Talk:Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers

Some Clarity

I've been reading through this after seeing there were some comments about it on the article nominations page, attempting to see if I could help with the concerns about PPOV. I'm not in this fandom, so sadly I may not be a huge help, but I hope I can at least re-word some things to help them sound less likely to be inflammatory to someone. But, I mainly wanted to post on the talk page about a few things on the page that confuse me, and could need some clarity. It seems like some statements contradict each other on the history of the forum, and I just think a little revising could make it more understandable for someone not in the fandom. Some of the things that confused me or I think could use a little more editing are below.

• Under Fandom, it says: "...has been around since 1998 and led by the same admin, Dr. Indy, since 2000..." Might be more obvious to others but I had to re-read it a few times. Does this mean the forum started in 1998, and Dr. Indy joined in 2000 and stayed ever since? If so, it might be good to see who the admin was before 2000.

• Under Ultra-conservative, deeply homophobic and transphobic, religious zealots, it says: "have been criticized as early as 2005..." but then imply that no one has ever gone up or broken these rules, leading to this stereotype. I re-worded the original phrasing, but it used to say "but nobody ever seems to rebel against them." This is confusing to me, were these rules criticized in 2005, or has nobody ever criticized them at all? If it's true there was a fuss or discussion over them in 2005, perhaps we should remove the statement about nobody rebelling against them, or it could instead say that nobody has rebelled against them since the initial 2005 discussion?

• Under the same section as above, something about nobody "slipping through the cracks" and how quickly people will be banned for discussing the censored topics- I assume that is referring to the ban on discussions of homosexuality and non-binary identities, including transgender discussions. But I don't know what that line has to do with disproving the stereotype, which is what those bullet points seemed to be attempting. Stating that many members consider themselves as not -phobic, then under that stating any discussion of such topics get people swiftly perma-banned, feel quite like opposites. Still, including both statements seems more inline with PPOV than including just either one separate, so I left that statement alone. Maybe just something to consider and revisit to see if there's any way to make this bullet point more concise? Perhaps a wider variety of opinions from forum members would help- both on the strict forum rules and their opinions on the censored topics (for example, are the people who see themselves as not -phobic made uncomfortable by these rules, but keep quiet so they can use the forum? Are there any members who are themselves LGBTQ that frequent the forums, or are the forums only frequented by non-LGBTQ members? Or people who utilize the "ally" title?)

• The "further criticism" section leaves a tidy list of many other criticisms of the fandom, however I think this part could use a lot more elaboration, especially the broader ones such as claiming non-fandom members think fandom members are "obsessed" with the history of their show/fandom, and apparently see that as a bad thing enough to criticize it over. "You care too much about your fandom history" is not a criticism I've seen in other fandoms before, so it would be really interesting to see this one fleshed out more, maybe even grab some quotes from said critics.

• For the long length of this article there actually aren't a lot of citations at all. There isn't really a citation requirement necessarily, but citations really help enrich articles, and help readers engage with the work by clicking links to go own their own explorations. I definitively feel like adding citations on certain areas would really impact this article for the better, like for example under the March 1989 section there's a part about a page in the official comics being a big deal for early CDRR fandom. If someone finds a citation for that it would be really cool, though that one could be hard since you'd probably need a copy of that page. Otherwise, fan remembrances of it, such as if there was a forum discussion of people remembering how they used to use that page and send each other mail, would be great too. Another that could use citation and clarification- under Novemember 1990 it says a fanfic that got rejected by Disney was "published for fandom." But where? What was it called? A link to the fic could be in order, it sounds pretty important to the fandom.

• Under March 1989 there's a mention of a "Great Debate." Right now, there is nothing else about this "Great Debate" in the article; that's the one and only mention of it. If there was a shipping debate all the way back in the late 80s, that would be a perfect topic to expand on.

This article is so long that I'm afraid it's taking me a lot of time to read through it, I've barely gotten 25% through the thing, and that's even with skipping the entire canon section. I don't want to nitpick too much, so I'll leave my thoughts as this for now. I'll keep trying to read more through it and see what I can do, but it may come down to a CDRR fan or someone more dedicated to digging into sources and citations to get it more spruced up. I will say it's super thorough and that's always great!! Patchlamb (talk) 19:33, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

First of all, apologies for not making myself known earlier. I am the one who reworked this article, and for some better understanding, I have now completed and put out my user profile.

Now to get to your criticism. This post will hopefully give you some more insight into the inner workings of the CDRR fandom.

Your first point is valid. It's mentioned further down who founded the Acorn Cafe, but if you say that giving this information at this point already, then so be it.

For your second point, it's important to know that the Rangerdom is quite different from other fandoms. One would expect the Rangerphiles to rebel against such rules. But one would also expect their fanfic to be some 60% explicit Chip/Dale slash and 30% likewise explicit Chip/Gadget and/or Dale/Gadget smut, judging from experiences with other fandoms. In reality, there is hardly any CDRR fanfic with a rating beyond PG. In an estimated over 90% of all fanfics, they still do as they do in the show: They fight crime. And fans who make their idols protect the law in fanfics are unlikely to be anarchist freedom fighters themselves who break laws in order to make them go away.

Besides, there is not a single alternative to the Acorn Cafe. It's the only CDRR fan forum remaining. A ban at the Acorn Cafe means not only "bye-bye, Acorn Cafe", but "bye-bye, CDRR fan community". There is simply nowhere else to go. And hardly any Rangerphile is willing to sacrifice their membership in this fan community to rebellion against homophobia.

Now you may say that any modern fandom with common sense would cause a mass-rebellion, risk mass bans and either topple the rule or topple the entire leadership of the Cafe or abandon the Cafe and start a new forum. Why don't the Rangerphiles do that?

First of all, it's because they genuinely love the Cafe. And that's because this fandom lives, breathes and loves its history, its past, its rich heritage. It resides in a forum that, while having gone through several instances, is 23 years old. That has been the same leader for 21 years, a really nice guy who knows the fandom and its history like the back of his hand and who organized annual fandom awards for many many years, no matter how big the effort was. If you ask the Rangerphiles for a fanfic recommendation, they'd recommend a fic that's over 25 years old and still counts as one of the best. Not to mention The Rangerillion, a Tolkien-style three-part meta-fic from 2007 which in the first part retells the story of CDRR itself and in the second and third part retells the story of the fandom. This fandom literally lives on its history.

If they went and torched the Cafe for its conservative rules, they would also go and torch the fandom's heritage and history. You may just as well shut the entire fandom down. This fandom is too old to start over somewhere else, and it is driven too much by its heritage and history to be able to survive such a step. And this is a major reason why there is no rebellion.

Also, if someone could run another forum and wanted to run another forum, don't you think there'd be another forum? But there is none.

Besides, this fandom is small. Teeny-tiny. I've been to a fan meet-up in Poland together with the Polish host, a Brit, a Swede and a Dutchman. We've referred to this as a "convention". No gathering of Rangerphiles has ever seen more than 20 people. Even North America has only ever had one regular meet-up, also referred to as a "convention", so this isn't due to the fans being spread across a whole number of meet-ups either. The Acorn Cafe has one or two dozen regulars currently. They simply aren't enough to sustain two forums. You simply can't divide a fandom in two that has fewer members worldwide than a Dutch brony convention has attendants and expect it to survive. Plus, the Rangerphiles love their Cafe too dearly for everyone to move over to another forum. Some will want to stay. For tradition.

I'd like to be more specific about bans, but for that, I'd need to know about specific incidents of pro-homosexual and/or anti-homophobic posts at the Acorn Cafe which led to bans of users. For one, there have only ever been very few bans since 2005 in spite of the strict rules.

I think I can recall five or six. All but one were in early 2007 when one user, driven by frustration and intoxication and inspired by similar actions organized on 4chan, deliberately started attacking and trolling the Cafe and breaking rules left and right, helped by three or four other users who basically acted as his goons. This was in a time when I visited the Cafe daily, but time zones got in the way of me becoming an eyewitness. The whole incident must have taken only one or a few hours, maybe even less than an hour. I'm in Germany which is 6-9 hours ahead of the USA, and all people involved in this are Americans. So when I went to bed, nothing had started yet, and when I came back to the Cafe in the morning, the aftermath had been cleaned up, and all users involved had been permanently banned. Whether or not the anti-homosexuality rule was broken, I can't tell because all traces of the incident had vanished before I even learned of it. The one remaining user was several years later when I wasn't a daily visitor anymore. All I know is that I unexpectedly found this user banned. I have no idea about and no record on what caused this ban.

Any of these banned users may or may not have rebelled against the anti-homosexuality rule. There is no evidence and no record for either. So this can't be written out any more specifically.

This leads us to your third point.

The prejudice that's taken as fact outside the CDRR fandom is that nobody is talking about homosexuality at the Acorn Cafe because every last single member of the Acorn Cafe is deeply homophobic. Otherwise they'd rebel against this rule, now wouldn't they?

Reality is that nobody is talking about homosexuality at the Acorn Cafe because they don't want to be thrown out of their beloved fan community. Because if they did talk about it, they would be thrown out of the fan community. Again, not only the Cafe, the whole community. Again, there's nowhere else to go.

Rangerphiles aren't all homophobic per se although everyone seems to believe that. It's just that the very core of this fandom, the place where everyone has been meeting since 1998, has a ban on homosexuality as a topic. And it's better to talk about the topic of homosexuality elsewhere than to be thrown out of the fan community. It's better to adhere to the rules than to essentially burn down the fandom.

Also, talking about the rules can get you perma-banned from the Acorn Cafe and thereby from the fan community since the early 2007 incident (of which no records exist to be used as citations). So you won't be able to get Cafe members to talk about the rules in any other way but positive. Not at the Cafe because that'd get them banned, not outside the Cafe because there is nothing outside the Cafe where they could talk about the rules in such a way that can be used as citations.

To my best knowledge, the Cafe doesn't have any LGBTQ members because the LGBTQ community steers clear of the Acorn Cafe (due to its rules; they couldn't even possibly as much as introduce themselves without risking a ban) as well as the CDRR fandom in general (due to the implications and the resulting prejudices of rampant homophobia). But I have no citable written evidence of this. I suspect Meghan Brunner, the author of the Mooncrystal series in which Gadget is a lesbian, to be a lesbian herself, but she was amongst those who left the fandom upon the Cafe relaunch in 2005 in protest (and because she couldn't go anywhere else then already).

About your fourth point: You say that you haven't heard any complaints about obsession with fandom history yet. This may be because few fandoms live as much in their own past as the CDRR fandom does, especially not fandoms that have started since 1980, that haven't been around for as long as the Star Wars or Star Trek fandoms. I mean, we're talking about a fandom that still remembers two flame wars from 1997 and 1998. That celebrates the birthday of a forum which was launched in 1998 and that, while being an incarnation from 2005, has an archive of threads dating all the way back to 2000. That recommends a fanfic from 1996 and a fan-made graphic novel from 2003 as their greatest works ever. That keeps a static copy of a website about a one-shot character from the turn of the millennium alive. That comes up with a meta-fic about itself (written as a Tolkien-style three-parter no less, not to mention renaming everyone to tie in with the Tolkien style, thereby making the fic completely incomprehensible to anyone but dedicated fans).

And that doesn't have much else to say. It really doesn't, but you have to know that, and that's weird enough already.

In fact, just how many small, non-mainstream cartoon fandoms are aware of their history all the way back to before 2000? Before 1995? Again, I'm not talking about the ginormous Star Trek fandom which can trace its own history back to the late 1960s.

If you need more elaboration on what's written about fanfic, i.e. statistics (% of G-rated fic, % of PG-rated fic, % of PG-13-rated fic, % of R-rated fic, % of X-rated fic, % of slash etc.), I have to disappoint you. There are no statistics. The CDRR fandom doesn't have a central user-maintained fanfic archive of the likes of FanFiction.net with ratings and genres and whatnot that can be filtered and examined for statistics. Only a tiny fraction of all CDRR fanfic resides on FanFiction.net itself. Most can be found on the RRDatabase which is a glorified static webpage on a tech level from over 20 years ago and/or at the Acorn Cafe which is a forum, and neither has any form of searchable tags or rating. Neither is there a kind of "Rangerbooru", a user-maintained image board for fanart with tags and ratings.

I understand that an article on a fandom that's so much different from most other fandoms requires a lot of detailed explanation. But I'm afraid that'd blow the already huge article even further out of proportion. Besides, it all would have to be backed by citations which would mean a lot of research. And this research would have to be done by someone who really knows the fandom as opposed to an outsider who has pretty much only just discovered that this fandom exists. There may be at most circa three people with this kind of in-depth knowledge of the entire fandom. I'm one, the Acorn Cafe leader Dr. Indy is the second one, and the third one is the author of The Rangerillion, Mr. Spumoni, who hasn't been seen in the fandom in years.

As for citations in general, my plan was to add them if I happen to stumble upon them. It would have taken days or weeks of wading through the Acorn Cafe, various CDRR fandom history pages and the Wayback Machine to gather them all together.

I've clarified the "Great Debate" part a bit. But if I were to fully elaborate about it right there (Chip/Gadget vs. Dale/Gadget; later Pro = Chip/Gadget vs. Anti = anything but Chip/Gadget; Ranger War I 1997; Ranger War II a.k.a. St. Valentine's Day Massacre 1998), this would stop being a chronological timeline.

The episode-script-turned-fanfic-due-to-rejection-by-Disney mentioned in November 1990 is Miami Munks by David Walker; both title and author are mentioned in the paragraph several times. I had included a (red) link to a wiki page on it that I had planned to write eventually. AFAIK, even the Ranger Wiki doesn't have an article on Miami Munks yet. I could replace it with a link to the fanfic itself, but I guess that'd require spreading out all the Fanlore standard fanfic info next to/in this paragraph as well plus a redirect from Miami Munks to this paragraph for as long as no specific page for this fanfic has been written.

I'm afraid that in order to make this fandom easier to understand, a lot more articles will be necessary, also because this fandom is so small, so obscure and actually so reclusive that next to nothing is known about it (great fuel for prejudices, by the way, because they can't be proven wrong by "common knowledge" because there is no common knowledge about this fandom). And it's most likely me who'll have to either rework them from Ranger Wiki pages (not exactly few of which I've written myself back in the day) or write them from scratch. One about The Rangerillion will certainly have to have a high priority. -- Midnight Man (talk) 15:59, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Content flags

Currently, I don't believe this wiki page is in need of either a Needs Less Fandom flag or a Cleanup flag.

Maybe the page could use a Plural Point of View flag. Idk. — PictoChatCyberBully (talk) 01:48, 9 April 2022 (UTC)

I understand what you mean, but this'll be hard to fix. For it'll be hard to find someone else to fix it who knows enough about the topic.

The CDRR fandom is a) tiny (only one fan forum with not more than about two dozen active users) and b) obscure to the point of its existence being almost completely unknown (this one forum even hides from Google).

The largest Star Trek con is capped at 20,000 visitors while having competition even in the USA. The largest CDRR con had about 20 visitors, and it was actually a meet-up with no competition anywhere in the world. Just to put things into perspective.

You won't find neutral on-lookers from outside the fandom because whoever could possibly be one doesn't know the fandom exists. Even other people from fannish circles barely know it does, if at all, unless they've been Rangerphiles themselves at some point.

So it's safe to say that people either don't know anything about the CDRR fandom and precious little about CDRR itself, or they have been in the fandom at some point or still are. So there are only two kinds of people who may be able to write something about CDRR and its fandom: Rangerphiles and former Rangerphiles.

More or less active Rangerphiles are easy to find. Just go to the Acorn Cafe. Some have been around for decades, and hardly anyone knows the fandom as well as the chief admin since 2000, Dr. Indy. But, again, it's only about two dozen people you could ask altogether. And getting a fully neutral POV from these people will be very very difficult. Indy knows more than I do, also because he has been around since even before 2000, and because he runs his own fandom museum. But he's also the one who introduced the homophobic rules at the Cafe in 2005.

Forget about looking up CDRR fanart on deviantART and then asking people about the fandom. Most of those who've posted CDRR fanart on dA don't know about the existence of a fandom either.

Former Rangerphiles can only be found if you know their names and their whereabouts. These people may still have fond memories of their time in the fandom (not neutral either), but they may just as well have left the fandom behind in hatred, mostly due to what's commonly criticized about the fandom in general and the Cafe in particular (even less neutral, but swinging the other way).

Look at the First Impressions section again. Before I re-wrote the article from scratch, these "First Impressions" were taken at face value. They were considered as what the CDRR fandom actually is. The sources for the article were limited to Wikipedia, one former-fan-turned-hater and a wacko article on English Russia. So much about people who have never been Rangerphiles really knowing and being able to judge the fandom.

But these are the only people who know anything about CDRR and its fandom. At the same time, there's a lot to know about CDRR and its fandom, also because this teeny-tiny fandom has its own history of almost 35 years extremely well-preserved.

I'm afraid you'll hardly find anyone who actually knows about this fandom (and that means far beyond "wasn't that a bunch of gay-hating religious nutjobs that fap to cartoon mice") and knows enough to be able to contribute here, and who at the same time is even more neutral than I'm trying my best to be.

If you look at articles about other specific fandoms, I'm pretty sure that any in-depth editing is done by people from that particular fandom who really know what they're writing about. Big popular mainstream fandoms have dozens or hundreds of people whom this applies to. The CDRR fandom, I'm afraid, has only got me.

Now there's an apparent dilemma here. On the one hand, Fanlore's raison d'être is to collect, preserve and inter-connect fandom history, isn't it? That's what it was made for. That's why it exists.

On the other hand, you've got that cartoon fandom that's on the brink of total irrelevance because it's so tiny and almost unknown, but that comes with boatloads of exactly what Fanlore is seeking to collect, all well-preserved, much of it well-documented. The history of the CDRR fandom should be an absolute treasure trove for Fanlore, but I guess it's just overwhelming because it comes so unexpected for such a tiny cartoon fandom, also because there are generally only so many fandoms out there with their own historians and archivers.

Now I can hear those who previously didn't even know a CDRR fandom exists scream that this is wayyyyy too much information on such a small and obscure fandom. Yes, it's unexpected. Yes, it's overwhelming.

But yes, there's nowhere else to go for all this than Fanlore. And this is exactly what Fanlore was made for.

Wikipedia can't write about fandoms if it can't reference non-fannish sources, and in CDRR's case, it can't. In CDRR's case, the fandom is even the most extensive and reliable source for the show, not to mention the fandom itself. Besides, the whole thing is too irrelevant for Wikipedia.

The Ranger Wiki is half-dead. The admin has been gone and next to impossible to contact for 15 years, and for that long, it has been impossible to register new users. The reason why I've started editing here is because of just that, because I'd like to take what I know, what the fandom knows to Fanlore before the Ranger Wiki is eventually shut down. Also, it's easier to find on Fanlore than on a fandom-specific wiki.

There are two CDRR wikis on Fandom.com, both of which have taken over Wikipedia's rules verbatim, thereby ruling out anything fannish.

So the only alternative to piling everything up on Fanlore is to leave it where it is, scattered across a few still running personal fansites, the Wayback Machine and a forum that hides from Google. Let it sit there, unnoticed by everyone but Rangerphile fandom archaeologists, and wait for these websites to go down and take all this with them.

Maybe some of it deserves articles of its own. But still, some basic information has to stay in the main article so that first-time visitors can see without much jumping from page to page what everything is about. And until more specific articles are written, this extra information should stay in the main article.

But who's to decide what is relevant and what isn't? Who has got the in-depth knowledge about the CDRR fandom to judge over that and to tell what is biased and what isn't? Who could possibly tell you that what I've written is not one-sided propaganda from a wretched hive of homophobic furries?

If you want a well-informed and unbiased alternate POV, give someone several months to study the CDRR fandom, read through old websites both still active and archived on the Wayback Machine, Google the show and try to find comments on it and its fandom, go to the Acorn Cafe, talk with the people there (just don't mention homophobia if you don't want to risk a ban), interview Indy, find out who else is part of the Old Guard, locate them and interview them, too. There's just so much to know about the CDRR fandom to even be able to judge it, it's very hard to find if you know what to look for, and it's even harder to find if you don't. --Midnight Man (talk) 12:05, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

Midnight Man, my man, the CDRR page is awesome. This is probably one of the neatest, most complete pages on Fanlore, which is a pathetic wiki rn tbh. The scope and layout serve as a good example for what other pages should be.

I'm actually kinda surprised the Batfamily article I worked on somehow got to be a Featured Article, because I think it's way less comprehensive compared to the CDRR page. It doesn't even really cover shipping and stuff! Looks like the judgment might just be wiki pages needing to have more than one pair of hands at work, hence the PPOV flag (see here). It's a good opportunity to recruit a fellow fan to the wiki cause.

Maybe a "comments" section would help. Just slapping some quotes from forums or blogs or varying platforms with differing opinions, to get some diversity of viewpoints. Like a few choice quotes as snapshots representing the collective sentiments of two or more factions regarding a certain topic during a certain era/phase.

Also like

go to the Acorn Cafe, talk with the people there (just don't mention homophobia if you don't want to risk a ban)

...obvs that's not your fault, but being unable to even discuss an experience might hinder the complete representation of fan experience. Idk.

Also

Forget about looking up CDRR fanart on deviantART and then asking people about the fandom. Most of those who've posted CDRR fanart on dA don't know about the existence of a fandom either.

I think going by the Fanlore definition, those guys are considered part of the CDRR fandom just by virtue of creating transformative works and forming communities however loosely, regardless if those guys would be considered part of some satellite fandom rather than the inner core of true believers and original generation pioneers.

But like I don't style myself as the arbiter of wikidom or whatevs. If you or anyone else wants to take down the PPOV flag, I ain't gonna put it back or anything. But also a flag isn't the end of the world, and it doesn't necessarily even like proclaim the quality or appropriateness of any article imo, so it's no big deal in the first place.

Man, I don't even go here. — PictoChatCyberBully (talk) 06:48, 18 April 2022 (UTC)