because just because ugh.

hell her being the culprit makes me like her even more! she’s running a complex art theft ring while working a 9-5? girlboss

Dagny used to be married to a woman

A very large subset of the HeR boards were conservative, homeschooled religious kids and their parents who lost their damn minds over this

Sooooo many posts about not wanting to see it, “keEp PoLitiCs OuT oF tHe GaMes”, “I don’t disagree with it I just don’t like it and hate it”, petitions to not have any more gay ppl, threats to boycott, etc…

Nearly all of these posts had two things in common, they used their religion as the reasoning and also had some variation of “that’s just my opinion!” ie something like “HeR shouldn’t support LGBT people, it goes against the Bible! I don’t have a problem with them but I don’t want to ever see them and I pretend they don’t exist and I hate them, but that’s just my opinion so you can’t be mad at me!”

Sooooo what happened was there were a big group of us who didn’t like this and thought that was all not very nice. So one genius starting pretending to be in a religion that followed Big Island Mike. If they were going to use their religion to be hateful then we could do the same thing!

So a lot of us started doing that! We would say stuff on those homophobic threads like “well BiM is a loving and omniscient god and His word says that you are a jerk and that every character in the Nancy drew games is gay, sorry but that is just my onion” (the onion thing was on purpose we were saying it to make fun of people claiming hate was just an opinion)

It went on a loooooot. We kept making more and more things about the lore of big island Mike, his ponytail was like a sentient god that whispered secrets in his ear, we capitalized He and Him when talking about him, made theories that he was behind every game, everything we could think of. I’m realizing here this doesn’t sound like much but please believe me it was like a weeks long Thing where this was all we did and every post was like this.

This was like an actual coordinated thing, most of us were on tumblr and we would like discuss the best ways to push back against the homophobia, unfortunately I don’t think many of those blogs are active anymore (for myself it was an old blog that I deleted many years ago, and I haven’t seen any of the others around since making this one more recently. If any of you still exist I’m sorry!)

The homophobic people were doing the same thing on twitter and we knew that so we were like one step ahead lol. One time one of the main ones posted a list of the users he hated the most and I was on it and I was very proud of myself!

We would also do non-BiM things, like making petitions for games with only gay characters from here on out, and also talk about other social justice issues, stuff to get under their skin

The mods HATED all of this (most of them fell in the conservative homeschool type parent group if I remember correctly) but we weren’t really breaking any rules. Eventually they started deleting all the posts about BiM and His power and saying that made up stories had to go in the magic library

Then they amended the rules to say that no trolling is allowed and started deleting everything en masse, which they weren’t really doing to the homophobic stuff but they eventually I think did that as well. But that was another proud moment because they literally changed the rules because of us lol.

To circle back to OP’s original point, a big part of the fan base really was homophobic (at the time, I hope that is no longer the case) and their fit after SEA came out really did a number on the fan base and likely the company. Right after this the whole MID thing happened and they got a lot less interactive with the fans and basically killed off the original fan base. And we were all super divided anyway so the message boards just died. I’m really happy that there’s a newer group of fans with the clue crew now but that was like a very stark end of an era for sure!

And, to my knowledge, that is the origin of all the BiM worship. It does my heart good to see that all live on despite the loss of the original meaning or even like that there was a meaning at all lol (something something ancient history, meaningful things living on, I’m old now, blah blah blah)

Anyway I think that about sums it up! Please forgive me if I left anything out, this was like literally ten years ago and like I said nearly everything has been deleted at this point. If you go on the HeR boards and look at the summer of 2015 I think there are still some remnants hanging on but like very heavily edited by the mods. Writing it all out it doesn’t sound all that interesting but it was a truly wild time and one of those you had to be there type things, I hope it was at least mildly entertaining to read, I’m sorry I forgot the actual content of the memes lol