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