I Was In The Fandom The Cookie Needle Incident Occurred In! It Was Undertale. TLDR We Still Dont Know

I was in the fandom the cookie needle incident occurred in! It was Undertale. TLDR we still don’t know why the artist got a needle cookie because the culprit was never caught. The reason it got tied into antis and shipping stuff was because someone on Tumblr took the opportunity to go “it wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t drawn my rival ship minor/adult!”

r/Hobbydrama has a write-up, but unfortunately the OP spends most of it going “lol Undertale fans and shippers” and right when shipping would actually be relevant it gets completely ignored. The actual incident is shoehorned in with unfounded assumptions, and OP finishes with “maybe don’t ship adults with minors”. So I’m gonna attempt my own write up from what I remember. I urge your followers to correct me if I get things wrong!

Once again: The culprit was never caught so we have no idea why they did what they did. Keep this in mind.

A popular Taiwanese fanartist called Avimedes was at a convention in 2017. She got some gifts there, among them a cookie. When she took a bite her tongue was pierced by a needle. I think it was bad enough she had to go to the hospital? Either way she posted a picture of the bloodied cookie and needlea on her plurk, stating she had no idea who did it. A screenshot of it was posted and spread on Tumblr. The first reblogs were of people reacting with horror.

Then someone reblogged with (paraphrased) “Sure it was wrong, but it probably wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t drawn Frisk/Sans.”

Context: Frisk is the protagonist of the game, implied to be a child but very open for headcanons and self-inserts. Sans is THE most popular character in Undertale and thus the most shipped one. He interacts a lot with Frisk, so while it was never the fandom OTP for him it was pretty popular. People got around the age thing by simply drawing Frisk as a teenager/adult. Avimedes was one of them.

Not that the reblogger, who just so happened to ship Sans in the fandom OTP Soriel, cared. They might’ve been a BNF? Either way now legions of Soriel shippers were reblogging that version of the post, either as is or with additions about how minor/adult is wrong, Frisk is a child, [insert typical ship and anti arguments here], until people were outright defending the culprit.

The incident got posted only a day later to r/Undertale, but by them rumors were already flying about ships being the cause. Reddit OP made it clear the culprit hadn’t been caught and that these were just rumors, but they still took the time to denounce the culprit and people defending them for those reasons.

One game of telephone later and we have today’s “artist got feed needle cookie by an anti!”

Because of this there’s an now forgotten incident that happened few months to a year later. People started talking about how the culprit had been caught, and it turned out they had been one of Avimedes’ fans! I can’t remember if a reason was ever stated? Either way this got spread for a while until people got suspicious and looked up the source.

The source was a Soriel shipper going “Trust me guys! Also this totally had nothing to do with ships!” See, while it was (still is) the fandom OTP… turns out people will side-eye its shippers if it seems like they’re fine with people being seriously injured if they’re rival shippers. Once it was clear it was damage control people stopped spreading those claims.

So while anon is right in that we can’t say it was because of a ship because we don’t know, people were damn quick to defend the culprit because of their shipping bias so it IS still tied into anti-stuff and fandom purity. Kinda side-eyeing anon for trying to down-play it, because it certainly had an effect on Undertale fandom and ships.

After some research I’m also gonna side-eye anon for bringing up the claims about animal abuse and scams. The only sources I can are from 2021, from a few people going “source: trust me guys”, several years after the fact.

Even if they’re true, and even if that’s why the culprit did it?

People still thought it was fine an artist got needles in her cookies because she created content for their rival ship.

Thank you OTNF for letting me rant late at night, and apologies because this'll probably start another round of discourse.

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What's wrong with sidelining a character from the canon ship and writing them as an arsehole though, really? If I'm here for A/B, and the canon ship is A/C, I'm usually happy to see C trashed because clearly I think they weren't right for A anyway, which is why I'm shipping A/B. I don't think it necessarily automatically means poor quality writing? Sometimes it can be done in an interesting way that explores a different aspect of C, for example. And I don't get why people are often offended by C's treatment in an A/B fic? Like, it's okay guys, C isn't actually a real person whose feelings will get hurt... And if you like C so much then maybe you shouldn't be reading the A/B tag?

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A skillful writer can show how C is bad for A with nuance.

Strange Cats

was suddenly moved to draw a toony sort of character design .. but this is a bit too close to 2013 tumblr sexyman for my own comfort

Was so baffled at people claiming there’s only porn on AO3, so did a quick stats search. 

This is how the ratings look at the moment of counting, over the total 9,3M works on the archive (9 380 645 to be exact, atm)

Explicit: 1 551 860 (16,54%)

Mature: 1 409 093 (15,02%)

Teen and up: 2 834 938 (30,22%)

General: 2 651 772 (28,27%)

Not rated: 932 982 (9,95%)

Even combined, Explicit and Mature works barely overtake the total percentage of T-rated ones. That’s the overall stats on AO3, but fandom to fandom the landscape would differ greatly, of course.

The Underage tag, which is used to justify the witch hunts against the archive as a whole, returns only 222 748 works (2,37%).

EDIT: Look at the follow-up to see the ratio of Explicit and Mature works that contain sexual themes.

Only time I've really seen DNIs for a good reason is people putting 'Minors DNI' on NSFW / smut fics which ... should be a given.

Otherwise, yeah, it's a little silly. I'm all for cultivating an internet experience, but that's more on the user's end. You can't expect everyone you come across to filter themselves based on a list you posted somewhere on your profile. It just doesn't click for me.

I mean, you can put whatever you want on your fics, but minors have been lying about their age on the internet in order to see porn pretty much since the internet was invented 🤷‍♀️

You can't expect everyone who reads your fic to be someone you approve of. Putting a DNI on your work just tells those people that you don't want to hear from them. And it signals to other people that they might not want to talk to you either.

If some 13 year old wants to read my smut, I'm not going to stop them. I'm also not going to parent them. That's their parent/guardian's job. I write my stuff and I tag and rate it appropriately. If they're old enough to find it, they're old enough to decide to read it - or to nope out of it if it's not for them.

Just my two cents. Feel free to have at it in the notes.