One of the lesser known clowns.
Yet another post about the internet.
Harry Potter fandom circa the early aughts was a weird place. You could get genuinely famous and that fame could come with material rewards, though for many, I think fame itself was the real prize—being, as the term goes, a “Big Name Fan.” Round the decay of that colossal wreck the lone and level sands are indeed stretching far away, but at the time, it was a big deal, for some people. And that is why one person in the fandom resorted to some trickery to get herself at the top of the ladder. This person went by “MsScribe.”
You can read about the whole story here (or watch a video here) but what matters for our purposes is that MsScribe started by creating fake fans for herself as a way of getting her name out there. But when that didn’t work, she tried something else: she created a fake enemy.1 A fake enemy who put her on a “Big Name Sinners” list with a bunch of other people, even though all those people were so much more famous. (How random!, as we said in 2003.) And this worked. So s…