Four more insane stories of niche Internet Drama

Star Wars Puppet cancelled, cow bomber fakes a harassment campaign, a disappearing demon kiss and HORSE CRIME

Welcome back, gremlins. Every once in a while, I run across a great story from social media that doesn’t really fit into a typical post. These are incredible stories, but either timed poorly with other posts, or a bit raunchy, or just passed by some time-sensitive breaking news.

I keep these stories in my back pocket, and I’m documenting them now as a bonus for paid subs. This week we’ve got four stories from the world of bizarre internet subcultures:

• The disappearing asexual demon kiss

• TikTok Star Wars Puppet cancelled for homophobia

• Forum ecoterrorist cow bomber banned for faking their own harassment campaign

• The horse fraud cancer scam

If you’re not a paid sub, consider joining and helping to support the blog! If you are a paid sub then hold on to your butts, because it’s about to get weird.

The Disappearing Asexual Demon Kiss

Good Omens is a TV show based on the book of the same name by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. The plot revolves around an angel and a demon who are on opposites sides of the celestial war - Aziraphale and Crowley. The two characters live on Earth, and have essentially grown used to being around humans. After 6000 years of being around one another, they’ve become friends. And as heaven and hell gear up for Armageddon and the final apocalyptic battle, Aziraphale and Crowley decide they like Earth too much to let it burn up in a grand religious conflict and decide to stop the apocalypse.

The book was a highly acclaimed best-seller, and the first season of the show essentially follows the book beat for beat, ending at the same point as the book ends. The show immediately developed a large fanbase, but it was unclear whether or not the show would continue - after all, the source material was exhausted.

Notably, the show developed a very specific kind of fanbase that you might call the tumblr-queercore-fanshipping scene. The internet in general (and Tumblr even more specifically) loves TV shows that feature ambiguous gay subtext, well written high concept sci-fi, and characters that can be romantically shipped. The first season of Good Omens is a feast for all three things. It oozes ambiguous gay signals from the two leads. In season one they’re never romantically involved in the slightest, but they sure do have a lot of long lunches together and dramatically save one another several times. They exchange glances. There’s enough there to read it as a gay relationship, or an asexual romance, etc. And boy was Tumblr ready and willing to do so.

Gaiman, for his part, has highly encouraged this. He’s highly active on both Twitter and Tumblr and often responds directly to fans. In response to frequent questions about whether the angel and demon were just good friends, or romantic interests, or in an asexual relationship, he responded like so:

I wouldn't exclude the ideas that they are ace, or aromantic, or trans. They are an angel and a demon, not as male humans, per the book. Occult/Ethereal beings don't have sexes, something we tried to reflect in the casting. Whatever Crowley and Aziraphale are, it's a love story.

He’s also definitively said the relationship is queer, although he’s never committed himself to any particular interpretation of what that means.

So! That’s where the fandom found itself waiting for season two of the show. Season two was special in that it was the first time there was anticipation of the unknown - the first season’s plot was directly from the book and predictable. The Good Omens fandom spent their time writing Aziracrow¹ fanfictions and speculating what the second season might bring.

Then Amazon accidentally released this image six weeks before season two, and the fandom exploded: