CrystalWank

Related terms:	The Cassandra Claire Plagiarism Debacle, The MsScribe Story, Victoria Bitter Wank
See also:
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CrystalWank occurred in 2004.

It inspired the term My hed iz pastede on yay.

From a fan in 2020: "So what was all the drama about? What drew people to this drama in particular? Shitty Photoshops and terrible art, mostly. Or, more specifically, shitty Photoshops, terrible art, and a creator who just would not shut the fuck up."

Summaries

2004

[She] claimed to have received original photos of Dom and Billy from the Berlin premiere, and to have done original sketches, including one that Dom liked and signed for her. Other people believed her art was original, and showered her with praise.

It's funny, she did a photomanip placing Dom in her living room last week and admitted that it wasn't real in comments. People liked that even after they knew it was a manip.

But she kept claiming originality. When someone gushed "So... when is your first gallery show?" she answered "I keep asking myself that same question". She's been selling "prints of her sketches," thus making money off other fans. And basking in the adulation.

But then it all fell apart for her.

For example [[almostnever[1]]] recognized the Dom and Billy picture as a wire photo that she'd detagged, including all the fuzzy bits where the tags used to be, and points this out in a comment. And others recognized that [her] picture of her sketch with Dom's autograph looks strangely unlike any of his signatures anyone has seen. And that all the "sketches" are extraordinarily difficult to do by hand but easy to Photoshop. And that she sure got a lot of sympathy when she claimed her notebook was stolen (and thus her originals can't be seen). And that her original art is much less sophisticated than her LOTR actor "sketches".

The wank gets laughed at in fandom wank, a JournalFen community set up to snark at silliness. So she tries to get them removed from JournalFen (which was set up for weird fan stuff like wankery). The JF admins weren't amused, especially after she claims they removed the whole post (in a post on LJ she later deleted).

The silly hen was also "fighting" back, by accusing de-watermarkers of copyright violations. And posted pictures purporting to show her original sketches in a notebook. And claimed that you can tell her originals because the charcoal comes off (most artists fix the charcoal so they don't ruin the picture). And wrote supportive posts for herself as anon, pretending to be the original photographer, but using the same IP address and the same misspelllings. And tried to explain that in awkward ways, including claiming that her nanny was doing things from home. And deleted opposing comments and even whole posts in Dom and Billy communities. And deleted the manip in her user info of her standing next to Billy.

As wanks go, it has some of almost everything. ETA: Including over 10,000 comments.

If she'd just admitted they were photoshops, everyone would have been impressed. But she was accepting praise for something she didn't do. And to cap it off, she was selling what she claimed were prints of original sketches.

2005-2008

From Fandom Wank Wiki:

Initially, Crystalwank's exploding comment count was fueled by two things: first, Crystal's own efforts to defend herself in the Fandom_Wank thread, which only led to more wank and mockery in the comments; and second, the ancillary wankiness that was uncovered by the commenters after the initial post. Crystal had been a busy girl. In addition to everything mentioned above, wankas found that Crystal had claimed in various forums that she had met LOTR actors, who told her they'd read and loved her fan fiction; she said she continued to be in touch with the actors through email and IM. Letters "signed" by LOTR actors were found in her website's guestbook. As well as faking photos of the actors in her apartment, Crystal had faked photos of herself at LOTR premieres. Wankas found many self-aggrandizing posts from Crystal about the popularity of her fan fiction and "artwork", including a story from Crystal about meeting someone at a bookstore who, by sheerest chance, had read her fan fiction. Crystal was not to be outdone by HP fandom; there was even some plagiarism!

However, most of Crystalwank is incredibly off topic, and after the tenth page, it's dominated by "OMG HOW LONG IS THIS GOING TO LAST?" comments for the remainder of its 76 pages. People continued to comment just because of the legend of CrystalWank, and were only stopped months later when the JFA upgraded to LJ's newer version of the journal software (that limited posts to 5000 comments). Even though the JFA later increased the limit to 11,827 (as discovered by lol meme), CrystalWank's 13,269 comments can never be matched by any other wank, past or future.

2010

You had to be there for 2004's CrystalWank, the largest wank in FW history and the first one for which the owners of Journalfen, the domain where FW is housed, manually lifted the comment restriction for the community so that the party could continue. It was the largest wank in FW history--and it was comprised almost solely of bad photoshop art.

The wank involved a Lord of the Rings artist named Crystal who was attempting to sell her fanart at conventions. The problem? The "art" was just clumsy Photoshop work of actor Dominic Monaghan, ranging from decent tries to the downright sloppy. In attempts to play around with their own "fanart," FW denizens spawned what is perhaps the community's most beloved phrase, in response to a guest appearance by Crystal herself, who showed up and offered "proof" that the real Dominic Monaghan was a good friend.

Whoever was lying on her bed, it was obviously not Monaghan, whose "hed" had been "pastede" on. (Yay!)

2020

From Reddit (See entire post here):

This is one of my favorite fandom scandals ever, because it didn’t even involve any of the morally questionable posts or actions that tend to get the most attention in today’s fan communities. You know how most fandom drama you see on Tumblr and Twitter happens because of fans doing downright insane shit, like sending death threats to actors or lacing cookies with needles or forming real life cults? CrystalWank didn’t have any of that, and yet it managed to become the most well-known post in Fandom Wank history because of its sheer ridiculousness. This scandal, despite being extremely petty and stupid on a surface level, was the most commented-on thread in the Fandom Wank JournalFen community, with over 13,000 comments and 86 pages at its height. People who weren’t even involved in the main fandom would show up in the thread just to say they commented on the legendary CrystalWank post.

So what was all the drama about? What drew people to this drama in particular? Shitty Photoshops and terrible art, mostly. Or, more specifically, shitty Photoshops, terrible art, and a creator who just would not shut the fuck up. Before I get into that, though, here’s some background info.

How it all began

The story starts with “Crystal Gamgee,” a young member of the Lord of the Rings fandom. Unlike most of the people featured in scandals like these, Crystal wasn’t particularly well-known in the community; for the most part, she was a generic fangirl with a pretty small name. She wrote fanfiction and participated in fandom discussions, but there wasn’t anything that made her stand out from the crowd. On occasion, she drew art, which was generally well-received, but even that wasn’t enough to really propel her into popularity. Before the drama, she was one fangirl in a sea of millions and millions of them—a very small fish in a very big pond.

Eventually, Crystal got tired of this, and she did what many fans do when they get sick of not being noticed — started lying about things she had done, actors she had met, and resources she had access to. It began with a relatively tiny lie: she claimed she’d been given exclusive photos of actors Dominic Monaghan (Merry) and Billy Boyd (Pippin) at the Berlin premiere of one of the Lord of the Rings movies. Naturally, this garnered attention immediately; other fans were eager to get their hands on these photos and use them in their own works (and/or drool over them.) Around the same time, Crystal claimed that she’d drawn extensive amounts of original sketches, including one which Dominic Monaghan himself was supposedly extremely impressed by. She later posted a picture of said sketch, with Monaghan’s signature on it, and the community responded with praise, which varied from “that’s pretty neat” to incoherent keysmashing. The response was so good that Crystal started selling her sketches for $10 apiece, and people readily bought them.

Meanwhile, outside of her art side hustle, Crystal continued to claim that she knew actors personally and had exclusive access to photos and media that other fans couldn’t see. At one point, she posted a picture of Dominic Monaghan just hanging out in her apartment, lounging around on her couch. Initially, this was posted without comment, as if Monaghan was just a casual friend of hers, but she later admitted that it was Photoshopped. The thing is, though, people didn’t really care — it was a decent Photoshop, and it was common practice at the time for people to create image manips from photos of actors. Crystal could have admitted that it was Photoshopped from the start, and people still would have liked it. She didn’t do that, though, and it wasn’t long before people started to see her as sort of shady. This was not helped by the fact that, when someone asked about seeing her original sketches, she claimed that her notebook was stolen and she no longer had the original drawings. By now, you can probably see where this story is going.

The saga begins

I’ll go ahead and state the obvious: most of Crystal’s claims were total bullshit.

One of the first people to point this out was a popular fan who went by the name Almostnever (at the time, at least; she later changed it to “Cesare.”) Almostnever said that Crystal’s “exclusive premiere photos” were actually just Getty stock photos with blurred-out watermarks. How did Almostnever know this? Because she was the one who had originally removed the watermarks in the first place, and Crystal hadn’t given her credit for that. Ethics of stealing stock photos aside, most people agreed that it was pretty shitty for Crystal to steal Almostnever’s content and pass it off as her own, and even shittier that she claimed these stock images were some kind of rare, exclusive, Crystal-only pictures when they were actually random photos anyone could access.

From there, other people started noticing more and more gaps in Crystal’s stories. She claimed that Dominic Monaghan had signed her sketch, but his “signature” there looked completely different from his actual signature. She claimed that all of her sketches were originals, even going so far as to say she’d considered looking into getting a gallery show, but most of her non-LoTR art was painfully amateurish. And the fact that she conveniently lost her notebook the second people asked to see the originals was a red flag, to say the least. It turned out that most of her “art” consisted of random images run through Photoshop filters.

Immediately after these revelations, someone posted the story at Fandom Wank, a Journalfen community centered on fan discourse. Initially, this wasn’t a big deal; people lie about their experiences and talents all the time, and while it was pretty scummy that Crystal was selling prints of fake sketches, it wasn’t like she’d kidnapped someone or started a cult or anything like that. Crystal was banned from some Journalfen communities for the lies and the selling of fake art, and that was where most people expected the story to end.

That is not where the story ended.

Things escalate

Some time after the story was posted on Fandom Wank, people started to uncover more information about Crystal. Not only had she lied about getting exclusive original photos, she was also obsessed with various actors to such a degree that she set up an elaborate charade so she could pretend to be their friend. If she couldn’t go to a fan event or a premiere, she’d steal other people’s photos of said event or premiere and photoshop herself into them, often poorly. She had dozens of pictures of random actors hanging out in her apartment and in her bedroom, sometimes in her bed, and even though many fans enjoyed making image manipulations of actors they liked, even they thought this was going a bit too far.. She also had loads of r/thathappened-type stories in which she claimed that many people, including both famous actors and random strangers on the street, had read and enjoyed all of her Lord of the Rings fanfiction and told her as much. And, to put the cherry on top of the cringe cake, most of her fanfiction was plagiarized.

Initially, most of the discussion on Fandom Wank was centered around the sheer cringiness of this. In the words of user byagghametta:

"Wow. You know you've hit a low point in life when you not only lie about being a fan artist via photoshop, but you've also entirely failed to convince anyone else that you know anyone remotely famous you claim to. Sad, sad girl, this one."

Other people were mostly just laughing at the incredibly bad quality of some of Crystal’s photoshops, which run the gamut from “decent” to “downright laughable.” Basically, everyone in the comments section was making fun of this girl, and although some of the comments could get mean-spirited, most people thought it was justified; after all, she had scammed people out of real money by selling her fake sketches. So the “drama” consisted mostly of people giggling about Crystals’ creepy obsessions and bad art skills for a while… until Crystal herself showed up to defend herself.

“My hed iz pastede on yay!”

Naturally, as soon as Crystal showed up in the comments, all hell broke loose.

[see more at "MY HED IZ PASTEDE ON YAY," a.ka. CrystalWank.

Fan Reaction

[She] broke the social contract of fandom. She lied to friends. She took their money and their admiration under false pretenses. She betrayed a society based on trust and sharing. Then she attacked the people who called her on it.

I thought of this because of a conversation with grevious_angel, who lost a lot of files from a computer problem. When I offered help, she said 'D'you know, sometimes I just love LJ! This is the place where people really do just help each other out. "You want that? I've got it. here y'go". Love it.'

We do that all the time. People pay for LJ time and pictures, do favors for someone they've never seen, send magazines overseas, and stay in hotel rooms together. We trust each other. We even collected enough money to fly Kia back to the states when she was stranded in England.

Every time someone plagiarizes a story, or passes off artwork as their own or blows someone off, it hurts that community trust. So maybe there's a bit more anger than the actions seem to deserve. But that kind of betrayal makes us wonder about what and who we can rely on. It encourages cliques and wariness. And I hate that.

The fact is, it's not just fandom that has the nutcases. It's life. No matter where you go, what you do, there will be 1% that make you scratch your head and say "huh?"

The trick is identifying them, and staying way the hell away from them. This one decloaked herself, inadvertantly, and the rest of us, who are relatively sane, can move on in community.

Of course, it did make for a deliciously yammy wank :D

This is me agreeing with what you say here. Fannish ethics exist because fannish currency isn't cold hard cash, it's creativity and the trust between fen. So yeah while I'm sure people think that too big a deal is being made over this or something like the recent Establishment wank, the fact is that things like that upset the fragile economy of fandom.

Crystal reminds me of an infamous woman in the Monkees fandom named Sammi—same delusional behavior, same lying just to make herself seem important, same avoidance when caught, same continuing on as if nothing had happened even when caught in a direct lie. I can't speak for FW but people who think they can act like that with impunity drive me mad. Moreover, the fact that she still may con newbies with her lies may be (and is, unless I misread) the reason why people are so carefully compiling the wank ... so that others won't be duped.

Lying is one thing. Taking money . . . out here in the real world it's called fraud. Which is still illegal, last I checked.

And now, just on the off-chance that she doesn't cheat on everything, all her work has been thrown into doubt. She may very well be a talented artist, but these lies alone mean that those who know about all this will look at anything she does (artwork, photos, writing) with a skeptical eye. She's not only hurting fandom; she's hurting herself. (And if she's as ding-dong nuts as people have speculated, that latter probably doesn't matter much, as long as she gets her precious attention.)

Further Reading

• Thoughts on Fandom and Trust (re: Crystalwank), ^{Archived version}, MSilverstar, April 17, 2004
• The 10 best tales of online drama from 10 years of Fandom Wank, ^{Archived version}, by Aja Romano at The Daily Dot, March 11, 2013
• CrystalWank at Fandom Wank; WebCite
• Crystalwank images, ^{Archived version}
• Bring out your manip & sketch wank!, ^{Archived version}, creative works inspired by CrystalWank
• Fandom Wank Highlights
• Fandom Wank Highlights
• Fandom Wank Highlights
• Fandom Wank Highlights
• "MY HED IZ PASTEDE ON YAY," a.ka. CrystalWank, ^{Archived version} by iwasonceafangirl, post on Reddit (July 2020)