A Collective of One: the strange lives of Andrew Blake

This is a story of cults, fraud, murder, Hobbits, identity, fandom, and the astrally projected clone spirit of Elijah Wood.

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BrittanyQuinn.jpgSource: Facebook

On a sunny Saturday morning in May, 2011, Brittany Quinn was thinking about hiking across New Zealand. The night before, shed played her final hand in a two-year long court battle: serving her ex, Jason Eisenberg, with a civil suit for equal ownership over the house they were living in. It hadnt gone well, but things rarely did with Jason. He had exploded in fury over the new suit, and she had called the police.

Six months earlier, shed shown up out of the blue at the house they once shared together, a two-story bungalow nestled on a wide, shady street in Fairfield, California. She reminded Jason that as his ex common-law wife, she had co-ownership in the property, and now she needed a place to stay. When he refused to budge, neither did she.

Ever since, 27-year-old Brittany, Jason, and Jasons father had all been residing in the house they were warring over, a growing cloud of tension in the heart of the cheery stucco residences in the Green Valley subdivision. After a judge ordered them to secure reliable third-party witnesses to their legal battles, they each installed supportive roommates. Jasons guy was 41-year old Tony Chambers. Brittanys guy was 27-year-old Andy Blake.

When Brittany served Jason the papers, he told her that if she wasnt out of the house by morning, shed be dead. It was the kind of empty threat he made all the time. Jason was the kind of guy who would threaten to burn down your house if you cut him off in traffic.

In the end, she decided it was all bluster as usual. When the police got there, no report was taken.

The next morning, Jasons father heard gunshots in the house, on the floor above him. He fled, running across the street and alerting a neighbor. Jason Eisenberg had just walked upstairs and into the bathroom, where he shot Brittany Quinn multiple times before turning the gun on his roommates. He shot Chambers twice as he came out of his room, in the head and chest, then looked around for Andrew Blake, who was in his bedroom frantically dialing 911.

When Eisenberg walked into Andrew Blakes bedroom, his gun didnt fire. He left the room at first, perhaps in frustration, and Blake quickly locked and blocked the door. Eisenberg turned back and fired once through the bedroom door, shooting Blake in the foot, before giving up and turning the gun on himself.

Police returned to the house on Venus Drive. Quinn, Eisenberg, and Chambers were all dead. Blake was released from the hospital with only minor injuries.

What happened next should be about Brittany Quinn. Its not.

Its about the man behind the door.

from-fb.jpgSource: Facebook

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I was struck by the speed at which VB lived, thought, and wrote, Fanfic writer Cara Loup tells me. At the time I didn't realize how much was going on behind the scenes. In hindsight I was the odd person out, I guess.

Cara met Andrew Blake online in January of 2002, when he was first posting fic and meta essays in the revived and teeming Lord of the Rings fandom. To Cara, Blake was a hyper-creative but ultimately harmless teenager.

Caras perspective is rare these days. More often than not on the Internet, Andrew Blake is referred to as a cult leader, a pathological liar, a longtime con artist, and a master manipulator. Hes known as the man who spent a full decade of his life claiming the ability to channel the souls of fictional and real people, allegedly up to 168 different people at once. These included everyone from fallen World War 2 vets to the astrally-projected souls of Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom.

Blake, now 31, swears those days are gone forever, that these many personas or alters were delusions. His detractors disagree; to them the alters were, and still are, the main tools involved in an elaborate process of lies and manipulation which make him dangerous.

But if Blake is telling the truth, that hes gotten therapy and the delusions are gone for good, shouldnt he have time to prove it? This tale spans 15 yearsenough time to create an Internet spook story no real human could ever live down.

How long do you give someone to reform their past if you suspect everything they do is a long con? How long do you wait for the supposed long con to play out? Five years? Ten?

How long do you give someone to reform their past if youre not sure the reform was ever real to begin withespecially now that a triple homicide has been added to the puzzle?

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On a Friday morning in April of 2000, a woman named Victoria Ann Mettler sat down on a bench outside the Walter Stiern Library on the campus of California State University in Bakersfield. She detached her prosthetic leg and laid it beside her on the bench. Then she pulled out a .22-caliber pistol and shot herself in the chest.

The quiet university community reeled from the effects of such a shockingly public suicide. But on a usenet forum called alt.startrek.creative, Mettlers death made even more of an impact. Mettler, under the username TrillSeeker, had been a beloved member of the Star Trek fandom, writing, reading, and commenting on fanfiction. Trilly was always rich with positive feedback, the ultimate currency in a community that trades its wares for free.

In the wake of Trillys death, the community responded with outpourings of grief, including numerous tribute posts memorializing her and fanfic written in her honor. In the midst of it all, a fan going by the handle Strwriter wrote a post about the incident on a community for a different fandom altogether, alt.tv.due-south.creative. Trillys passing, they wrote, has made me think of all the friends I have here in Due South fandom, and what I would miss if something happened to any one of you. There followed a long list of specific fans Strwriter wanted to thank, with names like Wolfwalker, Poet Bastarda Dareau, VoyagerBabe. After the lengthy list, Strwriter went on to compose a moving ode to appreciating life: Please, you never know when someone you know and even love will be gone, they wrote. Take a moment to thank your friends, virtual and real alike, for simply being there.

This eulogy must have seemed sweet and sincere at the time. Fifteen years later, anyone reading it who is familiar with the longtime history of Andrew Blake is inevitably struck by three significant things.

The first is that although this post is ostensibly about the death of another fan, the author is placing himself at the center of a community tragedy, making her death all about his own revelations. In the process, hes using the incident to garner favor with other members of the fandom, using tragedy to draw them closer together.

The second is that within the list of other fans for whose friendship hes grateful, he includes, without any apparent self-consciousness, one of his other sockpuppets. In the grand scheme of things, creating two sockpuppets in a fandom and then playing them against each other like this isnt the worst of sins, but its eyebrow-raising. In Andrew Blakes case, its a giant red flag.

The third and most important thing is how similar this eulogy is in style to one that Andrew Blake, this time writing under his own name, would offer 11 years later following the death of Brittany Quinn. On Facebook, he would write:

Footsteps on the stairs.

Eight shots.

Looking down the barrel of a 9mm six inches from my face.

It jammed.

Three times.

Calling 911.

Trying to talk him down.

A bullet in my ankle and two in his head.

Twelve minutes, fourteen seconds between the first shots and me in the back of an ambulance begging to know if Brittany was alive and getting my answers in the evasive looks of the medics and the overheard chatter of the scanner in the front cab. It was not okay any more.

For me, it will be okay again. For Brittany, it won't.

Blake went on to ask Quinns online community to help him fundraise a memorial hike across New Zealand in her honor. I will walk all 1,864 miles with the bullet still in my ankle if I have to, he wrote.

Apart from the extraordinary tale of the gun jamming, a story he defends years later, it seems eerily similar to the way he spoke of Trilly years before; theres the same pattern of placing himself at the center of a community tragedy, and using it to draw the group closer together.

11 years later, however, the eulogy was for his dead best friendand a now-leery community was wondering if Blake himself had contributed to her death.

AndrewBlake-2011.jpgSource: Tumblr

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Between 1999 and 2000, Blake, then going by Strwriter online and using a previous legal name, befriended a fan named Stormlight. Stormlight went on to get a rare early glimpse of Blakes family life. He spoke of extremely religious, restrictive parents who inflicted Protestant exorcisms upon him as a child, a claim he would repeat as late as 2011. Stormlight believed his mother was abusive and overbearing, and was somewhat surprised later to speak to her by phone and discover that she was instead apparently just overprotective and leery of what her child was doing on the Internet.

Blake also introduced Stormlight to his good friend, VB. AB was obsessed with VB, who became, according to Stormlight, [our] main topic of discussion. VBs life story included being starved for days. Locked in closets. Forced to ingest household chemicals. VB claimed to have been rescued from a life of forced child sex slavery after being spotted tied naked and gagged to a bed by a horrified neighbor who called the police.

Stormlight once got to speak to both VB and AB on the phone at the same time. I could have sworn at the time that I was talking to another person, she wrote years later. The voice was feminine but very rough-sounding, which I took to be caused by the attempted poisonings. Gradually, however, the Strwriter handle faded out of fandom, and ABs mother, so Stormlight thought, eventually cut off his Internet access. A year or so later, the entity calling themselves VB, who had moved on to the Lord of the Rings fandom, told Stormlight that her former friend AB had been shipped off to some sort of boarding-school style college.

Except, of course, there was no boarding school, just as there were no poisonings. AB and VB were the same person.

In March of 1999, at that point still pretending to be both Strwriter and VB, Andrew Blake wrote a fanfic called Collective of One and posted it under both his sockpuppets, pretending that they were separate people collaborating on the fic together. Its a short scene from the viewpoint of a character whos been struggling with their de-assimilation from the Borg collective, a giant hub of individuals whove been forcibly assimilated into a hivemind.

I have not laughed or truly smiled since I was disconnected from theCollective....

Resistance is futile.

I will always be a collective of one.

In retrospect, Stormlight appeared bemused that she could ever have fallen for all of it.

But Stormlights bafflement about Andrew Blake pretending to be two different people while on the phone with her was nothing compared to what came next.

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original-moot.jpgSource: https://kumquatwriter.wordpress.com/

Friday, April 19th, 2002

10:23a - I am wounded. It will never really heal....

When I took the oaths of a Paladin and began training, I expected spirit-plane battles. I expected that I might be asked to do extraordinary things. I just didn't expect it....

I am...suddenly old. I have all of his memories. All of them. From toddler to the day he died. Over a hundred years of memories, every day, every moment crystal-clear in full sensory detail. He's five times my age in life-years. I don't know what to do with this. It's overwhelming me by sheer mass of memory. I know things now, understand things that I'm just too young to, and I don't know what to do with it. I don't even think in the same language any more. My own cradle-tongue is now something as if learned, something I have to translate INTO for speech and text. My thoughts come in the words of his youth.

With these words, Andrew Blake launched himself into the next ten years of his life. By now 18, he was enrolled in college but only attending sporadically. Desperate for a distraction he claims to have begun taking lessons from a paladin master who lived in Newport News, Va. With her guidance, he began to contact spirits on another plane. It might have added up to no more than some intense roleplay sessions, but Blake believed.

He had been taken over by a real soulspecifically the soul of Merry, the hobbit from Tolkiens Lord of the Rings universe. Blake was convinced that not only was Tolkiens fantasy a real world on another dimensional plane, but that the real soul of Merry had taken over his body, and that the hobbit might return at any time.

Very quickly, Merry was followed by other visitors to Blakes head.

The others arrived to Blakes bodyoften several of them at oncedisoriented and panicked, each with their own wealth of personal issues needing to be dealt with. The things they needed to heal from involved life-or-death crises and events requiring Andy and his friends to honest-to-goodness save the universe. Understandably, these were the kind of exhausting, all-day dramas that seemed to require endless quantities of time, energy, and inside knowledge to deal with.

I thought I had a rare and dangerous paranormal ability that needed to be kept secret, Blake tells me years later. Anyone Blake let into his secret usually felt incredibly special, but also took on the responsibility of helping Blake deal with all of the alters intergalactic crises. It was grueling. In May 2002 he wrote of one friend having visions due to his initiating them into his secret, another having tantrums and memory rushes.

By itself, Blakes experience isnt that weird. Channeling other souls is actually downright common in the nether-subcultures of the Internet. People who live as fictional characters are called fictives; people who live as other real people are called factives. Further along the spectrum of identity are Otherkin who believe that their truest identity may not even be human, that they may instead be the soul of an animal or a mythical creature, an anthropomorph, or even an inanimate object.

Those who have multiple souls within a body are usually called plurals, multiples or a multiple system. Theres often some overlap between multiple systems and people with Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID (formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder). Its perfectly possible to live a full life as a multiple. If diagnosed with DID, the alternative is reintegration, the process of identifying and merging all the different souls, alters, or headmates into one single identity. Reintegration generally requires years of focused therapy.

I asked a multiple system named LB Lee, owner of a website on healthy living with multiplicity, how to distinguish between a fictive or a factive, another kind of multiple, and someone with DID. They said that wasnt actually important. Honestly, I see the fictive/factive as a distraction, they told me. I know PLENTY fictives who never abused or hurt anyone, and a few factives. The majority of them go about their lives quietly, and they are no more likely to be dangerous or abusive than anyone else.

Lee doesnt believe Andrew Blakes claims of experiencing delusions are legitimate. They tell me to focus on Blakes behavior, not who or what he claims to have in his system.

Blake says he spent the years from 2002 to 2012 fully convinced he was a superhuman channeler in danger of being captured and experimented on by the government. But instead of seeking external support groups, Blake created his own communities with people he met in fandom, many of whom came to believe in and support his magical abilities.

Some of the ex-members of these communities now believe they were in cults.

Its reasonable to ask why Blake didnt do more to seek out resources for multiples. Sure, it was early Internet, but in 2002 there were plenty of resources for Otherkin and especially multiples and people with DID and Multiple Personality. Astraeas Web, a former website devoted to healthy multiplicity and living plural, first appeared online in 1995.

When I ask him about this, he explains that none of it seemed applicable to his case:[I was] sure it couldn't be DID or similar, and I'd only heard in passing about otherkin/headmates, but very much with an attitude of "silly 13 year olds who think they're unicorn soulmates" so I never looked further.

Lee points out that Blake has only ever focused on the most dramatic and lurid effects of his supposed system. More typical behavior of a multiple system, they indicate, would be something like having to argue internally about every little thing, from what to wear that morning to what to buy at the store.

Instead, the kind of intense structured fantasy Blake was enacting seems to bear a strong resemblance to the Dianetics roleplays Scientologists use in order to purge thetans. Scientologists believe thetans are ancient alien souls residing in the human body who must be walked through their traumas, healed, and expurgated. Part of the power of Dianetics on members of Scientology is the incredible adrenaline rush it provides the roleplayerthe power of having conquered a cosmic problem and freed a trapped soul from agony.

I was secretly privy to the most Sacred Magicks, his once longtime partner Abbey Stone tells me. She now runs a blog and Tumblr partly dedicated to warning others about Blake. Stone was 22 when she met Blake online in late 2001. She was already primed for his level of fandom immersion, having already picked up a habit of half fic-writing, half role-playing that easily blurred fantasy and reality.

Andy reacted eagerly to Abbeys stories of writing from the viewpoint of the hobbit Pippin from Lord of the Rings. He told her his paladin master believed the Goddess was trying to reach her "through a little man or a bird. To Abbey, unused to the intoxicating rush of an intense writing or roleplay session, it was a clear sign that the hobbit Pippin, short for Peregrina hobbit (short man) whos also a little birdwas real.

Abbey found the attention each of Andys alters fixed on her exhilarating. She grew conditioned to silence the alarm bells in her head. Sometimes I knew it was all lies but I couldn't hold that as true the way I could hold Andy's stories. I kind of just let those doubts go.

Just like Scientology, Blakes world-saving sessions served another ultimate purpose: control. I can't emphasize enough how he used the alters to play off of each other, Stone says. He'd argue me into whatever he wanted and then switch alters and dismantle his previous argument and back and forth until whatever he wanted I did.

The other friend in their early initial group of believers, Adrienne, eventually phased out, either from lack of interest or lack of spiritual acumen. She and Andrew got matching tattoos.

Abbey, who stayed with Andy, didnt opt to get tattooed, but she would still walk away scarred.

________frodosam.jpgSource: Turondo.com

In the year 2003, Blake achieved eternal fandom infamy through a series of increasingly dramatic fandom events which many fans believe were scams. It started out well enough: LotR actor Sean Astin collaborated with VBs website on a charity project. Despite raising $3,000, the event wound up in the red, but Blake went ahead with his next project anywaya music fest which advertised a number of bands and Elijah Wood. Neither the bands nor Elijah Wood showed up. The non-event had a venue pricetag of $1800, but although numerous former friends of Blakes stated afterwards theyd chipped in money to cover costs, the check still bounced. Still, Blake did get Astin to call during the event and propose marriage to Abbey on behalf of Andy.

At this point, Blake phased out the VB handle online and attempted to replace it with a new entity named Jordan Woodalso the name he began using in real life. What only a small inner circle of people knew was that Jordan was an alias for Jordans real identitya duplicate clone of the soul of Elijah Wood, who was residing in Blakes body nearly full-time at that point. As part of his belief that his previous legal identity no longer existed, Blake mailed a vague suicide note to his parents, who immediately contacted police and instigated a missing persons search. Oregon police eventually located Blake and learned he had recently tried to get a new Social Security card under his new identity by claiming he had no official documentation because he was born in an Estacada pagan commune.

ab-sean-astin-as.jpgSource: https://kumquatwriter.wordpress.com

In October 2003, Blake, Stone, and a group of their fandom friends moved to L.A. together and made plans to produce a mid-sized LotR convention called Tentmoot. At 19, Blake had no convention or major financial experience of any kind, but he was popular, and he claimed to have ins with all of the stars from Lord of the Rings. It was easy enough to believeafter all, he did have Sean Astins phone number.

In December, just days before the convention was supposed to happen, everything went belly-up. Despite Blake telling the Oregon Convention Center that the con would bring in about 1500 fans, and despite his telling the other con organizers that theyd sold hundreds of online passes, sales stood at just 21 tickets sold. Elijah Woodthe other, famous versionhad failed to return any of his clone twins calls or emails, much to Blakes hurt and bafflement. On top of that, Air New Zealand had no knowledge of an airfare deal Blake claimed to have struck which he insisted was supposed to have given them exorbitant plane fare free of charge. Panicked, Blake ordered Stone to call everyone she knew to try to scrounge up money for the last-minute plane fare.

Acting in good faith, one of their friends, Jeanine Renne, used her credit card to charge $15,000 worth of plane tickets from New Zealandenough to buy tickets for the four minor actors from the Lord of the Rings cast who had agreed to make the long trek from the filming location to Portland for the con. By the time the actors landed in Los Angeles, however, Renne and two other members of the Blake household had discovered the magnitude of lies Blake had told about the convention. Renne canceled all of the remaining airfare on her card, leaving one confused actor stranded in New Zealand, and the other three confused actors stranded in Los Angeles. They had no way to make it to their final destination in Portland, no con to attend even if they had made it, and no way back to Auckland. Two of them wound up spending the night sleeping on the floor of Blake and Stones empty apartment.

Renne was furious and betrayed, and would spend the next several months embroiled in a dispute over the remaining $10,000 in airline charges. The next time Andy and Abbey came to Portland she contacted authorities, and Blake was arrested for identity fraud.ab-mug.jpg

Source: Jeanine Renne

The state of Oregon allowed Andy and Abbey to avoid charges of fraud by paying a fine and agreeing never to solicit funds for charity in the state again. Jeanine Renne wrote a book about the entire experience called When a Fan Hits the Shit. For the last 11 years she has dedicated her website, Turondo, and her LiveJournal, turimel, to documenting the ongoing exploits of Andrew Blake.

when-a-fan.jpg(source: Turondo)

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After Tentmoot, the L.A. household fell apart. One of the residents whod been initiated into Jordans special secret abilities was a minor whod been living there with her parents permission. She returned home. Two more friends, disgusted by what they viewed as Blake and Stones escalating duplicity, cut ties with them both and left. The final resident, a longtime LotR fan nicknamed Diamond, quickly became initiated into the inner secrets of Blakes soul-channeling abilities. For a time, the three of them enjoyed an uneasy household fraught with astrally projected drama and sexual tensions, as Blake routinely encouraged them both to vie for the sexual attentions of his alters. Around this time, he brought the clone spirit of Orlando Bloom into the permanent mix of alters, specifically focusing clone!Orlandos romantic attentions on Diamond.

When I asked him, in 2014, if he had sexually coerced both women, he replied, in retrospect, yes, but stressed that it was a byproduct of believing that the others required actions and sacrifices that would allow them to save the world. Sometimes I lied to them to get them to cooperate, he said. But it was because I thought the stakes were that high.

Abbey and Diamond, who remain friends today, believe that Blake designed the Orlando Bloom persona specifically to manipulate Diamond, and that he added and discarded personas as they became useful for manipulating those around him.

Eventually, the wedge between the three of them proved insurmountable. They were evicted, Diamond left, and Abbey and Jordan embarked on a three-year-long period of extreme poverty. They worked mainly as cosplay panhandlers on Hollywood Boulevard. A 2005 article in the Wall Street Journal describes Blake, while cosplaying as Puss NBoots, jump[ing] into other characters' pictures at the last minute, then tr[ying] to wrangle some of the tip, while Abbey, dressed as Fiona from Shrek, pestered tourists.

pussboots.JPG(Source: Turondo)

The duos time on the Boulevard was marked by financial desperation and increasing exhaustion. Frequently Blake would wake Stone in the middle of the night, desperate for her to help his latest alter deal with a crisis.

He was always urgently isolating me about some kind of crisis in his head, she says.

As Stone fell further into the delusion, Blake culled details about her past, including abuse that never happened. Then she claims he used it to alienate Stone from her family and friends. Blogging about the experience years later, Stone wrote:

Hed keep telling me, in the form of my father figure/guide, that there was more to remember. It was like a game; unraveling these riddles that had (apparently) always been inside me, ruining me. ...

[M]y greatest shame is how much I hurt my mother when I cut her off. With a hand written 95 Thesis of why she was a bad mother. In Jordans handwriting. I cant even write about that without an actual lump coming into my throat. Most of that book was recovered memories that never happened.

Under Blakes influence, Stone sent her mother a book detailing false accusations of abuseon Mothers Day. it would be nearly three years before they spoke again.

In March of 2011, two months before she died, Brittany Quinn wrote a similar letter to her father on Facebook. Full of bitter accusations, it accused him of trying to destroy his nine children. At the end of it, she broke off contact with him entirely. I have no relationship with you outside of our shared past and genetic material, she wrote. I will no longer interact with you and I ask you to refrain from contacting me.

Her baffled father responded, commenting twice, both times to assure her how much he loved her. I am guilty of many things and many mistakes, he wrote, but not all the things I am being accused of and in the degree you are accusing me of. I do Love you and all your brothers and sisters, more than I can say...

[T]hat letter is so disturbing, Stone wrote much later. It's Andy all over it. So much of it is just like what I wrote to my mother under his direction/coaching.

It would take being pushed to life-threatening extremes for Stone to break and finally contact her mother again.

Brittany Quinn would never have that chance.ob_vb_mullerphoto.jpg(Source: Turondo)________

In 2007, with cops on the Boulevard increasingly cracking down on the costumed panhandlers, Andrew Blake grew fixated on starting a new life in Canada. By now totally broke and convinced the government was closing in on him, he persuaded Abbey to pack her bags and fly to Buffalo New York, where, in the middle of a February blizzard, they proceeded to walk across the city, dragging their luggage, and then across the border to Canadaalmost freezing to death in the attempt:

We walked the frozen streets of Buffalo for hours, dragging ourselves from hotel lobby to hotel lobby to keep warm enough to move, occasionally catching a bus to get us closer... Eventually, we were dragging ourselves across the Peace Bridge...

Obviously, you cant just walk into Canada, say Govmint spies are after me! and just get handed an apartment. I dont know why I ever expected differently, but by that point I was pretty much a non-thinking entity.... When I was interviewed by the (surprisingly sympathetic) immigration agent, I couldnt even explain why we were there. I had no answers.

The border patrol allowed the pair to sleep on the floor of their office. Still freezing, huddled in a sleeping bag, Abbey thought about calling her mother, about going home. I had never felt as utterly defeated. So hopeless. So done.

Stones mother had been researching de-programming and preparing for her call in the years since shed broken off contact. She moved quickly to transport her daughter safely back home, and began a systematic process of extricating Abbey once and for all from Jordan Wooda process she called Operation Catch and Release. After weeks of carefully reintegrating Abbey back into her old life, it worked.

She guided me to the car as Jordan began to scream; that same hideous, chilling, keening wail that he terrorized all of us with in the cult. Now no longer the howl of some supernatural anguish, but that of a thwarted, monstrous child. I got into the car and Mom drove us the hell away from there.

liberty.jpgSource: https://kumquatwriter.wordpress.com

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While Blake and Stone had been living together in L.A. neither of them had been active online or in fandom because they couldnt afford the Internet. Once Blake was again living with his parents in Virginia, however, he was back in business. Blakes parents insisted on his getting therapy, which Blake claims today he lied his way through, terrified the whole time that his therapists would find out his real superpowers and put him on a dissecting table.

Blake returned to fandom, this time to Harry Potter. Eager to distance himself from the well-known fandom scandal that was Tentmoot, he took the handle Thanfiction (as in stranger than.) On Fanfiction.net he began posting a very long fic series full of original characters called Dumbledores Army and the Year of Darkness. Though it wasnt a tremendously popular fic, its fans showed a notable degree of loyalty to the series, referring to themselves as DAYDians. The DAYDverse, as it became known, racked up fanart, a TV Tropes page, its own Wiki, and a Facebook community. They even threw a small informal convention for themselves.

DAYD-fanart-by-vignette1.jpgSource: http://dayd.wikia.com/wiki/File:DAYD.jpg

Gradually, as Thanfiction met up with more members of the DAYDian community, he let a few of them in on his secretsome of the characters of the DAYDverse were real. They had joined the ever-growing cast of alters vying for space in his head.

The DAYDians were a closed, quiet group of friends. Yet slowly, word leaked out to the wider fandom community that VB was back, and he was now calling himself Thanfiction, otherwise known as Andrew Blake._______

Its extremely difficult to get members past or present to talk to outsiders about what the DAYDian community is like. What is obvious is that though the activity of the group has died down as Andy Blakes interest in the universe has flagged over time, he is and always has been the groups center. In 2008 he posted to his LiveJournal account encouraging readers to practice starvation for a few days in order to write better. in 2014 a now-deleted Tumblr user, abcand123, wrote of him attempting to use his alters, now Harry Potter characters, to emotionally manipulate people who are interested in the series.

In the months before and after the death of Brittany Quinn, members began leaving the DAYDian community. Two former DAYDians who spent time with Andrew Blake in real life spoke to me separately on condition of anonymity. Both of them told me they saw repeated evidence of Blake continuing to claim to channel alters. One saw at least three personalities, along with several instances of online chats and phone calls where the line between what was channeling and what was role playing became very blurred.

The other DAYDian thought isolation was a big part of what drew group members to the community. We were still of the generation that grew up with it not being OK to be a nerd, one told me. It's a noticeable trend that DAYDians didn't really have much of a life outside the internet.

See the people he really went after were all people of low self-esteem and/or emotionally unstable, me included... We happily plugged the gaps and ignored gaping holes in his stories ourselves because I think we WANTED it all to be true.

The ex-DAYDians are adamant that Blake was manipulative. He tended to go through bursts of obsessive interest in single projects and people, often faking illness or sickness to get out of taking responsibility or something. He'd come up with a grand but usually unworkable idea, sold it to you convincingly all the same, made you do all the work, sabotaged it and then blamed you for the failure, one told me.

He tended to go through favorite people who were a part of his inner circle, the other DAYDian said, but appeared to quickly push them out if they did something he didnt like.

This ex-member went on to tell me that fear and worry eventually outstripped the fun; they started to believe Blake was either lying or it was more of a mental health issue.

I broke contact when I started to fear for my safety, and what he demanded from me was more than I was willing to give.

The other ex-DAYDian tried to explain why they stuck around as long as they did.

Apart from the classic manipulation signs the whole "other people in my head" thing should have sent me running for the hills, but I was naive, had nothing against him and was honestly curious to see where it was going, and once you strap yourself in for that ride you're in it for the long haul. And then when I really spent time up close with him I was always hungry, exhausted and disoriented... so I was much, much easier to influence....

In hindsight I'd have saved a lot of people a lot of trouble if I'd just kicked him off a cliff when I first had the chance.

________

Brittany Quinn fell into the DAYDian community early; she hung out with other DAYDians in real life and attended the informal DAYDian convention in 2010. She was caring and maternalvery kind and always willing to lend advice and encouragement, one of the ex-DAYDians said. Blake had by now returned to California. Between 2009 and 2010, Blake and Quinn lived together with a family in Orange County. According to Blake, theyd been working as domestic help for the family but left after things got fishy tax-wise. From there, they spent a few months couch-surfing until, in Blakes words, the situation with Jason really got rolling as the mess with their joint property became relevant.

Theres a world full of debate around those words, became relevant. To Blakes detractors, including, allegedly, Quinns own family, Blake is the one who pushed Quinn to pressure Eisenberg for more money and custody of the house. After Quinns death someone claiming to be her father left a lengthy comment on Rennes LiveJournal, relating what they claimed was the Quinn familys conviction that Blake was partly responsible for her death. Beachcomberbob believed Blake was now using Brittanys memory as an excuse to fundraise what hed always wanteda trip to New Zealand, land of Lord of the Rings.

I hope that by working with others we might put a stop to Amy/Andrew's destructive influences once and for all.... We knew from the beginning that there was something not right about "Andrew" but could never get Brittany to admit anything. She went downhill, changed and acted very out of character after she met him. We suspected for a long time that "Andrew" was pushing her to sell her things, borrow money and file court actions against her ex to get more money for "Andrew". Andrew was always whispering in her ear when she had a conversation with anyone else while he was there and had a weird control over her. It reminded me of a little demon sitting on her shoulder, influencing her.

Numerous other people seem to confirm what Bob says in this comment. Stone, writing about Blakes behavior towards her six months after Bobs comment, mentioned Blakes frequently whispering in her ear. Speaking about her time in the DAYDian community, one of the ex-DAYDians told me they felt Blake had a special hold on Quinn:

As time went on, it soon became clear that amount of influence Andy had on her... was concerning. It seemed as if Andy used Brittanys maternal instincts to gain her sympathy so that she felt obligated to assist Andy in whatever situation he (or possibly the other personalities) felt was important at the time.

Simply put, it appeared that he used a variety of methods to make sure she had her complete attention on him. It was a real shock and tragedy when I heard about her death. I wish I could have gotten to know her better when she wasnt under Andys influence.

Here are the things we know about Brittany Quinns life in the months leading up to her death.

She and Andrew Blake couch-surfed with friends together before she moved back in to Eisenbergs house, bringing Blake with her. Blakes ex-friends have alleged that he has a pattern of moving in with people hes manipulating.

Quinn filed several lawsuits against Jason Eisenberg seeking more control of their property. According to an ex-DAYDian, Blake has always encouraged or suggested the use of lawsuits and other legal or official actions as a manipulative tactic.

News articles about the murders reported that Quinn was pressuring her husband for extremely large amounts of money, at one point reportedly threatening to involve law enforcement if he didnt comply. This, again, corresponds to both what the ex-DAYDian said and what we know of Blakes tendency to ask people for large amounts of moneyspecifically, the $3,000, $1,800, and $15,000 that he asked Lord of the Rings fans to come up with during each of his failed 2003 fan events.

Finally, we know she abruptly accused her father of abuse and cut off all contact with him, just as Blake allegedly influenced Abbey Stone into accusing her mother of abuse and cutting off all contact with her.

But heres another thing we know about Andrew Blake:

He did not pull the trigger on the gun that killed Brittany Quinn.

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This story so far has barely touched on the outrageous and endless lies Blake told on the Internet over the years. Easily hundreds more words could be spent detailing some of the most outlandish claims: that VB was his evil twin, his obsession with claiming to be Irish, to be on the run from the IRA, to be a shaman wizard, to have lost his son after his split with Abbey. (The son was actually their pet sparrow.)

But enough.

Imagine that none of that matters.

Imagine that the truth really starts in September of 2012, and Andrew Blake is not who he once was.________

AB6.jpgSource: Skype

The word everyone uses to describe meeting Andrew Blake for the first time in real life is intense. One anonymous ex-DAYDian told me, I remember that it felt like talking to a minor celebrity. Cara Loup, his old LotR friend, clarified: Intense and a little overwhelming, but not exhausting.

Meg Carlson agrees. He was... intense, she says. A lot to take in, definitely.

Meg, 21, is sitting on Andys bed after joining him in his room (hes back living with his parents in coastal Virginia. At one point, she gets up to leave. My mom doesnt want you wearing those pants in the house, Blake tells her. At another point, she asks him, am I allowed to answer this? He looks a bit discomfited and leaves the room not long after to give her some privacy.

On Tumblr, Carlson is known as wings-andgrace. (Note: She changed her Tumblr name prior to publication.) Shes become the subject of close speculation from the ongoing and growing community of watchdog blogs that attempt to warn fandom members about Blake and document what they see as his unhealthy influence over his local fandom friends in Virginia, who call themselves the Virginia Posse. Early on, the Blake-watchers were convinced this was a sign that Blake was forming a new unhealthy group of minions. The posse took their name randomly; if you ask them, they scoff at the idea they are Andrew Blakes posse.

The watchdog blogs arent taking any chances. When Blakes meta in the Supernatural fandom grew popular, they popped up to warn fans. When Blake got briefly into Teen Wolf and Welcome to Night Vale fandoms, the people he messaged to introduce himself to responded by broadcasting an alert and warning people that he was attempting to enter their fandoms, urging their fellow fans to stay away.

Whatever Im expecting from Meg Carlson, its not what I get. When I ask her if shes had any alarm bells about their friendship, she unhesitatingly says yes, and that she can easily see why some people feel the posse and his influence over them is cult-like. When I ask her what the difference is between how she views his behavior, as his friend, and how the watchdog blogs view it, she replies, He got to me first.

Prone to co-dependency due to borderline personality disorder, Carlson has worked to maintain an appropriate distance from Blake ever since she met him in early 2013. Another friend, Jenn a.k.a. winjennster, told me she broke off contact with Blake after seeing him behave towards Carlson in ways she felt were manipulative and controlling. Though she once was close to Blake after they bonded over Supernatural together, Jenn recently told Blake not to contact her again.

When I first interviewed Carlson in July she was actively seeking more distance from him. A few months later she moved in with himor rather in with his parents, who Blake lives with again, at their request. Blakes mother asked Carlson to be her groundskeeper in exchange for room and board, effective as long as Carlson is furthering her education. When I ask Blake about it, he answers, we made sure to lay strict limits so that our relationship kept the necessary space.

Still, when I ask Carlson if shes happier now than before she met Blake, the answer is equally emphatic: yes.

Before I met Andy, I didn't really have any friends... I was depressed and not really living, just surviving. The activities and support and other people that I have been led to through meeting Andy have brightened my life considerably, and I have never regretted meeting him.

________

andrew-meme.jpg

Source: Fandom Wank

In July of 2012, Andrew Blake was fired from a job in South Dakota where hed been working as a camp counselor for a Christian organization. The official reason was that his supervisor discovered the long history of controversy surrounding him on the Internet and decided better safe than sorry.

Blake was forced to return to his parents once again. In the car home from the airport, they gave him an ultimatum: he could enter voluntary therapy or they could refer him to in-patient therapy at a local residential environment.

Convinced he could fake his way through voluntary therapy like he had in 2007, Blake took the first option. Two months later, he insists, he had a therapy breakthrough: for the first time in a decade, he came to understand that the alters werent real.

I am solo in here, which is awesome! he tells me.

But the problem, as he knows well, is that most of his detractors believe he was flying solo all alongthat the alters are his way of avoiding responsibility. I can see why; he says he takes responsibility for his actions, but also says the alters made him do it.

If all of his suspect behavior had ended in 2012 when he claims his delusions did, we might be having a different interview today. But in 2013 he participated in a giant fandom scavenger hunt, GISHWHES, and stirred new rumors about being just as controlling and manipulative as he ever was. Multiple members of the Posse told me things had gotten out of hand the week of the project, and Carlson, who didnt participate but was with the group for most of it, told me at one point he drove them to go without sleep.

Staying ended up being a mistake because the next day I crashed from exhaustion and I couldnt even go into work that day. And, you know, looking back on it, I was scared to tell him I skipped work. Because I was afraid if I told him, at seven or so in the morning, when I was awake and called into work, that I was awake, he would have said, Okay, get up here, we need to keep going.

It all sounds eerily familiar. But at the same time, it all sounds relatively typical. Blake is an obsessed fan, precisely the kind of obsessed fan you need to win an elaborate and silly competition like GISHWHES. He, Carlson, and a longtime friend, Karen, all claim he accidentally went off his medication that week.

On numerous fandom watering holes, Blake is a daily topic of conversation, and his Tumblr is constantly flooded with people attempting to get details about his past. He answers fewer anonymous asks these days, but his posts and profile changes are frequently dissected by watch bloggers looking for evidence that he hasnt changed at all.

I have to ask him why, given that he has so much bad blood in fandom communities, he doesnt just leave and start over somewhere else. Implied is also the other possibilitythat he could change his name, get a new Tumblr handle, and come straight back to join us, and none of us would really ever know.

He says the reason is that hes staying for the benefit of future potential victims of people who once were like himself. I want the right to live it down, he says. Thats all I want. In essence, he wants to be the one to turn his own past into a cautionary tale.

My responsibility is to not cause further harm... if I just disappear off the face of the universe, then Im not taking responsibility, and Im not, maybe even possibly helping somebody, making some kind of good out of the mess.

He says he wants to stick around to demonstrate that even the most fucked-up fan can get treatment, can get help, and become this dude with a perfectly-enough normal life... thats maybe something powerful and helpful.

AB8.jpg

Skype

When Andrew Blake talks about Brittany Quinn his entire body shifts. His voice drops, he slumps, and he stares off in the distance. His manner is so altered it elevates the narrative he tells me into the realm of a soliloquy; all hes missing is a backlit stage and a follow spot.

It was a Saturday, he tells me when hes finished. It sounds like a story hes told many times before.

A few minutes later, as our interview is wrapping up, he mentions that his friends are spending the day in Portsmouth, Virginia, where I lived for three years. I perk up, talk about living there and how much I enjoyed it. Its next door to his own neighborhood of Hampton Roads, but he just stares at me blankly. My attempts to make small talk go over like lead bombs.

After the interview I keep thinking about this moment. It bothers me, but I dont know why. It could have been that he was lost in thoughts of Quinn, and that small talk so soon after his discussion of her death seemed disrespectful. Finally it hits me that what bothered me was Blake himself. Despite being extremely friendly, open, and casual for the rest of the interview, in that one moment, the moment when I went off-script, it felt like he could barely be bothered to feign interest in me as a human beingas though unrelated small talk wasnt in his playbook, and the moment I went outside of discussing him, he dropped the pretense of being interested at all.

________

As I wrote this article I was reminded frequently of disgraced former journalist Steven Glass. Both men, in addition to their long history of fabulism, are known for their extreme charisma and charm, as well as a tendency to over-apologize. And despite having a history of less-than-truth-telling, both are attempting to start over, to move on.

Hannah Rosin, discussing her unwitting forgiveness of Glass last year, wrote, If the first step of reforming yourself is acknowledging your sins, then [he] was determined to get an A-plus, along with extra credit. Blake, too, readily acknowledges his sins, but seems to be anxious to get to the part where he redeems himself. I get that. Eternally working towards redeeming yourself in an environment thats already decided nothing you can do will ever be good enough must be exhausting. Carlson openly urges anyone looking to befriend Andrew Blake to understand what theyre getting into first:

[G]et as many sides of the story as you can before you make any decisions. There are a lot of people involved in this, and a lot of bias on both "sides" of the conflicts that have arisen from this. On the other hand, if it's just too much drama to handle, then I encourage you to stay out of it because it's a handful, and I wouldn't blame anyone for simply not wanting to get involved.

Shes not alone. Among Blakes former friends was a member of one community who was originally eager to speak with me, but ultimately backed out. I'm removing myself from everything about Andy [and] the cult, they told me. I just can't do it anymore.

More than anything, thats the emotion that seems to be consistent from everyone around Blake, friend or enemy: exhaustion. In the end, its almost less exhausting to throw ones hands up and say: whats the harm?

So what if Andrew Blake is prone to obsessive behaviors and once claimed to be Elijah Wood? So what if hes still a little controlling these days? So what if he may or may not have manipulated a friend into doing things that got her killed? Thats all done with, right?

Right?

When I ask him flat outgiven the long line of lies and manipulative patterns that pre-dated the appearance of the alters, why should we believe youre telling the truth now?he forgets to give me an answer.

Now enrolled in community college, Blake is working on transferring to a four-year school in Hampton Roads. Last weekend he attended an anime con, Katsucon, with friends. Underlying his eagerness to tell his side of the story is the worry that telling his story might jeopardize his attempts to start fresh without his past following him into this next phase of his life.

If you dont draw the lines, I wont try to be your cult leader but I also wont shut up for hours, he told a former friend (who has now joined the watchdog bloggers) at one point.

In the end, maybe thats what hes really offering the people around himnot a chance to be inspired by his recovery, but a chance to define his behavior for themselves, if they dare. Clearly, Blake has charisma. Clearly he has talent. If he can find a community willing to give him a chance, he might finally be able to turn his hand to projects with indisputably positive results.

Cara Loup, who still remembers him remarkably well after all these years, told me, Whatever the ultimate source, that energy was absolutely real and quite fascinating.

Blake obviously cant turn off the magnetism thats drawn people to him for years.

But it seems its infinitely harder for the rest of us to turn off the fascination with which we wait for him to reveal his true colors.