Realms of Ruin

Title:	Realms of Ruin
Creator:	Marie Lu, Tahereh Mafi, Ransom Riggs, Adam Silvera, David Yoon, Nicola Yoon
Date(s):	20 October 2021
Medium:	Shared Universe fiction
Fandom:
Language:	English
External Links:	Archived Website
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This article documents a currently unfolding situation within the fannish realm. Content may change quickly, and the page structure itself may undergo major revision. New details are very welcome.

Realms of Ruin was a planned multi-author shared universe featuring several prominent YA authors such as Marie Lu and Adam Silvera. It was quickly cancelled due to fan backlash against the project's seemingly predatory monetization aspect through NFTs. It was set to feature 5 realms, 42 characters, and 12 stories written by the original authors at launch, with each of the 42 characters having an associated collectable NFT available for purchase. Fans were encouraged to get involved and then mint their stories into NFTs, which would accumulate worth based on an individual fan's audience and the initially involved authors would then "promote and reward" the stories they felt were best.

The Premise

Not much is known about the actual content of Realms of Ruin, aside from what was initially teased on the project's website. From the Realms of Ruin website:

There is almost nothing that the Five Realms have in common, save one thing: the Ruin must be contained, at all costs.

Long ago, a city of sorcerers summoned a powerful force called the Ruin, which they hoped to control, but could not. It unleashed hellish monsters upon the city, largely destroying it and killing most of its population. The Ruin would have poisoned and tainted the rest of the world, too, had the sorcerer elite not given up the fight, abandoned the city, and encircled it with a magical wall called the Palisade.

Within the Palisade are the decaying remains of this ancient city, a heart of darkness known only as the Grid. It’s a wasteland haunted with monsters, madmen, mysterious artifacts, and a powerful energy source carefully harnessed by each nation. Maintaining the integrity of the Palisade is a responsibility shared between the Five Realms through wars and disasters. Only with the unity of all can all thrive.

But this world is not known for unity.

And as each realm competes with the others, the Ruin stirs…

The Controversy

A promotional image for Realms of Ruin spread on Twitter as a meme.

Sometime around 15 Oct 2021, fans discovered the Realms of Ruin Instagram and started generating hype about the potential new project. A few days later, a riddle or scavenger hunt of some sort with ARG aspects was introduced and fans worked together to discover the website. The project was formally announced on 20 Oct 2021 and, from the moment that Realms of Ruin was announced, people had questions about it. Besides the usual excitement for new content from a beloved author (or in this case several beloved authors), fans were skeptical of the inclusion of the following on the website:

Your tales can be minted into NFTs whose value could rise as your readership does. As the world expands, the authors will be reading closely to decide which stories and characters are compelling enough to become canon.

This suspected monetization of unpaid fanworks did not sit well with people, especially as they suspected that any aspects from these fanworks that became canon would then belong to the owners of the shared universe rather than the creators themselves even though that would likely not be the actual case. Additionally, people were concerned about the NFT aspect of the project as NFTs are a hot topic right now in the art world. Fans wondered how making an NFT of a piece of writing would even work, and how said NFT could accumulate value as readership grew. They were also concerned about the fact that because the authors involved in the project primarily write Young Adult fiction, the project was seemingly being marketed toward younger fans who are legally not able to purchase the cryptocurreny necessary to participate in the project. Furthermore, fans were worried about the potential environmental impact of NFTs being involved. While Realms of Ruin was set to run on Solana, which the website promised has "low transaction costs and minimal environmental impact," further investigation by some fans turned up no hard numbers on how Solana was more environmentally friendly that other types of blockchains.

The cancellation announcement on Discord.

With these complaints in mind, fans took to the Realm of Ruins' public Discord server, initially linked on their website, and voiced their concerns. Many of the comments and concerns made in the Discord were screencapped and made available in a Google Doc but from all reports it seemed as if the authors were ill-prepared to answer the many questions posed by fans about the project. There were also reports that the authors were genuinely pushing the NFT aspect of the project to their potentially quite young fanbase and giving "get rich quick" scheme vibes by saying things like "someone could fund an author career writing stories for Realms of Ruin." This dissent eventually lead to the project being cancelled, with the announcement being made over Discord (seen to the left). Subsequently, almost every trace of the project was wiped off the face of the internet.

Over a matter of hours Marie Lu, one of the authors involved in the project, appeared to reverse her thinking. She went from slightly condescending responses to dissenters to acknowledging the concerns of the community and promising that they were taking a "step back" from the project to discuss. Shortly after the project was cancelled, The Mary Sue covered the issue in their typical snarky fashion and putting together the most relevant aspects of the controversy. Amanda Silberling also posted an article to TechCrunch titled "Inside the Realms of Ruin." This article clarified some aspects of the project, such as the confusion among fans regarding the NFTs of characters and whether or not these collectibles were required to write about the characters:

TechCrunch’s source said that the character NFTs were intended to be marketed toward people already onboarded into the crypto sphere, and the profits would go toward a “community treasury,” which would be used to benefit the community by subsidizing gas fees, offering crypto incentives for the best stories or anything else the community decided. But some fans believed that they would have to collect the character NFTs in order to be able to write about those characters, and the project’s developers didn’t do a good job at communicating that this wasn’t the case on the Realms of Ruin website.

The article only further highlights how poorly thought out and underbaked the project was, given that it went from a mere idea to being announced within a few weeks. It featured several quotes from Rebecca Tushnet about the fannish aspect of the project and how Realms of Ruin was, perhaps, approached from the wrong direction to attract the audience they wanted. There was also discussion of the project on Tik Tok by various creators. A month later, in November, Julie Zhuo posted a thread about the "failure" of Realms of Ruin that failed to address anyone's concerns about the project:

Among the publishing community, skepticism and questions popped up that quickly turned into a tidal wave of misinformation. The project became characterized as “some well-known authors are starting a pyramid scheme to exploit minors in a way that destroys the environment.” And as we know, once a juicy misinformed narrative spreads online, fueled by an indignant mob, clarification becomes impossible. We made the decision to cancel the project. The negativity made it untenable to do it in the fun, collaborative spirit we had hoped for.

Zhuo was not one of the authors involved in the project, but rather one of the people behind the NFT aspects of Realms of Ruin. Her thread characterized fannish concern about the fact that this project was targeted toward the relatively young fanbase of the involved authors as misinformation born out of baseless fearmongering rather than the authors not having even remotely considered these questions during the creation of this process.

Fan Commentary

Imagine if 6 NYT Bestselling authors created a collaborative world, let teens post their fanfic-type stories, & let readers provide those teens with kudos.

Then those same authors could use their movie deal money to pay those teens according to the kudos earned.

Imagine if 6 NYT Bestselling authors created a collaborate world, readers posted their fan works, & then the authors chose their favorite stories to mentor.

Or even brought those writers on as a co-writer on their next project?

Imagine if 6 NYT Bestselling authors created a collaborative world, readers posted their fan stories &

then the authors used their movie deal money to run bi-annual anthologies featuring the fan authors where they're paid for their work & given a publication platform?

Imagine if 6 NYT Beselling authors collaborated to use their money & platforms to entertain their readers while also supporting future writers.

Imagine if they'd focused on how they could use their power to help instead of how could they exploit readers for more money.

So let me get this straight, @joulee helped organize a bunch of authors to experiment with using Web3 to regain some digital sovereignty & empower fans in the same ways musicians have done for well over a year, and people thought that was...bad?

All these threads I'm reading are like "I don't know anything about NFTs, please don't make me learn. But I KNOW they are awful and going to melt the planet. No, I'm not reading the website to learn about how little energy their set up would use."

"And furthermore, current surveillance capitalist social media like Instagram are definitely the best way for teens to engage w/the writers they love, despite the fact that IG harms their mental health for profit. How DARE authors try to give teen fans a healthier alternative?!"

[...]

My sympathies to all involved. The hot takes are real gross today and the #RealmsOfRuin project sounds like exactly the sort of creativity and inclusion that's needed in the space. Publishing has a lot of work to do.

TL;DR today some authors said "there may be a better way" and publishing twitter burned the witch.

Authors of dystopian novels doing something called realms of ruin/ruin your life that involves NFTs and exploiting teenagers and ruining futures and the climate... Is it April 1st??? What am I missing???

Wait. Wait. A group of authors decided to create a ‘World’ where fans can BUY NFTS to ‘claim a character card’ and then write about this character - and I’d they get a big readership (and value up the NFT’ - the authors use this created character in canon … and? WHAT? W H A T

If I'm reading this right, these authors are basically running a grift where they both make fans pay for NFTs to join the "community" AND then get to steal the fan fic community's ideas for free and call them "canon"?

Marie, as a fan of your works, I want to politely ask you to not promote this. Many of your readers are young teenagers, and advertising nft's to them as something fun and exciting instead of enviroment-destroying is harmful to your audience and the planet

“Realms of Ruin” DO THEY NOT SEE THE IRONY OF THAT TITLE??? “bUt iT’S aN eNviRoNmEntALLy sUsTaiNaBLe nFt” ????????????? How about you stop pretending otherwise and just admit that you’re basically going to exploit teen audiences while also realm-of-ruining the environment?

I’m just not really understanding why they cancelled this whole Realms of Ruin thing entirely? The problems were centered around the NFTs so if the stories and collaboration were the main driving force why not DO THAT? But without the NFTs?