 High-flying mil. 

group

45 __ museum
46 Land divisions
48 Hard stuff
51 Pollution 

watchdog org.

54 Designated 

money

55 Pretentiously 

elegant one

57 Help in a bad way
58 Puckish
59 Type of coffee or 

whiskey

60 Start from scratch
61 Simple tops
62 Tot’s tea party 

guest

DOWN

1 Project detail
2 Without feeling
3 European range
4 Wisconsin winter 

hrs.

5 Security system 

components

6 Game with 

rooms

7 Rapunzel’s 

“ladder”

8 Play divisions
9 __ Moines

10 Panda’s diet
11 Of no 

consequence

12 Parts of Hawaiian 

greetings

13 Get (into) 

carefully

18 Attention-getting, 

in a way

22 Reactions to 

fireworks

23 Little piggies
24 Winter Palace 

monarch

25 Starting spots for 

some races

26 Reversed on 

appeal

27 Treasure __
28 Blew away
29 Dark clouds, 

maybe

30 Internet 

destinations

31 What a 

capital sigma 
symbolizes, in 
math

34 Course standard
36 Informal London 

eatery

37 Gossip
39 Degs. for 

choreographers

40 Campsite 

staple

42 Familiar with
43 Unclear
46 Off in the 

distance

47 Rubik creation

48 Reveal
49 Almost never
50 Protest singer 

Phil

51 Children’s author 

Blyton

52 Returning GI’s 

diagnosis

53 Pallid
55 Considerable, as 

a bonus

56 “Where __ you 

now?”

SUDOKU

WHISPER

“I’m going to 
survive the 
finals.”

“Counting down 
to Christmas.”

WHISPER

12/01/21

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

26 Director of many 

27 What people who 

35 Tyler of “Archer”

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
6 — Wednesday, December 8, 2021

M. DIETZ

Digital Culture Beat Editor

What the University 
should do about Bobby 
Kotick’s dirty money

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

