Pseudonym Sunday: The Rise and Fall of MsScribe

Fewer pseudonyms live on in infamy than that of the notorious MsScribe. The story is a saga that literally spans years. It has become a bizarre piece of internet lore, a drama-filled story that entertains as much as it repulses. An absurd comedy that has become the stuff of legends. It is probably the definitive piece of fandom wank, the likes of which we might never see again. Users can and have written thousands of word about the events and their fallout. The most famous and comprehensive of these write-ups is so long that it’s even segmented into chapters. Charolette Lenox’s work is admittedly a super long but very entertaining read if you have the time. It is perhaps the most referenced work, almost a required reading, when people discuss MsScribe.

I’m not going to try and summarize everything. Others already have done a much better job than I could hope to replicate. One blogger, Scott Alexander, succinctly summarizes:

In the early 2000s, Harry Potter fanfiction authors and readers get embroiled in an apocalyptic feud between people who think that Harry should be in a relationship with Ginny vs. people who think Harry should be in a relationship with Hermione. This devolves from debate to personal attacks to real world stalking and harassment to legal cases to them splitting the community into different sites that pretty much refuse to talk to each other and ban stories with their nonpreferred relationship.

These sites then sort themselves out into a status hierarchy with a few people called Big Name Fans at the top and everyone else competing to get their attention and affection, whether by praising them slavishly or by striking out in particularly cruel ways at people in the “enemy” relationship community.

A young woman named MsScribe joins the Harry/Hermione community. She proceeds to make herself popular and famous by use of sock-puppet accounts (a sockpuppet is when someone uses multiple internet nicknames to pretend to be multiple different people) that all praise her and talk about how great she is. Then she moves on to racist and sexist sockpuppet accounts who launch lots of slurs at her, so that everyone feels very sorry for her.

At the height of her power, she controls a small army of religious trolls who go around talking about the sinfulness of Harry Potter fanfiction authors and especially MsScribe and how much they hate gay people. All of these trolls drop hints about how they are supported by the Harry/Ginny community, and MsScribe leads the campaign to paint everyone who wants Harry and Ginny to be in a relationship as vile bigots and/or Christians. She classily cements her position by convincing everyone to call them “cockroaches” and post pictures of cockroaches whenever they make comments.

Throughout all this, a bunch of people are coming up with ironclad evidence that she is the one behind all of this (this is the Internet! They can just trace IPs!) Throughout all of it, MsScribe makes increasingly implausible denials. And throughout all of it, everyone supports MsScribe and ridicules her accusers. Because really, do you want to be on the side of a confirmed popular person, or a bunch of confirmed suspected racists whom we know are racist because they deny racism which is exactly what we would expect racists to do?

MsScribe writes negatively about a fan with cancer asking for money, and her comments get interpreted as being needlessly cruel to a cancer patient. Her popularity drops and everyone takes a second look at the evidence and realizes hey, she was obviously manipulating everyone all along. There is slight sheepishness but few apologies, because hey, we honestly thought the people we were bullying were unpopular.

(I stress that this is a very abridged version that glosses over and skips A LOT.)

If it has not been made apparent yet, this tale starts over a decade ago in the early 2000s. It was the time when livejournal acted as the central hub for fandom activity. Everyone was recovering from the 90s, Myspace was still starting up, and many internet users still had to go through dial-up connection instead of broadband. (For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, be glad you were never subjected to this awful noise.) Even so, the MsScribe story may still provide some sections that echo more modern activity and may still have some relevance for people.

At its core, the MsScribe story is one of a user who was determined to reach fame (BNFdom) by any means possible. She constructed wild stories for her pseudonym, generally just caused a lot of drama, and used a variety of sockpuppets, both to prop her up and slash her down. Of course, the latter only further endeared her to her followers. In the process, she stepped on more than a few toes. It’s easy to forget that MsScribe’s dramatic show involved other real people, people who were personally invested, deceived, and hurt. She caused a lot of chaos and backlashing in the circles she frequented. And as she moved up in popularity, the ripples only grew.

In the fallout, many users began to look critically at the structure of online fandom and fame.

Original thread here.

MsScribe's heyday is over, but her legacy still lives on. It provides the perfect study for a lot of behaviors that are prevalent on the internet today - the drive for internet fame, sockpuppeting, stirring up drama. It speaks to the dangers of imagined hierarchies and internet communities who all too easily believe almost anything with minimal information. It exposes how easily some social structures on the web may be exploited and manipulated.  People still refer to her usernames and even claim them as their own at times. Some people have even role played as the users involved.

And above all, it makes a really entertaining read.